Ryan’s Advice on Finding the Right Partner

There’s no magical guarantee that ensures you’ll love all your coworkers, that every new friend is going to be a lifelong confidante, and that your first date will turn into forever … or even a second date. However, you can actually tell a lot about how these situations will go by looking for a match between your energy levels.

Are you both highly enthusiastic and energetic, or are you both on the quieter side? It’s all about looking for someone who you feel will have the same type of reaction to something that you do, and that will be jumping on the table right along with you when you close a deal (or whatever the equivalent is in your life).

• Identify Your Energy Match

Relationships where the energies are matched are inherently better and easier. You can have totally different interests and be totally different people but you can cohabitate, and you can co-work.

I’m a high-energy person — I barely sleep, I work all the time, and I love it and I hate it at the same time. Emilia is also high-energy so we operate on that same wavelength. I like the adrenaline, but everyone I work with is the same way there, too, so it works.

That’s not to say that energy levels are always the same for the same people in different situations. Take people who work in high-emotion, high-stress environments like ER doctors — when they come home, they may very likely want to relax and have the opposite. Just because they have that high-energy personality and thrive off that adrenaline, they still don’t want to come home to a high-stress, high-emotion environment. But their partners understand that.

• When Energy Levels Are Not Matched

The hardest work and life relationships out there are the ones where the energy levels are not the same. There have been people that I’ve worked with, or that have come to work with us, that are not the same way; it doesn’t work for me and it doesn’t work for them.

If your partner is not on the same energy level, and if your partner isn’t thriving in the same type of environment, they may not understand your reactions to certain situations, and then you become a selfish being in their eyes. If I need a break, Emilia understands that it’s not personal and has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with what I went through that day. If the other person can’t truly relate to that, it becomes really, really hard on a relationship.

• Show Empathy in Both Situations

Relationships are defined by expectations and, as long as those are set and agreed upon from the beginning, any relationship can be successful. For example, you don’t have to work at the same time or same pace as me but I know you’ll get back to me by a certain time.

You also have to have empathy and compassion — any good salesperson, actually any good person, knows this. It may be harder for someone with a different energy level to understand it in the way you do, or know how to offer that empathy in a way you’d best receive it, but you have to still show the other person that they are appreciated in their terms, and try to genuinely understand where they are coming from in their actions and reactions.

Every day I strive to show Emilia and my team that they are valuable to me — on a very basic level, it’s just assuring that you mean something to them, and that they mean something to you. Hey, you’re either going to love me now or love me later but, for this to have a happy ending, we’ll need to come together and love each other eventually.