How To Feel You’re Ready To Improve Your Tinder

When I started my self-improvement journey, I was bombarded with all kinds of negative thoughts.

Anxiety. Fear. Doubt. Uncertainty.

Aren’t I irredeemably fat and ugly? I’m nowhere near those IG models in attractiveness, so there’s no way I can date those really hot girls. I feel no one really understands me and I can’t find friends that really enjoy being with me. I hate my job, but what would others think if I aim for entrepreneurship? Why would I do any of this when it’s so uncertain anything positive comes out of it?

Am I ready for this?

After I tried to channel my anger to productive actions, a massive fear rose and prevented the action. What if others think I’m weird for doing this? What if they say that I’m a freak for doing this? Am I really ready for this?

The answer is, no. Or at least in my experience, you’re never really ready to start something. You always meet your own self-doubts and fears when you want to step even a bit outside of your comfort zone.

The process of trying to improve yourself often raises a ton of (mostly) negative thoughts. Especially when you start improving yourself. Often, it’s all those feelings and insecurities that you have tried to hide from in the past.

But those insecurities aren’t the problem, and feeling emotions isn’t rocket science. It’s how we react to the emotions when they pop up. I’ve used a stupidly simple technique to feel the negative emotion when it comes, accept it, reflect on it, and decide to try see what happens if I do the action anyway.

Negative emotions aren’t a problem, it’s how we react to them

The negative emotions aren’t the problem here. We are human and we experience all kinds of emotions that we can’t control. All of them are valid. All of them are OK to feel. It’s after we feel them, we need to decide how to act on the feeling.

In the past, I thought am emotionally mature man is someone who doesn’t feel negative emotions or many emotions for that matter. They are like a large rock in a storm, unwavering. Others call them stone-faced or without emotions.

But I’ve learned that I was wrong, that emotionally mature men do feel the same emotions. They just have learned how to feel them, reflected on which insecurity they arise from and resolved those insecurities. After working on their insecurities, they can face the negative emotions without those negative emotions affecting their life a lot.

In other words, the negative emotions don’t control their life. We can decide to act based on them, but we are in control.

When feeling anger at our lives, do we lash it out by breaking things around us or do we channel it into motivation to change our environment?

When feeling fear for taking action, do we freeze and decide not to do it or do we appreciate the fear and try to do the action anyway (regardless of the outcome)?

When we feel anxiety for others’ judgment, do we try to get their approval or do we be ourselves regardless whether they like it or now?

Here’s the thing. Negative self-talk runs in the background and it will keep running, unless you make a conscious effort to notice it. Or rather, it will keep running even then. But you can notice it and realize “oh, a shitty radio show in my head right now”.

Just the act of noticing helps you stop from letting your emotions control you. When you notice and feel that you’re e.g. feeling fear when taking action, you can decide to appreciate that yeah it feels a bit scary, but I’ll do it anyway.

How to notice and feel emotions

Here are six steps that I’ve used to get comfortable feeling my emotions.

1. Notice the emotion – Do you feel it physically somewhere in your body? Most feelings have a physical component to it, so try to stop and see if you feel something different from normal. How would you describe it? Do any kind of sensations go along with it? If you thought about it, could you name the feeling?
2. Accept the feeling – If you feel the instinct to hide the feeling, don’t. Accept that it is happening. Try to encourage yourself by saying e.g. “It’s safe to feel this” or “I’m willing to feel this emotion right now”
3. Be with the feeling and observe – The physiological (i.e. bodily) experience of an emotion is often quite short. Observe if and how the feeling changes and transforms into something else.
4. Be kind to yourself on what you just went through – Assure yourself with e.g. “I’m here with you”
5. Reflect on it – What could you learn from this emotion? What thought led to that emotion? Was that thought accurate? Was it irrational? What did the emotion tell about your needs and how they are or aren’t being met?
6. Decide how you want to respond – You’re a human being so all your feelings are valid. It’s more important how we choose to respond to the emotion.

Even just the first step is useful in my experience, so if all steps feel too much, try just the first one.

I’ve felt tons of fear the first multiple times I went in front of the camera for Tinder photos. Anxiety after getting my first matches and sending messages to them. Fear for actually going on a date and completely freezing up and not getting a word out like an idiot. Anxiety whether she’d like to see me again or not.

Each time I took time to appreciate the negative emotions, taking the action was easier. Of course I didn’t always succeed, but I got better at it over time.

In my experience, there’s never a moment when you feel ready for doing something you’ve never done before. To get started, you always need to push through the negative emotions like self-doubt, uncertainty, and fear. That builds experience that becomes confidence that you can do it.

Takeaways

• We are human and we experience all kinds of emotions that we can’t control. All of them are valid. What matters here is do we allow the emotions to control us or not.
• Feel your negative emotions, appreciate them, and try to do the action anyway. The more you show your body and mind experiences that you made through something, the more confident you become with it in the future.
• There’s no moment where you’re ready for improving Tinder. To get started, you always need to push through the negative emotions like self-doubt, uncertainty, and fear.