Tweeted this out the other day – it got a lot of traction and was asked to expand on it:

Why did this tweet hit home?

Methinks because it reconciled a dilemma a lot of guys face, and assume they need to tradeoff on:

Their relationship with work and women.

Now, I won’t deny that there is — you guessed it — CONTEXT to this.

Are there times when you will be so focused on work that women can’t really factor in? Most likely.

Are there times when work will be on the back-burner, while you “play the field?” Quite possibly.

But these are tactical, not strategic issues.

On your honeymoon you should not be thinking about work. While you’re negotiating the details of a make-or-break buy-out you should not be thinking about women.

But if women are preventing you from meaningful work, and if work is preventing you from meaningful relationships…

It might be time to consider that your life is OUT OF ALIGNMENT.

Of course, that may not be the case. If you LOVE your work, even if it’s face-paced 80 hour weeks, then perhaps your career is the love of your life.

Similarly, if your relationship is amazing, but you put more into it than work, perhaps experiencing a great romance is your true calling. Who am I to judge?

But I would say that most men are not satisfied with the either / or.

And I would further muse — and this is the real observation of the tweet — that the deeper we fall into alignment with our core purpose, the more the rest of our life coalesces into alignment as well. That of course includes our relationship with women.

What’s the reason for this?

As the manosphere likes to jest: “sinple, really”…When we are doing things we were meant to do, things we aren’t meant to do feel less and less appealing.

When we understand OURSELVES, we are much more clear on the women we truly want… not simply the women who trigger our trauma-patterns etc.

Ergo dating dumb, low quality women will lose its luster.

And the women who we are meant to date — the women who will give us what our soul really craves — will begin to enter our lives.

Now, will that happen immediately?

Maybe not.

Sometimes a work pattern is easier to resolve than a pattern with women. We may like to repeat the latter a bit longer than the former… and vice-versa.

But if we are meant to have a special woman in our lives — and most men are — she will present herself when we go about our life path. And if our hearts are open, we will connect with her.

A final technical point re: work as it’s very relevant.

We may love our job, we may be “in the right work” — yet we may STILL have a bad relationship with said work.

We may be “out of balance” or compensating in this area to escape from another (often romance).

So I want to emphasize what I mentioned casually above: you must pursue your life path with zest, but you must also keep your heart open and practically-speaking put yourself out there.

It is for instance borderline impossible to meet a girl even if you are the CEO of your own company that fulfills all your dreams if you are spending all your time inside the office dealign with business matters. Perhaps you will meet some woman in your work capacity who catches your fancy, but this has a low probability of being anything more than a lust-filled fling.

We need to be on the road to our dreams, and actively manifesting them, but we also need to allow ourselves to not stay in tunnel vision (there may be a time and place for it, but it is not 24/7/365).

Because then we won’t only be unable to meet such dream women, we will lack the bandwidth to keep them.

Anyway, as you can tell… the real issue here is calibration.

How do you know if you’ve got the right relationship with your work? How do you know if you’re really keeping your heart open to new possibilities?

The truth my friends is that this is the challenge of life. You don’t “know” without experience, or objective feedback.

Which is why you have coaching with people like me.

I can see past your patterns and see who you really are. What you really want.

And I can help you to see that too… so you can make choices that expand rather than compress your life.

If you want me in your corner, apply here: www.patstedman.com/application

– Pat