From Entropy.....
About two and a half years ago, I wrote a post titled The Newbie Guide to PUA Development. It was designed to give newbies a blueprint to follow to help them improve and succeed as quickly as possible. It became widely popular, being stickied on various forums around the world and garnering tens of thousands of views and hundreds of replies.
This is a much-needed update and revision to that first document. Information and theory in the PUA industry has evolved quite a bit since early 2008. Not to mention my own understanding of people’s development.
There’s a lot of information out there to sift through and a lot of people telling you that THEIR way is the CORRECT way. The truth is, developing your skills with women is a personal journey, and everyone is going to gravitate towards their own style and interests. But there are some common sign posts that we all pass along the way which I hope to elucidate here.
This is my best attempt of organizing everything out there into a comprehensible “big picture” format to base your learning around. Focus is on what types of practice and action you should be taking, not just theory.
Finally, as I said in the last version of this document, the common denominator in everyone’s success with this stuff is the same as it is with any other skill-set: the effort you put in and your willingness to change your behavior. Nothing written below will mean anything to you if you’re not willing to humble yourself enough to learn or put in the necessary effort to achieve the results you want.
A few notes before we begin:
The recommended time frames below are assuming regular activity and practice. They’re based on my observations of dozens, if not hundreds, of guys over the past five years. Obviously there are exceptions, but I find these time-frames to be the most common.
Like many things, learning pick up is not completely linear. In fact, it’s probably impossible to lay out a perfect linear progression that everyone must follow, as everyone’s preferences, natural strengths/weaknesses, lifestyles, etc. differ very widely. Chances are your particular progression will bleed over between phases slightly. So don’t be alarmed if you see a little of yourself in one stage ahead and/or behind where you are. That’s probably normal.
Recommended products are the ones I’ve found of highest quality and most applicable to that particular sticking point. All links are not affiliated.
Stage 1: Newbie
Experience: Varies widely. Commonalities usually includes being very passive and supplicant, failed relationships or complete lack of relationships in the past. Social skills range from decent to abysmal. Personal lifestyle ranges from very strong to very weak.
Purpose: To educate himself and try just enough to figure out what works for him and what doesn’t.
Average Timeframe: 0 – 6 Months
We all come from very different backgrounds. From 18-year-old high school students to 55-year-old retired professors. Divorcees and virgins. Engineers and artists. Every country, all walks of life, rich or poor. Some of us come wanting a new girlfriend/wife. Others want to fuck everything that will stop and let us. Either way, the idea that we all should be taught the same thing or that there’s a one-size-fits-all-formula is ridiculous.
As a newbie, you must take it upon yourself to educate yourself as much as possible and then experiment enough to understand what works well for you and what doesn’t. Everything out there is “right” in one way or another — in that it worked for the author. But that doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for you. So you must try it out and see how it feels. It’s also your responsibility to get your baseline lifestyle in order to even give yourself a chance to meet and attract new women.
Reach a Baseline Lifestyle – A baseline lifestyle is the very basic components of a lifestyle that you need to even be considered an option to any self-respecting woman. Baseline lifestyle requires health, profession and friends. This is basically what “having a life” is, and if you don’t have one, no amount of practice, theory or tricks will ever help you. You will have horribly inconsistent success and when you do manage to get laid, you will never keep a woman around. Ever.Health means you are at least healthy. You don’t have to be ripped or run a marathon. But be healthy. If you’re obese, you need to lose weight. If you’re skinny, you should join a gym. If you’re chronically ill or very sick, you need to get it under control first.
Profession means that you have some sort of purpose with your life. It means you’re employed and if you don’t have a career, you at least have plans for one. I don’t care how good-looking and charming you are, no woman dates a broke deadbeat with no job. Or at least no woman we’d ever want to hook up with.
Friends means you have friends. World of Warcraft Guild members don’t count. Facebook friends don’t count. IRC chat buddies don’t count. Friends. Real friends that you see in person, hang out with, go out with and do things with. If you don’t have friends, there’s nothing PUA can do for you. Take care of that first.
Learn and Understand All of the Fundamentals – Fundamental seduction and pick up knowledge is a must to even get started. There are more than enough available books out there covering the basics (recommendations below). Get your hands on them and try to understand everything in them.The most important topics to understand are the following: how attraction is built and the many ways to do it, basics of conversation and rapport, basics of texting/phone calls/follow up, dates, escalation and roughly the steps it’s done in, fashion and style, body language. If you feel like you’re weak at any specific topic, spend more time on it. All of the above topics are MANDATORY.
Other pick up concepts that you should understand: the difference between day game, night game, and social circle game. The concept of social proof and social status. Canned game (routines) versus natural game. Direct versus indirect.
Learn to Approach – The first one will always be the hardest, so get it over with as soon as you can. A lot of guys wait a long time before they grow the balls to get out there and actually do it (it took me over three months to do my first approach). Right now, unless you’re working with a coach, most of your approaches will not go well. That’s fine and expected. Get used to the awkwardness. Learn that it’s not such a big deal.
Figure Out What Works for You and What Doesn’t – Everyone responds to different pick up and seduction material differently. I personally gravitated towards natural game and David DeAngelo’s material. I mostly went out at night. I have friends who gravitated towards canned routines and became very good. I know guys who did mostly day game and went direct. Chances are, you’re going to suck at almost everything right now, so figure out what FEELS MOST COMFORTABLE. Figure out what material and theory makes you say, “I could do this for the next few years and enjoy it.” Once you find that method, coach or specific school of thought, stick with it.
Seek Out Wingmen – Motivating yourself becomes 100 times easier if you can find like-minded guys in your area willing to go out with you. Wingmen are critical when you start out. Not only to help and learn from each other, but to push each other and keep each other motivated. Look into a local lair. If the lair sucks (many do), then post on some message boards or look around Facebook.
Recommended Products for Newbies:
Practical Pickup by Entropy (http://www.practicalpickup.com)
Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo (http://www.doubleyourdating.com)
Magic Bullets by Savoy (http://www.lovesystems.com)
The Game by Neil Strauss (Check Amazon)
Stage 2: Intermediate
Experience: Able to open and hook many sets. Can consistently get phone numbers when going out. Has a solid understanding of basic pick up theory. Has been going out for a few months. Has probably gotten laid a few times, although it’s very inconsistent and feels “lucky.” Most importantly, understands what works for him and is able to focus on that.
Purpose: To improve their results from inconsistent to consistent.
Average Timeframe: 6 Months – 2 Years
Guys in the intermediate stage can often be deceiving and to an untrained eye often appear better than they actually are. They can open and hook many sets, often in a very charming and exciting manner, and to most civilians and newbies this looks very impressive. Unfortunately, they don’t get laid often and when they do, it’s usually because the girl is very easy and/or she puts in most of the effort escalating. A lot of intermediate guys start believing they’re better than they are as well, and often begin coaching. Which is fine, as long as they’re coaching newbies.
Intermediate guy’s worst enemy is lack of persistence. His lack of persistence comes from the fact that he’s still somewhat sexually inexperienced and he hasn’t developed much emotional resilience to the unforgiving ups and downs of chasing women. Intermediate guys often complain of their state. They also often eject too often congratulating themselves that they got a girl attracted to them or a make-out, yet not having the balls or persistence to take things sexual.
Intermediate guys have the fundamentals under their belt and have a good understanding of what works with their personality and purpose. Now it’s just a matter of honing that into results on a consistent basis.
Developing Emotional Resilience – Or what is referred to in psychology as an “internal locus of evaluation.” This was also commonly referred to in the community as “state control” a few years ago. But basically the idea is that responses you receive from women vary widely, from amazingly awesome (”OMG, she loves me!”) to abysmal (”OMG, she told me to fuck off and die!”). Early on, most guys let their emotions become determined by these responses and therefore they become mood-based pick up artists. When they feel great, they do great. When they feel like crap, they do poorly.There’s no short answer for this outside of experience, and a very particular type of experience. Guys must learn to detach the reactions they get from women from their ego and their self-esteem. A common favorite among coaches is to create “blow out” games or other fun approaching games designed to turn bad responses into something fun and interesting for wingmen to laugh about. A lot of bootcamps revolve around this as well as “inner game” based coaching.
Unfortunately though, the only long-term cure for this is sexual experience and many positive reference experiences. How long it will take a guy to develop this will depend on two things: his pre-community experiences with women (including his mother), and his determination and will-power. A lack in either department will create one of those moody and drama-queen PUA’s that probably all of us have been out with at one point or another.
Master Sexual Escalation – It’s actually pretty surprising how many guys get stuck at this. Again, because it’s so easy to be perceived as “good” without actually getting laid and because it’s so easy to receive validation from women (more on that later) without getting laid, many complacent guys never put in the effort to succumb to the vast amount of awkward moments mastering that sexual escalation demands.But if you put a gun to my head and said, “what’s the one thing I can learn that will get me the laid the most the fastest,” it’d be sexual escalation. If you went out and just escalated like a pervert on every girl you met, you’d get slapped a lot, you’d get rejected a lot, but you’d get laid a lot as well. It wouldn’t be pretty, but hey, if that’s what you’re looking for, there you go.
Sexual escalation is a complicated topic because of the sexual anxiety that most guys possess to varying degrees. The process of mastering this is often more complicated than simply “touch X, then touch Y, then say Z,” although once mastered, that’s what it looks like. It’s also important to understand the basics of same night lays, primarily the importance of logistics.
Understand Basic Inner Game – It was a fad for a couple years recently that “inner game is the only game.” Unfortunately, I think this has proved to be both untrue and and impractical approach to improving with women. The simple truth is that I’ve personally met too many complete headcases and nut-jobs who were amazing with women for it to be true.But it still holds that inner game is very important to understand and that by the time a guy has reached the Intermediate Stage, a lot of his pesky outer sticking points actually have a deep-seated internal cause.
Basic concepts to understand are the ideas of emotional state, seeking validation, being non-reactive, positive thinking, self esteem and various other topics. Honestly, the vast majority of information in the PUA community on inner game has simply been ripped off from Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle and other self help gurus, so you may even be better off going straight to the source.
Become Great in Bed – Towards the end of the intermediate stage, you should be getting laid with some sort of regularity. And once you start getting laid regularly, the rush of simply getting laid recedes enough to need to become a good lover in bed.Hell, don’t be a good lover, be a phenomenal one. The benefits of a great sex life and sexual confidence bleed over to all of your interactions big-time. Knowing you can make a girl cum in three different places will remove a lot of your anxiety when it comes time to make a move.
Also, not to mention that once you learn how to be every girls best lover, they’ll NEVER stop coming back to you (no pun intended). Easiest way to keep high quality girls is to give them orgasms. It’s that simple.
Recommended products for Intermediate guys:
Date Hotter Girls by Rob Judge and Zack Bauer (http://www.datehottergirls.com)
The Complete Game System by 60 Years of Challenge (http://www.60yearsofchallenge.com)
Flawless Natural by Real Social Dynamics (http://www.realsocialdynamics.com)
Sex God Method by Dan Rose (http://www.sexgodmethod.com)
No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover (Paper and Glue)
Stage 3: Advanced
Experience: Can get results with some consistency. Almost always has sexual options. Has had and maintained multiple casual relationships. Has 20-30 lays under his belt. Is versatile in that he can meet and seduce women in many situations (day and night) and in various ways (direct and indirect). Able to travel to a different city or country and fares a solid chance of picking up a woman there in a short amount of time.
Purpose: To come to terms with the emotional realities of their social and sex life.
Average Timeframe: 2 Years – 5 Years
Advanced guys are what we used to refer to as “mPUA’s” back in the day. They get laid. They usually get laid a lot. And when they talk about it, it’s immediately apparent that it’s true. They’ve gotten laid and dated girls in a wide enough variety of circumstances that they can formulate some pretty deep thinking about the topic and about their own success.
These days, guys either start coaching when they hit this stage — if they didn’t already start as an Intermediate (”ZOMG! He approaches so many girls!”) — or they slowly remove themselves from the community. For years and years, our metric for success was little more than lay count, and perhaps looks of the women involved. As such, advanced guys have been treated as the pinnacle of seduction until very recently.
Luckily, as more time goes on and more is understood and the more we all evolve, this mentality is falling by the wayside. Racking up a ton of lays (some guys up into multiple hundreds) is not only being seen more and more as a bit excessive, but some times as a compensation.
The easiest way to explain the plight of the advanced guy is to sum it up like this: self image and identity always lag behind how we actually are. Fat people who lose 80 pounds usually still perceive themselves as fat for years afterward. Well, guys who all the sudden rack up 35 lays and a few girlfriends over two years still feel themselves to be that nerdy loser who couldn’t get a kiss if his life depended on it. This causes some serious internal dissonance and often erupts in behavior that’s self-sabotaging, misogynistic, or painfully over-compensating.
Their emotional self or what’s sometimes referred to as “core confidence” hasn’t caught up to their outer results. And this actually causes a number of problems.
The biggest problem is that most guys who reach this stage (very few, maybe 1% of guys who join the community) do so because they’re driven by something deep down. Often it’s some sort of emotional issue, past trauma, or baggage from their life. Learning to get this good with women — and let’s be honest, learning how to go out and bang 100 women is not a reasonable use of one’s time by most of the world’s standards — it usually comes from some sort of emotional quirk.
Advanced guys are forced to face this quirk eventually. I can tell you from experience, the rush and the validation from banging more women eventually runs out. Eventually you hit a point where sleeping with number 87 makes you feel absolutely NO different than you felt after 86. They become interchangeable faces and ironically, might as well all be the same vagina for all you care. Once this happens, once the need for validation and affection runs its course, you’re faced to confront what’s actually driving you in your sexual deviance.
Most guys realize that they’ve been compensating for their lack of masculinity. Some realize that they have issues with mom. Some realize that they’ve been exacting emotional revenge for the bitch that cheated on them and dumped them. Some of these guys have some sort of neuroses or compulsive disorder. Some are actually sex addicts (seriously).
Either way, the next step is to confront this original impetus and resolve it. If you’re the domineering and compensating short guy, it’s time to chill out and realize that you don’t have to prove yourself anymore. If you have some strange obsession with female attention because of your family life, it’s time to let it go. If you have some neurosis that causes you to constantly seek validation from people, then you need to come to terms with that.
In my experience, this can’t really be forced. Some guys figure it out pretty quickly and confront it. Some guys need to sleep with 50 girls to get their fill before they start realizing that they need to chill out. Some guys need to go nuts for years and bang 200 or more and have dozens and dozens of relationships blow up in their face before they finally confront. It’s a different pace for everyone, and unfortunately, I’ve met a number of guys who seem perpetually stuck here indefinitely (they’re fucking amazing in-field though).
Relationship Management – Learning how to juggle multiple women, build a rotation and even flirt with bringing them together for threesomes. But most importantly, learning to open up and become intimate with a girlfriend.Here’s a dirty little secret nobody talks about: having a happy and healthy long-term relationship will teach you more about women and help your inner game more than 1,000 cold approaches and 50 lays. By its very nature, a long-term relationship forces you to open up and come to terms with yourself emotionally. Which brings me to really the only major goal for the advanced guy…
Master Your Emotions as a Man – Again, this is so much easier said than done. Most guys I run into are completely oblivious to their emotions, much less in control of them. Like I said, a long-term girlfriend, if you’ve never had one, will do wonders for this. Therapy can also help a lot if you have some deep-seated problems.Once you open up emotionally, the whole “game” takes on a completely different view. I fucking hate this cliche, but it really is like “Seeing the Matrix.” Words cease to matter. You only see intentions and emotions. You realize anything you say or do only matters as much as the emotion it creates within her and within yourself. Everything you say and do is designed to play with this emotional string that vibrates between you and her. You begin to have entire emotional conversations with women with depth and meaning without actually talking about anything substantive. You are able to read people and situations better than they can read themselves, and you begin to connect with women on a completely new level. A level so powerful that concepts such as LMR, cockblocks, value, and shit tests go out the window. But first one must develop a sensitivity, both to your own emotions and to other people’s.
I think it’s much easier to rather than describe what mastering this looks like, what NOT mastering it looks like. If you DON’T master your emotions and the motivations that brought you to the community, this is what you can look forward to: a constant fixation on sex and women’s reactions to you, an addiction to validation from women (and men), a constant and nagging feeling of “not enough” that will persist and never go away, an unhealthy lifestyle that will grow old while your friends grow up, and an inability to ever maintain a relationship of any significant satisfaction. Your social life will be less about enjoyment and more about achievement. Friends and lovers turn into numbers and statistics. Every conversation you have will simply be a ladder rung to get to your next destination and victory… one that you will celebrate by yourself in your own mind.
For this reason, accomplishing this goal usually involves leaving the community. The community simply validates and objectifies behavior that at its core is an emotional behavior. At it’s core, seduction is an emotional action, and to try to measure it only disassociates it from our emotional well-being.
Recommendations for Advanced guys:
Way of the Superior Man by David Deida (Paper and Glue)
Therapy
A Girlfriend
Leaving the Community
Stage 4: Integrated
Experience: Has more than his share of notches on his bedpost (probably at least 50-100). Has experienced the ecstasies of serious multi-year relationships, the excitement of one night stands, and appreciates them both. He’s integrated his love and pursuit of women with his emotional desires. He’s more or less impervious to rejection as he sees it as women screening themselves out of his life. He’s experienced a wide variety of women of all ages, backgrounds, cultures and personalities and is pretty clear on what he enjoys and likes.
Purpose: To organize his lifestyle as best possible to efficiently screen for the women who will make him happiest.
Average Timeframe: 5+ Years
Eventually you come to a point where the behavior you’ve spent so long studying and practicing is simply integrated into your being. You may still push yourself here and there, but women come through your life fairly naturally and you know how to capitalize on opportunities.
As an integrated man, you no longer have a pressing emotional need driving your seduction. An integrated man is cool with one night stands, but he’s not necessarily looking for them. He’s also cool with a long-term monogamous relationship, but he’s not necessarily looking for that either. He’s open to everything yet seeking nothing. His actions are based upon what he wants, not what the each woman he meets wants.
The clear cut sign that you’ve made it to this phase is that you regularly turn down women that you’re pretty confident you could sleep with if you wanted to. In fact, you probably turn down five to ten women for each one you end up with. The reasons can vary widely, anything from looks to personality, to a lack of emotional interest, to logistical issues. You’ve gone from trying to be chosen to the one doing the choosing. You no longer seek to meet women’s standards but seek women who meet your own. Whereas a newbie will walk into a bar and be grateful to have ANY girl in it, the integrated man will often walk into a bar, talk to the few he finds physically attractive and find he has no interest in any of them.
The crux of the matter is that you no longer receive validation from sex or women’s attention, therefore you’re free to exercise 100% command and control of your interactions and which women you allow into your life.
The problem for the Integrated Man is finding a woman who meets his ridiculously high (and hard-earned) standards. He’s done everything and slept with everyone. He knows what he likes and sets about to get it.
The name of the game changes from effort (as a newbie or intermediate) to effort versus reward. An integrated man isn’t willing to spend his valuable time chasing a woman who he’s fairly sure he won’t enjoy his time with that much.
Since effort/reward is the new name of the game, the goal has changed from persistence to efficiency. The integrated man invites rejection and experiences it regularly. Everything is a screening process, and everything he does and lives is designed for the qualities he’s looking for in women. He loves artsy girls? He schedules his life around concerts and gallery showings and immediately screens for women with his similar interests. If he’s looking for intelligent women, he’ll purposely speak very rationally and logically about in-depth topics to weed out the ditzes and party girls.
This is far easier said than done and is a constantly ongoing process. This isn’t to say that the integrated man has flawless game… he usually hasn’t mastered everything. But he’s experienced to the point where he knows his strengths and weaknesses and knows how to use what he’s got to get what he wants.
Another progression to look at is newbies usually focus on day game because of it’s ease and how casual it is. Intermediate guys and advanced guys usually focus on night game because it’s the most challenging, makes you improve the fastest and rewards you with sex the quickest and in exciting fashion.
Integrated men focus on lifestyle and social circle. They realize that the odds of meeting a woman who meets their criteria in a random bar is fairly low and that the effort required for even a one night stand with most women no longer seems worth the meager amount of excitement (and mediocre sex).
He realizes that the most significant relationships one can have — casual or not — are borne out of similar interests and social connections, and therefore he spends his time positioning his lifestyle in such a way that it automatically attracts the appropriate women into his life. Whether this is starting a band, learning photography, becoming a teacher, or whatever. They then use their strong pick up skills to convert these high quality women with a startling consistency. By this stage, integrated men have usually developed their lifestyle to a high enough point that it makes them incredibly attractive in their own right.
They also understand that the constant approach-a-thon of classic pick up is a hamster wheel — designed only to train your muscles, not to actually get you to a real destination. Fulfillment comes from emotional connections and shared experience, not accomplishments and notches birthed from hundreds of nights out at the club.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
What Explains The Huge Differences in Results Between PUAs?
From Captain Jack
Hola Dudes!
I’ve been in the labs so to speak working on something that has bugged me for a long, long time…
What explains the huge differences in output between PUAs?
Stated another way, how can one PUA get 10-12 lays in a month while another PUA who puts in the same amount of time and effort walk away with almost nothing?
The research into that problem has been extremely interesting. It’s caused me to examine several schools of thought. I’ve thrown out ALL of psychology as essentially worthless. I’ve completely tossed out hypnosis (we need LESS hypnosis not more). Forget magic and other stuff like that, sometimes work but not repeatable.
What this has caused me to do is look at a Game Dynamics and it’s subset, Sexual Framing, and look at it from successful execution backwards. To give you some idea of what I’m talking about I would ask questions like this,
“What would a person need to be good at to successfully set a frame?”
“What would a person need to believe about how things work in reality to have confidence it would work?”
“What kinds of things would he need to be able to notice to know when to set it… about whether or not it was set?”
And, there are many others.
What is coming out of all this is a very thorough and, eventually, complete set of undercuts to discover where a person IS and pull them along a gradient scale to where they can get the maximum results.
A LARGE portion of this will be a method for the REMOVAL of standard Pick-up ideas and beliefs.
The actual mechanics of pick-up aren’t that complicated at all. There really aren’t a lot of tactics or techniques. Most of the tactics floating around in the various systems are corrections of shit you did wrong earlier in the interaction or buffers against common future fuck-ups. Remove the core problems and the need for most of the tactics disappear.
A full and final system of pick-up would:
1. diagnose what the PUA could not see (i.e. was unable to look at) and correcting it.
2. Remove all the false shit from his head.
3. Extrovert him socially
4. Teach him something like Game Dynamics.
Hola Dudes!
I’ve been in the labs so to speak working on something that has bugged me for a long, long time…
What explains the huge differences in output between PUAs?
Stated another way, how can one PUA get 10-12 lays in a month while another PUA who puts in the same amount of time and effort walk away with almost nothing?
The research into that problem has been extremely interesting. It’s caused me to examine several schools of thought. I’ve thrown out ALL of psychology as essentially worthless. I’ve completely tossed out hypnosis (we need LESS hypnosis not more). Forget magic and other stuff like that, sometimes work but not repeatable.
What this has caused me to do is look at a Game Dynamics and it’s subset, Sexual Framing, and look at it from successful execution backwards. To give you some idea of what I’m talking about I would ask questions like this,
“What would a person need to be good at to successfully set a frame?”
“What would a person need to believe about how things work in reality to have confidence it would work?”
“What kinds of things would he need to be able to notice to know when to set it… about whether or not it was set?”
And, there are many others.
What is coming out of all this is a very thorough and, eventually, complete set of undercuts to discover where a person IS and pull them along a gradient scale to where they can get the maximum results.
A LARGE portion of this will be a method for the REMOVAL of standard Pick-up ideas and beliefs.
The actual mechanics of pick-up aren’t that complicated at all. There really aren’t a lot of tactics or techniques. Most of the tactics floating around in the various systems are corrections of shit you did wrong earlier in the interaction or buffers against common future fuck-ups. Remove the core problems and the need for most of the tactics disappear.
A full and final system of pick-up would:
1. diagnose what the PUA could not see (i.e. was unable to look at) and correcting it.
2. Remove all the false shit from his head.
3. Extrovert him socially
4. Teach him something like Game Dynamics.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Charm
There is a book I read called "The Power of Charm: How to Win Anyone Over in Any Situation". A lot of the book is common sense and a regergitation of things from all the rapport books on the market but a lot if it ties into a lot of the inner game stuff people struggle with, but there were a few takes aways I made note of:
*How Charm is defined - The ability some people have to create extraordinary rapport that makes others in their presence feel exceptional.
*How do you learn it? - It's a personality quality and skill you can develop by doing the things that charming people do, and being the kind of person that charming people are. You change your external behaviors by developing and using certain skills, skills that give you control of your personal image that you want others to see, and the inner dynamics over time start to take care of themselves.
So what the book also said, is that first you create the the outward behaviors, the way you walk, talk, and behave - and then you move inward, layer by layer developing the psychological reasons for the behaviors. And by changing our external behaviors, we can influence what others feel and also what we feel inside.
I haven’t had a chance to test the theory, but it makes some sense, and I plan on implementing it to see what the result is. I’m going to try to rely less on canned material and focus more on being in the moment and being fully present in the interaction (not scanning the room for the next person I am going to talk to our the next routine I am going to run). I am going to try and mimic some of the charming qualities of those I find charming, by copying some of their humor, body language, eye contact, and mannerisms.
I tried this a little bit at a wine tasting event I was just at it actually felt really good. I wasn’t “gaming” every girl I came into contact with, but mixing with the entire crowd, intently listening to what each person was saying, and free flowing with the conversation based on the topics that came up. Now I will admit that I did throw in a few routines to generate some sexual attraction with one specific girl I connected with, but it was very organic and spontaneous. We have a date on Sunday. I’ll post on the results after having some time to explore it more.
SO with that being said, here is a great example of Charm in my opinion. I know it's the movies, but if I could have this type of interaction consistently with the females I come into contact with....it would be a DONE deal. The look in his eye, the smile, the chemistry, how intently he is into her, the way they banter. This is one to emulate.
*How Charm is defined - The ability some people have to create extraordinary rapport that makes others in their presence feel exceptional.
*How do you learn it? - It's a personality quality and skill you can develop by doing the things that charming people do, and being the kind of person that charming people are. You change your external behaviors by developing and using certain skills, skills that give you control of your personal image that you want others to see, and the inner dynamics over time start to take care of themselves.
So what the book also said, is that first you create the the outward behaviors, the way you walk, talk, and behave - and then you move inward, layer by layer developing the psychological reasons for the behaviors. And by changing our external behaviors, we can influence what others feel and also what we feel inside.
I haven’t had a chance to test the theory, but it makes some sense, and I plan on implementing it to see what the result is. I’m going to try to rely less on canned material and focus more on being in the moment and being fully present in the interaction (not scanning the room for the next person I am going to talk to our the next routine I am going to run). I am going to try and mimic some of the charming qualities of those I find charming, by copying some of their humor, body language, eye contact, and mannerisms.
I tried this a little bit at a wine tasting event I was just at it actually felt really good. I wasn’t “gaming” every girl I came into contact with, but mixing with the entire crowd, intently listening to what each person was saying, and free flowing with the conversation based on the topics that came up. Now I will admit that I did throw in a few routines to generate some sexual attraction with one specific girl I connected with, but it was very organic and spontaneous. We have a date on Sunday. I’ll post on the results after having some time to explore it more.
SO with that being said, here is a great example of Charm in my opinion. I know it's the movies, but if I could have this type of interaction consistently with the females I come into contact with....it would be a DONE deal. The look in his eye, the smile, the chemistry, how intently he is into her, the way they banter. This is one to emulate.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Braddock on Approach Anxiety
Some of the worst feelings in my life have come when I have chosen to avoid something I wanted out of fear. Knowing that I logically wanted something and then didn’t go for it because I succumb to a bunch of emotional rationalizations that are 95% bullshit, is killer. It reminds me of the Jim Rohn quote, “We suffer one of two things. Either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. You’ve got to choose discipline, versus regret, because discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons.”
As we all know, more often than not emotions steer the ship of our life and especially our day to day and moment to moment decisions..not logic. I feel like one of the biggest life challenges we all face is cultivating the ability to choose right action over fear. Fear can come in many forms, actual gut level pain, rationalizations, excuses, deflecting, blaming, comparison, etc. No matter what form it takes on, one of the greatest handcuffs we face, especially in the dating world, is overcoming that fear.
Sadly, the raw emotion of fear, is much much worse than the actual root of the fear. Actually approaching a woman is actually not as painful as the raw emotion of thinking about it. It’s strange how much your life changes when you learn to control this emotion and move more effortlessly through the world.
While the emotional feeling inside will never go away completely, you can condition your body and mind to be almost numb to it. Much like when you play baseball as a kid. It’s scary the first time you step in the batters box and have a kid throwing a ball at you. But after several years of playing, the fear melts away. Strangely, in the example of baseball, the fear should actually get worse being as the pitcher throws harder and harder as you get older. Even though you know this logically, your mind is numb to the fear.
What happens is that you develop a new habit. A habit of right action. If you always choose right action over emotion, you take the guess work out of it for your body and brain. Eventually your body and mind calm down and get on board through desensitization.
Guys come to me on bootcamp and think there must be something wrong with them because they have such bad approach anxiety. There is nothing wrong with you just because you have approach anxiety. If I took the best dating coach in the world who says he has zero approach anxiety and threw him in the batters box against a major league pitcher who throws 100mph, would he feel anxiety? Of course. If I took the most calm, cool, collected major league baseball player, who never gets nervous in the batters box, and took him a bar and forced him to approach a beautiful woman he didn’t know, would he feel anxiety? Of course.
You are feeling nervous for a whole host of reasons, which I will explore in great detail later in this article, but mainly it’s because you are doing something you have very few reference experiences for in a situation where you feel like you can’t make a mistake. In baseball, you get to start off on a tee, with no one watching. Once you have that down you can start hitting soft toss. If you mess that up, no big deal. No one is watching and no one is judging you. Once you have that down, you can move to the pitching machine, then a real pitcher. You can do all of this in the off season with no one watching. By the time the season rolls around, you are ready.
In pickup you don’t get to slowly graduate up to the wold series. The first woman you approach feels essentially like it’s the world series. On bootcamp we almost always cure 85%-90% of a guys approach anxiety by the end of the weekend. The weekend forces the guys to get mass exposure like they’ve never experienced. Sure, you will always feel something when you approach, but you can make it manageable.
Develop the Habit of Right Action Over Emotion
If you really want your approach anxiety to go away it simply requires you develop a new habit. You must cultivate the habit of right action over emotion. Realize that everyone feels approach anxiety and those who feel the least, are the ones who have done the most approaches. These guys are not super human, they have just desensitized themselves to the pain through repetition and carry a mindset focused on long term gratification over short term gratification. They have faced that fear so many times, that it has lost its hold.
If you rode a roller coaster 500 times in a row, you would eventually lose the ability to get a rush from riding it. If you only ride that roller coaster one or twice a month, then you will surely feel the rush with the same intensity as you did the very first time you ever road it.
If you wanted to help a friend get over the fear of riding roller coasters would you have him read 300 books and spend 5 years on a psychologists couch or would you put his ass on a roller coaster again and again?
Just like any other habit you want to create in your life this is done through repetition. The fastest way to ensure that you have approach anxiety for the rest of your life is to only do one or two approaches every now and then.
My favorite self help guru Brian Tracy says, “Fortunately, the habit of courage can be learned just as any other habit is learned, through repetition. We need to constantly face and overcome our fears to build up the kind of courage that will enable us to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life unafraid.”
While there are infinite things we could be afraid of, at our core we are crippled with fear of rejection and fear of failure far beyond all else. The fear of rejection is the most damaging because it can literally be crippling. It is a cancer that can literally hold you in a self-imposed prison keeping you from taking the necessary action required to meet a specific goal.
Usually there are several factors in regards to approach anxiety that make this fear of rejection heightened. Some of them are unavoidable and in regards to those you need to man the fuck up. However, several factors are within your control. Remember, there are certain factors that predispose us to heightened levels of fear or anxiety. By removing those factors we reduce the level of anxiety to a manageable level. Remove the road blocks in your mind that are holding you back, especially early in the learning process.
Let’s look at a few that you can remove:
1. Approaching In Front Of Old Friends: We all know that failure is unavoidable in any new endeavor and that the lion share of failure takes place at the beginning of learning something new. This means, that your fear of rejection is not completely unfounded. You will in fact get rejected quite a bit when you approach women, especially in the beginning. What can make this even worse is the fact that you are trying to learn this in front of old friends who have never seen you behave in this new way. You have a well-defined role within that circle and to get rejected in front of them could create a level of social pressure from them that you are not sure you are willing to accept. You don’t want the role in your group to change, you don’t want to be openly ridiculed by them, and you don’t want to be ridiculed behind your back.
Remedy: Knowing that you are trying something new and scary, the last thing you need is extra pressure from your friends. On the nights when you are going out to work on this stuff don’t go out with the guys who add to your stress. Go out with the one or two guys who you are most relaxed around and don’t feel like you would be judged. Once you are over your approach anxiety you can start chasing girls in front of those guys and it won’t be such a big deal. When I was first learning this stuff, I couldn’t go out with my older brother and his friends because I couldn’t stand the thought of looking bad in front of them. As ridiculous as that frame of mind might be, by simply removing them on the nights I wanted to work on this stuff I was able to fight just one demon that night, my crippling approach anxiety. By going out with them and wrestling two demons at once, I was paralyzed into doing nothing. This was retarding my growth on a massive level. We all thrive when we deal with people who we feel understand us, respond well to us, and aren’t judging us. While this is less important in most situations, it’s very helpful when attempting something new and stressful.
2. Approaching In A Local Venue: I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life studying every book I could get my hands on that had to do with the brain and how it works. One thing that I see consistently in the books I’ve read on neurobiology is the brain is a horrible multi tasker, especially in high stress situations. An area of our brain that this drastically affects is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Dr. Richard Restak says, “The MPFC springs into action whenever we direct our attention inward and think about ourselves or outward and think about others. As we interact with colleagues, compete with opponents, or watch our friends and family experience their own ups and downs, having insight into the feelings of others enables us to understand what they value, how they feel about us, to offer appropriate support or gain competitive advantage, and to predict their future behavior.”
The medial pre-frontal cortex fires up not only when we actually experience an event, but also when we ‘think’ about experiencing an event. It also fires off when we think about putting our self in the shoes of another person looking back at us.
The more we are concerned with what the other person thinks about us, the more our MPFC will fire off, scanning to assess how they ‘might’ feel or what they ‘might’ be thinking. This means, that our attention gets scattered and fractionated like crazy in high stress situations. If you are scared of public speaking and you are speaking to a group of important clients your MPFC will be doing back flips trying to assess how they feel about you. You will oscillate between: full attention on your speech –> What they are thinking about me? –> full attention on your speech –> What are they thinking about me? …Over and over etc.
Each time this happens, you are obviously pulled away from your speech and you lose focus. You become more and more self conscious every time you lose your place in your speech and the MPFC fires off more concentrated and much more often. Before you know it, you are so concerned with what the crowd is thinking that you can’t even talk. This is essentially like driving drunk. Your mind can’t keep up with all the inputs and it’s almost impossible to focus. You feel disoriented and anxious as a result.
This explains why you feel like you are naked on stage when you are in your local bar trying to approach. You are in a bar full of people you either know, kind of know, or have seen multiple times. Now all of a sudden you decide to approach either these groups of people or approach strangers in front of these people. The fear of rejection and failure kicks in and fires off your MPFC. Now you can’t stop thinking about what all these people in the bar who you kind of know are thinking about you.
“What if it goes wrong? I’ll never be able to show my face in here again. What if I use a line and she’s hear it before? She’ll tell everyone in here. What if I get blown out and she knows someone I know? My ex girlfriend is in here, what if she or one of her friends sees me get blown out? That asshole I knew in college is in here. If I get blown out in front of him, he’ll probably say something smart ass to me.”
Now your MPFC is scanning the room at lightning speed trying to assess the feelings of everyone in the room. You now feel like you have 50 video cameras on you and the thought of approaching feels about as scary as pulling your cock out on national TV.
Remedy: DON’T PRACTICE IN THESE PLACES!!!!!! It’s that simple. When I was learning this stuff and approach anxiety was my number one concern I would drive to cities 1 hour, 2 hours, sometimes even 4 hours away so I could practice in a place where I didn’t feel like I was on national television. Yes, you will still feel the pressure and your MPFC will still scan the room, but not wish such ferocity. You will be more apt to keep your composure and stay in the moment. You may still feel like you are on TV, but it will feel more like public access channel 13 at 3am, instead of HBO on Sunday night at 9pm.
Once you get comfortable with your approach anxiety in these places, you can slowly test the waters in the places that gave you the most pain. Eventually, your local bar won’t seem that daunting and you will have little or no trouble approaching a woman in these venues.
3. I don’t know what to say: This is a pretty common, yet avoidable cause of approach anxiety. You might be thinking, “Any idiot can get the balls up to go over there and make a fool of himself. I don’t want to be like that. If I’m going to go over there I want to at least have something to say. What kind of fool goes up to a woman and says, hi, and then stands there like a moron?”
That’s actually a fair point. I know I felt the same way when I was learning this stuff. Sadly, this kind of thinking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Thinking like this can cause more long term damage than you can imagine. What this causes is the death of action and the birth of a guy who reads for months and never actually approaches.
You begin to think that you should read and study pickup eBooks and memorize every possible routine and funny line. Then at some undetermined time in the future, you plan to start approaching.
What really happens is that you read an insane amount of information and NEVER digest any of it. Your mind never hardwires any of the concepts and you become a master of theory and you actually get worse with women instead of better.
Reading without practical application through real world experience causes you to develop major gaps in your learning. You become over stuffed with random knowledge. You need to start with small amounts of knowledge and digest those and really master them before moving on to the next piece. The act of actually approaching and interacting with women, bad or good interactions, will help you connect the dots between each piece of new information you acquire.
When you just read all the time or talk pickup all the time, you simply play a guessing game in your head. You read and assume. You build false constructs in your mind of what the author really means and you create some weird mutation of reality. When and if you ever do decide to take action your brain locks up and gives you massive approach anxiety because you have all this information in your head you have no idea what to do with it or what order it should go in. You are so nervous because you haven’t approached in a long time and when you finally do it goes either horribly bad or just ok. You feel guilty inside because you feel like you should be really good considering you know theory better than any dating coach on the planet and you wonder how it is possible with all that reading, you still can’t think of anything to say. This makes you feel anxiety and frustration so approaching the next girl makes you even more nervous, because each experience seems to validate that you are completely lost.
Remedy: As the quote goes, “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Take one piece of information and go out and master it before moving on to the next. If you can’t open then there is no reason to be reading about the newest qualification technique or sexual framing. Your approach anxiety will go away in direct proportion to your amount of women you approach and your ability to master one step at a time.
Give up on the idea that you need to have the perfect thing to say before you approach a woman. While the lines and routines are extremely powerful, they are worthless in bulk. Pick one or two things to open with and one or two things to transition with. Stick with these 2 things for a while. Stick with them until your approach anxiety drops to a reasonable level and you feel like you have those down.
Change your mission. Take the 1,000 things there are to learn in game and learn them 1 at a time. Approach anxiety is the first one on that list. Advanced concepts mean nothing if your brain and body are engulfed with crippling anxiety. Give yourself a break and tackle this one thing first. Go out give yourself mini missions.
Also, realize that there is no reason why you can’t just walk up open, transition and then politely eject. The women won’t care and it will take tons of pressure off of you. You do not have to stand there like an idiot for an hour having awkward conversation. Yes, in time you will obviously need to stay longer, but for now you are just working on beating approach anxiety, right? As you become more and more relaxed with this process, you can begin to stay longer and longer.
The Recipe
To defeat your approach anxiety you need to expose yourself to gradual increasing doses of social pressure. The lowest form of this may simply be talking to a clothing store clerk and the opposite end of that spectrum might be smacking a girl on the ass. Between those two polarities you can expose yourself to gradual increases. Keep doing the same one until the anxiety it gives you is either manageable or non-existent. Once you hit that threshold, move on to the next thing on your list that gives you an increased dose of social pressure.
The more times you expose yourself to these situations, your brain will calm down and you will start to pick up conversational reference experiences. After numerous approaches over several weekends you will become bored just approaching and walking off. You might get nervous on the first few of each night, but most of them will feel like nothing.
Every time you approach and start a conversation, no matter how short or long, it’s like going to the gym for your brain. You will literally build conversational muscles. The first week you do this, you may run out of things to say after 5 seconds! However, as your mind calms down in these high-pressure situations, your brain will allow you more access to the creative side of your brain. It’s not about memorizing more lines, it’s about being calm in those situations so you can access what you already know. The more calm and the more internalized your openers and transitions become, the more material you can add if you like.
Please please trust me when I say that you will never memorize 300 routines and be able to go out into a bar and use them. Memorizing 300 routines is NOT a remedy for approach anxiety or a recipe to get laid. If anything, they will make things worse because your brain will feel clogged. You don’t need to memorize 300 lines to talk to an old friend, you just relax and talk to one another, right?
You will never completely eradicate your approach anxiety and that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to get it to a manageable level. The absolute ideal state is indifference. This is the feeling you have when you are talking to a friend or acquaintance. When you are talking to a friend or an acquaintance you are not to worried about what they are thinking and you have little or no concern about what the room is thinking. Putting yourself in these gradual-increasing levels of social pressure will help you reach indifference much faster.
Facing the harsh reality of “No, I’m not interested in you”: The fear of rejection can be a heavy feeling when you first start out. This one single factor is enough to keep most guys on the sidelines their entire lives. Because of this fear/pain they will be relegated to dating the women that come on to them or they will have to build a dynasty of a social circle and hope it creates enough gravity to draw women to them based on their lifestyle and social alliances.
Even if you are a guy who is lucky enough to have been extremely successful with women in your social circles, you will have to get used to hearing “no” in cold approach. You will hear “no” from beautiful women and from women you wouldn’t even consider dating anyway. This can be a mind trip, because you may be used to beautiful women in your old social circles being all over you or even nervous to talk to you. In the sloppy world of cold approach, it is not the least bit uncommon to have below average women look at you like you have a dick growing out of your forehead when you approach.
If you are not used to dating very many women or you are new to cold approach, then getting over the fear of rejection can feel daunting. Many guys take it personal. They assume that the woman sees some deep internal character flaw in them that must be true. They assume that if several women reject them, then most/all women must not like them.
If you are not careful this can create some deep seeded inner game issues that are hard to unwined. At the end of the day, it is successful reference experiences that breed confidence. You can only pump yourself up for so long and keep telling yourself that it will be ok or that “it’s not you, it’s them.” This is why it’s so crucial that, especially in the first 6 to 9 months, you write out clearly defined, measurable, and realistic goals. You can gain a ton of confidence by hitting small goal after small goal. These small goals, slowly give birth to bigger and bigger goals. While you may not be getting laid or getting the women you want for that time, you are still hitting those small goals and this is the path that will lead you to dating those women by giving you the positive reference experience you need to build durable confidence.
If you are new and you have MASSIVE approach anxiety..STOP MAKING YOUR GOAL TO GET LAID!!!!!!!! Ready for some real talk??? You are not likely to consistently get laid or get an extremely hot girlfriend through cold approach for several months or longer if you are at the stage where you still suffer from severe approach anxiety. So, stop beating yourself up with ridiculous goals and feeling bad when you don’t have some epic sexual conquest or get 5 phone numbers.
Step back and draw up a realistic 6 month game plan where you can have success. If you wanted to become a millionaire, would you get your feelings hurt and become deflated if you weren’t a millionaire tomorrow? 3 months from now? 6 months from now? Of course not. You would set up a game plan and a business strategy full of subsidiary goals all leading to the attainment of the big goal, a million dollars. Do the same with your dating life.
You can do this, just step up and make it happen!!
As we all know, more often than not emotions steer the ship of our life and especially our day to day and moment to moment decisions..not logic. I feel like one of the biggest life challenges we all face is cultivating the ability to choose right action over fear. Fear can come in many forms, actual gut level pain, rationalizations, excuses, deflecting, blaming, comparison, etc. No matter what form it takes on, one of the greatest handcuffs we face, especially in the dating world, is overcoming that fear.
Sadly, the raw emotion of fear, is much much worse than the actual root of the fear. Actually approaching a woman is actually not as painful as the raw emotion of thinking about it. It’s strange how much your life changes when you learn to control this emotion and move more effortlessly through the world.
While the emotional feeling inside will never go away completely, you can condition your body and mind to be almost numb to it. Much like when you play baseball as a kid. It’s scary the first time you step in the batters box and have a kid throwing a ball at you. But after several years of playing, the fear melts away. Strangely, in the example of baseball, the fear should actually get worse being as the pitcher throws harder and harder as you get older. Even though you know this logically, your mind is numb to the fear.
What happens is that you develop a new habit. A habit of right action. If you always choose right action over emotion, you take the guess work out of it for your body and brain. Eventually your body and mind calm down and get on board through desensitization.
Guys come to me on bootcamp and think there must be something wrong with them because they have such bad approach anxiety. There is nothing wrong with you just because you have approach anxiety. If I took the best dating coach in the world who says he has zero approach anxiety and threw him in the batters box against a major league pitcher who throws 100mph, would he feel anxiety? Of course. If I took the most calm, cool, collected major league baseball player, who never gets nervous in the batters box, and took him a bar and forced him to approach a beautiful woman he didn’t know, would he feel anxiety? Of course.
You are feeling nervous for a whole host of reasons, which I will explore in great detail later in this article, but mainly it’s because you are doing something you have very few reference experiences for in a situation where you feel like you can’t make a mistake. In baseball, you get to start off on a tee, with no one watching. Once you have that down you can start hitting soft toss. If you mess that up, no big deal. No one is watching and no one is judging you. Once you have that down, you can move to the pitching machine, then a real pitcher. You can do all of this in the off season with no one watching. By the time the season rolls around, you are ready.
In pickup you don’t get to slowly graduate up to the wold series. The first woman you approach feels essentially like it’s the world series. On bootcamp we almost always cure 85%-90% of a guys approach anxiety by the end of the weekend. The weekend forces the guys to get mass exposure like they’ve never experienced. Sure, you will always feel something when you approach, but you can make it manageable.
Develop the Habit of Right Action Over Emotion
If you really want your approach anxiety to go away it simply requires you develop a new habit. You must cultivate the habit of right action over emotion. Realize that everyone feels approach anxiety and those who feel the least, are the ones who have done the most approaches. These guys are not super human, they have just desensitized themselves to the pain through repetition and carry a mindset focused on long term gratification over short term gratification. They have faced that fear so many times, that it has lost its hold.
If you rode a roller coaster 500 times in a row, you would eventually lose the ability to get a rush from riding it. If you only ride that roller coaster one or twice a month, then you will surely feel the rush with the same intensity as you did the very first time you ever road it.
If you wanted to help a friend get over the fear of riding roller coasters would you have him read 300 books and spend 5 years on a psychologists couch or would you put his ass on a roller coaster again and again?
Just like any other habit you want to create in your life this is done through repetition. The fastest way to ensure that you have approach anxiety for the rest of your life is to only do one or two approaches every now and then.
My favorite self help guru Brian Tracy says, “Fortunately, the habit of courage can be learned just as any other habit is learned, through repetition. We need to constantly face and overcome our fears to build up the kind of courage that will enable us to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life unafraid.”
While there are infinite things we could be afraid of, at our core we are crippled with fear of rejection and fear of failure far beyond all else. The fear of rejection is the most damaging because it can literally be crippling. It is a cancer that can literally hold you in a self-imposed prison keeping you from taking the necessary action required to meet a specific goal.
Usually there are several factors in regards to approach anxiety that make this fear of rejection heightened. Some of them are unavoidable and in regards to those you need to man the fuck up. However, several factors are within your control. Remember, there are certain factors that predispose us to heightened levels of fear or anxiety. By removing those factors we reduce the level of anxiety to a manageable level. Remove the road blocks in your mind that are holding you back, especially early in the learning process.
Let’s look at a few that you can remove:
1. Approaching In Front Of Old Friends: We all know that failure is unavoidable in any new endeavor and that the lion share of failure takes place at the beginning of learning something new. This means, that your fear of rejection is not completely unfounded. You will in fact get rejected quite a bit when you approach women, especially in the beginning. What can make this even worse is the fact that you are trying to learn this in front of old friends who have never seen you behave in this new way. You have a well-defined role within that circle and to get rejected in front of them could create a level of social pressure from them that you are not sure you are willing to accept. You don’t want the role in your group to change, you don’t want to be openly ridiculed by them, and you don’t want to be ridiculed behind your back.
Remedy: Knowing that you are trying something new and scary, the last thing you need is extra pressure from your friends. On the nights when you are going out to work on this stuff don’t go out with the guys who add to your stress. Go out with the one or two guys who you are most relaxed around and don’t feel like you would be judged. Once you are over your approach anxiety you can start chasing girls in front of those guys and it won’t be such a big deal. When I was first learning this stuff, I couldn’t go out with my older brother and his friends because I couldn’t stand the thought of looking bad in front of them. As ridiculous as that frame of mind might be, by simply removing them on the nights I wanted to work on this stuff I was able to fight just one demon that night, my crippling approach anxiety. By going out with them and wrestling two demons at once, I was paralyzed into doing nothing. This was retarding my growth on a massive level. We all thrive when we deal with people who we feel understand us, respond well to us, and aren’t judging us. While this is less important in most situations, it’s very helpful when attempting something new and stressful.
2. Approaching In A Local Venue: I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life studying every book I could get my hands on that had to do with the brain and how it works. One thing that I see consistently in the books I’ve read on neurobiology is the brain is a horrible multi tasker, especially in high stress situations. An area of our brain that this drastically affects is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Dr. Richard Restak says, “The MPFC springs into action whenever we direct our attention inward and think about ourselves or outward and think about others. As we interact with colleagues, compete with opponents, or watch our friends and family experience their own ups and downs, having insight into the feelings of others enables us to understand what they value, how they feel about us, to offer appropriate support or gain competitive advantage, and to predict their future behavior.”
The medial pre-frontal cortex fires up not only when we actually experience an event, but also when we ‘think’ about experiencing an event. It also fires off when we think about putting our self in the shoes of another person looking back at us.
The more we are concerned with what the other person thinks about us, the more our MPFC will fire off, scanning to assess how they ‘might’ feel or what they ‘might’ be thinking. This means, that our attention gets scattered and fractionated like crazy in high stress situations. If you are scared of public speaking and you are speaking to a group of important clients your MPFC will be doing back flips trying to assess how they feel about you. You will oscillate between: full attention on your speech –> What they are thinking about me? –> full attention on your speech –> What are they thinking about me? …Over and over etc.
Each time this happens, you are obviously pulled away from your speech and you lose focus. You become more and more self conscious every time you lose your place in your speech and the MPFC fires off more concentrated and much more often. Before you know it, you are so concerned with what the crowd is thinking that you can’t even talk. This is essentially like driving drunk. Your mind can’t keep up with all the inputs and it’s almost impossible to focus. You feel disoriented and anxious as a result.
This explains why you feel like you are naked on stage when you are in your local bar trying to approach. You are in a bar full of people you either know, kind of know, or have seen multiple times. Now all of a sudden you decide to approach either these groups of people or approach strangers in front of these people. The fear of rejection and failure kicks in and fires off your MPFC. Now you can’t stop thinking about what all these people in the bar who you kind of know are thinking about you.
“What if it goes wrong? I’ll never be able to show my face in here again. What if I use a line and she’s hear it before? She’ll tell everyone in here. What if I get blown out and she knows someone I know? My ex girlfriend is in here, what if she or one of her friends sees me get blown out? That asshole I knew in college is in here. If I get blown out in front of him, he’ll probably say something smart ass to me.”
Now your MPFC is scanning the room at lightning speed trying to assess the feelings of everyone in the room. You now feel like you have 50 video cameras on you and the thought of approaching feels about as scary as pulling your cock out on national TV.
Remedy: DON’T PRACTICE IN THESE PLACES!!!!!! It’s that simple. When I was learning this stuff and approach anxiety was my number one concern I would drive to cities 1 hour, 2 hours, sometimes even 4 hours away so I could practice in a place where I didn’t feel like I was on national television. Yes, you will still feel the pressure and your MPFC will still scan the room, but not wish such ferocity. You will be more apt to keep your composure and stay in the moment. You may still feel like you are on TV, but it will feel more like public access channel 13 at 3am, instead of HBO on Sunday night at 9pm.
Once you get comfortable with your approach anxiety in these places, you can slowly test the waters in the places that gave you the most pain. Eventually, your local bar won’t seem that daunting and you will have little or no trouble approaching a woman in these venues.
3. I don’t know what to say: This is a pretty common, yet avoidable cause of approach anxiety. You might be thinking, “Any idiot can get the balls up to go over there and make a fool of himself. I don’t want to be like that. If I’m going to go over there I want to at least have something to say. What kind of fool goes up to a woman and says, hi, and then stands there like a moron?”
That’s actually a fair point. I know I felt the same way when I was learning this stuff. Sadly, this kind of thinking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Thinking like this can cause more long term damage than you can imagine. What this causes is the death of action and the birth of a guy who reads for months and never actually approaches.
You begin to think that you should read and study pickup eBooks and memorize every possible routine and funny line. Then at some undetermined time in the future, you plan to start approaching.
What really happens is that you read an insane amount of information and NEVER digest any of it. Your mind never hardwires any of the concepts and you become a master of theory and you actually get worse with women instead of better.
Reading without practical application through real world experience causes you to develop major gaps in your learning. You become over stuffed with random knowledge. You need to start with small amounts of knowledge and digest those and really master them before moving on to the next piece. The act of actually approaching and interacting with women, bad or good interactions, will help you connect the dots between each piece of new information you acquire.
When you just read all the time or talk pickup all the time, you simply play a guessing game in your head. You read and assume. You build false constructs in your mind of what the author really means and you create some weird mutation of reality. When and if you ever do decide to take action your brain locks up and gives you massive approach anxiety because you have all this information in your head you have no idea what to do with it or what order it should go in. You are so nervous because you haven’t approached in a long time and when you finally do it goes either horribly bad or just ok. You feel guilty inside because you feel like you should be really good considering you know theory better than any dating coach on the planet and you wonder how it is possible with all that reading, you still can’t think of anything to say. This makes you feel anxiety and frustration so approaching the next girl makes you even more nervous, because each experience seems to validate that you are completely lost.
Remedy: As the quote goes, “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Take one piece of information and go out and master it before moving on to the next. If you can’t open then there is no reason to be reading about the newest qualification technique or sexual framing. Your approach anxiety will go away in direct proportion to your amount of women you approach and your ability to master one step at a time.
Give up on the idea that you need to have the perfect thing to say before you approach a woman. While the lines and routines are extremely powerful, they are worthless in bulk. Pick one or two things to open with and one or two things to transition with. Stick with these 2 things for a while. Stick with them until your approach anxiety drops to a reasonable level and you feel like you have those down.
Change your mission. Take the 1,000 things there are to learn in game and learn them 1 at a time. Approach anxiety is the first one on that list. Advanced concepts mean nothing if your brain and body are engulfed with crippling anxiety. Give yourself a break and tackle this one thing first. Go out give yourself mini missions.
Also, realize that there is no reason why you can’t just walk up open, transition and then politely eject. The women won’t care and it will take tons of pressure off of you. You do not have to stand there like an idiot for an hour having awkward conversation. Yes, in time you will obviously need to stay longer, but for now you are just working on beating approach anxiety, right? As you become more and more relaxed with this process, you can begin to stay longer and longer.
The Recipe
To defeat your approach anxiety you need to expose yourself to gradual increasing doses of social pressure. The lowest form of this may simply be talking to a clothing store clerk and the opposite end of that spectrum might be smacking a girl on the ass. Between those two polarities you can expose yourself to gradual increases. Keep doing the same one until the anxiety it gives you is either manageable or non-existent. Once you hit that threshold, move on to the next thing on your list that gives you an increased dose of social pressure.
The more times you expose yourself to these situations, your brain will calm down and you will start to pick up conversational reference experiences. After numerous approaches over several weekends you will become bored just approaching and walking off. You might get nervous on the first few of each night, but most of them will feel like nothing.
Every time you approach and start a conversation, no matter how short or long, it’s like going to the gym for your brain. You will literally build conversational muscles. The first week you do this, you may run out of things to say after 5 seconds! However, as your mind calms down in these high-pressure situations, your brain will allow you more access to the creative side of your brain. It’s not about memorizing more lines, it’s about being calm in those situations so you can access what you already know. The more calm and the more internalized your openers and transitions become, the more material you can add if you like.
Please please trust me when I say that you will never memorize 300 routines and be able to go out into a bar and use them. Memorizing 300 routines is NOT a remedy for approach anxiety or a recipe to get laid. If anything, they will make things worse because your brain will feel clogged. You don’t need to memorize 300 lines to talk to an old friend, you just relax and talk to one another, right?
You will never completely eradicate your approach anxiety and that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to get it to a manageable level. The absolute ideal state is indifference. This is the feeling you have when you are talking to a friend or acquaintance. When you are talking to a friend or an acquaintance you are not to worried about what they are thinking and you have little or no concern about what the room is thinking. Putting yourself in these gradual-increasing levels of social pressure will help you reach indifference much faster.
Facing the harsh reality of “No, I’m not interested in you”: The fear of rejection can be a heavy feeling when you first start out. This one single factor is enough to keep most guys on the sidelines their entire lives. Because of this fear/pain they will be relegated to dating the women that come on to them or they will have to build a dynasty of a social circle and hope it creates enough gravity to draw women to them based on their lifestyle and social alliances.
Even if you are a guy who is lucky enough to have been extremely successful with women in your social circles, you will have to get used to hearing “no” in cold approach. You will hear “no” from beautiful women and from women you wouldn’t even consider dating anyway. This can be a mind trip, because you may be used to beautiful women in your old social circles being all over you or even nervous to talk to you. In the sloppy world of cold approach, it is not the least bit uncommon to have below average women look at you like you have a dick growing out of your forehead when you approach.
If you are not used to dating very many women or you are new to cold approach, then getting over the fear of rejection can feel daunting. Many guys take it personal. They assume that the woman sees some deep internal character flaw in them that must be true. They assume that if several women reject them, then most/all women must not like them.
If you are not careful this can create some deep seeded inner game issues that are hard to unwined. At the end of the day, it is successful reference experiences that breed confidence. You can only pump yourself up for so long and keep telling yourself that it will be ok or that “it’s not you, it’s them.” This is why it’s so crucial that, especially in the first 6 to 9 months, you write out clearly defined, measurable, and realistic goals. You can gain a ton of confidence by hitting small goal after small goal. These small goals, slowly give birth to bigger and bigger goals. While you may not be getting laid or getting the women you want for that time, you are still hitting those small goals and this is the path that will lead you to dating those women by giving you the positive reference experience you need to build durable confidence.
If you are new and you have MASSIVE approach anxiety..STOP MAKING YOUR GOAL TO GET LAID!!!!!!!! Ready for some real talk??? You are not likely to consistently get laid or get an extremely hot girlfriend through cold approach for several months or longer if you are at the stage where you still suffer from severe approach anxiety. So, stop beating yourself up with ridiculous goals and feeling bad when you don’t have some epic sexual conquest or get 5 phone numbers.
Step back and draw up a realistic 6 month game plan where you can have success. If you wanted to become a millionaire, would you get your feelings hurt and become deflated if you weren’t a millionaire tomorrow? 3 months from now? 6 months from now? Of course not. You would set up a game plan and a business strategy full of subsidiary goals all leading to the attainment of the big goal, a million dollars. Do the same with your dating life.
You can do this, just step up and make it happen!!
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