| Approach anxiety was one of my biggest fears starting out in pickup. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of time and experience by letting it control when or if I would approach. Recently in studying the way our brains work I came across a theory and exercise you may find helpful in overcoming AA. My only wish is that it was around when I started.
First it’s important to understand that all normal human choice is driven by two things. It is our desire to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure. This is one of the basic principles of NLP.
So in an approach there may be the pleasure of possibly getting to know the girl, but there is also the pain of possibly being rejected. If the perceived pain is greater than the perceived pleasure we will not approach and vice versa. Generally speaking we will do more to avoid pain than gain pleasure. Think about it, would you do more to possibly get $500 or do more to keep someone from taking $500?
Here’s the thing. Pain and pleasure are not objective perceptions, in other words, what’s painful to one person may be pleasurable to someone else. Skydiving to one person may be a huge rush, while to another person it is the scariest thing ever. As stated, if we associate pain to a behavior we will avoid it, versus if we associate pleasure we will go for it.
In the skydiving example above the difference is each person’s association to the event. See all of us have associations to a myriad of events, behaviors, and experiences. And many times those associations are on auto-pilot. The person who loves skydiving may automatically make an association to the rush of the jump, the freedom of free-falling, while the person who hates sky-diving may associate the possibility of the parachute not opening and therefore dying, or the embarrassment of crying like a little girl before jumping out of the plane.
The thing about both people’s associations is that they are realities to the individuals. But these realities can be changed. Say the person who loves skydiving does a jump with his girlfriend and she has a crazy accident and dies. While the act of skydiving is the same, this person’s association becomes less about the freedom of free-falling and more about the possibility of death and the recent death of his girlfriend. Now he starts to associate more pain to sky-diving than pleasure and as a result stops doing it. What changed? Not skydiving. The act of skydiving is still skydiving. Rather the individual’s association to the behavior has changed. Even simpler, what thoughts run through his mind concerning skydiving have drastically changed.
Say for the other guy he meets this beautiful girl and she says she’ll give him the best sex of his life 5x times a day, everyday if he skydives with her (I know a little far fetched, but it will help prove my point). Unless he’s dickless, his brain is likely to start associating more pleasure to skydiving via the best sex of his life than all the fears before. His association to skydiving has drastically changed as now it equals immense pleasure.
So how’s all this relate to approaching. The thing is, is that it is possible to change your associations without someone dying or promising you the best sex ever. Associations can be changed with cognitive conditioning, basically a big term for becoming aware of how the hell your mind works.
So let’s take approaches, especially approaches with gorgeous women. The first thing you want to do is to make your mind believe that it must change the old behavior or suffer a life of misery. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take out a pen and paper, and ask yourself what ten things do you lose or outcomes that may come from not making approaches to beautiful women.
Let me give you a few outcomes and things you lose out on by not approaching: you continue to experience lower self confidence and self doubt, you miss out on the opportunity to meet the women of your dreams, every lost approach is a potential a lost sexual encounter, you lose experience needed to become a natural with women, you run the risk of marrying a subpar mate, you run the risk of looking back on these years of your life with regret for not sleeping with more beautiful women, you miss out on the confidence in other areas of your life that comes from consistently approaching beautiful women, and the list goes on.
Now imagine a life if all the above took place. It’d be pretty shitty to say the least. It be safe to say, you’d be a loser and if you continued acting in the same way, that loser personality would only amplify as you got older.
So now you have a strong enough reason to change your behavior. But at the same time you still have the old associations of pain when it comes to approaching. So you want to short circuit that inner dialogue that brings up all those associations of pain.
So let’s look at what happens when you make an approach: A stunning woman who looks like she walked off the pages of this month’s Playboy magazine. And there you are, knowing that you should approach. And then starts that tape in your head. What should I say? What opener should I use? What do I say after my opener? What if she doesn’t like me? What if I make an ass out of myself? And before you know it, you’re a bundle of nervous emotions and already killing attraction before you’ve made your approach.
We want to shut that tape off. Imagine if you are running through these questions and George Bush goes streaking right in front of you yelling, “I am not a crook, I am not a crook, I am not a crook!” Would you be able to finish that internal tape? Would that bundle of nerves that you are creating turn into a silent, “WTF?!?!” You might even start laughing.
This is anchor used for interrupting the pattern. Basically the event of George Bush streaking has broken your thought pattern and taken you out of your frame of nervousness. You want to be able to do the same thing in the event of approaching, but it needs to be self generated.
Before I came across this technique, I used to slap my thigh, in my head say “It’s go time,” and imagine myself back in my football days running for a touchdown. The slap on the thigh was firm enough to cause a little pain and distract me from running the pattern of What Ifs that had been going off at the time. The silent verbal affirmation and imagery took me into a frame of action and seeing the interaction as a game, rather than some test I either pass or fail.
I also used to visualize the girl doing the funky chicken in a garbage bag, which generally got me smiling and seeing her a bit of nerd while I made my approach.
You need an anchor that breaks your pattern and changes your frame of mind. Come up with something unique that will a) break your negative internal pattern associated with making approaches, and b) get you into a positive frame.
The last part is to use your pen and paper and list 5 great things you gain from approaching women. Here’s few to get you started: higher chances of getting laid with more women, increased confidence, more social confidence, higher self-esteem, higher likelihood of marrying someone that is amazing, and you get the idea. Now list 5 reasons you know you can do this: It’s as easy as walking up and letting the words come out of my mouth, I’ve had trying times in my life before and passed them, others that are stupider and uglier than me are doing it, etc.
These reasons are what you literally need to memorize. Now every time you fire off that anchor you need to be running through these reasons. Practice this enough and it will become automatic.
I suggest doing this before you even make your approaches. Once a day, visualize Jessica Alba or whoever and run your anchor and the reasons you must make the approach and why you know you can do it. It’s like exercising when you are 50 lbs over weight. At first it’s tough, but after a while of doing it over and over again it becomes easy and something you do automatically.
This routine works outside of the approach and even pickup in general. If you are having trouble say picking up the phone to make calls. If you aren’t kinoing as much as you should out of fear, run through this routine. If you have a crack habit, this might even work for you, but I doubt it.
On a little bit of different note, when you first start out in pickup, make success easy on yourself. Make success in approaching the very act of approaching. Unconsciously your self-confidence builds on success, and if it’s as simple as making the approach, it’s easier to build your self-confidence up. On the other hand if you think a successful approach is number closing or sleeping with her and you just started out, it’s gonna take you a lot longer to build your self-confidence up. The funny thing is, the more self-confidence you build, the easier it is to number close, master other parts of the game, and eventually sleep with her.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to PM me.
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CHAT
