Our journey to a healthy and loving relationship, like any journey, will have its own rhythm. There’ll be moments when we feel all fired up, when we know where we’re going and the road ahead looks smooth. Then there’ll be moments when we hit bumps in the road, run out of energy or even grind to a halt and we don’t think we can stay motivated to date. If that happens, try these:

Connect with your truth

For me, awareness is the first step on any healing journey so firstly, I invite you to become entirely honest with yourself. How are you really feeling about your search for love? Many of us don’t want to feel our true feelings, perhaps because we want to avoid hurt. We push the painful emotions down, we stuff them in or we brush them off. But if we numb the pain, we also numb our capacity to feel the good feelings and we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to heal the difficult ones.

To connect with your deepest feelings, you might need to sit still, stay quiet, journal, converse with yourself, converse with God and/or converse with a friend. Remember, honesty breeds intimacy. I invite you to get more honest with yourself and with those who love and care about you – this is great practice for a healthy, intimate, romantic relationship.

Know your why

Dating requires effort. Finding a healthy relationship requires an investment, often of time, energy and money. Maintaining a healthy relationship requires huge levels of emotional maturity. It’s important, then, to know why you want to be in a relationship.

This may seem obvious but, from my work with clients and from my own experience, I know that some of us have more worries and fears about romantic relationships than we do reasons to be in them. So, think about the benefits of being in a relationship or of being married. Think about the advantages. Do you have a long list of benefits? I hope so because this long list will encourage you to put in the necessary time and effort and to stay motivated, even in the face of setbacks.

Shake up your social life

While dating online is a great way to meet potential partners, it’s also good to be interacting with new people in the real world. Take a look at your social life – do you have enough friends, enough hobbies? Are you someone you’d like to take on a date? Creating a full, sociable life – with balance, of course – will make us feel happier and more confident. It will also make us a more attractive prospect to others. And it means we’ll be less tempted to put all our eggs in the romantic relationship basket right at the start – we’ll be able to proceed slowly, while maintaining our friendships and hobbies.

Perfect your profile

Let me ask you this: have you invited a friend or two to take a look at your dating profile? I know how tempting it is to do everything on our own, to choose our own pictures and write our own description. I also know how hard it is to blow our own trumpet, to sing our praises, especially on a dating site.

If you haven’t done so already, why not ask a friend or two, ideally of the opposite sex, to review your profile and make suggestions? You may find that you’re under-selling yourself. If you’ve already had input from friends, perhaps it’s time to get some professional photos taken or to freshen up your shots?

Take an action or two

The best way to motivate ourselves out of inaction is to take an action or two. Maybe you’ve been looking at someone’s online dating profile but you haven’t sent them a message yet. You may even have talked yourself out of it, deciding the person is too young, too old, too attractive, too unattractive, too successful or not successful enough.

I invite you to silence this inner voice or to override it and send a message or two anyway. I know how easy it is to put things off, to procrastinate. I also know how buoyed we feel when we take a decisive action, no matter how small. So, take an action, and ideally an action that takes you out of your comfort zone – as this is how we grow.

This year can absolutely be your year of love so keep up the momentum, hold on to your mojo, put those doubting voices to bed, get all the support you need and stay hopeful and confident.

What tips do you have to stay motivated to date? Let us know

Read more dating and relationship advice by Katherine Baldwin here