#1 365 Consecutive Days on... TINDER?

Episode Summary
In this inaugural episode of The Tinder Project, hosts Mark Rosenfeld and Teal Riege introduce their mission to explore the world of online dating through a unique challenge. Mark, a dating coach, embarks on a year-long journey of dating as a woman, while Teal, a self-love coach, shares her insights on feminine energy and personal growth. Together, they aim to make dating fun again, bridge the gap between men and women, and provide valuable lessons along the way.

Keywords
dating, self-love, personal growth, relationships, online dating, coaching, social anxiety, feminine energy, connection, personal development

Takeaways
Mark aims to solve the problem of women not meeting good men.
Teal emphasizes the importance of self-love in relationships.
Both hosts share their personal journeys of growth and transformation.
Mark's challenge is to date online for 365 days straight.
Teal's coaching focuses on helping women relax into love.
Mark's past experiences with social anxiety shaped his coaching approach.
The podcast aims to bring men and women back together.
Both hosts believe in the potential for personal growth through dating.
Mark and Teal highlight the importance of empathy in dating.
The conversation sets the stage for future episodes exploring dating dynamics.

Chapters
00:00
Introduction to The Tinder Project
01:01
The Purpose Behind the Project
05:00
Teal's Journey to Self-Love
09:25
Mark's Transformation Through Social Challenges
17:11
Goals and Intentions for the Podcast

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to The Tinder Project
• 1:01 The Purpose Behind the Project
• 5:00 Teal's Journey to Self-Love
• 9:25 Mark's Transformation Through Social Challenges
• 17:11 Goals and Intentions for the Podcast

Transcript

[Speaker 1]
G'day and welcome to The Tinder Project, the podcast where a straight Aussie man attempts to survive 365 days dating online as an American woman. I'm your host Mark Rosenfeld, Australia's dating coach for women. I'm here with my sidekick, self-love coach Teal Elizabeth, and together we have one mission to make meeting good men fun and easy for you.

Let's give it a go. Can I survive 365 straight days dating online as a woman? Why on earth would I want to do that and who would be crazy enough to join me in the journey?

Welcome to The Tinder Project. There she is giving a big wave. Welcome to The Tinder Project.

This is Australia's dating coach, Mark Rosenfeld, bringing women, men and women back together. And I'm here with Teal Elizabeth, feminine energy and self-love coach who has been wild enough to join me, to volunteer to join me in this journey. Teal, it is my pleasure to have you here for episode number one.

Thank you for joining me.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Rose. I just called you Rose. Thank you, Mark.

[Speaker 1]
I'll be a Rose to you, Teal. Teal has a lovely, lovely podcast voice that you guys are going to get to listen to for many episodes here today. But you're probably wondering before we even get into introductions, why am I here?

What's the point of this project, Mark? I've been listening for 63 seconds now. I want to know what's going on.

Well, I'm going to share what's going on. I was working a lot with clients, guys, and I was realizing that first of all, a lot of dating coaches aren't very good at relationships. Unfortunately, they're good at dating, but they don't know how to keep a relationship.

Second, I realized a lot of relationship coaches who may have great relationships haven't dated in a very long time. So they can be a little out of touch. And I started to feel in that second basket.

I very much grew up on dating. My personal development revolves around dating, but I've been married for some time now. I've been in a relationship for a lot longer than that.

So I was starting to feel myself getting a little bit rusty with dating. And so I started going online with my clients and spending a lot of time with them on apps, which is where a lot of us are now for at least part of our meeting strategy. And I realized that essentially there was a way to beat the apps.

I realized through specific things that you do and actions you take, mindsets you have, paradigms you embody and identities that you take on. It was a lot easier to meet men than what I see most of the women who are coming to me thinking that it is. And I can tell you, I don't know about you Teal, but probably the number one presenting complaint that I hear from clients is, Mark, I'm just not meeting good men.

And you and I talk about different patterns and things that can be going on underneath that. But for many of you who might be listening and certainly for clients that come to us, that's the number one thing is I'm not meeting good men. So I said, bugger it.

I'm going to solve that problem forever for my clients. And so I thought, you know what, what if I could do it in an interesting way that you guys can follow along? And I said, well, I'm going on the apps anyway, sometimes as my clients, and sometimes I'm doing it as Sam, my wife with test accounts.

What if I challenged myself to do it for a full fucking year straight?

[Speaker 2]
You're wild.

[Speaker 1]
Am I wild or just stupid? Is that just a bad life decision?

[Speaker 2]
Well, I guess, yeah. Well, I'm going to hold reserve judgment for now.

[Speaker 1]
You're going to reserve judgment. Okay. What's the point of this?

Well, first of all, I hate how people don't see dating as fun anymore. That makes me sad. Dating is so much fun, especially when done right.

And there can be so much personal growth there, even if you're not necessarily meeting your husband or wife. So that's number one. Number two, I'm seeing men and women getting more and more polarized, more and more pulled apart.

And the apps are making everything worse and the apps are not going anywhere. So I really want to bring men and women back together. That's a big part of my messages or my message rather.

And third, I do love the growth in the process. And I used to think the only growth possible was meeting people out and about. And I've realized that the apps actually present a unique environment.

As I say, they're not going anywhere. I'd probably get rid of them if I wave a magic wand, but they're not going anywhere. They're driving men and women further apart.

So I thought, well, you guys can follow along my little journey being a woman online. I'm going to do it for 365 straight days, or at least I'm going to set that challenge for myself while you all listen and watch. And we're going to learn how to do it.

We're going to learn how to make it fun. We're going to learn how to have empathy for each other again. We're going to learn dating etiquette along the way.

Teal and I are going to have lots of fascinating chats about all aspects of dating. And Teal will probably question me on many, many things that I do throughout the journey. So that's the point of the project.

That's why I'm here. That's the purpose of it. And I think it's only fair now we introduce the co-host of the Tinder project.

Now she may not be here for every episode. She's a very busy lady. It's very hard to get a hold of lovely Teal.

But I do have her here with me today. So Teal, do you want to do a little bit of an introduction of yourself and also tell the listeners, why would you volunteer for this? How did you get talked into this?

[Speaker 2]
Well, welcome. Thank you, Mark. My name is Teal Litzbeth.

I'm the founder and CEO of Relax and To Love Coaching. And I help ambitious driven women to learn how to relax and to love both with themselves and with a relationship and a partnership. And I had my own journey of challenges in relationships.

I have very much been that go-getter, independent, badass, kind of A-type masculine energy driver woman. And for the majority of my life, I was just checking the boxes on my life, career, friends, house, all that stuff. But for some reason, I could not check the box on love and relationships.

And it really drove me crazy. And no matter what I did to lean in and make that goal happen, it just blew up in my face. And so much so that I literally call it now the hook and fizzle, where I literally got in this pattern where I would hook men in with allure of being this fun, independent go-getter.

And then a few weeks or a few months into dating me, they would just fizzle away or dump me on the spot. And it really started to mess with my self-esteem and just my self-worth. And I was just starting to wonder like, what is going on that I can't seem to get a man to stick around?

And all my friends and family would be like, you seem so great. And I just could not figure out what was going on. So I ended up taking a whole break from dating and I went and traveled to Southeast Asia and I checked myself into a five-day silent Buddhist meditation retreat.

And I said, this has got to hopefully give me some sort of clarity because my mind will not shut up.

[Speaker 1]
And Teal, for context here, Teal, you are a very extroverted human being. So five days in silence is a...

[Speaker 2]
It was madness. It was really pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, which is what we are here to emulate, right? As coaches, we push ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

And so for me, I said, you know what? It's time to sit and just be with me and understand and get clarity. And the first two days, I'm not going to lie, Mark, were really, really difficult.

I'm up on this mountain in the middle of nowhere in Thailand with monks chanting all day long in white, not speaking a word. And for the first two days, I was just literally in my head. Why am I here?

What am I doing? This is stupid. When's my next meal?

When can I leave?

[Speaker 1]
I need to get back to work.

[Speaker 2]
Exactly. But on day three, something really profound happened. I remember I was sitting there all by myself, and my mind started to quiet.

And all of a sudden, my soul literally started lifting up out of my body, floating up out of my head, and went about 10 feet above my head, looked down on my body. And all of a sudden, I said, Oh, my God, I'm not in my body anymore. I literally had an out of body experience.

And I was floating there hovering, just observing this beautiful moment. And then I just zoomed back down into my body to make sure I hadn't died. Like most people when they have this kind of experience, they have a near death experience, right?

They're in a coma. I was not in a coma. I literally was just able to have that experience and have this deep, profound awakening and profound experience that helped me understand the energetics of the soul on such a deeper level than I could ever learn in a textbook.

And I remember coming back to the United States, getting back into the corporate world, dating again, but it just it was like all the fog had lifted and everything that I brought into all my interactions with everyone and with dating came from this deeply energetic place. And it shifted everything. It shifted the opportunities that came for me.

It shifted how men received me. And next thing I know, I met my now husband. We've been together for 10 years and it's just been such a profound experience.

And I ended up leading and building out my company that I call Relax Into Love Coaching, because I want to help women have that same kind of experience without going to the monks.

[Speaker 1]
I was going to say, yeah, this podcast is sponsored by Five Day Monk Retreats. We're not allowed to talk. Tia runs those now.

[Speaker 2]
But it gave me such a deeper understanding of just the energetics of relationships that I now talk about and teach my clients and how to really step into that beautiful feminine energy that men can feel and sense. It's all the stuff that is the unsaid things. It's the stuff that's not in the mind, but really coming from our energy of our spirit.

And that's what I help women come back home to within themselves.

[Speaker 1]
I really love that and I almost feel, Teal, you are, you know, we both obviously have crossover. You work with women in dating. I work with women on personal development.

But I do feel there's a sort of what's the word, a step-by-step where you almost work with the women to get them really centered and there with themselves. And part of my work almost takes on from there, which is let's meet the guy. Let's now apply.

Let's make sure he's in your life. So I think there's a good, I can't quite, can't quite think of the word. Yeah, good overlap there.

Exactly.

[Speaker 2]
Absolutely. And I love that you bring a lot of like scientific, more specific logistical practices and tangible techniques to your practice and your coaching as well, which I think compliment.

[Speaker 1]
And I wanted to develop that just so we could offer people that really solid guarantee. I just felt that a lot of coaches were taking the easy route a little bit where, okay, I'm, you know, paying good money for a coach, but how am I getting the result? Do I know my investment's going to be safe on its return?

So that was kind of my motivation. I really wanted to be able to say, yep, we've got a system here. We know how it works.

We've broken it all down for you. If you can work on yourself as you very much teach ladies to do, and if you can apply this stuff and sometimes the stuff I do, yes, it can be quite numbers based, but it's hard. And I have clients all the time where they're going along, but then some trauma gets activated or something else gets, gets ticked as they're going through the process.

And then they, Oh, I have to go back and do some of my centralizing work. And you sound like you're fairly somatic with it. I have different stuff I do with clients on that, but it is a journey guys.

It's not just one to the other. It's as you go further along the path, stuff is always going to come up. Um, which is actually a good segue into my own journey because Teal, your big step out of the comfort zone was monks and five days of silence, uh, leading to an out of body of experience.

Mine was nightclubs and stripping. To me, to me, it was no less meaningful. Now I can't claim the, the out of body experience part of it, but I can certainly say that there's particular events in my life that was such big growth steps for me that I remember them.

I would say to the degree that Teal remembers her out of body experience. So to go back a step when I was growing up, I suffered with pretty crippling social anxiety. It started a long way back.

I would say it honestly started in middle school when I changed schools at kind of a bad time and really didn't have a good time after changing schools. I changed back after a few years, but I think a bit of damage had been done with my social confidence at that point. And I really withdrew from social groups, especially those involving women.

Fast forward a few more years. And because I wasn't getting out of the house at all, and I didn't want to be around women, my general social skills were also falling. And I started to do a few things to help it out.

I got a job and then I moved in with some roommates. I even moved into a college campus, figuring that if I'm around people that would probably solve it, but it really didn't. I started to develop symptoms of agoraphobia, which is fear of leaving the house and just more and more, there'd be a college party or there'd be something going on.

And I'd just be terrified of it. I would just be thinking, what am I going to do? Do I take the train two hours back to see my parents this weekend?

Use that as an excuse. Well, I can't go to my parents every weekend. Is there something else I can do as an excuse?

It got really debilitating. And I'm sure anyone who's had any kind of agoraphobia can relate. So it got to the point, it was like November one year.

And I said, this is getting ridiculous. None of these sort of passive fixes are doing much. I need a really active fix.

And it just happened that I was starting veterinary school the next year to become a veterinarian. And I thought, you know what? Vet school is one of those things it's hard to get into, but once you're in, it's hard to get out, like to get fired.

It's like a government job, right? It's like, you get it, it's kind of hard to lose it. So I was starting to be a bit, I was about to start starting to be a veterinarian, but I thought, you know, if I was ever going to kind of flunk out of school without entirely flunking out, but if I was ever going to go from an A student to a C minus student, this was the best time to do it.

So I said, instead of working academically this year, I'm going to work socially. And so I set this goal to go out every second night to basically wherever scared me the most for 365 straight days. And I realized that, well, wherever scared me the most is pretty much nightclubs because in terms of socializing, it doesn't get much more overwhelming, more overstimulating, more hard to meet people, more intimidating women than that.

So January 1st, or it might've been second. I can't remember if I did the first day or not, but January 1st or second that year, I went out for the first time and I still, I actually took the train that I would usually take to my parents. I remember sitting there on this train being like, I want to get off.

No, sorry. I want to stay on the train. I don't want to get off the train.

I don't want to get off. But I got off the damn train and went to a nightclub and tried to meet some people there. And it went horribly as you would expect, but it went.

And that was what mattered. So for about the first 50 nights, which was a hundred calendar days, it was pretty bad. I didn't have much social skills.

Didn't know how to meet people. And I'd spend every day basically dreading, oh my God, I have to go out tonight. Oh my God, you know, to get to nine, 8.39 at night. And I'd be tired and be thinking, I've got to leave here by 10. And hopefully I can get meet enough. I had to meet my quota each night.

So I had to meet eight to 12 groups of people each night. So if I can get my quota done by 1.00 AM, I'll be home by two. And then, you know, repeat tomorrow or Wednesday.

It was a rough time, but it was kind of funny because I really learned at that point that you have to look at your actions, not your results, because there was no validating my results. There was nothing good to find in there. But day after day, I knew I was doing something right.

Cause I was so scared and facing it. And eventually around night 50, things started to turn a little bit. I could start to introduce myself to people.

I could meet people. It wasn't awkward and weird all the time. And in fact, sometimes it was actually quite good.

You know, I started to get dates out of it. I started to meet women out of it, even make guy friends out of it. And pretty much I only just made it.

I almost missed a couple of nights there because I wasn't doing every, I would do maybe three in a row and take three off for example. And I just made it by New Year's Eve that year. So I completed that goal and it completely turned my social confidence around.

And from there I started coaching men. I later switched over to women and I needed the challenge. So that was when stripping came into play.

And I thought, you know what? I want a way where I can put myself out there, force myself to build confidence and still be socializing, still be in a social environment and stripping just ticked all the boxes. I was terrified.

And much like your out of body experience at a temple, I can remember every detail of my first stripping show. And all of it was terrifying. It was a 30 minute show.

It was full Monty. It was two hours away from home. I drove up in this car, you know, dead silence driving in your own car and you can hear the party going on inside.

And I'm sitting there going, fuck, I've got to be in the middle of that in like 15 minutes. And you're in such a quiet mode. But I remember, I think I got like, I did a second job that night.

So I think I got 350 bucks for the first one, 200 bucks for the second. And I had like $550 cash that day. I went, this is the best fucking $550 cash I've ever had.

I spread it out on my bed that night and I literally fell asleep in it because it was one of the proudest things I've ever done. But that was my journey out of social anxiety. And now I moved that through into coaching.

I eventually retired as a veterinarian. I had to stop stripping when I moved to America to be with my wife, girlfriend at the time. And I'm just really saddened by all the polarity that I see between men and women now.

And I can see how much the apps, which are absolutely not built for our force that upon us. So I've kind of taken it upon myself now to go, Hey, let's, let's make dating fun again. Let's bring some etiquette into it.

And most of all, let's find the growth there so that good men and good women could come back together. So here we are 365 days straight. Yes.

[Speaker 2]
And what is your goal for this podcast? What is the 365 days? What is this challenge for you?

[Speaker 1]
It's to show that dating can be fun and it's to bring men and women back together. They're the two big ones for me. Of course, I want strategies, better advice for my clients.

I want to be able to honestly say at the end of it, say, Hey, I've been doing this every single day. I know exactly what works. I know exactly what doesn't.

So there's selfishness for me there as a coach to perfect my craft, but the real drive for me, which was kind of the original drive that saw me going out and trying to improve myself was the personal growth was finding that it could actually be fun. And now I'd say the newer drive in the last five years is that idea of bringing people in this case, men and women back together. We see so many polarities and so many aspects of the world.

I mean, obviously we've got politics and things like that. We've got ageism, but you can see it happening more and more with men going their own way, women going their own way. Women saying they don't need men, men saying they don't need women, independence culture.

You just see all of that. And the human brain is really interesting because unfortunately, the way it works is the apps really facilitate that we're really good at empathizing and having compassion. When we've seen someone's face and exchanged a few words with them, they become a real human to us, but we're a lot more likely to perceive threats and to attribute negative negative characteristics to unknown entities and people.

Someone who we don't tribe, whether it's the group we belong to, whatever association you belong to, it's really easy to see negative characteristics of people we don't perceive are in our tribe. And unfortunately online, our brain kicks in and does a lot of that. We just see a lot of negative and I totally get, you know, I'd be already been online for the challenge only started a few days ago, but I've already been online for over a hundred days doing warmups.

And I totally get it because there is some negativity there and our brains are not built for it. But I think it's sad because at the end of the day, my core belief is that a minimum of eight out of 10 people are good people, eight out of 10 women, eight out of 10 men. So I always go online and remember that first and foremost.

And I say, if I'm a woman, I say, okay, well, eight out of 10 men here are good men. So how do we make sure that we're meeting them and connecting with them and basically bringing connection back together in a very isolated world to you?

[Speaker 2]
Yes. I love that. And my intention and goal is just to be here, to be your trusty sidekick, to help influence the perspective that this gets to be something that is possible.

It's absolutely possible and help women learn along the way. Every part of your journey is a learning opportunity for every woman and man listening that wants to go on this journey along with you. So it's going to be very insightful and educational along with being very entertaining.

[Speaker 1]
I must say, I'm very excited to have you here, Teal. I'm glad that I got you to agree to this. So guys, next episode, Teal is going to be asking me some of the questions that you might be thinking, which is, is this moral, Mark?

What are the ethics of this? And Mark, what does your wife think of this? How did you introduce that topic?

And how does she respond to you having so many dating apps on your phone? So that is going to be in the next episode. Teal, thank you for joining me today.

First episode.

[Speaker 2]
It's been great.

[Speaker 1]
Done and dusted.

[Speaker 2]
For the next one.

[Speaker 1]
Me too. Guys, thanks for joining us today. We appreciate you.

We will see you next week on the Teal Project. Bye for now.