Well, when it comes down to dating, we don’t trust our guts at all. All of the sudden we see someone who we’re attracted to, we want to talk to them and we come up with something clever or relevant to say. But then we don’t trust our guts. We don’t act upon it, we don’t pull the trigger.

Are you dating somebody right now, but it doesn’t feel right so you have to ask all your friends and get their opinions on it first? We don’t listen to our own gut to tell us what to do. We can’t make our own decision. We have to listen to 10 other people’s opinions and get advice from all over the place. Even from the internet.

It’s funny. With all of our basic and primal needs, we trust our gut because we have to. And guess what? It always seems to work out every day. For those of you with irregular bowel movements, sometimes you can only trust your gut on Metamucil. But you get the point. It’s really time you started trusting your gut. There are a lot of areas where advice and second opinion helps. But a lot of things you can actually figure out for yourself, you just have to dig deep.

It’s time that you actually started acting upon what you want for yourself, and it’s time that you stopped asking all of these different people what they want for you.

How do you feel when someone tells you anything? Are you always looking for that loophole? Are you always looking for the untruth in what they’re saying to you? Are you always looking for something that doesn’t feel right? Are you someone who just can’t put yourself out there?

It’s funny. So many people in this world — and I don’t respect any of them — try to teach people to meet the opposite sex by turning them into something (or someone) they’re not. What happens when you follow their advice is that when you meet someone, they aren’t really meeting you.

They’re actually meeting a version of you. It might be the superhero version of you, the fantasy version of you or some other version of you, but in any case it’s not you.

The truth is that if you don’t put yourself 100% out there in life — your convictions, your beliefs and everything about you — you’re not going to get the truth back. If you only put half of yourself out there, you’re going to attract people who only put half of themselves out there. In fact, if you only put half of yourself out there then you will attract the kind of person who will ‘Google’ someone before a date to see if what they’ve been told so far is the truth.

The other day I was interviewed for an article in Cosmopolitan magazine. The interviewer asked me if people should ‘Google’ their dates before going out with them in order to find things out about them. My answer was absolutely not!

One of the most destructive behaviors you can have is to make assumptions about someone before you even talk to them and get to know them as a person. Don’t ever assume someone is going to lie to you before you even get to know them.

There is a dating expert out there for whom I have zero respect (and whose name I won’t mention), who advises everyone to ‘Google’ every person with whom they go out on a date prior to the date. I believe that you should trust people, because if you don’t then you don’t trust yourself.

If you’re somebody who’s ‘Googling’ dates and expecting the worst from people because you don’t trust yourself, then it’s time to make a major change. You have to start putting yourself out there, and you must do it 100% every day. Put yourself out there 100% as to who you are, what you’re all about, your convictions and your beliefs.

You’ve got to stop holding back. So many of you don’t trust based on your past. Do you know where that gets you? You get exactly what you had in your past.

You get in life what you put out. If you don’t learn to trust the moment, then you will constantly be recreating past failures based on your mindset and how you react. You’ve got to learn that you only get who you are.

So for all of you who hate the term “trust me” and who are always looking for that “Aha! I knew you were lying” moment, the reason you feel this way is because you’re not honest with yourself. It’s time to get honest with yourself before you actually go and meet people. It’s time to figure out who you are and what you want, and it’s time to be proud of it.

Now, let me give you one word of caution. Even after you figure out who you are and what you want, you’re still going to screw up when you’re out there meeting people. You’re still going to do things that are going to irritate people. You’re still going to get hurt.

That, though, is what life is all about. Just when you think you got it right, you realize you need to figure it all out again. It never ends. Self-growth is a process that never ends until the day you die.

But there’s something interesting that I want to bring up to everyone on the blog. As many of you know, I’m not really in to New Year’s resolutions – I think that they are a crock of shit. They are just a complete waste of time.

Everyone always makes 10 or 11 New Year’s resolutions – and of course they are going to be broken! You’re trying to do too many things. I bet most of you have already broke most of the resolutions and we are only 12 DAYS into the year!!

I was talking to some clients the other night and I told them that what I like to do is to choose a theme for the year. I know if I concentrate on a theme, I’ll make things happen. I’m going to start believing in that theme.

I remember one year – I think it was 2004 – my theme was patience and trusting the universe. I wanted to put my trust in the universe in everything I did. I wanted to allow things to happen on their own terms. I didn’t want to force anything.

When I was in the business world, when I would lose a client I would be totally bummed out. If I didn’t have a good month, I’d start stressing out, wondering if things would get better.

A wise friend of mine, told me I needed to start trusting the universe. If you trust the universe, everything that you want will manifest. Things will start to happen because you are no longer suffocating the energy. You aren’t putting too much pressure on things and you are allowing them to unfold in their own time.

Trusting the universe means having the abundance principle. If you embody the abundance principle, people will start becoming attracted to you and they will want to meet you or do business with you.

So in 2004 I worked on trusting the universe and being patient. Then, in 2005, after I learned how to be patient, I started working with the theme of abundance. I started working with the theme of abundance in every facet of my life.

And by the end of 2005, everything was abundant for me. Business was great, the people in my life were great – I had no complaints.

So what did I want to work on in 2006? In 2006, my theme of the year was living in the moment. I wanted to embrace and be present in every moment. I didn’t want to think about the future of everything; I just wanted to embrace every little moment of life.

I wanted to learn about the gift of life. I wanted to embrace it. I wanted to be present every moment and I didn’t want to have to think about what I had to do tomorrow or what tomorrow would bring. I didn’t want to think about the past either. I just wanted to be in that moment.

And by doing that, each moment that I was truly present helped create another moment that I could embrace. It’s all about living in the moment. It’s all about staying focused, positive and having abundance.

All of these themes work really well together as well. This is what you need to do: you need to choose themes for your life.

What was the theme I chose for 2007 and 2008? To continue to live the life that I love. I’m really living the life that I love every day. I want to thank myself every day for this amazing life. I want to thank the people that I work with every day for the amazing job that they’ve done. I want to thank all of the people in my life for what they offer.

It’s about being 100% in tune with what is going on in the world so that you are able to put all of these principles and themes together.

By now, the 12th of January 2009, you all know that you’ve totally screwed up your New Year’s resolutions because you chose too many things.

Start concentrating on one thing. Life is a marathon – it’s not a sprint. It is about being able to go the distance. If you can go the distance in life, you’ll be able to accomplish everything you hope to.

The problem is that many people try to master too many things at one time. Rather than concentrating on one thing, they try to learn too many small things at once.

If you are a fast learner, you could concentrate on having a new theme every month or every three months. But you need to do this work in order to have an amazing life and attract great people into it.

What is your them for the year?

Do you know what mine is?

I have a theme just for the day.

I want to break the record we set last week with 300 responses to last Mondays blog.

So start typing folks!!!

When you’re dating somebody, what are the boundaries?

Recently a woman I know had an “intuition” that “something was up” with her boyfriend, and that intuition led her to check her boyfriend’s email without his knowledge or consent. What she did was basically read through all of his emails until she found some information she didn’t like.

What constitutes a violation of someone’s privacy? When, if ever, are you justified in violating someone’s privacy?

If you have an “intuition” about something, does that give you the right to start digging through someone’s drawers? To start reading through their email? To start listening to their voicemail messages?

I mean, think about this. Someone has an email account which they use for both work and personal messages. By going into that account, you are violating the trust that person has with all of his business clients, business associates, friends and family members . . . all because you had some kind of “intuition” that he was doing something wrong.

Beyond violating the trust of all those people, investigating an “intuition” by reading someone’s emails or listening to their voicemail messages can be misleading because you are only getting about 20% of the story. Your perception of what you read or hear is all wrong.

Relationships are really hard. We’re all out there looking to meet somebody. Once we find somebody, though, where and how do we draw the line about privacy and trust?

Of course lying is not good. I’ve been guilty of it. We’ve all been guilty of it. We have all lied in certain situations to avoid hurting someone or to avoid talking about something we think may hurt someone. So although we lie to protect someone, when the lie is exposed (which it almost always inevitably is) we end up digging a deeper hole.

I’ve come to believe that although it is sometimes really hard to say, the truth is always better than a lie. It has been my experience that every time I tell a “little white lie” to someone because I was afraid to tell them what was really happening to avoid hurting them, that I always end up getting caught. Then when I do get caught, not only do you end up hurting that person anyway but you end up hurting yourself even more.

In life, what you fear will actually manifest – but it will manifest at an even higher level than what you feared. So whatever you were trying to protect the other person from by lying to them will seem worse than if you had just been open and honest about it from the get-go, because you will have to dig yourself out of the “lying” hole.

So lying in a relationship is something you should never do. It’s a tough thing. Sometimes we think we’re protecting somebody and we’re not.

Something equally bad you should never do in a relationship is violate the other person’s privacy. To violate someone’s privacy is to violate their trust.

You should NEVER dig through someone’s personal emails, look through someone’s wallet or listen to someone’s voicemail messages . . . ESPECIALLY if you’ve done it before and you promised never to do it again. If someone has decided to trust you even after you’ve broken their trust once, and then you you break their trust again and again, then you have a relationship that either cannot survive or at a minimum will need significant repair.

So even if you have some type of “intuition” that somebody is doing something wrong, it is better to confront that person openly about it and slug it out with them than to violate their privacy and their trust searching for answers behind their back. Even if that person doesn’t respond to your attempts to talk about it the first, second or third time, chances are that you will get to talk about it.

Consider that the other person may be struggling with something deep or something very emotional, and that may be the reason they have been hesitant to discuss something with you. Whatever the reason is that has caused their hesitation, you need to be prepared to be open to what they have to say.

So many of us definitely have communication issues in our relationships. A lot of us feel things we’ve never felt before with somebody, so we get scared.

When you’re scared in this way, you feel tense and you retreat to what’s safe instead of facing that fear openly with the other person. For some that fear may manifest itself by snooping in the other person’s private things, while for others it may manifest itself by lying to the other person. Neither one is right.

The best thing to do in a relationship is to try and keep your communication open as much as possible. We’ve all got issues. We’ve all got baggage. What you need to do is work through that baggage on your own and openly with your partner. Violating someone’s trust will never take a relationship to a better place.