In one of my earlier blogs I wrote about the importance of gratitude. I defined gratitude as “a life orientation toward noticing and appreciating the positive in the world.” What I want to talk about today is how to maintain an attitude of gratitude in the face life events that make it next to impossible for most people to still feel grateful and optimistic about their life.

One of the most difficult things for some people is being alone over the holidays, particularly after a divorce or a breakup. If your partner breaks up with you or wants a divorce, what do most men usually do? They fight it making declarations that they’ve changed, they tell their partner over and over that they love her, or try to argue with logical reasoning to try and change the woman’s mind. Men put their lives on hold hoping that things will go back to the way they were. Of course you want to save your relationship. But does any of this work? Hell no, and think of how much energy it takes to do all of this!

When you fight an outcome, you are creating resistance. When confronted with the breakup, you truly believe that calling a bunch of times, making a plea that the relationship can still work, or that you can change, or that things can be different, will really sway your partner from their decision to go through with the breakup. No matter how badly you want your partner back, the more you fight them leaving, the more obvious it is to everyone else but you what the outcome is going to be... it is pushing that person further away. So, why does the opposite of what would help always seem to happen in this case? The answer is fear. When a person is resisting the breakup it is usually out of a fear of loss. When the seed of our actions stem from a negative emotion, there is usually a thought or story in our subconscious that is feeding that negative emotion and working to shape the situation in the form of that negative thought or story. This is called a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The good news is that positive thoughts and positive stories can be self-fulfilling as well, and true gratitude plays an integral role. 

Our emotions are like signals to us. In the case of anger, fear or sadness it is a sign that something is not going right in our life. Instead of succumbing to these negative emotions, channel them into constructive action in your life. If you face a breakup, take the opportunity to spend some time alone and get in touch with yourself. Use that time to figure out what went wrong in that relationship. Is there anything that you brought into the relationship that led to problems? Is there something about the partners you are choosing that is not working for you? Was this person honestly all you really wanted out of a relationship? Or was there something lacking?

This is your chance to finally take inventory of your life and make conscious decisions about what you really want and don’t want. Ask yourself those tough questions, and then take that opportunity to start making a positive out of the situation by bringing the things you want into your life. Immediately start seeking out what you want in your life and strive to do things that are fun and make you happy.  This is what will be most likely to attract the interest of your estranged lover more than anything. If it doesn’t then you are already in the process of attracting the next exciting pieces of your journey. The only chance that you have to save your relationship is by moving on immediately and working towards being happy. If you are truly doing what makes you feel happy (especially if you have been negative and that contributed to the break-up) then this will trigger her curiosity about you. The positive that will come out of the negative may not be immediate, but the opportunity to begin to make something good come out of something bad is always there, and it is up to you whether you grab a bite of life or starve. 

If you want to attract good into your life, you need to focus on what you want in your life that will help you feel good. Commit to feeling good, nurture your thoughts, and change that life story toward having a better ending. Choose a value that you believe in and commit to it, live your life according to that value, and you will give yourself the gift of integrity (a quality exemplifying strength that women not only love, but will make you feel good about the life you’re living). This is the path to happiness suggested by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics 1102a5: “happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with complete virtue, and virtue is defined as a habit disposed toward action by deliberate choice.” Be grateful for that breakup.   Complaining will get you nowhere.

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Getting to the First Date has received praise from it's readers: "What's in this book is exactly what I would have said to myself after a year of learning online dating on my own through trial and error. It saved me the time and effort of having to learn the hard way by figuring it out through my own mistakes." 

Getting to the First Date is a great fit for men:

- looking for a mindset shift to help the dating process start to go the way you want

- recovering from a breakup or divorce and trying to get back out and date again

- recovering from a bad or abusive relationship and trying to figure out how to establish a healthy relationship dynamic from the start 

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