Bonus Episode 7 | Bella Gandhi - Mastering the Art of Modern Love - Mick Unplugged

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Are you ready to change your habits, sculpt your destiny, and light up your path to greatness? Welcome to the epicenter of transformation. This is Mick Unplugged.

We'll help you identify your because

so you can create a routine that's not just productive, but powerful. You'll embrace the art of evolution, adapt strategies to stay ahead of the game, and take a step toward the extraordinary.

So let's unleash your potential. Now, here's Mick.

Welcome back to another episode of Mick Unplugged, where we challenge you to look beyond the why and find your because.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a special one for you today. We're talking about love and how to find it in all the right places.

We're diving into the world of romance with one of the most sought-after experts in the field.

She's a featured guru on Good Morning America, a regular on shows like Steve Harvey and Kelly Clarkson, and she is the founder of the Smart Dating Academy.

She's transformed the lives of thousands with her cutting-edge dating strategies. Everyone, please welcome the incredible, the incomparable, the dynamic Bella Gandhi.
Bella, welcome to the show.

Oh my gosh, I'm blushing. So thank you for that amazing introduction.
I'm honored to be here. It is all the truth.
It is all the truth. Bella, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Today we're going to tell people how to do it it the right way. How did you get started? What was your reason for doing this?

Like dating, you know, since what, 2000, there's been a million different platforms for people to do it the wrong way. What was it that made Bella say, no, there's a better way to do this?

And more importantly, there's a right way to do this. So I have probably the most non-traditional background to be doing what I'm doing.

I'm a finance major with an accidental degree in German language. I came out of mergers and acquisitions and then owned a manufacturing company with my family.

But since I was 19 years old, I had these instincts that I started setting people up and watching them get into great relationships. I stopped.

dating people that weren't good for me, put together my own little analysis, the common denominator of all of the problems, which was me.

Got my dating house in order, have a great husband, have been married over 20 years.

I set up so many people, Mick, that I knew there was this little voice inside of me that says, you're supposed to do this.

And so in 2009, I put aside my, I don't know if you ever put aside your fear of failure, of, you know, not knowing what to do, being good enough. Can I do this?

And I just kind of said, okay, I've got one life to live. It's failure or regret.
I'll take failure over regret any day. And so I started it and have been amazed.

And I'm so humbled and still get blown away every day that this is the work that I get to do with single people every day.

Because finding love, even if you're, you know, a badass rock star in every other pie piece of your life, this is the most tender, fragile, vulnerable one for everybody on earth.

So to be able to really be the personal trainer for someone's love life is a distinct honor that I will never take for granted. That's amazing.

And you've mastered that art of relationship coaching, relationship development. What are the top three skills you believe someone needs to master to be successful in modern day dating?

Well, there's so many.

I think the first thing is, is you have to focus on being the best version of yourself and doing that introspection and not just jumping from relationship to relationship, lily pad to lily pad, you know, kind of saying, well, that was her fault and she wasn't good and she was crazy.

Again, like I said in the beginning, what's the common denominator in all of this? It's ourselves, right? And so do I need to fall more in love with myself? Do I need to become more self-aware?

Do I need to become a better dater? Maybe I need to have a dating plan. Anything big you want to do in your life, you've got to have a plan, right?

And with dating, you want to have a plan that includes online dating, that includes meeting people in real life and getting set up with people.

So there's so much to this process that we have to think about. And it's more complicated.
For example, than, you know, I want to get straight A's. That's great.
That's what I call unilateral.

You study hard, you get the A. But in the dating world, you can be doing as best as you can, but there's still another person involved in this.
It's bilateral. So it's complicated.
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Wow. That's amazing.
I want to unpack that a little bit. So again, amazing background that you have.
Thank you. How do you help your clients imagine new possibilities in their love life?

Because I have to imagine that a lot of people come to you and they feel like they're stuck in their dating patterns, right? So how do you help them imagine new possibilities?

So we help them to understand why they're stuck. And I always say if your picker, the way you pick people is broken, it's not your fault, right?

Most of us have broken pickers or have had broken pickers. So it's really reimagining what a happy, healthy relationship should look like.

I know you just said to me when we were in the green room that it's going to be your one-year anniversary. And relationships are work, but not that soul-sucking, soul-crushing kind of work.

Overall, a good relationship is easy. And I don't mean easy, meaning you never have to work on it, but you can navigate through the ups and downs of life pretty easily with the right person.

Totally agree. And this is what I found.
And I would love your opinion on this. I say this all the time in relationships.
There's no such thing as 50-50, right?

You don't give half of yourself to someone. And I want people to stop saying that.
It's a 50-50 thing. It is 100-100.
And then you work together to make it work.

But before I say that, and that's the thing, I'd love to hear what the expert Bella has to say. I love the way you just framed that, Mick.
I couldn't agree with you more.

It's kind of like when people, they call your significant other, you're plus one. And why do they say that? Because you are whole on your own.

You are not 0.5 and that person is 0.5 that completes you. You are complete as yourself.
So I couldn't agree with you more. It's 100 and it's 100, right?

And in that 100 and 100, you're going to have to flex every day. She wants to go here.
You want to go here. I need to do this for work.
So you've got to take the kids.

It's always that sometimes you're going to give more and sometimes you're going to receive more, right? It's like when people ask the question, can you have it all?

And I always say, you can have it all. You just can't have it all every single day.
And relationships are very much the same.

But if you come from the mindset, and I love what you said about 100 and 100, if you come from the mindset in, I'm going to be 100% in the give bucket, right?

I want to give and to be the better partner. It's going to be hard to go wrong with that mindset.
That's amazing. You've been doing this a while.

What's been the biggest change that you've seen in the dating game? You know, it's interesting. I think humans in general, we are pair bonders.
We want to meet a person.

I think that the fact that we are living so much longer, we have so many more expectations out of a relationship, right?

And our significant other, you know, if you ask your grandparents, or if I ask mine, what did you want in a husband or a wife? And they'd say, I wanted a partner, I wanted someone to do this.

Today, we say, I want my best friend, I want a partner, I want a soulmate, I want a lover, I want someone who I can do things with, confide in, right?

We, our expectations are so much higher than they have ever been at any time in the past. Think about it.
At the year 1900, the average life expectancy was 30 years old.

Today, in 2024, it's well into the 70s. We're living so much longer.
We expect so much more of one person.

And I think the right way to look at this is you're going to have six to 10 relationships with this person over the course of your relationship because you're going to evolve and they're going to evolve.

That was powerful right there. How many relationships are you going to have with that person? Six to 10 relationships, right?

I got married young, still married to the same guy, and our relationships evolved. We were two, you know, high-powered careers, traveling around the world, sometimes living in separate places.

Then you have your first baby. Then you have your second one.
Then they get older.

As they get older, you change as a parent i have one that went to college two years ago i'll be an empty nester in two years so my relationship is going to change again

i am going to change again so this is what i mean by that so it's amazing and i think we need to think about this and we need to constantly think about who am i now and who is he now and where do we want to be together as the people that we are now which is very different than we were 23 and 24 years old.

That was so powerful, Bella. I mean, I haven't even thought about it in that sense, but you're totally right.
I mean, we change as humans by nature. We should.

We should because we're growing. But how many of us put that same time and energy and effort into changing and evolving our relationship?

Because if our spouse, if our significant other, if our plus one is also changing, we can't do or be the same things in the relationship that we were three, three, four, five, seven years ago.

That was powerful, Bela. Oh, I'm so glad.
And I think that think about it from this way.

And sometimes we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, like, well, if you think this and I think this, then we just need to, you know, head to divorce court.

And I'm not saying one doesn't, but I'm saying really

think about, is there something that you want that you're not getting? What does the other person want that they're not getting? Who are you now?

And having these conversations with a facilitator to help you.

I have so many people that I work with, Mick, that are now, you know, in their 50s, sometimes in their 60s, and they'll look back and they'll say, you know, sometimes youth is wasted on the young.

If I could go back and

I wouldn't have divorced my first wife, right? Knowing what I know now,

I could have made that work. Wow.

That's crazy.

I'm in thought right now. I'm in thought right now.

That's wild. You know, one of the things that I always talk about, you know, Les Brown, one of my personal mentors, has kind of termed this phrase called the Mick factor, right?

So it's mastery imagination, character, and keep going. And we've talked about mastery and imagination just from the conversations that you and I are naturally having.

How important to you is character in the relationship? Because I know it can be a challenge, especially, you know, you meet someone new and everyone always puts their best foot forward.

It's like a job interview, right? Like on a job, they are the perfect candidate, right? But then all of a sudden, when they start, it's like, wait, where is this person that interviewed?

They haven't walked in the door. And to me, that's character.
How, how strong and how important is character in the relationship space? It couldn't be more important.

Character is everything. I tell people,

you can change teeth. You can get more fit.
You can change somebody's wardrobe. You can redo their house, but you cannot teach or change character

so for everyone listening if you're in the dating world i i promise you character should be the number one trait that you look for for me anyway that's what it was for me i can always speak for myself that's right and knowing what you value and knowing that that person values the same things it just makes the relationship so much easier All right, so let's talk about keep going.

So in relationships, more than anything, there's failure. You know, the first person you ever dated is not the last person you're ever with in life, right? So rejection happens.

How do you coach people on the resiliency to keep going? Because a lot of times when we're rejected, that creates a very low moment for us.

And I don't think people understand how powerful the emotion of rejection can be in people. How do you encourage people to not let that be the end all for them? Rejection is inevitable.

It's how we think about it ultimately, right? And I always say if somebody rejects you, then they weren't the right person for you. So don't let it get you down.
Does it hurt? Absolutely.

Do you need to go back and lick your wounds and heal after rejection? Yeah, but look at it this way. Most people are not right for you.

If you walk into a bar, a cocktail party, a fundraiser, a meetup group, do you expect that 30 out of 100 people are going to be right for you? No, it's less than 1%.

You might find 30% of the room attractive. But again, is that character? Is that compatibility? Is that values-based? No.

And like you said, everybody looks good in the beginning, but you're dating that person's representative for the first three to six months, right?

And then when the mask starts to come off, who is that person really? And that is where character comes in. A lot with character, you kind of see the person as they are from the beginning.

But and this is why you need to be intentional and slow in the dating world. We want everything instantly in the 21st century.
We want a three-date rule.

We want everything to be Amazon primed to our house. We want it fast.

Here's what I'll tell you.

At Smart Dating Academy, nobody's getting into an exclusive relationship Mick until they've been on 15 or more dates over the course of at least three months with this person.

And I am not saying 15 dates in 15 days.

I'm talking about having a funnel, having a bench of people where I'm helping to filter, looking in their inboxes, helping to read profiles, looking at messaging.

My clients have dating graphs, what good relationship trajectory should look like. They've got dating scorecards, right? We're a whole thing.
And so through that,

that's where you start to slow things down. That's where you start to break your patterns.
That's where you start to find someone who is actually really good for you.

And this is how we've had zero divorces in 15 years. That's insane, but it makes total sense.

And for those that are watching the video podcast, you saw me almost laughing on the inside because I have a friend who I promise I am not going to say their names on this podcast.

But when when you said 15 dates is the minimum requirement, I have a friend.

I have friends that are married right now, Bella, that have been married for 20 years that haven't been on 15 dates from the moment they first met each other to now.

So I know they're listening. 15, Bella? 15.

Let me put this into perspective, Mick, because your thought around that is like everybody else's. So when I tell my clients, I want you to wait 15 dates, right?

And they'll say, well, okay, that's a long time. I'm like, let's say your average date is two hours.
That's 30 hours with that person. That's like Monday and half of Tuesday.
That's right.

So for everyone listening, I know some people that have been on three dates and then got married. Bella's saying you're messing up.
I'm saying a lot of people get lucky.

Look, my own parents met on a Sunday. They got engaged on Thursday and they were married 72 hours later.
And they've now been married for 50 years. Okay.

What I'm saying is if you have a history of being in relationships that don't serve you, that you're not happy, they end badly, and you're going, what can I do differently?

I'm not saying you can't have love at first sight.

You can't go out on one day, meet somebody at a bar, sleep with them, and then get married and have three kids and live in the suburbs and have a white picket fence. All of that is possible.

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Here, when you have the opportunity to do this differently, and especially if you haven't found the person that you want yet, you have no harm in trying something different because we all know that the definition of insanity, it's like keep doing the same thing over and over again.

And what? You want to find true love and you're not doing this is amazing, Bella.

so walk us through what it's like working with bella so what would that roadmap look like other than you know it's going to be 37 dates before you can get married so walk us through what that process looks like for bella oh my gosh you've got like when you hire us usually for six to 12 months you've got professional best friends that are helping you through this process like personal trainers for your love lives you detail all of the details about your life how you grew up, what was it like growing up at home.

Was there a mom? Was there a dad? How did they relate to each other? And you talk us through all of your significant relationships. What worked? What didn't work? What was their responsibility?

What was yours? And so through this constellation of data points that we get, our first meeting with people is three hours over Zoom.

We work with people all over the globe, so it doesn't matter where you are. And it's called the Jumpstart Session.

And it's in that session where we are working the magic, the juice, and helping people to really fix their partners, wipe the slate clean, get excited to do things differently and jump back into the dating pool.

So after your jumpstart session, we have a photo studio in Chicago. Everybody gets to come to do a very fun, lifestyle-y, cool photo shoot.
I know what people are looking for in online. dating.

And so we give people a ton of granular help on how do you look your personal best. I've got people sending me photos all day long of what they want to bring to the photo shoot.

I'm like, yes, no, no, no, go get that shortened. That needs tailoring.
So we're in the weeds with people because when you look your best, you feel your best.

I wrote a book during COVID that produces the perfect online profile. So what we've done essentially is we've taken a lot of the friction out of this.

The things that stop people, the things that people do wrong, right? I was like, well, no one has good pictures.

I'm just going to take it in-house and make sure everybody gets on the conveyor belt to do this sequentially in the right way and then after we quote unquote launch you with your profile you're jump started you've got the right photos then we're coaching you three times per month live and it's awesome and you're talking through all of your dates with us so we teach you how we're going to coach you but what we do is we provide that sounding board so that you don't have to listen to your friends and your family, all of whom love you.

They're well-intentioned, but they don't know how to do this. They know their own experiences, but they don't know what's absolutely right for you.
That's how our process works. And it's been great.

And when you go through phase one and you meet somebody and you've got a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a partner, then we watch that relationship for six to 12 months after that to make sure there's no wolves in sheep's clothing.

Okay. So what percentage of your dating, I don't want to call it setups because it's not dating setups.

How many of your dating situations are both your clients where partner A and partner B are both clients of yours? Very few. Okay.
Very few. So we're coaching people.

If I get that feeling, Mick, that I think, let's say if you were my client and I'm like, oh my God, I need to introduce you to Lila. You guys are going to love each other.

Then we connect people, but our goal is to help people understand how to become their own matchmakers. And we're along for the ride.
I love it. So I'm impressed.

And the reason I asked that question, because I know you have a high batting average, your success rate's really high, and you're doing it where just one of them is your client, not both.

That's freaking selling you like crazy right there. That's amazing.
Wow. Thank you.
I never thought about it that way. Yeah, because it's real easy, right?

If you have both profiles and it's like, oh, this is a match, but what you're saying, you're taking this one person and making them the best version of themselves in the dating world.

Like that's, that's insane. And they're going into the wild.
Yes. So, speaking of this wild, because technology changes every day now, right? Like, technology changes every day.

So, I can only imagine the challenges that are put in front of you and your team in this new world, especially with AI.

I, as a business owner, I didn't personally send this, but an AI clone of me was sent to my team. asking them for information.
What? It is crazy what is going on. And I'm not saying all AI is bad.

So I'm definitely not saying that at all.

But I can totally see situations where the 2024 and 2025 version of catfish is you're going to show up and you were talking to a digital clone the entire time.

How are you preparing for this new wave of technology and AI? And what parameters are you putting around your clients to make sure that they're not getting catfish?

So there's a lot of telltale signs, Mick, about catfishers, right? Whether they're AI or they're sitting in a call center in Nigeria or India, right?

A lot of these people, they don't want to connect live. And that's what's so interesting.

They might talk on the phone, but they certainly don't want to get on video and they don't want to be taken around into different parts of their house or walk you around.

So there's a lot of ways that we help to keep our clients safe.

I mean, an easy thing, if you're a listener and you're thinking of dating, dipping your toe back into the dating pool, get a Google voice number.

So you don't even have to give out your real cell phone number to somebody. It's free.
It's easy to use.

You can call and you can text from it because today we can be Google-ableable by our cell phones. Absolutely.
Bella, there's so many places we could go.

Like we're going to have to come back into a part two because this is this is amazing.

And all the things that you talk about and speak about, like I told you, I've been a fan for a long time and listened to a lot of your talks.

And I can say this because my wife is going to listen to this podcast. Like Bella was somewhat influential.
I wasn't a client, but

there's enough information that Bella gives out for free that everyone listening, like, just go find it. It's out there.
I promise. So, Bella, I thank you for that because you were inspirational.

Oh, thank you so much. Well, right back at you, my friend.
You're inspiring too. Your story is amazing.
I appreciate that. So, where can people find Bella?

And then, obviously, we'll have a link to the Academy as well in the show notes. Yeah, go to smartdatingacademy.com, sign up for our free newsletter list.

You can follow me on Instagram at SmartDating Academy.

And I have a podcast called the Smart Dating Academy podcast with tons of information about dating, interviews with amazing experts that are in dating and relationships, and a lot of client love stories.

So you can actually hear how so many of the people that we've had the fortune to serve, they were just like you and they were scared and they didn't know and they had picked people.

We have people that have been married four times, people that have never been married, people that are in their 70s.

So if you think, I don't really know if love exists for me, I'm going to tell you it does. Go have a listen.
Absolutely. And I love Bella's podcast.

And here's what I'm also going to tell you because I have a daughter and two sons that are all in their 20s, all have recently graduated college or one's graduating, the other two recently graduated.

As a parent, have your kids listen to Bella's podcast because I promise you, number one, you're going to help be a part of their lives by being that supportive parent.

They're going to listen to things that Bella says that, you know, maybe you're saying the same thing, but it's great when Bella and her team are saying it on the podcast as well, too.

So parents out there, have your kids download and subscribe to Bella's podcast as well. Bella, you're amazing.
Thank you so much for the honor of being on today. I appreciate you.

And for all the listeners, remember, you're because is your superpower. Go unleash it.
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