Awake In Relationship
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Awake In Relationship
Never let a good break up go to waste with Cole Zesiger
074 As human beings our nervous system is evolutionarily wired for connection. While our life circumstances have changed radically, our neolithic brains are still playing catch up in the modern world. When a rupture happens in a close relationship we feel it on a primal level. Core fear gets stirred that harken back to early childhood experiences and even deeper survival instincts coded in our genes. In a time when more than half of marriages end in divorce it is critical to understand a roadmap for self care and the science of a good break up.
In this episode of Awake In Relationship I speak with Cole Zesiger a break up coach and author of Ex’s and No’s: The Breakup Advice You Don’t Want to Hear. In this conversation we talk about the evolutionary biology driving our most extreme feelings and coping strategies during the end of a long term relationship. We also discuss how attachment styles inform our approach to conflict and point us to a profound path of personal growth, insight and renewal.
Welcome, dear listener. My name is Silas, and this is Awake in Relationship, the breakup edition. There's something about the end of a long-term relationship, or even a friendship that feels like a a direct hit to the amygdala. It provokes something very primal inside that can catch us by surprise. As human beings, our nervous system is wired for connection. In the grand scale of things, it really wasn't that long ago that if we found ourselves alone, separated from the tribe, that most certainly meant death. It's our cooperative spirit that's enabled us to become the apex species on the planet for now at least. While our external circumstances have changed radically, our Neolithic brains really haven't. Connection is a need, not a want. The great paradox over time is that we are surrounded by people all day long, but isolated behind the screen. The end of a long-term intimate relationship is high stakes in business. This is why I invited Cole Zeisiger, a breakup coach and author of Exes and Knows the Breakup Advice You Don't Want to Know, to the show. As someone that's gone through the fire. Cole draws on his own painful experience of divorce and the road back to a healthy sense of self. In this conversation, we discuss the evolutionary biology behind some of our most extreme coping strategies in response to a rupture in a relationship and how our attachment styles inform our approach to conflict and point the way towards growth and renewal.
Silas Rose:you. So your your book, Exes and Knows, uh opens up with this kind of pretty graphic postmortem on the end of your marriage. And it seemed like a a real shock. Tell tell us about that experience.
Cole Zesiger:Yeah, it was probably the hardest thing that I'd done in my life up to that point. So I was I got married when I was really young. I was 20 years old. I was just back from a religious mission. So like I've I remember Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so after it's like kind of expected you go and get married, so I did that. And then the marriage was pretty rough. Like we connected really well. I feel like we had a lot of chemistry and similarities, but we didn't handle conflict very well. And a lot of it was me. Like I was very critical, I had an anxious attachment style. There were things on her side too, but it eventually ended up at the place where the story starts, which the book starts with. She came home from work one night and just told me that she wanted a divorce. And it was about two and a half years into the marriage. So I was 23 years old. And I'd never expected that to happen. I had I had friends whose parents had been divorced, but I got married pretty young in comparison with the rest of my friends. So none of my friends were divorced, none of my peers were divorced, and nobody in my family was divorced. So I felt like a complete failure. I didn't think that it was even possible that this could happen. But it was really, really quick. After about three days, all my stuff was packed and the locks were changed. Her mom was living in our townhome. She flew to live with her daughter, and I moved back with my parents. And after that, I saw her one more time to like get my stuff, and that was it. So it was about, I think it was probably about a week from the time she said that to when I never saw her again. So it was extremely difficult. It it turned my entire life upside down in that one week.
Silas Rose:Yeah, it sounds like a dark night in the soul. Well, what did that experience teach you about yourself?
Cole Zesiger:At first nothing. So I then right after the divorce, I jumped into another relationship pretty quickly. And I've learned now what what I was going through was I was just so afraid of being alone and so afraid of starting over and not being on the correct timeline or not doing things perfectly that I thought I could just paper over mistakes and flaws by just doing it again. So my my literal plan was I'm just gonna find another wife as quick as possible and just continue on and not talk about this. So I did, I tried that. I got another girlfriend about a month after that just off of dating apps, and we dated for 10 months until it got to the point that we were talking about marriage in the future and all that, and I immediately fell apart again. I became distant. I started looking for flaws in her. I started noticing other couples on the street and thinking they looked happier than me. I was overthinking all the time until she broke up with me too. It wasn't until then that I really looked inward and I found out that I was extremely anxiously attached, so I didn't really believe that I deserved love intrinsically. I couldn't be alone. It was really hard for me to go to like a movie by myself without someone else being there with me. I didn't feel like I needed a lot of external validation at that time. That's still something I work on, but I needed a ton of external validation just to feel like I was doing good enough as a person. And I also learned at that time that I needed to learn how to take control of my life and be an agent in it, make things happen. And so I didn't I didn't really feel like I I felt like I had to learn out of stuff because I was drowning so hard after that second breakup.
Silas Rose:You introduced me to a phenomenon known as EX-back content on uh on social media, which I've never heard of.
Cole Zesiger:That is good for you.
Silas Rose:It sounds like serious clickbait. Um Is that what people are mostly coming to you for is to get their ex back?
Cole Zesiger:I discovered it right after the second breakup that I had. I did not discover it in between the marriage because I just got on dating apps immediately. But after that second one, I thought I'm going to die unless I get this girl back. There's no way I'm ever gonna be happy again unless I get this girl back. So I just Googled, I probably looked it up on YouTube and I said, how do I get my ex back? And then there's all these guys and they all make 10 to 30 minute videos about like if you don't know contact, then they'll miss you and they'll love you. If you write this specific text, then it's gonna work, especially if you do it right at day 45. That's when their chemicals in their brain are most receptive to hear from you. So there's all this strategy around it, and it gives you a lot of hope at the beginning. And it can be good and bad, but initially, that is what I made because that's that's all I was consuming. I watched about five hours of that a day, probably. I kind of just switched my MCAT studying schedule to study how to get this girl back into my life schedule. And I at the beginning, I started making videos pretty much just about that. Like, how how do you get someone back? But over time, as as my life has shifted, like I I met someone else, I got married, I had a daughter. I've I've shifted a lot more to more in the middle. So, right now on the internet, in the breakup sphere, there's generally two camps. There is the the one I just described of every ex comes back, just follow this formula and she will come back. You can control everything. And then there's also this other camp that is an ex is an ex for a reason, never get back together with anybody. Everyone who breaks up is a horrible, evil person. I try to be more in the middle where I'll make videos on these are the mistakes you can avoid if you want to maximize the chance of it happening. But in the meantime, let's put that on a shelf and work on improving your life so that regardless of what they choose, because they still do have a choice, there's nothing you can do to take that away. And you don't even want to take it away because you want someone who chooses to be with you. But regardless of their choice, let's help you build a life that's gonna include forgiving yourself, forgiving them, building hobbies, friendships, family relationships, your relationship with God. Let's let's focus on building a complete life that you're gonna love and it's gonna make you your maximum amount of attractive so that you can maximize the chance they come back, but also if they don't, so that you can be happier than if they would have because of what you've built. So that's what I try to focus on now.
Silas Rose:There's something about the end of a close relationship that, you know, it could be an intimate relationship or a friendship that just hits us straight in the amygdala. It's it invokes something very primal, very primal response. Why why is it so painful?
Cole Zesiger:I've looked at a lot of different explanations for this, and the favorite one I've come across, and this is what my book starts with after that story of me, is through evolutionary biology. So if you think about the way that humans evolved and we developed societies and things like that, the the very first building block is more when we were hunters and gatherers. So people lived in large groups and they had tents or whatever they lived in and then hunted, some gathered, that kind of lifestyle. If you imagine the people that were able to survive in those lifestyles are the people who were able to build strong connections with other people. If you couldn't get anyone to like you, then you'd just get kicked out, you'd get eaten by something, you'd starve, you wouldn't do very well. So the ones that were able to really connect deeply with others and very became very good at valuing those connections became us. They had kids and we evolved from that. But our brains aren't very different from that. So evolution takes evolution is a lot slower than the evolution of technology. So now we have social media, we have jobs, we have all these things, but essentially we have really similar brains to when we lived like that. So if you imagine that you're a hunter and you're living on a like a tribal field like that, and then you wake up one day and your entire tribe is gone, your tent is the only one there, and then there's this fire that's put out, I'm just smoking, you would feel absolutely terrible. You'd feel like you were going to die because you probably are gonna die. You're probably gonna get eaten by something or starve. So to evolve to survive, those people had to be flooded with adrenaline. They had to have all their dopamine taken away so that everything feels meaningless, but tracking down my tribe. That is all that matters. And it's not like it matters a lot because I love them. It's it matters a lot because I will die unless I get them. So those are still the brains we have now. But we live in totally different circumstances when having all that adrenaline and tracking people down ends up getting you restraining orders or blocked on Instagram or things like that. So we have to learn how to manage it, but understanding why it's like that, why we're wired for connection so much, it can really help to have grace for yourself and realize you're not a crazy person. You're you're a person. This is how people are. We're wired not to lose people ever. And if we do lose them, do everything we can to get them back.
Silas Rose:So this really relates to fear. You talk about uh three kind of core fears. I wonder what are those?
Cole Zesiger:So I like calling them primal fears just because they are they're the most common that I've seen across the 2,000 people that I've worked with. And that's one of the most amazing things I've seen as well, is as I've worked with people, I've found that people are so similar regardless of age or gender or where they live in the world. I've worked with people 18 years old to 70 years old from China to Africa to the US to Canada, men and women, heterosexual, homosexual, people tend to have these three fears, pretty much always. So the first one is the fear of being forgotten by their ex. It's a big one. Especially if you've started to go no contact, you're not, you're not texting each other. The general assumption your brain makes is this person will never think of me again. They're gonna experience no pain. They're just gonna go off into the sunset and meet the person that they'll spend the rest of their lives with, and I'm gonna be here sad in my room looking at Instagram videos alone. And as I've thought about it more and more, I think that is just one thought that our brains feed us to convince us to chase the person down. Even though it doesn't really work, our brains are gonna feed us whatever info they can come up with to get us to chase them down. So the best way I've seen to combat this fear is to just think about anyone that you know that's ever gone through a breakup. So you you probably have a friend that's broken up with somebody and you've seen that they have a hard time. They suffer. Also think about how you use social media. Nobody posts that they're having a horrible time on social media. So if you see that your ex is just out partying and having a great time, that only tells part of the story. They can still be suffering at home. And the last thing is, I've I've talked to probably of the 2,000 people I've worked with, probably 400 of them have been the ones that ended it themselves. And they're all sad. It's a hard thing to break up with someone. You don't go through it alone and you don't get forgotten. The second one that I've seen is fear of an empty future. So when you're with somebody, a lot of your future is predicated on how you're gonna build it with them. So you imagine yourself having kids, you imagine growing old with somebody, and they're in that picture. So as soon as they get taken away, your whole story about the future doesn't make sense anymore. And it's really difficult, and you don't feel like you know where you're gonna go. That's what happened to me. So I was gonna be married to this girl. We had a dog, I was gonna be an eye surgeon after medical school, have kids, and then all of a sudden she's gone and I get rejected from medical school and I don't have a future anymore. So it's really hard. The thing that helped me was the second you can start building towards the future, even in small ways, it it starts to be something you can imagine. So if you're having a hard time and thinking, I have no idea what my future is gonna be now, it's all dull, dismal. It's only going to exist if I get my ex back. Start as small as you can with what you can control now and it will expand. So that can be brushing your teeth or making your bed or getting ready. Once you've got that stuff down, clean your room. Once you've got that down, clean your house. Once you've got that down, go out with a friend and just start expanding that circle. And eventually you'll start building things in your life that are future-facing. Like now that you have friends, you have a trip planned in the future. Now that you have that trip, maybe you meet someone that you're interested in that you're not necessarily going to date this person, but they show you that you can be attracted to a girl again. It it builds on itself. You just have to focus on those small things first and you'll end up getting there. The last fear that I see people have is fear of losing the specific person, which is really scary. That you're like, okay, I believe that eventually I'll get married again or I'll meet somebody, but I like this one. I really like this person. So there's two ways I help people through this one. One is to realize that's true. You are actually losing something, and that's really hard. That's okay that it's hard. Like we life is hard. We go through hard things, and you don't have to diminish it. You don't have to be like, they were, they were nothing to me. I never felt this. If you did, you did, and that's okay. Second thing is to realize, and I heard this on a podcast from Matthew Hussey, actually. He's a he's a creator on YouTube, he's really cool. But he said, remember that at least half of everything great that you had in a relationship was because of you. So after my divorce, I had a really hard time because I could speak to my ex-wife for unlimited amounts of time. We could just talk about whatever for hours and hours and hours, and it was amazing. Then we got divorced and I started dating again, and I found that my max with other people was like three hours or two hours, and then like it would kind of peter out, and it was really discouraging. I was I I thought, okay, I guess I am not gonna be able to talk to anyone again ever. That's sad. And it wasn't until I I dated, I ended up getting past it, and I met my wife, Jocelyn, and with her, it was the same again. All of a sudden I could speak forever, and that's how it is now. Like Stranger Things Season 5 is coming out tomorrow. We've been theorizing about it for months. I'm really hoping Steve Harrington doesn't die. If anyone's listening, because he's he's really cool, but that's it's probably gonna happen. You'll know when this gets released, you'll probably have already seen it. I will have too. But but we can talk forever, and it's amazing. So what I learned is I can have that with people, partly because I need a good connection. Like connections aren't just a dime a dozen. It is rare, that's why you date a lot of people. But it's not something I'm ever gonna totally lose because I like to talk. I like to have conversations that are deep. I like to listen and to be curious and learn. And as long as I have those characteristics, then I'm gonna be able to attract and find someone else who can bring that out too. So if you feel like your ex was so funny or so adventurous or so spontaneous, and you'll never find that again, and everybody that you're dating sucks, it helps to remember that you had those things because you are those things, right? So they can't be taken from you. So those are the three main fears people face.
Silas Rose:So you mentioned that we have these kind of Neolithic brains. How does uh social media and digital communication kind of amplify those fears?
Cole Zesiger:They show you only the things you're afraid of. So the other part of the Neolithic brain is that it's called negativity bias. We we tend to give extra weight to things that could hurt us or that are negative. So if you see 10 signs that your ex is might be sad, but one sign that your ex is super happy, we tend to throw away the 10 that are sad and and really, really consider the one that's happy and treated that as the whole truth and catastrophize of that. Build up these elaborate hypotheticals about how they are so happy now. And social media helps with that because that's all people post anyway. So on social media, you're gonna see them going out, you're gonna see them with friends, you're gonna see people in the background, and you're just gonna take all those things and wind them into a story of how their life is incredible. So I would try my best to mute them on social media or delete the app, be away from it altogether. Social media, it can be good because that's my whole career. Like I make social media videos and I think they're helpful. But there's a lot of bad on there too. And once you've got a plan, like once you know what you're doing, once you're like, okay, I'm in no contact, I'm doing this to make my life better, I would delete it. I think it's just gonna give you things to worry about.
Silas Rose:Before we get into the art of a good breakup, how does our attachment style inform our approach to conflict?
Cole Zesiger:In every way. So an attachment style, for those who don't know, is it's basically the way that you understand how you relate to love and other people in in loving relationships. And it's it's not something you're born with, it's something that you just end up adopting because it's the best strategy for survival in the environment you grow up in. So there's four general ones, which are secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Just really quick, what they mean is secure. If you just think of a healthy relationship, you're probably thinking of secure, like good at understanding others, assuming the best of others, comfortable with distance and closeness, good at communicating, all that stuff. Anxious attachment is when, because of the way you grow up, you believe that you don't really deserve love. Something is wrong with you. So love is definitionally going to get away from you. So you have to do things to stop it from getting away. You have to ask for reassurance, you have to hold on extra tight, you have to always know what your partner's thinking. If there's ever a moment of silence, then you need to figure it out. Press this extra pressure on the relationship. That's the one I more naturally was. Avoidance, the opposite, where you believe that you're good, but love is something that's going to hurt you. Usually people have been really hurt in the past, so they lose trust in others. And that shows up as breaking up when things get too serious or pushing people away or having a hard time being vulnerable, um, getting really into work, becoming really self-reliant, which can be strengths, but can also harm relationships. And then a disorganized, the last one is just a mix of anxious and avoidant, but usually a mix that is like turned up to 11, so more volatile. So usually an example would be before you date people, you're extremely avoidant, you're cold to everybody. But then somebody gets through your armor and they they end up in a relationship with you, and then all of a sudden you are always on them. You're always clinging to them and always wanting to do all the anxious things. And it could be the other way too. You're always anxious, but then you get into conflict and you totally shut down and don't talk to the other person. So the way that it informs breakups is it often causes them. Oftentimes, people end up together who are like it's called the anxious and avoidant trap. Anxious people usually end up with avoidant people because avoidant people they just prove to each other that what they believe about love is true. So anxious people believe I don't deserve love, therefore I need to chase it. So they find someone who's running away from love so they have someone to chase, and then vice versa. So those people break up all the time and and don't want to accept the breakup all the time because they their styles tend to exacerbate each other's weaknesses. Um, so one of the first things I do when working to people to get past breakups is wherever they're starting from on that attachment style spectrum, which it is a spectrum, by the way. So you can be like secure leaning anxious, or you can be super anxious and anywhere else. Um, one of the first things I do is help people build a secure attachment style because you can change. You can get better or worse. You're not stuck wherever you are. And the more secure you are, the better you're going to be able to maintain a relationship, but also know and trust yourself and in what you want. So, right after a breakup, one thing that I see a lot is an anxiously attached person ends up getting broken up with, then they go research the heck out of the internet, like I did, to find how they can control everything again. And then I work with them and they become more confident in themselves, more stable, and and they believe that they they're gonna be okay. And then a lot of them don't even want their ex back anymore. They start to see all these things that weren't what they want to be in the relationship. And now that they're more stable, they they get to see that. Whereas a lot of times when we're feeling really anxious, we we don't really think past the I need them back. There's actually a relationship after that. But we can ignore that. All we think about is I just need to get them back. I don't really care what happens after that. So that those are some ways that it affects it.
Silas Rose:The first rule of of a good breakup is is no contact. It's kind of like the first rule of fight club. Don't talk about fight club, don't talk about uh your ex. That seems kind of like tough love. Yeah. Why is it so important?
Cole Zesiger:It is hard. I don't think it's harder than the alternative, which if you really think about the options you do have, let's let's say that you're the one who got broken up with. The options you have are pretend to be their friend and and just hope that they see the good in you again. Generally doesn't end up happening. Usually you just kind of get friend zoned and then feel terrible. You can chase them, you can really pressure and try to convince them, which generally that just ends up pushing people away, because when someone's chasing them, then they want to run away. Or you can go no contact. Now, what no contact is, is it's a couple things. One, it's just simply listening. So if someone breaks up with you and they're saying, like, I don't want to be with you anymore, if you don't be with them anymore, that means you listened. You're mature enough to say, okay, I'm gonna respect you, I'm gonna respect myself. That's it. So that's one definition of it. The second is that after breaking up with someone, they've actually done brain scans of people and found that the brains of people who are really, really grieving a breakup or a divorce are almost exactly the same as someone who's quitting a hard drug like heroin or cocaine. So it's similar to that, and you have to go through a withdrawal phase to be able to see clearly again. And it's gonna get worse before it gets better. So if you're quitting a drug and you go through, you stop taking it, and then you go through withdrawal phase, and it's gonna be horrible, and then you'll feel better, and it'll be done. Whereas if you just like, let's say I'm trying to quit the drug, but I take it every other day, you're not, it's not gonna do anything. You'll you'll go through like miniature little withdrawal phase and then start over and then just loop around that again and again. And that's what happens with people who end up in on and off or limbo or ambiguous relationships for years, is they don't go no contact. They keep talking, they they get like really shallow surface level conversations, and then maybe they dip into something deep, and then one pulls away, and then the other one like lightens it again, and they just do that. And and you can do that forever. The longest I've seen is eight years. Someone I worked with that they did that with someone for eight years. Neither of them were in any relationships in in the meantime. Like, that's that's enough time to like get married, start having kids, start a family, but they skipped it because they were they wouldn't go no contact and they were in this little thing. Um, so those are the first two reasons. Third reason is if you do want to get back together, it's the best way to make that happen because it gives the other person clarity on if they want to be with you or not. So, one example I use a lot for this is if you imagine a little kid who's who like goes to his friend's house and his friend has a dog, and then he goes home to his dad and he's like, buy me a dog. I really want one. They're awesome. They they do tricks, they're fun. So the dog goes and gets him a dog, the dad goes and gets him a dog, and he he gets the dog, but he says, Okay, I'm gonna need you to do all the hard things that come with owning a dog. Like, you're gonna have to take him out. He's gonna pee on the like the couch and you've got to clean it, and you've also got to buy food and all these things that are hard. And the kid's like, okay, I'll do it. Gets a dog, a year passes, and the kid learns, like, okay, like I know the good and bad now. And only at that time can he truly be like, I like having a dog or I don't like having a dog. And that's that's what it's like after a breakup, too, that they know the good parts of the breakup right when it happens. They know, okay, I'm free now, I don't have to deal with the fights we had anymore. But unless you actually leave, they don't get to actually experience the whole thing. They don't get to experience missing you, knowing what it's like to not be able to text you when something happens. And what you want deep down is somebody who, of their own free will, chooses to be with you because they think it's the best decision. That's the only type of relationship that's going to last. So by going to a contact, you give them the chance to figure out what that decision is. They see clearly both sides. They know what it's like with you, they know it's like without you. And then they can choose do I want to be in this or not. Whereas if you're always there texting and doing that, it's it's kind of like if the dad bought the dog for the kid and then the dad did all the hard stuff. Like he cleaned up everything. The kid wouldn't really know. So don't do that. Like give them the actual opportunity to feel both sides.
Silas Rose:It seems like a big part in the process from what I've hearing you say is also a willingness to kind of go through the fire, to create that space. To to feel the pain of loss, to feel the grief and the anger. I think that uh when we do that, it really is this kind of testament uh to our ability to kind of re parent ourselves or to express uh self-love. For anyone that might be listening to this podcast right now who is perhaps in the kind of initial phase of a painful separation and is maybe kind of feeling a little bit overwhelmed. What what would you advise?
Cole Zesiger:A couple things. So the first one, this is this is from Jordan Peterson, if you've seen him, but he has a book called Twelve Rules for Life about just how to how he thinks you should live a successful life. And rule number three is treat yourself like someone you're responsible for caring for. So one of the best ways we can treat ourselves is to imagine that you are external to yourself. Imagine that you're caring for someone going through the thing you're going through. So if you imagine that, let's say you're you could do your daughter, your best friend, your cousin that you feel really protective over, whatever you want to do, someone that matters to you. Imagine they're going through it, and then how would you help them? So, first, if they're extremely suffering, you don't say shut up, get back out there, date. You don't. You comfort them, you sit there with them, you cry with them. My mom did awesome with that for me after my divorce. We'd go on these walks and she just listened to me talk about all the all the videos I was watching, and and it was awesome. So that's step one is like if if you're really struggling, give yourself time to struggle. Be with yourself, don't shame yourself into getting better. Then two, sometimes it can help to set a timer on that. So if you find that you're doing that all day long, say I get an hour of sad feeling time, and then literally set a timer on your phone. And then after that, pick some sort of productive action that's gonna build that shiny object now for you in the present. So one way that I like to systematize it is if you break lives, if you break your life into these six categories, these are categories you have control over: family relationships, friend relationships, religions has spirituality, hobbies, work, and health. Rate those out of 10 based on how you feel about them, like your level of satisfaction. That that'll give you like, okay, this is what my life looks like right now. And then pick a couple actions you can do in each of those that would raise the numbers. And then after you get done with your, so that you have a list of like 12-ish things. Once you get done with your hour of being sad, do a thing off that list. And it's something productive that it ends up building your life. And once you do that over time, it compounds. And then let's say it's been three months, and every day you did one thing on that list, all of a sudden you're a lot more healthy, you have friends that you like. Like that's 90 things, 90 actions in in um in in 90 days that let's see if yeah, if you did it for three months, you get 90 actions to make your life better. That would make a drastic difference. So, yeah, that's what I do.
Silas Rose:So to finish up, I want to ask you a question that I asked a previous guest on the podcast, uh Mel Cassidy, which is I believe was episode 60, if people want to have a listen. Is it possible to begin a relationship with the end in mind?
Cole Zesiger:I think it totally is. I I don't think you're gonna be a hundred percent accurate, but I think you're going to arrive much closer to that end if you do that. And I think this is a valuable thing to have in every aspect of life. I've I've heard one, this is actually the beginner with the end in mind, if I'm right, it comes from Stephen Covey, who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Affected People. And in that book, he says that one exercise you can do to accomplish this is imagine your funeral and imagine what's said on your eulogy in the newspaper, and then write it. And then once you got that, like what you'd want to be written about you, live your life so that you end up there. And he just relates it to if you're beginning a journey, like have a destination. So, with a relationship, I definitely think that that is possible and a great plan. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is how to actually make marriage last because that's the stage of life I'm in now, which I I think there's a couple things I've seen that I want to do different than I think that most of the world does. Is one, I think that the world really decides or describes love as a feeling and just treats it like I'm I'm supposed to feel in love. And if I don't, then I should leave and go find something else that makes me happy and feel in love. This also from that Stephen Covey book, he says that love is an action. It's a verb. Your job is to create it. So that's what I that's what I try to do in my marriage is whenever I'm having a hard time, like I think it is my job to fall in love with my wife all the time. It's my responsibility. I'm supposed to look for things, I'm supposed to focus on good things that that get me there. The second thing that I'm trying to do to begin with the end in mind is I find that when when you get married relatively young, it's hard because people change and people grow and end up different people. So a lot of people I've talked to that have gotten divorced, like after 20 years, it's because they're not the same people anymore. Like they grew in different directions. So one way that personally I try to begin with the end in mind is have an ultimate direction that you're growing towards that is the same. The only one that I can think of, which this isn't going to work for everybody, but it works for me, is God, relationship with God. That if I find someone and marry her that wants to just make their life about developing a closer relationship with God, and that's our primary pathway we're both growing towards, then hopefully my plan is that we'll both grow in the same direction. That we'll be different people when we're older, but we're we're growing the same way, not different ways. So that that's the way that I'm trying to begin with the end in mind is find someone who has the ultimate same goal so that we grow towards the same thing.
Silas Rose:That's a great place to end. Uh Cole, thank you so much for this conversation. How can um people learn more about you and your kitchen?
Cole Zesiger:Yeah, so I make videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. If you just look up my name. Um, on Instagram, I'm coach Cole Zeziger, but the others is just Cole Zeziger. And I so I have a book that's coming out February 10th. It's made to be the book that I wish I had when I went through my divorce. So regardless of whether your goal is to get back together, to move on, to learn to date again or just to learn to love being single, my goal with the book was to take you from a place of feeling like your entire life is in shambles to growing and building life that you love and then accomplishing any of those goals. So just the place in between heartbreak and love again is the purpose of the book. And if you pre-order it right now, I'm offering um just a course. I usually sell the course for like a couple hundred bucks, but I'm just anyone who pre-orders the book will get that immediately so you don't have to wait for it to come out to start getting things. And you also get chapter one and a secret chapter that's never going to be released when you pre-order two. So you can get that on my website and we'll probably link it or something in this.
Silas Rose:Awesome. Thanks again. Awesome.
Cole Zesiger:Thank you.
Silas Rose:If you want to learn more about Cole, or perhaps take a three course, head over to ColeZazakar.com and I'll be sure to put some links in the show notes at awakenrelelationship.com if you found value in this episode and in the content I produce here at awakenrelationship. I'd really appreciate a quick review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and really helps to grow the show. You can find me on LinkedIn Substat and sometimes Instagram. Send me a message. I'd love to hear from you. Especially if you have ideas for future guests or topics. I can also be reached by the contact page on my website. Till next time, friends. Stay connected.
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