So thank you very much for the kind introduction. It's a pleasure being here in Oslo, and I'm honored to be able to talk to you this morning. As mentioned, my name is Anita Grazer, and I'm from Austria. I work in Vienna. I'm a researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology, where I focus on transportation research. So I'm looking at people moving and trying to find out what they're trying to do. Besides that, in my free time, I'm very involved in the open-source GIS community, most notably in the QGIS project where I'm part of the project steering committee. That is the group that tries to organize all the boring stuff behind the project. And then I answer questions on state overflow and try to do my own side projects, which you've probably seen around the internet. In addition to that, I'm also currently serving on the board of directors of OSGU. That's the big umbrella organization that hosted also the phosphor G in Bonn, and then it's home to many other open-source GIS projects. But I will talk about that a bit later in detail. So the whole story behind how I got involved into open-source GIS was really I started out as an intern in a research company. It was summer, everyone was on holiday, and so was the GIS person, which was great because no one knew where this ominous GIS license was and how I could get access to it. So I was there looking forward to a month of internship without the GIS. I had to sit down and try to find a different solution and Google around and try a few of the GIS tools. A few months later, the QGIS developers met for the second time to have their developer meeting and it was in Vienna, so I joined them and I've been stuck since. It's really the community and the speed of the project that got me and I'm still staying there. I already mentioned I'm working at the Austrian Institute of Technology. We are a non-university research institute, mostly in Vienna, which is owned by the Republic of Austria and the Federation of Austrian Industries around half-half. And we have a lot of people, there's over a thousand people working there on five main fields, which is energy, mobility, that's where I'm working at, safety and security, health and environment, and innovation systems. The small area you can see there, that's where I'm currently sitting, and I've been told when I come back I'll get to move a few months over. But overall it's a very nice view right there in Vienna. My group is called Dynamic Transportation Systems. We do everything, research on everything that moves on transportation infrastructure. So pedestrian trends and how they move in events or inside train stations. And we also look into how to collect data about movement, which is not as simple as we sometimes think, particularly if you want very reliable data. And then when we have collected data we try to understand it and we try to model it and make forecast models. And then there's also a big group, which is getting more and more important for our group, which is the dynamic route planning, optimizations and logistics, which has a lot of talented people in it. So the AIT pays the bills. And the QGIS project, that's really where my enthusiasm goes. We use it a lot at the AIT, we don't have any other GIS licenses currently in my group. The QGIS project was founded in 2002, so it's already over 10 years old. It all started in Alaska with one single guy, it was Gary Sherman, who sat there and he had this new thing. He had this post-GIS database with all the data that he could finally work with, but he had no way of looking at the data. So his whole motivation was he finally wanted to have a look at the data so he developed a viewer and that's the project that he called QGIS or back then Quantum GIS. Quite soon other people around the world joined him when he had released the code and it started rolling rather slowly in the beginning. You can tell that from having seven years between the first release and then going to 1.0 in 2009. I myself had joined it around 2007 when we had the version 0.7. From then it really took off, so we had four more years until 2.0 and I will talk a bit later about the plans for 3.0, which is around the corner. So we've been constantly growing and to channel all this work and to meet because there are so many developers all around the world from New Zealand to Alaska. We try to meet twice a year with all the people who can make it at developer meetings and since last year we also have a yearly user conference which was organized in Denmark last year and in Spain this year and it's a really great event to get both users and developers together in one place to discuss what's been going on the last year and what are the plans for the future. This is a picture that we took from this year's user conference in Girona, which was a real pleasure to attend. So I've already mentioned that the project has been growing continuously over the last years. Here you can see the number of contributors per month. Those are the contributors that can directly commit code into the repository. So this is the last underestimation of the number of people who work on the project. I will get later into how many people are actually involved in running a project like this, but even in the committers you can see we have a nice increase over the last 14 years already. And I think these numbers, these estimates that we get here from OpenHelp, those are really impressive considering how much work has already flown into this project and how mature it is. I already mentioned OSGU for a moment in the beginning. QGS is an OSGU project. It's a graduated OSGU project. That means it has a certain organizational structure which is a project steering committee and there is ways to contribute to the project and it's not sealed in but rather open to the public and to new inputs. OSGU is not for profit which is registered in the US and its goal is to foster open source uptake to help the project to support them if they have any trouble legally or in other ways. And it drives outreach projects mostly, for example the conferences but also GEO for role which is their program for academic, for teaching materials to reach out to universities and make them adopt open source in parallel to the commercial offerings that most universities currently have. Furthermore you will also be familiar with OSGU Life which is a tool also for academics but in general for outreach it's a collection of all the programs that are within OSGU and it's basically your first starting point. If you've never tried it out, get an OSGU Life, download a USB stick from one of the conferences, you just plug it into your machine, you boot it and you can try all the software. It's pre-installed, no hassle there. It runs on a lube onto operating system and it comes with test data so you can just give it a try without messing up any machine. Coming back to QGIS. QGIS is an open source project but knowing that is not enough to understand the nature of how it works and how it operates because there's many times of different open source projects. And there's this one distinction that is quite popular between the cathedral style open source projects and the bazaar style open source projects and I think QGIS is very far on the bazaar side of these things. Basically the main difference is in a cathedral there's architects, maybe just one architect and he or they they try to control the whole project and they sit and they do until they are happy and then they release the source code. So it's open source but while they are doing and while they are filing at the different pieces, bits and pieces you don't get to see what's going on. On the other side in QGIS you have this completely open system of the code being always visible, everyone can branch it, everyone can work on different ends and pieces and that way we collect a lot of different inputs. Sometimes you have inputs, features that attract the same crowd, so you have different people working on different issues and sometimes on the same issues and sometimes there's duplication of work but the big advantage is when people get together and find out, collaborate and that's why the bazaar is the model of choice for us and it has served us really well. In this paper by Raymond he says so nicely open source will triumph and not because it's morally maybe superior to say we want to share things, I mean if we get real who cares really, we all have to eat, we all have to pay rent so morals are nice but it comes down to survival first. But the point is and why he thinks open source is a good model for development is that the commercial, the proprietary world just cannot win the arms race of all these people are contributing to open source projects because they simply cannot put in the same manpower and skill manpower to solve the issues. I mentioned before that this number of developers that we saw in the graph is vastly underestimating the number of people that are involved in an open source project, especially an open source project that is as huge as QGIS. So I have here this graphic of the QGIS team as I call it which I like to show because it's really important for me to mention that the developers are an important part but they are just one part of a big puzzle in the whole thing. And then there's many other groups which are equally important and keep the whole thing running and making it usable for everyone around the world. For example we have the translators who make sure that QGIS is available for local users all around the world in I think over 70 languages by now. And they do an awesome job because they have to always keep up with all the new features that are introduced. Then we have of course the infrastructure managers who take care that the downloads are available when you need it, that the backtracking is available, that you can have all the infrastructure accessible for both the developers and the users. Then we have the huge group of documentation writers and they have a really hard time because as you might know we are releasing QGIS three times a year. So there's a lot of documentation that's always to write and also a lot of new features that want to be described. So we are really proud of our documentation team and they are always looking for more volunteers. Then what I've put here is community managers. Those are the people that are looking at the users and trying to support the users on the mailing lists, on JS Stack Exchange which was already mentioned today and in other places on local forums which are not in English but there's a lot of French forums and Spanish forums for example. So they try to keep all the people together, they collect feedback from the users and they bring it back to the project which is a really important task as well. Then you also need designers in your project particularly to keep the website model looking to half a good user interface and to try to do marketing outreach which doesn't look like it's been done at night by some developer who would rather have written codes than to make this kind of work. And then what's also very important to me, I consider the users as part of a team of an open source project. The users are super important because you shouldn't underestimate that developers involved in open source projects quite often aren't directly also the users of the open source project. Quite many of them are great at developing but they are not power users. They never use any of the cheer processings functions themselves so they probably will not notice if there's a workflow which is not ideal. That's why we need this feedback from the users which tell us okay this could be done much better the current workflow you always get stuck here that's made more complicated than it has to be. This feedback from the users is essential and it's the job of the user who is not the customer of the open source project but part of the team to also contribute. If you want to be a customer that's fine but you're the customer of the commercial support provider who works with the project. You can never be the customer of the open source project it's not how it works you're part of the community. Also part of the community and super important for us are our donors and sponsors. Without them it wouldn't be possible to have these developer meetings. It wouldn't be possible to do many of the other things that the project is trying to do like increase code quality by having regular practices and also run other outreach programs. And of the bottom of it all I put the project steering committee. It's the group of people who takes care of signing all the necessary contracts. We've trademarked the brand and the logo of QGIS so just in case to avoid any trouble. We have all the contracts for the servers and the domains and all this stuff needs to be taken care of. It's not very glamorous not very exciting but that's what the project steering committee is for. We've also been working on forming a new legal entity for QGIS because so far all these contracts were signed by individual members of the project steering committee. And after 14 years of existence we thought it's time to professionalize that a bit and to have a legal entity who can actually sign things. So there is a new organization association registered in Switzerland called QGIS.org which we are currently setting up and then we will have an official voting for the board of directors of QGIS.org. And if you want to vote voting members of the organization are nominated members of QGIS user groups. So we already have 13 user groups official ones that registered with the project and each of them can send one voting member to the association. And in addition to these voting members from the users we have an equal number of voting members from the developers to keep those things in balance. Because we really want to be a developer group organization. Because as an even number we have one other voting member which is from OSGU who can break a tie in case developers and users just cannot agree on a thing. I don't see it coming but just in case that one is there as well. So it would be great if for example from Norway I think we don't currently have a user group from Norway.  How we spend our money is a public thing. You can find this financial report for 2014 and 2015 on the website. And it shows you how much we've made mostly in donations and then sponsoring. And what we spend it on. And last year we spent a lot on bug fixing. So there's one bug fix round before every release. It's organized in a way that developers who have time to do the work they apply. And so far the PSC has decided whom to pick. We always had a set amount in our budget and we went along with that. We also have spent some money on the developer meeting expenses. That can be travel support that is mostly for the food at the conference. And we try to keep costs very low by having a venue which is usually at the university. So we don't have to pay for those things. And then there are some other expenses like the servers and all this other thing which you have to take care of. And this budget and how the money is divided is one of the things that the voting members will decide on. We also have some new ideas to not just invest in bug fixing. We also want to invest more in documentation both for the users and for the developers. So we have started a so-called grant program where we ask people to apply with their ideas for what could be done to improve the QGS project. And we hope we get a lot of submissions which deal with that kind of issue of how to improve documentation, about how to improve our infrastructure, maybe some outreach things that we then can support with some money. Speaking of documentation, there's tons of documentation available online and this has been like that for many years. But what really did take off in the last two years, three years is the books. And I have to say I think the books really showed that they're serious. And they had another big effect with the books and the QGS too. We finally saw a much bigger uptake of QGIS in education, in academia. With universities finally realizing, okay, this is not going away. They are serious about this thing. You can even get something that you can put in the university library so I can finally go to my superiors and I can say I want to offer a course for this software as well. And it's an important asset for our students to know how it works. So there is like a lot of courses that you can find online. I'm currently also teaching at the University of Salzburg which has a distance learning master's in geographic information science. And we're also using one of those books. Besides that, there are self-study materials available from mostly US American universities. Like the GEO Academy curriculum which is a good starter if you want to get an introduction into the whole topic of QGIS. Because they really made it step by step and you can follow along really easily and there's no need for an instructor in the way that they organized these learning materials. Of course, all these learning materials, they will never cover everything. We need support channels and there are a lot of different support channels and ways to get into contact with the project. The classic thing and I know it's frowned upon by particularly the younger crowd are the mailing lists. Yes, they are old school-ish but they work and the developers are used to working on those. But because we know that many people rather want to have a forum and something that's a bit more interactive, we also support on GIS.StackExchange which is a great platform for asking questions and finding answers because it's really indexed very well by search engines. So we used to have a forum before GIS.StackExchange started but it was really a problem because if you were googling for the questions you couldn't find them on the forum. And I think now with StackExchange that has much improved and I would recommend everyone to use it. I already mentioned the user groups. They also provide local support for their members because they often have to deal with very local issues with specific datasets like you also have in Norway, you have your own dataset standards and that's the same case in many other countries. So they deal with that and they also lower the language barrier because the official mailing lists, they're all in English and some people have trouble describing their issues. So they rather go to their local mailing lists or they have local forums where they can interact with the community that's in their country or in their language area. And of course there's also commercial support and I say of course these people have been working with QGIS for a long time and it's a myth that you cannot get a support for open source projects. The ones that I've listed here are just the ones which have core developers on their stuff.  But there's many more which are not listed here who have developers but the developers have to submit pull requests on GitHub to get the code into the project. That doesn't mean that you cannot get it in, it's just one extra step because we want to ensure the quality and we do laugh by having the core developers check it because they've been working on the code base for a very long time and they know the ins and outs and can estimate what effect it has if you change something in a certain place. If anyone is interested in joining this group of core developers, it's not a closed group, anyone can basically apply but you apply with your work. So before you can join it, you have to demonstrate your ability and your willingness to apply good code to the project and after a while you can get invited to join the core committers who have some certain powers but also responsibilities in the project. I mentioned before, it's getting time, it's getting exciting, we're moving towards QGIS 3.0. Why do we have to move? We have to move, it's not something that we decided on, it's not an our timeline. We have to move because many operating systems are moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and also from QT4 to QT5 and we want to stay up to date with these dependencies. They have a lot of advantages and we hope that they bring us advantages and not just work. So we will have QGIS 3 with all those new libraries. We think the first version of 3.0 should be out somewhere in spring. We will have to evaluate the timeline and see if that's doable around after Christmas, at least that's the plan right now. I would recommend, particularly if you're interested in the plugin development, that you try 3.0 because that's important to note. All plugins for QGIS 2 will be broken when you try them in QGIS 3 because Python 2 and Python 3 are just not the same thing. So everything will have to be updated to Python 3 and the new QGIS API. We're planning to have guides for plugin developers which show what are the usual things that you have to change. Of course a list of API changes to make it easier for the plugin developers to get to the new version. But still you will have to touch your plugins if you have any. That has the advantage that we will probably be able to narrow down the number of plugins that we have. Currently there's a thousand plugins in the plugin repository. I think no one has ever tried them all. And it's going to be really exciting to see how many of those will be updated to QGIS 3. And I also hope that we can consolidate a couple of those plugins which do very similar things into one better improved version which will then ship for QGIS 3. At least that's my hope. Other hopes that we have are bound to QT 5 which is supposed to have better support for mobile devices and for high-TPI screens which you probably have on your new notebooks. So supposed to look nicer then. And there's also other advantages that we hope for, for example, like the SVG export which is done with QT. That's hopefully improved in QT 5. So let's go from the organizational and from what are the plans for the future to what has been the latest improvement, what are the latest features that QGIS has gained. There's always a really, really long list so there is no way to cover them all in a talk. And you can find this list always in our so-called visual changelogs. They're visual because we try to add pictures and animations to show exactly what it is. So you can get a quick overview of what's been going on in the project in the last four months since the previous release. And it's always really fun to scroll through it. You also have a mention of who sponsored the features. If it's a sponsored feature that was contracted by a company. So you can see who's involved in the project, who has an interest and who are the developers as well. So if you have a certain task that you want to have implemented, check through the changelog and see who's been working on similar things, who knows their stuff. So let's dive into a few of those features that have been landing in the previous year. The first one seems 2.8 since the last long-term release version. One thing that I really like a lot is that we finally have a start screen, not just a blank map, but an actual start screen which shows you the last few projects that you've been working on. Which is really nice, especially if you have a lot of things going on at the same time, chuckling between them, to just with one click find exactly the project that you've closed the previous week or two weeks ago. That's a really nice way of having a look at the projects. We also have a new feature in the map view. If you have trouble seeing it, for example, because you have a high DPI screen, there is now a magnifier tool in the map view which you can use to increase the visibility just for working on the map. And you can also rotate the map now in this view, which is a nice additional thing. One big overhaul, and I don't know in Norway how the disaster looks like, but this has been driven a lot by this Swiss disaster, is the new geometry model in QGIS, which supports not just simple features, so always straight lines between points, but arcs and circles and all these things that you can design in CAD software. So you have direct support for a circle. This circle just has one dot and then a size, and it's more in that way rather than many, many different nodes that form something that's kind of a circle, but not really. So in the back end this has all been implemented, and if you have a storage system like PostGIS, which can store these arcs, you have the whole workflow, and you don't need to go back to simple features anymore. So maybe that's also interesting for the Norwegian disaster or engineering data sets that you have. There's also, on the slides, there's also support now for all the 3D data, so if you have a shapefile or any other data which has 3D coordinates, they are now maintained throughout the processes, which wasn't the case before. If you loaded something in 3D, QGIS just silently dropped everything in 3D or M values, and when you exported stuff it always ended up as 2D because they lost all that information. That should be solved now as well. There's also tons of new functions being added to the expressions like all the time. I've picked some out which are particularly interesting for photography, so that's something I like to work with, I like to explore what's possible, push to the boundaries of the styling functions. So you now have a way to, much easier, set different parts of the color to, for example, make it go from very light to very dark with the color part of setting. There's also an even more convenient function which just says darker, so you give it a color and you say make it a bit darker than that, and magic ensues you don't have to remember any RGB codes or other stuff that you do in other tools. There's also a reverse, so you can flip around lines for example if you want to draw arrows, but the roads kind of have an attribute which says is it in the direction that it's digitized or in the other direction, so you can flip stuff around. You can even do closest point computations now in the expression builder. So you give it two features and it finds out it's the closest point on the other feature and you can mark that there. And one really cool thing that you can aggregate in the expressions. So you can finally say, give me the maximum value of all the population entries in this layer and, for example, calculate the population share of this feature relative to the whole population. That's something really new because before that you could only compare it to other attributes of the same feature but not to the whole table and that makes many workflows just so much easier. Another workflow improvement thing is in exporting data, you now have fine control about which attributes you want to export and how you want to call them. So, for example, if you want to export to a text file, you get to choose from all the columns just exactly which do you want to use and if you want to rename them, that's also possible here. So, if you've ever worked with like joint data which ended up with 30, 40, 50 columns and you had to then open it in some other editor and remove columns, that's over now. You can all do this step directly when exporting from QGIS in this tool. Another thing that's really nice to work with when you get used to it and which a lot of people wanted is conditional formatting. Probably you know that from Excel. So, you say, in this column, if a value is under 5, make it red and if it's over 10, make it green. And you can do the same thing in QGIS in the attribute table. We have the same conditional formatting. Maybe it's even more powerful. So, you just define your conditions, the colors, and you can see how it translates to the attribute table and how everything is highlighted and you can sort by it. It's a really nice and nifty tool. That is not obvious to everyone because it's kind of hidden, so try it out. It's back there. Hit another button in the top right corner. There are also many more improvements in the attribute table. You can finally have a context menu. If you click on the name of the attribute in the attribute table, you can hide columns, you can change the width of the column there, and you can sort, which was really in high demand for a long time. You finally have a way in the attribute table to just sort it visually, not in the data set behind it. It's a little bit slow because you're changing the data set. It just changes the display order. And you can also add actions to the attribute table. So, a button right next to each line in the row in the attribute table to do a specific task. For example, to open a file where the path is stored in the attribute table and you want to see that file in front of you. And all these workflow things, there's tons of new improvements for visualizing the data. One thing that I really like a lot and that I want to use more, hopefully, in where it's appropriate, is the 2.5D renderer that you can see here. So, it's basically a block model that you can extrude the height of a building depending on the fixed value or depending on an attribute. And you can also style it and do all kinds of other fun things with the extruded areas. So, this is very useful for these building visualizations but we've also seen a lot of statistical maps, for example, where you have a certain value for a country or a district and you just scale it and you make the surface model out of it. We also have a new renderer for arrows. If you've ever tried to make some arrows in the past in QChill, yes, it kind of worked, but it was a bit hacky. Now you have arrows and you can even have curved arrows and those are really neat. You just need three points to define the arrow and it automatically calculates a nice, smooth curve for them and they can be highly customizable because you can apply every kind of polygon style to these arrows and if you've ever played around with QChill and styling, you'll know that there is billions of options in the polygon renderers. Another thing which popped up like three months ago was a guy on Twitter who said he had written a live hillshade renderer. So it was just a small Python script that he ran in the Python console on a digital elevation model and without actually writing a new hillshade file it would just display the original digital elevation model as if it was a hillshade. And this idea was picked up really fast by Nathan Woodrow, one of our Australian developers and now we have it in the main application. So the script anymore is actually part of QGS Core and you can just for any digital elevation change the display to hillshade renderer and it will create the hillshade live without writing a new file and you can change all the parameters if you like them and it's also live updating. This live updating you definitely have to try it's new in 2.16, so get that version and you will have what formerly was in the layer properties in a dedicated window is now on the right-hand side of the map and whenever you change something here it's automatically and immediately updated in the map so you have much faster time much faster response to any of your style changes to any of your label changes you see immediately what goes on if you change this one parameter it's so much easier to experiment and to fine-tune your map with that and I think that will be one of the tools that really improves maps because it's less tedious than always having to go somewhere opening two windows and change the color to a bit darker or a bit brighter so now this is just one click away and you have live updates and I think that will encourage people to make much better maps and increase the speed at which we can produce these better maps so I already mentioned you have the same capabilities for labeling so it's right here besides the map and whatever you change here is reflected immediately if you are worried that maybe that would be a bit slow in some cases it can be there's also a tiny button here where you can turn off the auto update but I've worked with reasonably big files and usually it's not an issue so I just keep it on for now and enjoy that I don't have to click apply anymore at close windows you can also open the attribute table at the same time I mean that before you couldn't do you couldn't have a look at the attribute table and the layer properties at the same time because the layer properties was always blocking the rest of the interface it's all gone away with this little addition which I think is just wonderful of course there's also improvements to the algorithms themselves for example the labeling algorithms there is now a better automatic placement so if you should first put it on the upper right corner and then in the lower left corner of the symbol you have also options now for label obstacles so you can say never put a label over this feature although labels have to be put somewhere else don't cover this one up that's one of the new things that's supported and we also have this really nice thing of that the labeling algorithms now considers the symbol sizes so you can tell here all the symbols have a different size but the label is always nicely relative at the same distance to the border of the symbol which was formally not possible automatically you had to do it with data-defined settings but now it's much simpler to achieve another thing that happened on social media which started on social media and that's what I enjoy so much about these fast development environments that we have in QJS is this gradient editor thing you probably some of you might know the old QJS label gradient editor which was just okay you have to can define two colors and if you want to have more colors you have to type in at which position of the gradient you want which color and it was really not very interactive and user-friendly and on Twitter we discussed that one day and it just took two days I think until it landed in the nightly builds and it's not just here that you have this gradient editor like you're used to from graphics design software but we also have this very nice new edition which is rather novel I think in most fields is where you can control actually different aspects of the gradient much better you can control for lightness we can see here in the demo when I move this up and down the color gets lighter and darker and you can create gradients that ensure that for example it always goes from dark to light so if you print it in black and white it will also make sense compared to your usual gradients which quite often screw up if you print them in black and white or you can also make like this gradient which is brightest in the middle and then gets darker to both sides and you have really fine control here which I also think will lead to improved maps and much better visualizations I hope my totally subjective action features showed you how exciting it is all the new things that came in please have a look at the visual change box as well because I certainly left something out that would have been very interesting to you as well I want to use this opportunity to also encourage you to get involved in a project there are many ways also for non-developers to get involved in this project you should definitely report issues if you find them let us know about them because otherwise we cannot do anything about them please help us translate and document our features we just looked up the Norwegian translation yesterday and it was somewhere at 80% so there is still room someone has started it there is still room to improve then we can always use bit more funding to squash more bugs to make our infrastructure better if you already know something and if you are interested in learning more try to engage and to answer user questions it's a great way of learning about the commonly faced issues and how to deal with them it will also help you within your organization because really 90% of the problems are always the same of the same issue and if you are a programmer of course it would be wonderful if you were to help us find and fix issues and help developing as well so my title was QGIS Community Power GIS and I think it is so great because it empowers communities all over the world and I hope it empowers you as well thank you


Okay, I'm going to try this again. Hi. This is Jonathan Asley of Jonathan Asley.com and I'm so excited to be doing my first live stream I'm having some technical difficulties So I'm gonna have to probably go back and delete some of these But I just want to thank those that are gonna be joining in a few moments I've just got to give a few seconds for people to jump on So please bear with me. One of the challenges with doing, you know live is just technology and whatnot So I've been having some problems trying to set this whole thing up and I'm gonna need to be taught. Who looks like Looks like bliss just joined us. Thank you for joining us bliss. I really appreciate that And I'm gonna give a few more seconds for some others to join us But while I do hey bliss, can you do me a favor and Post a comment post a question. You'd like me to have answered I'd like to just jump right in right now and answer questions So if you have something for me, please post it right now Let's get this dialogue going so we can have a fun live stream for the next five ten twenty thirty minutes However long this goes so again I see one person on if you could post a question. I would be so grateful Otherwise, this is just gonna be ramblings ramblings ramblings ramblings. So Well, it looks like you're bashful. So That's okay You know, I'm gonna talk about so for those are not hey Suzanne Thanks for joining do me a favor Suzanne if you have a question, please post it below This is all about having a live Q&A answering questions. So if we don't have any questions, this isn't gonna be much fun. So For those who are unfamiliar with my work, I'm a dating and relationship coach for women Mostly specializing in midlife, which is after baby making years and before retirement So my predominant demographic is those folks that are between 42 and 69 Okay, why I specialize in that is because those in their 20s and 30s There's a different energy to forming a relationship for those in their 20s and 30s That's usually centered around high everyone usually centered around having children and raising a family But what happens when you're in your 40s 50s and 60s the vast majority of single people who are looking for love are divorced and In that comes a lot more complications and I use the term complications in that we come to the table with our stuff in our lives Thanks. Hi everyone with our stuff in our life. We call it baggage. We call it luggage You know, whatever that is and it's a little bit more challenging to blend lives with another person This is why dating at midlife can be so much more challenging than those in their 20s and 30s And and let's not mention that my area of also expertise is helping women understand men so Because men at midlife I often say if you watch my videos are quite clueless and what they're clueless to is We haven't been really educated on how to merge lives with another human being when we come to the table with our stuff So in our 20s and 30s, we're like a blank sheet of paper And as we get in our 40s 50s and 60s, we have stuff and how do you make our stuff work? And this is where most people are rather clueless. This is why if you follow my work if you've been watching my videos I often talk about a variety of books. Hi everyone By the way, I noticed a question come in so I want to start Answering some questions because that's what this is all about. So you got a gist of where I'm going now Let's just jump into the questions. I'm particular Know what I'm looking for in a man. I find missing Find some missing many things. Okay, so Angelique wrote that by the way, thanks for everyone. That's writing from all over the world Thanks so much alright, so Here's the interesting thing about what Angelique just wrote and I want to comment on this because as a dating and Relationship coach for women. I can say to you that so many women Come to me in the clouds. They have this Fantasy of what they want in relationship and what they lack is the real foundation of understanding the relationship Now I will say that women are more relationship oriented than men women are more Fixated on relationships than men So there is one facet of women that is different than men is they're more focused on Relationship, but that doesn't make them any better ladies That doesn't make you any better at being in a relationship or understanding the mechanics of a relationship because if you did There wouldn't be the need for coaches like myself giving advice over and over and over again So I do want to say going back to Angelique's comment Well that that you you know that she knows what she's looking for I get it a lot of people know what they're looking for That's great. You know what you're looking for So, why aren't you finding it? Isn't that really the question the next question if you know what you're looking for Why aren't you finding it? All right now? There's some questions coming in slow down everyone Character integrity honesty open trust communication going back to Angelique. Yeah, there's a lot of men that lack all that just like There's a lot of women who lack that that's just called being a human being Okay, Kimberly writes my ex didn't see himself marrying me after a year together Can you know for sure by the length of time? Okay, great question Um and everyone please this is my first time and this is going really fast and I next time I'm gonna have to edit it So it goes much slower One year in relation here's my philosophy You know, it doesn't take much It doesn't take a year to decide if you want to be in a fully committed relationship with someone The challenge is does that person want to be in a fully committed relationship? That's partnership oriented Did you hear that partnership oriented?  What does partnership look like? Partnership means you're part of the same team together. You're on the same team You're helping each other and your personal lives. You're helping each other and your professional lives That's what partnership is And so a lot of people can be in relationship together But are they really in partnership together and that's one of the challenges? I do believe if you're not Aware of the and and understand the mechanics of a healthy happy relationship It makes it much more difficult to establish a partnership with another person. Okay, Jessica writes I am 34. He's 48. He keeps trying to push me away. But then comes back Comes right back when blank. What can I do this cycle? Okay Please forgive me. These questions are coming in really fast and I'm going to have a hard time Following this so I'm going to have to do a better job when I do this the next time So 34 48, uh, he I'm assuming he pulls away when she gets close It's very common once again The average human being men and women alike In today's relationships, uh, they have what their basic needs met those basic needs are companionship connection sex, okay This is what ester parel calls stable ambiguity. I talk about her book quite often called mating in captivity make Oh, that's backwards. Should I do it upside down mating in captivity? Uh in her I wonder what my book looks like self. Okay So it looks backwards. Um, so mating kept stable ambiguity basic means is the the stable part is that it's monogamous and exclusive and the ambiguous part Is is this a partnership? Are we trying to develop a partnership with one another? Breathe that in. Are we trying to develop a partnership with one another? Are we by the way? I'm assuming that that's what people want. Okay I'm under the impression that the goal here is to be in partnership with another person not in a relationship And you see how a partnership is a much stronger when I do this it can break away really easy. Wow This is brand new stuff for me. I just came up with this idea. This is what a relationship is It can be pulled apart really easy A partnership is much harder to pull apart So this is why I'm a big proponent of people Approaching the dating process with an awareness of wanting to be in partnership with another human being Okay men and women alike The sad reality is that most people are just seeking that companionship connection and sex without any real partnership Okay. All right. Wow lots of questions coming in Please bear with me. This is going by real fast. He's nervous dating me because we're in the same We're in the same friends group. This is what Tina wrote He's nervous to be dating me because we're in the same friends group Sometimes that can be a challenge when you are friends with other people There's an old saying, you know, be careful.  So it's kind of that's work related But that can be the same with friends because when you have your friends group and you decide think about this You like another person, but you're not really sure about them So you're thinking do I want to explore a relationship? Don't I want to explore a relationship with them? It can be kind of tricky because you don't want to disrupt the balance of your life if it doesn't work out This is one of the reasons why people vacillate In the dating process vacillate means they're they're back and forth. They're oscillating. They're unsure because the reality is and I know Ladies you've been sucked into this whole feminine energy kind of stuff that all you have to do is just be warm And smile and a man will just naturally gravitate for you the real that's great When that's a great way to To approach it when you're meeting people you're familiar with But the reality is is today we're meeting strangers now And I know in her case there's a friends group but We're we're really strangers to one another and it's hard to develop intimacy with strangers Because of fear of rejection the fear of fallout all of these reasons So that could be part of the reason what's happening there. All right. Hi ladies. Just finished private coaching December with oh, hey, Renee How's it going? Thank you so much. I really appreciate your comment there I know we changed your life and I'm really proud of that Angelique wrote yes person was with sex is good with him, but isn't much like me guess more emotional more physical I don't know what that means. Uh, thanks deep diver How to date after being with someone who's verbally abusive? Whoa How to date well first year if someone's been verbally abusive to you first off first and foremost Compassion for oneself Breathe that in compassion for with oneself self love. This is my book.  It starts by being compassionate for yourself Now forgiveness Also is part of compassion for yourself But forgiveness means for giving love for giving love and one of the best things you can do for yourself Is give yourself an injection of love because look at i'm not absolving someone of bad behavior But until there's a healing it's going to make it very difficult to be in relationship with another human being It's going to make it very difficult to actually trust another human being This is why i'm such a big proponent of self love Self love those who know me know my book what the heck is self love anyway Was birth after the loss of my 19 year old son connor you know I'm gonna cry now It's not That my son betrayed me Why i'm using the word betrayed When you lose someone you care about deeply it can feel Extension empty loss it can feel painful it can almost feel like a betrayal of what we what my I thought my life was going to be like with him So I share this with you is he was the inspiration for me to do a deep dive into what does it mean to love myself because I I my whole life i'm a recovering codependent I've literally adopted a philosophy is you need you have to love me for me to feel good about myself You have to love me for me to feel good about myself. So So self love is is loving yourself. It's giving yourself that big gigantic hug giving yourself that big gigantic hug because the reality is is It until we actually truly begin a healing And forgiveness and compassion just simply compassion for yourself It's going to be difficult to be in relationship with another human being. So that's my invitation for you. I apologize I didn't catch. I didn't notice your name, but for that for the person to ask that All right, I hope this is sinking in. I can't watch for you. He's showing me more love hugs to you Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that Um Okay, so angelic he's showing. Oh, let me go back to that one angelic He is showing love through sex more conversation. I'm more emotionally caring showing love I'm still open, but he needs healing from mother child abuse. Okay, so listen ladies for those who follow my work You know, I am here to say that the vast majority of the human population is deeply or is wounded Both from childhood wounds and traumas as well as adult wounds and traumas Let me repeat that childhood wounds and traumas and adult wounds and traumas Now what happens with childhood wounds and traumas? It usually creates our negative patterns and limiting beliefs in our lives Let me repeat that it usually Becomes the systemic problem with our limiting beliefs in our lives if they go unhealed So for example, I'm an anxious attacher. Okay for those who are familiar with love attachment stuff Do I have the book attached? Yeah, here we go the book attached. Okay Uh love attachment. There is basically anxious avoidant and secure okay, and um Anxious it means neediness. Please forgive me. My phone's going off neediness. So I can be very I can I've I've been doing a lot of healing from anxious attachment, but this all stems from my childhood So this was deeply ingrained. Okay now So this is and for for the for the avoidant It's where they're afraid of love and anxious person is like craving craving craving love So I'm just kind of giving you the cliff. No version of that Okay Other negative patterns and beliefs it could be we follow patterns of our parents I my mom was very critical in my life and guess what I am. I'm overly analytical and critical It's one of my negative patterns and limiting beliefs in my life, you know My belief that I need others to love me for me to feel good about myself all stemmed from my childhood Now adult traumas the biggest adult traumas that happens in midlife Happens to be centered around divorce around divorce and because of divorce It can absolutely shift the balance of power I'll say from that old paradigm of being men being provider protectors a lot of men Go through a divorce and the last thing they want to be in relationship is a provider protector Even though there's a base Instinctual need there the trauma circ can circumvent that this is why I I'm such a big proponent Of don't listen to the rhetoric that is centered on biology based dating biology based dating We have to throw out the gender and biology and we have to look at human beings as individuals Flawed in human beings riddled with flaws.  We need to create a different type of equality in relationships And what I mean by a quality.  You have a better chance of having relationship success this way Uh, let me see what else is going on Jonathan your videos helped me But I still have no self-love. I've been working towards healing childhood traumas, but it seems impossible Katharina, um, I apologize. I didn't pronounce your name properly Hey, that's a tough one. This is why where's my book? God, I should have just kept all my books up here I didn't this is why when I did what was called the hoffman process hoff man Hoffman process google it right now. This was a complete inner child workshop to heal my traumas Look at a hoffman process is rather expensive In fact, just for the record my ex-girlfriend after we broke up treated me on this and this is a $5,000 program This was my birthday gift from her Because that's how much we parted in a conscious uncoupling and I only share this with you is not every relationship has to be a Chaotic day at disaster two people can choose not to be in relationship and separate with one another in a conscious loving Compassionate way So she gifted me that and it was the most transformative thing in my life Now listen, you don't have to always do the hoffman process You can do insight google insight seminars You can do therapy to heal childhood wounds and traumas But I'm here to say if we don't heal underlying problems We're just going to repeat problems in relationships over and over and over again All right, I don't know if I helped on that one, but my invitation is do work When men tend to change their behavior before getting the woman or after why? um Is that alex? Oh, that's oh wait Before getting women and why alex. Come on the french except any input When men tend to change their behavior before getting the woman or after I don't really understand the question Um, you pronounced my name correctly. Oh, well, thank you, katherina Uh men okay men my age 40 often prefer younger women and those men only looking for sex What does a man look for in a woman in his own age can what can we offer or should we okay? Here's the thing about look at age Let's talk about the age conversation By the way for the record I was in a relationship with a woman who was significantly older than me She would kill me for say this and I say significantly. Let's just say I was in a relationship with a woman who was 10 years older than me.  Well part of it ladies is you know, we Ladies are no different. I I talked to so many women who want younger men as well because The older we are the more baggage and shit we come to the table That's one reason why people want younger The other thing is younger people tend to keep their physiques in better shape than people are older I'm not saying that is an absolute. I'm just saying that more frequently So this is very common men and women alike Especially after 50 years old tend to want younger Now do men want sex? Absolutely. Yes. That's part of the process But unconscious men that's all they care about for people like myself who's seeking partnership with another human being We're looking for the whole package. So yes, there are plenty of men who want younger women who want sex And there are plenty of men who want women their own age There are plenty of men that are open to dating women older than themselves like I am and they want partnership Here's the bottom line with that question Do you want to focus on what's wrong or do you want to focus on what's right? How about making it simply like this the right man for me appreciates my age The right man for me appreciates my body the right man for me appreciates everything about me Only focus on that stop focus ladies. You got to stop focusing on what's wrong and start focusing on what you want Let me give you an example an olympic athlete Doesn't sit there and go. Oh, I'm going to lose the olympics. I'm going to lose the olympics I'm going to lose the olympics because the olympics is the hardest thing to ever win That's not what an olympic athlete does. They go after what they want I mean, I'm going to use a different example My son collin that's him right there He's so desperately wants to be a comedian. That's his passion. Although right now He's a tutor. By the way, if any of you have children at home and need a tutor Please check out collin's online tutoring Write me privately. I'll send you a link to it because he does zoom tutoring But he wants to be a comedian And up until covet every night of the week He was going to open mic nights open mic nights open mic nights because this is his passion He didn't say to himself becoming a comedian is hard and it'll never happen He people that persevere and get what they want in life It's because it's because they persevere and they keep going So you have a choice The red pill or the blue pill the blue pill is negativity or we will go with red pill The red pill is negativity and the blue pill is i'm going to achieve what I want and focus on that You have the choice. It's it's binary. You can focus on what's wrong or focus on what's right. Okay Um, he isn't as handsome like when you and angelic He isn't as handsome like when we met him at 24 and 35. We're both in shape Okay, great. Um, okay. Thanks for loving that answer. Uh, let's see Correction when do men tend to change their Unx okay correction deep diver rights correction. When do men tend to change their unacceptable behavior? Before getting the woman or after mating the woman. Okay, listen I'm going to be candid with you They're unacceptable behavior Human beings are riddled with unacceptable behavior many You know the reality is is where two people are like sandpaper with one another oftentimes. What's acceptable. What's unacceptable What's most important is finding someone who's in alignment with you Ladies one of the reasons why I have a coaching practice And by the way, if you need support on this check out a free discovery call with me It's on all my links if you ever check it out. It's just go to johnathan asley hit the coaching button One of my areas of expertise is teaching you how to vet how to vet For emotionally healthy men. Here's the reality of life. Oh, where is my wheel? Where's my wheel? Hey stand by for a second Okay, i'm back Okay, look at This is you're going to see this in upcoming video, but I want you to look at this pie chart Okay, now in this pie chart, there's 10 percent 10 percent 10 percent 10 percent 30 and 30 Okay, this represents men and women alike Now this 10 and 10 percent These are the people that have clinical emotional issues that make them very difficult Practically impossible to be in relationship with okay. These are absolute clinical issues. Okay Now 10 of these people are already in relationship with someone and 10 percent are not okay So there is a huge percentage of the population that is in relationship with people that have clinical issues Okay, now i'm making up these numbers. This is very anecdotal, but this is just gives you an illustration Then there's another 30 percent that have issues that are doing no work healing themselves They're doing literally no work to heal themselves. This is half the population Half the population does little or no introspective work self-love work healing work. This is men and women alike Now the other 10 percent are people that are very conscious aware doing personal development work self-help work Um spiritual work. They're doing the work as I talk about in my book.  Anyway, have you ordered my book yet? Please order my book at self-love the book.com. Okay 10 percent of these men these are men and women 10 percent are in relationship And there's another 10 percent like me that want to be in relationship. Okay Then there's another 30 percent that are doing something They're doing some personal development work. They're in the tunnel getting there So why do I share this with you? Is because the reality is is the vast majority of human beings are riddled with issues This is why Dating and relationships can be so problematic. That's why don't buy into the rhetoric of the whole Man must claim you and man must be sugarous and the man does this and the man does that because that's great to getting laid But you've got to deal with the person after all that. That's why I'm a big proponent of vetting the person Because here's the real reality of life. I want you to look at this little chart that I created This says child This says adult and this says parent Half the human beings out there are acting like children And and when you're with a child the other person has to become the parent This is because most people aren't operating in their adulthood their adulthood And this is what I want to lean into more and this is what i'm trying to encourage So but men and women alike to do the personal development self-help work so they become an emotional adult Let me repeat that an emotional adult And that's what I want to encourage. Okay. What else is people writing? I I guess you're right.  He's my second love. Okay My boyfriend has only said he loves me twice. We've been together seven months now. Should I be worried? um so I think there's There's a fear around saying the words. I love you because I love you comes with some level of commitment Commitment in other words And there's and we men are fearful of saying it because we're it's basically implying that I'm going to go the distance with you Here's the bottom line You know two people that are spending regular time together are doing shared activities hobbies mutual interest spending time with family and friends Being physically intimate with one another um If they're not reached a point six months into the relationship and they're not feeling a sense of love I I don't want to say To be worried But I I really wonder if the two people are aligned with one another Do they have a shared vision do well first off? Do you share the same values? Do you have blendable lifestyles? Do you have a shared vision? Are they an emotional grown-up? These are all the important factors to end up with that partnership I've talked about And if those aren't present then it can be a problematic relationship. Here's the good news though Every relationship has value. I'm gonna repeat that every relationship has value Okay, so And and the value is what you learn for yourself and many people act like victims. Oh my god ladies in particular But guys too you act like victims It's always pointing the finger at the other person But you're not seeing the three fingers pointing back here in the united states We are suckling on the nipple of victim hood God people are act like such victims look I get it. They're unless you have to call a doctor A policeman or an attorney unless you have to call a doctor a policeman attorney Whatever happened in that relationship. You were a participant to it So take ownership to that part of the relationship. I know I'm going off tangent to what she wrote. Okay Oh, thank you, katharina I heard that men tend to change for women that they want before they get her But once they get her they don't want to work on themselves to improve um You know, I'm thinking of the movie uh as good as it gets you make me want to be a better man When a man genuinely cares about another woman I know when I was in a relationship with someone I genuinely care for I I wanted to be a better man Not to get laid That's such a short term thing. Um, I want to be a better man because it was good for me too That's how a grown-up operates now. Um I'm trying to give you an example of how I wanted to be a better man with her because I was in such a train Okay, look it Listen ladies I'm in my fifties for a majority of my life. I've I've been a trainwreck in relationship now not my marriage I mean in my marriage. I was so unconscious. I was so myopic. I was so focused on self I was in a good place in my life But I was very myopic myopic means is is another word for selfish But it's it's selfish from a place of unawareness I'm gonna repeat that it's selfish from a place of unawareness. It's not intentional I didn't intentionally want to be selfish then after my divorce. Oh my god. I was a trainwreck I went into the tunnel for 10 plus years And even my last significant relationship. I was a mess It and quite frankly it wasn't until my mother passed away and then connor passing away That I really did a deep dive into my own work That got me onto a threshold where I feel like the ground beneath me feels solid So why am I sharing this with you because this is a significant percentage of the male and female population? Most people are a trainwreck on some level.  It's just a matter of degrees. They are either Gandhi and mother Teresa on one end of the spectrum or they're Jeffrey Dahmer and lizzy born on the other end of the spectrum And everybody else is in between just like this crap So this is why I'm a big proponent of loving on yourself and compassion for oneself Okay, let's see what else. Oh, they say love Or they say they love you because they're afraid of you leaving Yeah, well because insecure people need love someone else to love them for to feel good about themselves ladies You're a perfect example of this I don't know how many of you are afraid to speak your truth to a guy because you're afraid they're going to leave This is why you wonder why you're in you know Unhealthy relationships because you're making you're not speaking your own truth chapter Chapter one in my book. Where is it chapter one right here? Speak your truth do it with kindness Learning to speak your truth is your feelings. You have to learn to speak up speak your truth Just do it with kindness What does it mean to be? Overwhelmed emotionally. What does it well? What does it mean to be overwhelmed emotionally?  You're holding on to the negative emotion and it requires just letting go And you and I like the way Esther Hicks says it our thoughts create our feelings So you can shift your thoughts to create new feelings. I always start thinking of happy thoughts I go into gratitude. I go into appreciation Um, what was the thing I said earlier to a friend of mine today gratitude appreciation that will come to me Oh purpose You know purpose. Well, I did a video on this recently about purpose I'll come back to that but when you have a purpose in your life It surely creates a helps create a foundation in your life when you have a purpose A lot of people when they're younger their purpose is to be a parent But this is the challenge in midlife is there we're lacking purpose and without purpose We can be very can be very dysfunctional. That's why establish a strong purpose develop a daily um self-love practice and be in appreciation and help create a solid a better foundation for inner peace. Okay Um men that I've attracted have flirted with me first then back off be Be they feel overwhelmed? They don't consider they don't consider feelings like they appreciate and support I give and then act like I don't exist. Okay that again That is an experience you've had Again, I understand those are some experience you have that's not all men that just happens to be some men That's been the experience you've had most likely. It's because you've You've um, we've allowed you've allowed, but I'm saying a we have allowed Attraction as being the center of how a relationship happens. It's all it seems to this is where most human beings Hyper focused on chemistry and attraction without any awareness to shared values and a shared vision blendable lifestyles and emotional maturity when you're with someone who has shared values and vision A lifestyle that can blend with you and has emotional maturity. You don't have to worry about these things It's not going to be an issue So rather than focusing on attraction or chemistry focus on those other three things and you might have a greater chance for success It's my invitation for you. Anyway, I did this to him. I did this to him this time around because older mature know Know how to speak truth my feelings. I'm disciplined now and okay got it last question Why do men realize they have a good woman when it's too late? Okay? um Why do men realize they have a good woman when it's too late? I I'm not sure Okay, so here's the challenge in most relationships one of the fundamental facets that's missing in a lot of relationships is appreciation Now I did a video on this and i'm going to go into a little more detail on this right now But the four elements to a successful relationship is attention affection Appreciation and acceptance. I'm going to say this very slowly someone write this down for me attention affection appreciation And acceptance so attention simply means being present. Am I present to this other human being?  Am I present to them? Or am I focused on the future or am I focused on the past? People are focused on the future focused on the past aren't present. They're not giving attention Okay Affection touching feeling giving each other compliments. Oh my god, you know the five love languages Uh words and touch and quality time attention is so I'm shocked. How many women call me wanting advice on a guy And the the guy broke up with them and i'm like Do you guys are you friends with one another and they go no and i'm like really? Then why are you lamenting over some guy where you didn't have a lot of affection towards one another? attention affection Um appreciation. Oh my god. Can I tell you ladies? Most of my male friends who have gone through divorce they said the one thing that they felt Was absolutely underappreciated in relationship. That's the vast majority of men say they feel underappreciated I can tell you that It's not the words. Thank you. It's the word grateful and appreciation And what's missing why somebody goes back after something You know why there's a breakup is because sometimes they might finally value or appreciate one another I want to encourage I want to make that I don't want someone to have to break up to feel appreciation This should be the daily vitamin in relationship and lastly is acceptance here Bottom line is we're going to meet people that aren't exactly aligned with one another You either accept them for who they are or at least work together or you move on I don't know how many of you women are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole Going oh, but you're not accepting him for being a square peg You keep trying to put him in a round hole I'm like no either accept him for who he is and he has to accept you for who you are Or there's going to be constant friction with one another All right Question we've been together for 10 months and neither he nor I are ready for him to be around my seven-year-old Dispute despite us knowing each other for four years prior should I be concerned? Wow 10 months and you guys haven't introduced each other.     You've got to introduce the family and friends. So this is important So have a conversation. This is where you got to use your words word use your mouth talk talk to one another I crack myself up sometimes. Yes. Use your words have conversations.  So have a conversation about it Okay, how do you get started being it? How did I get started being a dating coach? I'm watching plenty of dating coaches because I'd love to become one. Okay Um, how did I become a dating coach? Thank you so much for asking.  Oh my god. I was doing drugs. I was drinking alcohol I was lose. I lost my money in the market. I was incredibly depressed and what a great way to Shoot myself up Was online dating But what was happening was I got addicted to just talking to women. I was talking to women I was talking to women two three four five six seven hours a night all over the country Sometimes I'd have five instant messages going at the same time on yahoo personals. Oh my god But what was happening is a lot of women would reach out to me that I developed friendships with and say Hey, Jonathan, will you help me improve my profile?  Oh my god I met a great guy because of what the advice you gave me And then I began studying uh relationships. I I Amount I think I've amassed over 20,000 hours of coaching. I have over 3,000 hours of personal development work. I have a neuro linguistics programming certificate I'm currently getting my cognitive behavioral certificate Now I don't say this to impress you. I just want to impress upon you. I've done a lot of work How did I become a dating coach? I just put myself out there and it just happened Um Here's the thing There's a lot of dating coaches out there. There's a lot of people talk talk talk talk talk talk And a lot of them is it are they're talking out of the sides of their mouth My work actually is because I study human behavior So if you haven't done a significant amount of personal development work and actually study human behavior Quite frankly, there's no business being a coach out there because all you're doing is giving advice Based on the rules a lot of people give advice based on the rules based dating And that's very short lived if you follow my work and like my work. It's because I'm talking about human behavior I'm talking about psychology. Um, so maybe get a psycho psychology certificate might be a good place to start I would love your tips on improving our profiles on dating sites. Oh my god. Okay, angeli Master john, thank you.  So ladies, um, let me just give you an example Of a recent profile. This was a recent profile of a woman here. I'm sorry to put her name on there This was her first photo This was her first photo.  I see every day What does it what does a good profile look like here? Just give me a second Here's my photo Look at how crystal clear that is. Well, you can't really tell I'm bragging here for a moment every Photograph should be crystal clear.  No selfies. I mean come on. This is obvious. Do I even really have to answer this? John, it's normal. Hi, Jonathan It's normal for men over 50 to respond to all your messages and texts but never really initiate by the way your favorite You're my oh, thanks. Um, okay This is a great question. Why will men engage? On the dating sites and then not initiate a meeting Okay, I am guilty of this A lot So it's the pandemic. I'm bored. I'm by myself a lot. I want connection. So I've swiped Right and somebody else swipe right now. I look at her profile and I'm like, uh, it's it's it's I'm not overly It's a maybe it's a maybe And when someone's a maybe it's just nice sometimes to feel connection with another human being I'm guilty of this. I'm not proud of this. I'm guilty of this Here's the thing human beings are thirsty for connection.  They take forever. It's it's it's men and women alike. Okay Wow, this is really going great this live. Okay, you are crystal clear Uh, I'm having issues with what to write about myself on a dating site help. Uh, you know what? Here's the thing Go to match.com read other women's profiles I can tell you read the profiles Find the ones that you really like Go read some woman's profile find one and like and just you know, not plagiarize it but give you some Inspiration but most profiles are this block. They're like this Wa wa wa wa wa It's from charlie brown. It's literally you're saying a bunch of rhetoric find something spectacular. Oh go to Isirino isirino Dot com evan mark kats anyone know who evan mark kats is post his link right there to isirino He writes dating his company writes dating profiles. Evan's a personal You know social friend of mine So um go to isirino and check out to help create a profile for you I'm done with online. I've done online dating. Wait, I'm done with online dating 12 years I've been friends for one year. Wait, hi We've been friends for one year then a month ago. He said that he Is physically attracted to me and he wants to be friends with benefits. Should it be emotionally attract wait So why would a man want to be friends with benefits is because they like you they're attracted to you But it means they don't want a relationship with you. Hey, listen. I have had friends with benefits in my lifetime Now here's the thing. We both knew the score. Okay. We both know the score. So when someone knows the score Um, it's it's basically saying I like your company.  That's what that says In my humble opinion I know you're supposed to be a super positive when dating but any tips for when your life isn't really full because of pandemic Yeah, buy my book.  Look at the back by the way, isn't that cute?   It's hard to date during a pandemic I mean, do you know when remember when the pandemic happened and you saw all these dating coaches going? Yay, we can start doing zoom dates and you can have your cut You can have your your your wine and share a date over zoom together Yeah, that's great for a couple times.  So look at You got to fill your life with as many positive things as you can I just bought a uh paint by number set just something to do because I'm like going stir crazy so um do things that bring you joy call friends and um And just you know the more You can inject yourself with love. That's what matters most Okay, uh, it's cute. No kissing no kissing. No hugging. What is that? Sadly by the time you weed out the men who are just wanting physical relationship You are tired of the site. By the way, that's actually an interesting point she makes Okay Yeah, you know what sex is free It I mean, what's the expression? Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? The reality is is with the advent of birth control and the and the reality is his marriage isn't needed to have sex Yes, we men get to get we get all the milk for free. It's great. Thank you ladies for giving us the milk for free And what's happened is burnout has happened You know, if you listen to my podcast the what would love do podcast I always say the number one emotional health issue is I'm not I don't feel good enough I feel unlovable and I feel unlikable And nothing triggers that more than habitual dating habitual dating habitual dating I was recently a woman told me that a dating coach told her to go out on one day to week Well in one year, that's 52 dates That's a lot of people to go through to have nothing happen This is why I teach you how to vet for emotionally available men So instead of going out on 52 dates, wouldn't you rather go out on five dates with three? Solid with five solid prospects and shoes from that. That's what I teach anyway Okay, uh read books take new hobbies virtual painting dance bubble. Oh perfect. Thanks, Andrea Uh join your local meet-up groups, you know, yeah, I'm leader groups Doreen, I pronounced I butchered your name, you know, I think meet-up groups are fine But you look at you can't join a meet-up group now in a pandemic Please say the name of the site for profile again e sereno e sereno Go to evan e-v-a-n mark m a r m a r c cats k a t s or k a t z and check them out Come on jen zoom is cool. I better do nothing What is the ultimate happiness of a man? What is the ultimate happiness in a man in relationship sacks? No, I'm just kidding Ultimately when I'm you know, it's interesting Men and women want really ultimately at the base level the same thing to feel safe with the other human being To feel safe to be vulnerable authentic and transparent. That's what men and women are craving The problem is we're all covered in armor of childhood wounds and traumas and adult traumas That makes it very difficult because there's so many people are armored up men and women alike Trust issues abandonment issues and let's not get started on rejection men as they age fear rejection Significantly, this is why a lot of men, you know, aren't this chivalrous chivalrous and coming on. Oh, look at that Coming on strong, you know and take charge. I know it sounds all great in theory, but We're afraid. I'm afraid of rejection.  Is this sinking in? I hope it is Okay Why do men say one thing about One thing but mean something else. He says he doesn't want a relationship but treats me like his girlfriend Well, it's because it's not that he doesn't want a relationship He isn't a relationship with you and he thinks of you as a girlfriend. What's missing is partnership He doesn't want partnership with you. This is buying we can get the milk for free because guess what? Relationships today are getting the milk for free Partnership means an invest partnership looks like this. It's an investment relationship is this you can break away easily I just came up with that. I'm really proud of that one Okay, spoke my truth after being disappointed again and now he says he's giving me a break.  Sorry, let me go back here Um, should I let him go or not? Haven't heard from him in a week dating for 10 months.  Here's the thing Two people should be talking about your relationship should be something built It's kind of like building a house Okay, first you start with a foundation then you build walls then you build sides Then you build the roof and you have all these, you know all these trestles and things in there A relationship is something built Most of you are dating from a From a perspective of men or the leaders of the relationship and you give your job to the wrong person My mom right there. She was in charge of the relationship I'm here to say ladies. You are the emotional leaders of the relationship. You set the standard you set the rules You set the standard and you set the rules We men will follow if we like you a lot.  Can he be ready to date? Okay um okay He's flying. Okay, so uh someone who's recently separated look after my divorce I'll never forget. I've been separated for about four five months and I one woman I wrote on match.com And she said how long you've been divorced. I said i'm not divorced. I've been separated for five months. She said Reach out to me in two years after you've had or 18 to 24 months after you've had one or two transition relationships Here's the thing A marriage is like this you have to unravel the tapestry And regain your sovereignty your individuality before you can re-engage with another If someone is still in this phase It makes it difficult for them to be in their individual state to be able to come back like this So you take your you you take your life in your hands every time you choose to date a separated man Now here's the thing if he's codependent You will be the first person he latches on to And chances are you have an 80 chance of failure in your relationship because 80 of second marriages fail or 75 percent Anyway, so it's because you're not building a relationship together This is why you've got to buy the book eight dates by dr. John Gottman This is the book to teach you how to build a relationship the mechanics to a healthy happy relationship Wow, I I didn't believe this was going to go on this long. Okay I hope this is by the way, is this sinking in ladies? Is this resonating? Please post a comment Let me know leslie probably when he's moved on the distance will make him realize the distance will make him realize Distance doesn't make anyone realize anything this idea that men fall in love what they miss you Uh men fall in love when they appreciate you until you're appreciated by another human being There's no love whatsoever missing doesn't create love missing creates anxiety and a temporary fix Because a lot of people treat each other like property and not like human beings Uh Okay, okay. Oops Yes, amen. Thanks. You are awesome. Thank you so much. Yes, it's wonderful. Yes super interesting love this live Hey, this was a lot of fun. I um, this was my first time doing this.  Hey, um Listen, if you had value in this and you need some love and support Check out my link to a free discovery called check out my group called midlife love mastery Where I shoot Question I shoot videos based on your specific questions My book what that where is my book?  Please check it out. And also, uh, I've got a podcast called the what would love do podcast Look, I'm gonna wrap up this this live my first one. It's been an hour. I had no idea how this was gonna turn out I am so grateful for all of you. I can't read it because I don't have my well, let me just say um faith uh carol, uh Angelique gene akima, uh, thank you deep diver. Uh, there's just so many people yaffi jenny girl Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I've been truly honored to be able to share this with you I hope you did find value in this and again If you need any love and support reach out to me professionally Okay, I'm gonna wrap up this this live stream like I do my videos first. Oh, wait. Hold on one second Like I always do first off. I'm gonna give myself a big gigantic job the bear hug of self love I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone or a friend or a pat or even a teddy bear And give it a hug of love You guys have been so wonderful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart I want to thank you all for the love and support you've given me regarding connor You guys have been great guys gals friends ladies Um big hugs to you.  Thanks so much and bye. Bye now