242 - Mind Your Dating Thoughts

Register here for the TODAY's free workshop, The Real Work of Dating with Disability: What No One Else Is Teaching. I'll be reviewing how to use a skill set approach to dating with a disability. The workshop will be geared toward professionals but anyone is welcome to join.

Dating and Mental Health

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and few things stir up our emotional world quite like dating. Rejection, vulnerability, self-doubt — dating touches some of our deepest places. But here's what can genuinely change how you experience it: your thoughts.

Download this guide to help with your thoughts on dating.

It's not the bad dates, the unanswered texts, or the awkward silences that make you feel bad. It's what you think about those moments. And when that really sinks in, it's a game changer — because it means you have far more control over how you feel than you might realize.

Thoughts vs. Beliefs

It helps to understand the difference between thoughts and beliefs. Thoughts are like the weather — always moving, easy to redirect once you notice them. Beliefs are more like the climate — deeply rooted and harder to shift. Because thoughts are so flexible, they're the perfect starting point for real change, right now, today.

Your Inner Dialogue Shapes Your Reality

Here's something worth sitting with: everything you've ever created in your life started as a thought first. Before the relationship, the date, even that first message — there was a thought. The quality of your inner dialogue matters more than you think.

The Framework: How Thoughts Become Results

A simple framework makes this concrete: Circumstance → Thought → Feeling → Action → Result. Something happens, you form an opinion about it, that creates a feeling, which drives your actions, which produce a result. The circumstance is neutral. Your thought sets everything in motion.

Unintentional vs. Intentional Thinking

Take someone who's single and has a disability. If their automatic thought is "nobody will want me," they feel defeated, pull back, and stay stuck. The circumstance didn't create that — the thought did.

Flip the script: same person, same circumstance, but they choose the thought "I have so much to offer." Suddenly they feel confident, show up differently, and dating starts to feel full of possibility. Nothing outside changed. Just the thought.

Choose Your Thought, Change Your Result

One last trick: reverse engineer the process. Start with the result you want, then ask what thought would need to be true to get there. And whenever you catch yourself spiraling, pause and ask: "Is this thought actually getting me the feeling and result I want?"

If the answer is no — that's your invitation to choose again.