I was sitting around this morning and I realized something that really hit me like a ton of bricks: we’re all looking for our soulmates out there.  Everyday millions of people are going out on dates hoping and praying that they’ve met “the one” or their soulmate.  Everyday people are logging into online dating sites hoping that the new e-mail is from their soulmate.

We’ve been doing it wrong for so long.  Do you want to know where your soulmate really is?  Are you willing to join me on a journey to help you discover your soulmate? If the answer is yes, which I know it is, I want you to do something right now.  I want you to go into your bathroom or find the closest mirror. Maybe you’re reading this at work, maybe you’re reading this in the car while you’re driving. (You know that’s not allowed but hey, I’ve seen people do it constantly while living here in Los Angeles.)

Wherever you might are right now, I want you to go find the nearest mirror, and I want you to look at it, and I want you to come back and read the rest of this article.

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Great.

What did you see when you looked in the mirror?  I know your answer is probably simply yourself or maybe your eyes or your nose or your hair, or maybe you’re not having a good hair day so you noticed that you need to get a new conditioner.  That’s not what I was looking for.  I want you to go look in the mirror one more time, and then I want you to come back and read some more.

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Okay.  Now what did you see? I’m sure by now you’re confused, and you just want to go and skim down a few lines and see what I’m getting at.  Why is he making me looking in the mirror right now?  Why is he telling me to look in mirror?

You know why I want you to look in the mirror, because you just saw your soulmate.  You just saw the person you’re supposed to be madly in love with.  You just saw the person you’re supposed to connect with and honor in all ways.  You just saw the person that you’re supposed to nurture and take care of.  You just saw the person that you’re supposed to love unconditionally in every way, shape, or form.

You just found your soulmate.  Life is all about loving yourself and finding yourself.  It’s not about filling in the gaps.  It’s not about searching for that potential person that’s going to save you from a life of being alone.  It’s about loving yourself.  It’s about realizing that the person staring back at you in the mirror is your soulmate.  Once you fall madly in love with yourself, once you realize the power of this message, dating is going to become far easier because you’re already satisfied on so many levels.

Think about this for a second: if you would treat your lover with honor, with respect; if you would take your lover out to dinner; if you would go to great events with your lover; if you would travel with your lover—then that’s what you need to do with yourself.

If you do this you’re going to attract your other soulmate. You’re going to attract your other half, another person that loves and honors and respects themselves.

So go back to that mirror, and look at the beautiful person that’s staring back at you, and tell yourself that you finally found your soulmate. Try that attitude change for a bit, and see how it changes your dating life. My book Naked! is all about this, falling in love with yourself, so you’re able to fall in love with others.

A lot of times when a woman meets a new man and she feels like everything just “clicks,” she will immediately start to have all sorts of expectations about him. These are not things she expects him to do, however, but rather things she starts to expect that he is (or might be).

She starts to think to herself “This guy could be ‘the one.’ This can be the guy who gets rid of this annoying single binge I’ve been on for so long. This guy is different from all the rest.” She starts building all these expectations about a guy she’s just met.

Then she goes out on another date with that guy which also goes really well and, all of a sudden, she builds the expectations even more. She starts dreaming a little bit and thinking about how that guy might be her soulmate. She may start to think about how this guy could be someone with whom she can spend the rest of her life (and possibly have children).

By the next date, if things are still going really well, she will build the expectations further and already be picking out her wedding dress, thinking about their first vacation together or thinking about what kind of house they are going to eventually buy together. Who knows where the fantasy side of her mind may be going.

What happens every single time you build up expectations on a date or go into expectations mode, is that you become less present to what he really is (and is not) all about as a man. You stop noticing some of the little things, especially some of the little things about the guy that may not be right for you.

You stop noticing some of the behavior patterns that he may be showing you and, because you are lingering in expectation mode, you may go six months into a relationship that will ultimately self-destruct. Because you blinded yourself to what kind of guy this was due to your expectations, you will spend that six months thinking you are having an amazing relationship instead of seeing things through non-expectation colored glasses.

What happens here is you miss every single verbal and visual clue that is right in front of you which told you that this guy was not right for you. He was not right in so many ways, but you didn’t see that because of the fantasy expectations you put on the relationship.

I actually recently dated someone for six months who had much higher expectations of the relationship than I did. She had a whole different version of the relationship in her mind, even though my behavior was very consistent for the entirety of the relationship. She had all these high expectations that we were “meant to be together forever and ever” when, in reality, my expectations were just about being present in the moment and seeing where things took us.

You have to realize when you’re doing this that you have to dial back the whole expectations mode. You need to start paying attention to little things and start evaluating relationships on what is happening in the now.

Don’t think about the future so early in a relationship, and don’t think about the expectations you have for a particular guy (or a particular relationship). Instead, keep yourself present in the moment and think about what is going in a relationship right now.

It’s not that I want you to not be optimistic about a relationship’s possibilities, I just want to make sure that you don’t ignore its warning signs. Take a look at the guy and the relationship and evaluate them both on what is really there, because a lot of times when you think you’ve had the “perfect relationship” that has crashed and burned, the warning signs were there the whole time but you just chose to ignore them.

Don’t watch the movie; just listen to the movie and watch them.

When the leading character screws up – because that’s what we do, we don’t say what we should have, and we screw up. It’s the Hugh Grant moment where he realizes, why didn’t I tell her that I loved her at that moment? He’s just sitting there with his friends at a pub, and he realizes it.

And then he sees her out, and he still can’t tell her. When he finally goes and does it, watch the women’s reaction. Forget about watching the actors on screen; watch the reactions of the women in front of you.

Watch the way they sink down into their seats and almost sigh. Why do they do this?

Because all they want is for somebody to do that to them.

Every time I’ve ever been with a woman, I’ve had to claim her. Women will make it difficult, and they will test you. They will test you to make sure that you can be 100% vulnerable with them.

She tells you that she broke up with her boyfriend of two years and she called you. Now she’s sitting in front of you, looking into your eyes and telling you how hot everything is. You have to grab her right then and say, “ I have been thinking about you for the last year,” and just spit it out.

Many guys will try to avoid sounding needy. That doesn’t sound needy – it’s the truth! Speak the truth. You can stand behind the truth, and you’ll never have to backtrack.

You should never have to regret not doing something: I should have done this or I should have done that. That shoulda-woulda-coulda game will kill you. You want to eliminate the shoulda-woulda-couldas from your life entirely.

Don’t think, I should have done this, I could have done that. Some guys at the end of a bootcamp tell me, “I should have done this a year ago!” No, you weren’t ready. There’s that old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” You just weren’t ready, and that’s okay.

I probably should have bought a house in 2002 when they were dirt-cheap. I had the money to pay the mortgage and loans were certainly easier to get. But I just wasn’t educated enough and I didn’t do it. Now I’m paying double for it.

You pay for your lessons a few years down the road. It might be in lost time, but it doesn’t matter. You did it when you did it. Don’t worry about the time that you didn’t do it – just do it now! There is never going to be “perfect” timing for anything.

I had one guy tell me he was going to wait for a while to do a bootcamp. What are you waiting for? Just do it! Make the decision and do it. Do it, own it, and be okay with it.

It’s all about being vulnerable. You don’t think I’m vulnerable? I have 210 videos on YouTube, and the shit that people write under those videos…

It’s at the point now that sometimes when I do a video that will be posted on YouTube, I will even look at the camera and say to them, “alright you people who think that this is funny or those of you who don’t understand try to open your mind!”

I put myself out there every single day. I write, I post videos – and these videos are often shot in my house, sometimes I’m even stuttering.

In response to a video I posted called “How to Appear Confident When Meeting Women,” some guy today wrote, “David, you’re so wrong. How to APPEAR confident? You have to BE confident to meet women!”

No, if you have no confidence, you have to fake that confidence first. He missed the point of the entire video, and he was giving me a lecture.

I love people who don’t want to post their profile on match.com: “oh my god, what if someone sees me?” Great, then they can walk up to you and ask you, “aren’t you on match.com?” and you can have an opening conversation!

You want to expose yourself. If you’re not 100% vulnerable in life, the day you die you’ll have a flashback and realize, holy shit, what have I missed?

When you die, you don’t want to feel like you’ve missed anything. You want to celebrate your life and everything you’ve done. Death is a celebration of your life and the things you’ve accomplished. When people say that a person died too early, that just means that the person didn’t do enough stuff.

We all die. Death and taxes, right? We can manipulate and cheat the tax system throughout our adult lives – the system is set up for entrepreneurs! We have so many write-offs that the rest of you don’t have, but we still do have to pay something.

Death is really the only thing that you can’t cheat – but life is what most people cheat.

So if you don’t go to sleep with a smile on your face every night, you’re doing something wrong. I don’t know about you guys, but when I go to sleep, I can’t wait for the morning. I hate mornings, but I can’t ever wait for it.

Some nights I don’t want to go to bed. If it’s two o’clock in the morning, I ask myself why I have to go to bed – I just want to keep living!

Of course, you need to recharge your batteries at night, but I can recharge during the day. You see me check out for five minutes every now and then, I take little catnaps in my head. I go into my own little world for a bit and rest. I don’t hear anything or see anything when I’m in me-world. It’s great.

But sometimes when you go to bed, you think, oh man, what am I missing?

It’s a good thing that there is not much going on in the world between about 3:00 am and 9:00 am. I go to bed at about two and I wake up at nine.

Every night when you go to bed, you want to think, what were my wins today? What did I do? How did I live my life to the fullest?

This ride is amazing. When you really embrace it, it’s the most amazing thing.

Life is the best gift you can give anybody. When my birthday comes, people always ask what they can get me, and I say, “nothing.” I don’t ever want to get gifts from anyone. (It’s July 1st, in case anyone wants to get me a… just kidding!)

I don’t ever want a material gift, because the best gift is just spending time with people. I usually like to spend the day by myself on my birthday. I like to walk the beach with my dog, hang out and don’t do shit.

Anyway, you want to celebrate life every day, and you don’t want to cheat life. Don’t ever cheat yourself. If you cheat yourself, you’re missing out on so many opportunities.

When I was in London doing a bootcamp, I was supposed to go up to the country to spend a few days with friends, but plans changed at the last minute!

So I was like, bummer, man, I’m stuck in London for three days! Oh, that sucks. Too bad for me. There’s so much to do there, and there are so many people to have fun with. I had to find another hotel room, but oh, that was certainly tough to do in a city!

My whole plans changed at the last minute, and I was digging it. I just thought, oh great – three more days to explore London? That’s awesome!

London is kind of like a second home for me now; I’ve spent two weeks there this year, and I’ve been coming twice a year. I’m learning the city and I’m so comfortable there now. Nothing is new anymore, but it is still all there for me.

Todays video is all about body language and not being so stiff when talking to women.

Enjoy your Saturday!!

David: What would I say on my first phone call? The first phone call should always be based on something that we talked about the night before – always. I want to bring her back to the moment that we had before.

I don’t “date” that much at all. I’m very much about just hanging out; connecting… so my first phone conversation is always based on something we talked about the last time.

Jonathan: So let’s say I met her on the street when she was handing out fliers, and we bonded over Sweden. She’s from Sweden, and I’ve been there before.

David: Okay, what else?

Jonathan: Music, movies – she’s also a musician and an actress.

David: So how did you ask for her number? What did you say to her?

Jonathan: I don’t know, I don’t really remember.

David: Okay, well here’s the thing: it all starts with the way that you ask for the number. The way you ask for her number is the same way you start the phone conversation.

So if you said, “oh my god, I’ve really enjoyed talking music with you. Give me your number, I want to continue this conversation,” you’re giving her something to look forward to.

Then you call her up on the phone, you can say, “hey, how are you doing? You know, I was thinking about what we were talking about the other night and I was really curious and wondering whether or not you listen to the Postal Service?” or something.

You want to make it as if the conversation has almost never stopped. You want her to feel like it’s just a continuous conversation from the last time until now.

So many guys don’t relate to women very well. They will get her phone number and then call her up and telemarket her: “so, I’m the guy that you gave your number…”

It’s all about creating that moment. It’s the only line from Jerry Maguire that actually made sense – “you had me at hello.”

Women are looking for that magic “hello” or whatever it might be. They are looking for something to help them build that story up. It’s a continual story.

So that Swedish musician? That story is Jonathan and the Swedish Girl. The story started with music and meatballs – she was handing out fliers on the street and she met this cool guy who asked for her number. He called her the next night and remembered the details about the conversation (which excites women, because their biggest complaint is that men don’t listen.)

You bring that real conversation into the phone conversation. That is how I would do it.

Today is also all about how to relate to her when you first speak to her. Check out todays video.

I’ve been on a journey for the last couple years learning about self-love. Self-love is one of the most important things you can ever have, because you will never be able to truly love someone else until you learn to truly love yourself.

The reason this is true, is because until you learn to truly love yourself there will always be a wall up around you. There will always be something the prevents you from giving yourself freely to someone else.

A lot of us give of ourselves freely to our animals. Some of us become crazy cat people, while others become crazy dog people. A lot of us can give freely of ourselves to our children.

Many of us have trouble giving freely of ourselves to another adult of the opposite sex, however, because we are so caught up in protecting our emotions. Until you are able to give yourself freely to somebody, though, you will never experience love.

You actually may be able to experience some depth of love, but you’ll never experience powerful love. We all deserve to experience powerful love.

The personal journey of self-love I’ve been on has been unbelievable. What is most unbelievable about it, however, is that it all stemmed from a “Brady Bunch Greg Brady falling off my surfboard in Hawaii” moment.

I think there is an actual mark on the surfboard showing where I fell. I was truly channeling Greg Brady and his Hawaiian surfing episode: I went down in the reef, I had the tiki idol necklace around my neck, Marsha and Cindy were yelling from the beach . . . Ok, maybe not that last part. In all seriousness, though, something did happen to me in Hawaii.

Hawaii is a very spiritual place. When I was surfing in Hawaii this past summer staring at a waterfall, I noticed that if you lined up the surfboard correctly you’d be surfing directly into the waterfall and the mountains.

There is a lot of energy in Hawaii, both spiritual and emotional energy. For reasons unknown, although probably because I was trying to show off to people on the beach, I decided while surfing to jump off my board into the shallow water . . . and ever since that day my hip has been aching.

Once I went deeper into it, I realized that I was on an emotional journey to have and experience the most incredible love I ever wanted: the love of myself. I realized that until I was able to do that, I would not be able to meet and experience someone amazing.

The “I Want More” blog I wrote was all about the feelings and emotions you have for someone that are so amazing that you just constantly desire more. A man named Joe (Mr. “DarkEnergy” himself in fact) posted a comment to that blog asking me how you can tell the difference between the feeling I described in the blog and a simple “crush.”

My answer to Joe was that you want to have a crush . . . just a crush that lasts forever. That’s the magic of love. The magic of love is having a crush that lasts forever and ever, but also knowing and being able to do the necessary work to nurture that relationship to allow it to go the distance.

I want a crush that lasts forever. I want to look at someone and always think they’re the most beautiful person in the world. I want every kiss to be magical.

The only way to make that happen and to make a crush last forever, though, is to be totally conscious about the other person. You need to find someone who is effortless to be with and with whom doing the right this is easy.

The only way to make a relationship like this last is to have both of you want to make it last. You both must recognize the gifts. You both also must recognize your relationship to be comprised of two souls which connect on a deep level. Most importantly, you must have done enough work on yourself to realize that such a connection doesn’t happen every single day.

You may still have more work to do on yourself, but we all need to be working on ourselves every day. If you do and you have already found a crush, the great thing is that you have the other person to support you, accept you and embrace you for everything you are working on about yourself.

Granted, every relationship has a honeymoon phase, but I’ve seen couples who are still “ga-ga” about each other after seven or eight years. They may no longer be having sex seven days a week, but when they make love it’s still absolutely amazing. It is still so amazing because they are still making love to someone on whom they have a crush, someone with whom they’ve created a level of comfort where they know each other on every level and have given every part of themselves to each other.

So all of you should be looking to have a crush on someone, the kind of crush that lasts forever. The only way to make a crush last forever, though, is to first have a crush on yourself. Start getting a kick out of yourself. Start enjoying yourself.

More importantly, get on the same page as someone else’s soul, and let your souls connect. When two souls are connecting, you are going to have a crush . . . and a crush far greater than the kind you had at age sixteen.

Over the age of thirty, you truly know that when you find this it is a gift being presented to you that doesn’t happen every day. You are emotionally mature enough to embrace it and have fun with it.

For all of you who don’t believe in the magic of a crush, you are missing out on something. For those of you who still want to find someone on whom you have this “forever” kind of a crush, the only way to start is to first have a crush on yourself. Remember that nobody can have a crush on you unless you love yourself.

Do you know that a LOT of men have trouble approaching women? A lot of men suffer from a disease they call “approach anxiety” (although I call it “self-inflicted torture!”)

In my more than ten years of coaching men, virtually every one of them seek my help in learning to conquer approach anxiety. You should see what happens over and over again at the beginning of every one of my men’s bootcamps.

A guy will see a woman he’s attracted to and point her out to me. I’ll tell him to immediately go over and talk to her. What does he do? He’ll stand there like he’s wearing concrete shoes . . . and do nothing. He’ll hesitate.

By the time he finally decides to walk over to the woman, she’s usually made a sudden right instead of a left and has disappeared. He lost his opportunity to approach her.

See, you’ve got to understand that in some ways men and women are built the same. Having a fear of approaching the opposite sex is one of those ways. Many men have a lot of trouble approaching women, and many times women are very unapproachable.

So the next time you see a guy looking at you whom absolutely makes your heart go “thump thump,” I can guarantee you that he is attracted to you as well and that his heart is also going “thump thump.” Stop wondering in this situation if a man is attracted to you.

With that doubt eliminated, you need to put yourself out there just a little bit. Help guys out a little! It’s very important to give guys a couple of signs so they know you’re interested.

Women almost always sit back and wait for guys to do all the approaching. Women spend a lot of time hoping men will approach and waiting to see if men they’re attracted to will approach them. The problem with this is that when you’re a “waiter” in life, you never get what you want.

So the next time you see a really attractive man, smile at him – not once, but twice. When you smile at a man twice, he might actually take the hint and get up the guts to talk to you.

You need to understand the mindset of a man when you’re thinking about this . . . and the mindset of a man in this situation is terrified. As he quakes in his pants, he freaks out about being unable to approach you and feels like he doesn’t know the right thing to say even if he did.

If you were able to be a fly on the wall and listen to what men say during each one of my bootcamps, you would absolutely be amazed at what you’d hear. If you could do this, you would understand that men sit around all the time and wonder what the most clever thing is to talk to you about when they approach you.

The fact is most men still don’t realize that they can just walk over and say “hello” to a woman to strike up a conversation. So the next time you see a guy that you’re attracted to, make it a little easier for him and see what happens!