How to Date When You Hate the Way You Look

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Transcript provided by YouTube. Slightly edited with AI.

Intro

Hey, before we start the video, what are you doing on the 13th of April? I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re joining me for 90 minutes for the 30-day confidence challenge kickoff. This is a free virtual live event that you can do from anywhere in the world. If building your confidence is important to you this year because you know you are missing out on so much of life by having your confidence at a lower level than it needs to be, this is going to change that. Come join me at mhchallenge.com. You can sign up for free in seconds, and then join me back here for the rest of the video.

Your Looks Hold You Back

Let’s start with somebody who said that one of the things where confidence held her back is thinking that her appearance is the reason why she can’t seem to succeed when dating. I kind of want to speak to that and speak to people who don’t necessarily feel like their looks are their asset, and the thing that they get to wield in order to get attention and validation from people.

I think with looks, it’s probably more common than ever for people to feel like their looks hold them back somehow because the standards just get higher and higher, and the feeling of wanting to be chosen from a big pool gets harder and harder because of dating apps, Instagram, all those things we know about. You feel like there are these kind of perfect physical specimens out there, and most people feel like on some level, whether it’s height, whether it’s your face shape, your bone structure, your weight, your shape, whatever it is, everyone has a thing where you think, “Oh, if I had that thing, if I fixed that part of me, if I could have that, then I’d be okay.” I do sort of think that game never ends.

I think with looks, it’s a contradictory thing. It’s a paradox. You fix them as much as you can, and then you have to forget about them completely. It’s like, do whatever you can with your looks, and then just put it out like it’s not important. Okay, never look in the mirror again. And it is kind of like holding those two together because having loads of stock in your looks is also dangerous because you’re always gonna get older, stuff’s gonna change, circumstances change, and you go, “Oh my God, I don’t have my golden, my silver bullet was my looks, and now I don’t have that, and you’re gonna have to have something else, something else that keeps people’s interest, that compels them, that, “Oh my God, you’re so unique because of all these ways you’re exciting, these ways you’re sexy, these ways you’re interesting.” Those are the long game things that matter. But yeah, it’s hard when you feel like there’s something, we feel like, “I can’t compete on that level. I’m not gonna be able to be that.”

The One Thing You Control

Well, what’s funny when you, it feels like looks are the things that you have the least control over, right? And like the way it affects your confidence, it’s like, “Well, this is out of my control. Of course, I’m gonna be not confident about that.” But even as you describe that, Steve, and you just think about how looks are inevitably going to go away. The one thing that’s in your control and is actually always in your control your whole life is your acceptance of it, of where you’re positioned, where you’re at. Like, you have a spectrum of acceptance, and you can just accept it now. You can just save yourself so many problems down the line.

When I was growing up, I was so insecure about being pale. Summertime is coming, oh my God, I have to take my shirt off, I’m gonna be pale. And then as you get older, you just accept it more and more and more. I’m just like, “Why didn’t I just accept it back then? It would have been fine. It’s still gonna be there. It ain’t gonna change.” But you have that acceptance spectrum available to you if you just let yourself accept it.

That’s interesting when we become anxious about our looks. And if you think about it, insecurity can quickly morph into anxiety. The anxious thought is, “I’m never gonna find anyone because I’m not attractive enough physically.” And that anxiety can be kind of constant over the course of our lives, and it’s always looking for a new thing to attach itself to. It’s worth paying attention to the new things that it likes to find to attach itself to because they will have been something in your life that you used to worry about physically that you’ve stopped worrying about at some stage. And it’s not because that thing went away, it’s because your anxiety just latched onto a new thing. And so that thing doesn’t matter anymore, but this one, this is the reason you’re never gonna find love. And I can literally track through my life different things, different parts of my body, my face, my hair, my height, all different things that anxiety latched itself onto at different times.

I remember never told this story. I remember being in London with my dad one day, and I remember seeing a doctor, and I can’t remember why I was seeing the doctor. The reason I was seeing the doctor was something like legitimate. But my dad was with me, and he knew that I had been… It’s funny you say the pale thing, Jameson, because he knew that one of the insecurities I’d brought to my dad when I was little was that I was really veiny. If you looked at my stomach and my chest, I had, like, you could see veins. I was translucent. And I remember being at the doctor’s, and my dad knew that I wanted to ask the doctor if there was something I could do because I was insecure because I thought, “I don’t look good with the shirt off because of all my veins.” And my dad sort of gave me a nudge and said, “Come on, you know, you can ask him.” And I said to the doctor, “Why do I have these veins, you know?” And the doctor said, “Well, pull up your shirt.” And I pulled up my shirt, and there were all these blue veins everywhere. And he was like, “I was like, ‘Is there, is there like a way to, you know, do something about them?'” And he was like, “Well, you know, it’s perfectly normal. And as you get older, you know, that will change, and they’ll still show in some places, but you might find the ones that show now don’t show as much.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I remember leaving that situation, and it didn’t… It’s not like I went away feeling super secure about it, but I’ve never, like, since then… I don’t know what year I stopped thinking about the veins on my body, but it has never featured in my life since. But that same thing that went to the veins went to something else when something else was available. And it’s always looked for something else when something else is available. And as we get older, it looks for a new thing again, and suddenly a new

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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