This Valentine’s Day, let me let you in on a secret: everyone is hung up about love! It’s one of the top concerns I hear from my clients. Yes, even the hugely successful feel like they are utterly failing at it. Everyone wants to fall in love. Everyone wants a great love story. If you are single and reading this right now and wanting to find the one: you are not alone. As a matter of fact, the #1 question searched on Google at the moment is: “What is Love?”

Why is “finding the one” such a mystery to so many people?

Because we are looking for the answers in the wrong place. You are not going to figure out love by reading a definition on Google. Where should you look? In the mirror. YOU are the reason you haven’t found true love. You are sabotaging your love life. Now, before you get annoyed with me and share your list of excuses about why it’s not your fault, I want to let you know that you aren’t even aware that you are doing it.

You have negative theories about love which you are gathering evidence for and proving.

You are just doing what you do, thinking what you think, dating the same types of men or women, repeating your patterns and expecting a different result. Until you see what’s really standing between you and true love (your negative theories) you’ll either end up settling with someone or giving up on love all together.

Now, I know you believe that your reasons for why you don’t have love are true!

Dating is hard.
There are no good men/women out there.
I’m bad at it.
I’m too busy.
It never lasts.
I can’t have a career and a great relationship.
All men cheat.
True love doesn’t exist.

But guess what? Those reasons are not true. They are what I call weather reports.  Do we have control over the weather outside? No. We just report on it like, “A hurricane is coming. Brace yourself. Stack your sandbags.” We talk about our lives in the same way, “Dating is hard. Brace yourself. Another a$$hole is coming my way.” You believe you have no control. I’m here to tell you that you have all the control. Anyone can have true love in their lives but they have to be willing to really look at themselves, disprove their negative theories and do the work.

The most important ingredient to finding love is believing that love is possible.

If you don’t believe in love, you won’t do the work to make sure it happens in your life.  And those excuses and negative theories are why you don’t believe. They have been doing the dating for you.

In the Handel Method^®, one of the first steps we have a client take when searching for love is to write a love dream. We have them write out what they want in the area of love. Now, everyone’s first attempt at a love dream (before they really understand how to write a dream) usually reveals their issues on love.

“I fall in love with a great man and we actually love each other. We don’t yell at each other or fight. We never get bored. He is loyal to me and doesn’t cheat. We find time to have fun together. I feel loved for the first time.”

What’s wrong with that dream? It’s full of your issues and negative theories about love. Men cheat. Love is hard. Yelling and fighting is normal. You’re too busy to have fun together. You are lucky if you feel loved.

Where do your theories come from? Your upbringing, your personality traits, your past relationships and most importantly, your parents’ marriage – which is where you first learned about love. The problem is your parents learned about love from their parents who learned from their parents. And guess what? No one actually taught anyone about love or how to be in a relationship.

What you think impacts your actions, which creates your results.

If you believe that dating is hard work. It’s going to be hard work!  If you don’t believe true love exists, are you going to find it?  No.  Once you see that you are the source of what’s not working in the area of love – you have a choice. Either you stay a weather reporter with no control or you become the author of your love life.

The moment you become the author in the area of love is the moment your love dream becomes possible. @LaurenZander (Click to Tweet!)

Love,
Lauren

P.S. Our free love coaching tool will help you better navigate the dating world, get deeply honest about what you really want, and rock out your first few dates

Lauren Handel Zander is the Co-Founder and Chairwoman of Handel Group^®, an international corporate consulting and life coaching company. Her coaching methodology, The Handel Method®, is taught in over 35 universities and institutes of learning around the world, including MIT, Stanford Graduate School of Business, NYU, and the New York City Public School System. Lauren is also the author of Maybe It’s You: Cut the Crap, Face Your Fears, Love Your Life (Published by Hachette Book Group, April 2017), a no-nonsense, practical manual that helps readers figure out not just what they want out of life, but how to actually get there. She has spent over 20 years coaching thousands of private and corporate clients, including executives at Vogue, BASF, and AOL. Lauren has been a featured expert in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, Women’s Health, Dr. Oz, and Marie Claire and she is a regular contributor to Businessweek and the Huffington Post. Click here to schedule a 30-minute consultation with Handel Group.

Image Courtesy of Matthew Henry.