Matchmaker vs Coaching (hint: it's not an either/or question) - Ep 62

If you've been single for a while and you've got some money to spend, a matchmaker can start to look awfully tempting. Someone else does the work. Someone else vets the men. Someone else hands you a curated list of possibilities while you sit back and wait for love to be delivered. I understand the appeal. But before you send that Venmo, there's something you need to hear, and it might surprise you coming from a dating coach.

I have nothing against matchmakers. The good ones are skilled, ethical, and worth every penny for the right woman. But here's the truth I've watched play out over and over: if you haven't dealt with the reasons you're still single, you can spend $25,000 on the best matchmaker in the country and end up exactly where you started. Different men, same outcome. Because no matchmaker can change what happens in your body or mind when a good man finally gets close.

In this episode, I break down the real difference between matchmaking and coaching, why one finds you introductions and the other makes you ready to receive them, and how to know which one you actually need right now. By the end, you might realize the smartest money you can spend isn't on finding more men. It's on becoming the woman who can keep the right one.

The 7 Dating Patterns Smart Women Don't Realize They're Running - And Why Recognizing Yours Changes Everything. 

Transcript

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Diane Brandon Moody: Hey everybody, it's By and Brandon Moody here. Another episode of 50-something Love, and I'm so excited that you're here.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Today's topic is one that I think is very important to discuss, because I've heard more and more people doing this. And that is, should you do coaching, or should you just

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Diane Brandon Moody: Take the shortcut and go hire a matchmaker.

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Diane Brandon Moody: What I want to say to this is I am not against matchmaking in any shape or form.

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Diane Brandon Moody: They can bring people to you that have already been vetted, that, they already know.

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Diane Brandon Moody: whether they're married or not, or whether they have money or not, and, you know, etc. So, there are plenty of good reasons why hiring a matchmaker could be super good for you.

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Diane Brandon Moody: There's one big reason why I'm not in favor of matchmaking First.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So here's my… Beliefs around that.

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Diane Brandon Moody: First of all, if you are over 50, and you have been single all this time.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Or you have been through multiple relationships, and they always seem to

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Diane Brandon Moody: start out great, and they end up the same way. He's married, he's an alcoholic.

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Diane Brandon Moody: He's abusive, he's a narcissist, or whatever… whatever it is that you're talking about, it always ends up the same way.

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Diane Brandon Moody: There's more at work here than just Bad luck.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I don't want to make this sound blamey at all, because that is not my intent. But a lot of us, myself included, when we find ourselves finally getting the relationship that we want, and in my case, I got married at 58, took me a long damn time to get there.

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Diane Brandon Moody: there's something else at work. And in my case, there were multiple things at work.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You can grab my, 7 patterns that smart women run for dating, I think I just mangled that title, at my website at dianeBrandonmoody.com.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And I think I probably ran every one of those patterns at one time or another.

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Diane Brandon Moody: But your nervous system gets very used to

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Diane Brandon Moody: Protecting you from what could be hurt.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Feelings, devastation from a relationship that doesn't work out.

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Diane Brandon Moody: It's trying to protect you, but what it's doing instead is keeping you inside this same loop that your nervous system knows about.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Your nervous system knows what works, And…

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Diane Brandon Moody: That's why you keep getting the same thing. I don't know how many times I've heard this story that, you know, my dad was an alcoholic, this is not true in my case, my dad was not an alcoholic, but my dad was an alcoholic.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And, I worked so hard to stay away from that kind of person when I'm dating, and wouldn't you know it, 2 years after we got married, he's an alcoholic.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I am not blaming the woman in this case. In that particular scenario, it's the dude's fault, but there's still some kind of patterning that's working inside you that is saying, oh, I feel much safer with this guy.

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Diane Brandon Moody: than I do going into the arena when a guy may really want to get to know me. He may really want to know my secret innermost thoughts. He may really want to know and love me anyway when I am a bitch on wheels going through menopause.

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Diane Brandon Moody: he made…

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Diane Brandon Moody: abandon me when I'm dealing with cancer, or whatever it is, your fear of the unknown, and that is a universal fear, folks. Pretty much everybody in the world has a fear of the unknown to varying degrees, but you're fearing that.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And so, you end up kind of in the same place, because at least it's the devil, you know. We say that in Texas a lot.

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Diane Brandon Moody: At least it's the devil I know versus the devil I don't.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So, we've established that there may be reasons why you are running the same patterns, even though it is not your fault.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Nobody's blaming you for it. On the other hand, the most powerful position in the world on this topic

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Diane Brandon Moody: is that if somehow you're involved in this choosing of the wrong people, or being too scared to choose at all, which I did.

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Diane Brandon Moody: That… that is a powerful, powerful, powerful position to be in.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Because… If what you're looking at is, I just keep accidentally running into alcoholics.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Your only choice is to either keep on with the alcoholics.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Or, not be with them at all.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And that's no kind of choice. I know a lot of people decide to stop dating at this age, and if you are one of the people who are just thrilled with your life, you've had the relationships, you've had the kids if you wanted them, you didn't have them if you don't want them, which I did not, it wasn't my thing.

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Diane Brandon Moody: If you're in the place now where you're happy being alone and hanging out with your girlfriends and traveling and all that, God bless you. Nobody in my world

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Diane Brandon Moody: It's gonna blame and shame you for wanting to be on your own.

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Diane Brandon Moody: But I urge you not to give up if the position that you're in is really, I've messed up so many times, I cannot possibly make another good choice.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I am scared to make another wrong choice, and so therefore I give up.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Don't do that to yourself, sweetie. That's just… That's… That's just giving up.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So the powerful position is… To get some coaching BEFORE you do the matchmaking bit.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Because, then.

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Diane Brandon Moody: After coaching, you're not going to be, making up reasons why all these guys don't work for you.

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Diane Brandon Moody: He has an accent, I don't want an accent, he needs to be this tall, he needs to blah blah blah, he needs to have this much kind of money, he needs to have this kind of family, no kids, kids, whatever.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Y'all sent out these ridiculous lists, and I did too.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So, no blame, once again, you set up these lists that most human men can't live up to. They may give it a try.

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Diane Brandon Moody: But they're not going to be able to do it forever, because that's just not the way human beings are.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Nobody ends up the way that you started out.

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Diane Brandon Moody: When you have your first date, your second date, your third date, your

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Diane Brandon Moody: Third month, your fifth month, whatever, you're still in a halo of…

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Diane Brandon Moody: hormones, and dopamine, and serotonin, and you're all just thrilled with the way everything is. Once you get married, and you're dealing with illness, or grown children, or you have

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Diane Brandon Moody: Budget issues, or things aren't going the way you want to, or…

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Diane Brandon Moody: Communication problems, whatever, that that happens when you're in the relationship.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You have to have the solid love behind you.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You don't JUST need the dopamine.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You need the love, the respect.

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Diane Brandon Moody: The shared visions of what your life

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Diane Brandon Moody: Will be alike, in order for that relationship to work.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So, matchmaking, again, a wonderful thing if you can afford it. It can be very expensive, depending on where you go and who you talk to.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Sometimes they're long contracts, they will take a while,

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Diane Brandon Moody: They can only match you with people that they have, so if you're looking for this Mr. Perfect dude and they don't have Mr. Perfect, or they do have Mr. Perfect and Mr. Perfect isn't into you, that happens.

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Diane Brandon Moody: then… that's…

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Diane Brandon Moody: A powerless place to be if you haven't really knocked out some of this nervous system stuff that keeps you from getting to your person in the first place.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You probably have unconscious blocks. I know I did.

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Diane Brandon Moody: if I… I could tell you stories, but I'm not going to.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Maybe… maybe secretly at the… at the bottom of all this is you fear that you're not good enough, but you're gonna hide that from yourself, and you're gonna hide that from the other guys by pretending he's not good enough. That's called projection. All humans do it at some time or another.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Those of us who have done some work will catch ourselves in it eventually, or if we've had spouses who've done the work, the spouse will sometimes say, sounds like projection to me. So…

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Diane Brandon Moody: That will only carry you so far.

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Diane Brandon Moody: If you keep on finding fault with the people that the matchmaker delivers, and that's the report that I keep getting back from the people I know who have tried it.

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Diane Brandon Moody: is that they say, she never gave me the ones I wanted.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Okay.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I don't know the particular situation of each of these. I haven't, you know, done an autopsy on the whole conversation of beliefs or their contracts with the matchmaker.

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Diane Brandon Moody: But I would… I would be willing to guess that a whole lot of that is just made up. It… it just is. That's just the way it works in modern days.

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Diane Brandon Moody: If you're doing your coaching first.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You can be prepared for matchmaking.

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Diane Brandon Moody: You… you can have more ideas about what is really, really needed in your life.

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Diane Brandon Moody: If you are looking for a long-term relationship, or you're looking for marriage, there are things far more important than how tall he is.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I happened to get a tall one. I'm a tall woman. My husband's 6'3", I was delighted by that, but my dad was shorter than I am, and so I was kind of used to a guy being shorter, and it just didn't bother me to go out with a shorter guy. So…

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Diane Brandon Moody: it just never really bothered me, but a whole lot of women get really hung up on that. And what that is, in many cases, first of all, it's…

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Diane Brandon Moody: It's evolutionary.

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Diane Brandon Moody: When we were living in caves.

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Diane Brandon Moody: We were physically unsafe if we didn't have a man to keep the hyenas and the other cavemen away from us while we were bearing children, so that's a little bit evolutionary. It's also part projection.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Because…

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Diane Brandon Moody: A lot of women, and this has been said, it's been said by former clients, etc, that they're looking for a big, hunky guy because they will feel smaller.

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Diane Brandon Moody: with a big guy. Because they're not comfortable with their own body.

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Diane Brandon Moody: as it is. Now, whether that's something that can be fixed or not fixed, I don't know, but that is really more projection, and

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Diane Brandon Moody: Before you say that all men are just looking for a skinny woman, that just isn't true. I have not been skinny for most of my life in varying weights. I've weighed all over the place. But, when I was dating.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I was not skinny for most of it, and I still had plenty of dates. They didn't all work out, and I wasn't always somebody's cup of tea, and they weren't always mine, but this isn't true of all guys. There are plenty of guys who have no problem with who you are IF

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Diane Brandon Moody: You're okay with who you are, and you can project that you love who you are. That's what they're looking for. They look more for that.

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Diane Brandon Moody: feeling that you love who you are, and you love life, and you're out there doing your thing. They look more for that than they are looking for your size.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And I know this because many, many men have actually said that to me.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So, in coaching, we help work through body image issues, and whether that moves on to you doing more for your body, or just loving it, learning to love it can be a chore sometimes. Learning to love it, that's extremely important.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So… These are the reasons why that I recommend that you do your coaching first.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Do your coaching before you do the matchmaking, and you will end up appreciating the matchmaking much more.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And I'm saying this assuming you get a good matchmaker.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Matchmaking is a whole different world.

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Diane Brandon Moody: From what I do, I had a former client say that I should get into that, and I looked into it a little bit, and I was like, whew, no, that's just a whole other line of business, and I… it's not for me right now.

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Diane Brandon Moody: But… Assuming you get a good one.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I think that you will have a completely different experience if you do the coaching first, and then it becomes much easier to find your match. And you may not even need a matchmaker at that point. Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

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Diane Brandon Moody: We'll just see how that works.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So…

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Diane Brandon Moody: Thank you for being here. I am so happy to have you here. Again, go unlock that 7 Patterns Guide that's on my website, dianebrandonmoody.com.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And I am doing the very last… Dating safely and scam-free.

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Diane Brandon Moody: class, for the year. I will probably do it again sometime, but, it will only be…

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Diane Brandon Moody: Like, this year.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And that is June 25th, Thursday, June 25th.

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Diane Brandon Moody: at 7pm.

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Diane Brandon Moody: And again, go to my website. If you want to go there, go into dianebrandonmoody.com slash safety. We go through how to keep yourself physically, emotionally, and financially safe while dating.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I know…

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Diane Brandon Moody: three people, personally, who lost $160,000 while dating. That was just the three of them. One of them was a guy, 40 years old, had a PhD. He wasn't a dummy, but he got taken. The other two weren't dummies, they got taken. So we go through all of the signs of a scam and what that would look like, but we also go over how to

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Diane Brandon Moody: Keep yourself date while online dating, should you choose to do that. And even if you don't want to do online dating, and you want to meet in person, I have tips for that, too.

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Diane Brandon Moody: So that is Thursday, June 25th at 7pm. You can get that on the website, too. Dianebrandonmoody.com is where you find everything. Thanks! I'm so happy you've been here. Thank you for, listening to me, and…

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Diane Brandon Moody: I would suggest…

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Diane Brandon Moody: that if you like the content that I do, please give me a review. I would appreciate that so much. And I would also appreciate your sending it to a girlfriend, if you've had a girlfriend complain to you about any of the topics I talk about, and this is my third year, so we've talked about a lot.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Please, please, Have, her listen to this.

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Diane Brandon Moody: I wish you all the best now that we're in the good ol' summertime.

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Diane Brandon Moody: Peace out, have a good day.

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Diane Brandon Moody: week.