Approach Anxiety
One of the most frustrating things teachers of dating science have to deal with is approach anxiety, both their own and their students’. Don’t mistake this frustration for a lack of commitment or volition. If someone comes to me to fix their problems approaching girls, that is a wonderful thing. At least he’s being proactive about his situation and not resigning himself to pining for women’s desire in the corner of life’s bar, shielding himself with a beer or a pile of excuses. But it makes me sad when someone pays me a lot of money to shove my hand between his shoulder blades. It’s beneath both of us.
Approach anxiety is the most pervasive sticking point amongst the legion of men I’ve encountered since I first started studying romantic/sexual social dynamics. From instructors who have been teaching others how to attract girls for years to my meeker friends who would just as soon retreat to a plastic guitar or a d20 and maybe (maybe) meet a “bbw” off the internet, approach anxiety is a phenomenon understood across eras, languages, and cultures. I don’t know if everyone’s chest tightens when they have to make the transition from, “Hey, that girl is cute!” to “I should go talk to that cute girl!” but I’ve seen breath shorten in the mouths of the most seasoned lotharios I know when they see a potential lover, whether the man in question has been successful with women his entire life or he learned how to talk to girls on the internet. Like AIDS, approach anxiety does not discriminate.
The biggest nuisance of approach anxiety is that the real work of improving your initial relationships with women, the real work of hammering out for yourself what it means to be an attractive man, doesn’t begin until you overcome that one hurdle, this action so mythic your mind will shove a thousand reasons in the space of a synapse to help you not go through with the awful, arduous task of starting a conversation with a beautiful stranger. But once you approach you still have to be cute, interesting, dynamic, non-needy, funny, charming, and above all fun. While those things are possible under the duress of having just sluffed off a bout of approach anxiety– I’ve had to summon them professionally under the watchful, hungry eyes of students– they do not come easily. When we teach “opening” at Love Systems, we try to explain this paradox, that the opening of a conversation is simultaneously the most troublesome and difficult (because everyone gets approach anxiety) and the easiest and least important (because anything works to open and after that initial approach, you need follow-through).
In the last few months I’ve noticed a marked decrease in my own approach anxiety. I can’t claim it has disappeared, but I have done some soul-searching that has helped me suppress or eliminate the demons that rise up whenever I want to speak to a girl. Understand I’m writing about a phenomenon in myself that surprised me when I noticed it. I EXPECT to feel anxiety, so when, in recent months, it would strikes like a cobra in my guts (normal, been happening for years) and subsequently fade in seconds (not normal), I was delighted and eager to figure out how I did it. Everything I’m writing here is me trying to make sense of my recent discoveries and to share it with my readership, with former and potential students. If it doesn’t make sense or you think it sucks, by all means let me know.
What magic salve have I discovered? How did I overcome a sticking point that has plagued me since long before I knew about the SUISC? Simple:
Girls love me.
In fact, I’ll go one further and say that people, as a rule, enjoy my company when they meet me. Time and time again, this has proven to be the case. I start flirting with a girl on the PATH train or ask the girl behind the counter for her number, and it goes swimmingly, even perfectly. Yes, yes, I know what I do for a living, but the new part is my perspective, not my job. See, in the past, when I wanted to talk to a pretty girl, my brain would start listing contingencies, possible failure states, and just generally be unhelpful. Now, I retreat to the foxhole in my mind. In my mind, I sit in my office and play with my dog while an ocean breeze wafts through my nostrils. This while my feet are moving and my mouth is opening.
Or I’ll own that moment. I’ll see her standing in front of me and feel my chest tighten, and I’ll surrender to it. I’ll play the movie in my head, except it goes very well. As my breathing halts and my chest tightens, I notice. I unwind the muscles and inhale while the pleasant movie plays in my head: now she’s laughing at my joke; now she’s playing with her hair. Other memories come into play as well. If you’ve been on a boot camp with me recently, you’ve seen my little ritual where I thrust my fists into the sky and scream, “Women love us!” Partly I’m trying to psych my guys up, partly I’m being funny, and partly I’m going through a list of successful conversations and interactions in my head:
It was a cold night, and I had to drag myself out; mostly it was an excuse to hang out with Big Business and TheDon. This beautiful girl next to me was shivering, and I offered my coat. She and her friends loved me.
I had a new video game, and I didn’t want to go to the birthday party I’d already said I would attend. I walked up the stairs with a smile and walked out the door a few hours later with the most beautiful girl in the room.
After a boot camp, a night of drinking and carousing ended at Scores. I broke all the rules and ended up dating a stripper with a pin-up body.
She was a perfect afternoon in Los Angeles whose memory I won’t spoil by recounting here. Fortune smiled brightly on me.
None of those examples is me tooting my horn; they are real, powerful memories I cycle through when I feel even the slightest twinge of fear when faced with a beautiful woman who would normally intimidate me. Like you, my brain gives me a ton of reasons why I shouldn’t approach a woman I’m attracted to. Sometimes they’re no coherent; they just fly by and form a knot in my gut. If I slow the tape down they range from, “She’s with a bunch of guys; you could get killed,” to “Who talks to strangers on the subway? She’ll think you’re a creep.” They all make sense in an unhelpful sort of way because I’m a clever boy, and clever people are masters when it comes to explaining and rationalizing their own points of view. I don’t know why my brain is wired to consider all the potential negative consequences of talking to a beautiful stranger, but at some point in the last few months I started believing my own press releases, I guess, and I was finally able to supplant that over-cautious voice in my head telling me I was destined for failure and replace it with a genuinely excitement to explore this new person, to make a stranger into a friend or lover. A large part of it is that I have started enjoying people again, maybe even loving them. The way people behaved when I was in Toronto was so different from how they behave in London, and both are wild contrasts from New York City, the greatest city in the world. Yet all people are the same in fundamental ways. Every new encounter with another human, another soul walking the earth just like you, is a chance to meet a new best friend, a chance to explore another perspective, maybe even a chance to meet the love of your life or the lust of your night.
(This article is all about frame control, by the way. Savvy readers already figured that out. If you haven’t yet, read it again.)
Big Business recently reprimanded me for cursing the fickle attentions of a girl whose attentions waned over the course of our conversation. It’s always humbling when someone quotes you back to you. “Maniac,” he said, “Right in my notebook: ‘Cunt’, ‘bitch’, ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’. Get rid of them. Wipe them from your vocabulary. So how is it that you’re calling that girl a ‘bitch’?”
Right he was. As my idol, Joss Whedon, says, “Everyone has a story, everyone has a motivation, even the second thug from the left.” Everyone has their own reasons for being how and who they are, for manifesting whatever public face they use. Beautiful women, those lucky, lucky girls, are the focus of our attentions, and they deserve special empathy because it is so often denied them. They live in a spotlight they didn’t earn; they are genetically blessed, inhabiting a fortunate phenotype, and they are under the microscope, under so much pressure from the ticking clock pulsing in their veins, a clock that will drag their breasts toward the dirt and line their eyes with crow’s feet, reminders of how they smiled too much, of how happy their beauty once made them. They are people, big festivals of flaws, and they deserve no more or less deference than anyone else. The fear hits because you are overestimating the value of their tentative, accidental gifts. Consider why we have fear. It exists to alert you to the possibility that you might, just maybe, die. Your mind sends messages to the body that this is a new situation, and you might be unprepared to deal with it. But barring the presence of bombs or bullets, most choices we make in the first world have little to do with life and death. They are choices between a flat screen and a projector, to watch American Idol or a movie or read a book. Some gurus argue that our fear is evolutionarily based; while their arguments are sound, I’m not going to let our parents or media or friends off the hook. I think the fear is societally based, an implanted fear of talking to strangers, of rocking the boat, of going against the grain and daring to fail. Learn to fail so you can learn from failure. Learn to love the opportunity to experience the cold water of another person’s raw humanity being sloshed in your face. Take joy in the explosive potential of every moment. When you see that girl, review every positive experience you’ve ever had and focus on the many ways life has been so very, very good to you.
And go talk to her.
Obviously, I can say all this because I have a list of beautiful women reacting splendidly to my approach that I can drag from the depths of my memory. It was not always that way. Try this:
Visualize what it would be like to approach that woman.
If your chest clenches or you otherwise experience approach anxiety, that’s a good thing; it means your imagination is working.
Now, imagine yourself approaching.
(Some of you might see yourself getting rejected. If that’s the case, it’s perfectly natural. Just start over.)
See yourself doing well. See her laughing at your jokes, maybe casually touching your shoulder.
Do this over and over again until your body stops fighting you.
Indeed, if your reaction to that situation is too visceral, focus on relaxing, calming your body and slowing your heartbeat and breathing.
Then go back.
The first time you approach That Girl, you might still be nervous, but eventually you will staunch your fear response.
As I mentioned above, much of this is me running my sock. I don’t know how much of it is coherent and useful. Please leave comments, positive or negative, so I can sort through my own ideas.
Now, for the sake of completeness I have to touch on the other good advice on approaching you’re likely to find by perusing the Interwebz. I must repeat what has been posted a zillion times before, which is that your fear response is pretty much irrelevant. Everything I posted above is a nice bonus, but the REAL advice is that if what I said doesn’t work for you, you still need to put one foot in front of the other and open your mouth. You can’t count on any technique to make the fear go away. It doesn’t matter if you hate clubs or bars or if you work too much, if you are reading this, you have seen beautiful women who have passed you by. Why are you going to wait for the fear to leave when it won’t change your results? Are you really going to lose the one opportunity to talk to an amazing woman because you didn’t deal with your approach anxiety? Hell, no, you’re not.
Also, to repeat others’ advice, when approaching at night, the first three interactions don’t count. Talk to as many people as you possibly can; obviously focus on women, but don’t be shy about guys. You want to be socially lubricated, not charismatic or wonderful. After the first three groups, you will find your anxiety dramatically reduced. By the same token, you should generally be more talkative. Don’t think of cashiers as “ATMs with hands” as Sinn used to say. Chat. Add five sentences. See if you can make a stranger laugh. Talk about the weather. Don’t think so hard about why you’re saying what you’re saying so much as having an interaction with another human being. Ideally, you can actually relate to them, but it’s not necessary. Heck, an unexpected pleasant conversation goes a long way to improving your average Joe or Jill Cubicle’s day.
I’ll change this article as my thoughts become clearer. I just wanted to get it out there. I hope it helps some of you! ‘
Peace be with you
(UPDATE: Earlier this year, I did some extremely intense work with Hypnotica, Johnny Soporno, and Jamie Smart. I also recently sat in skeptical but rapt attention while listening to Devon White. One of the most annoying parts about asking hypno-NLP-spirit-chakra-woo-woo guys about inner change work is that they always talk about how they’re imprinting things that will take time to manifest or take shape, that their work will just suddenly fall into place, and you can’t rush the process. Well… that’s probably what happened with everything above. What’s that hoary expression? When the student is ready, the master will appear… or something? As I unravel my new understandings, it would be disingenuous to omit the work I did with these guys. I want to especially mention Hypnotica, who produced results that I didn’t know were possible, and he did it in about thirty minutes. He did some very funky woo-woo stuff to me and it felt like he had literally tossed my anxiety out of my body. While the initial effect subsided in about 24 hours, the aftermath is hard for me to dispute… or prove. Steve P was there, too, but we didn’t do nearly as much spiritual stuff. We did what he’s well-known for, and you should definitely buy his product. It works.)
Tags: approach anxiety
so glad you’re back man. much love… very manly love!!