Confidence

Are you worried about what might happen if you start to talk to women or date? These 'what ifs' are common – but also immobilizing.

Lately we've had a spate of guys in the comments or on the forums worried about this or that potential, hypothetical situation.

Typically these guys are not actually in the field. i.e., they are not actively approaching women and getting live experience with the opposite sex. Or, if they are, their activity levels are minimal.

Thus, these hypothetical situations are really more of a series of thought experiments for them.

And while it is good to try to get yourself some answers in advance, when you go too far into hypotheticals all you are really doing is tying yourself up.

The stuff guys get caught up worrying about when they're not active in the field tends to be stuff that they will almost never run into once they ARE active... or stuff that, if they run into it once they are active, they'll easily handle.

Or will discover is not actually that big of a deal.

Yet, because they aren't active, and are just imagining these things in their head, just like with the One Special Girl Problem™, and the Amazing Connection With A Girl You've Just Met Problem™, it is all too easy to blow things way out of proportion in their imaginations, and start fixating on stuff that is not as significant as they think -- or may not even be there at all.

To stop being nervous around women, you need to interact with people and gain a level of social normalcy. You just need more experience, and here’s how to get it.

Would you like to stop being nervous around women? You’re not alone.

Every student I’ve taught told me they have approach anxiety. Why do they suffer? Because they don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to say largely because they’re nervous.

It’s an evil feedback loop of despair.

If it weren’t for nervous men, I’d be out of a job. It’s the #1 reason most of us find the seduction community. Not because we want to be big pimps, have harems, and run a pickup company. We just want to be able to attract women.

I used to be very nervous around beautiful women.

When I was a kid, I developed man boobs, otherwise known as gynecomastia. Nothing hurts a young man’s self-esteem like having tits. Also, I was raised by a single mother and two sisters who surprisingly taught me nothing about attracting women.

I was horribly insecure, especially around the pretty girls. I couldn’t talk to them because I’d get too excited. My heart would start racing, and I’d sweat, stutter, stammer, and have panic attacks. The girls would just look at me with concerned expressions and ask, “Are you okay, Tony?” This happened often enough to be a big problem.

I did date a few girls: the ones who basically threw themselves at me. But because I was so needy, those relationships rarely lasted longer than a month. I felt that if I screwed up a relationship, it might be years before I found another girlfriend. Of course, this desperation drove the girls away.

That is, until I got liposuction, and found the pickup advice forums.

On the forums, I learned about “game.” How to cold approach women in bars, day game, push-pull, teasing, stories, cold reads, future projections, and on and on. So I started going out to practice, to change my life with this new arsenal of tactics, techniques, and philosophies. This was it, I thought, I’m totally going to pick up hot women with all this knowledge!

You can learn to read women's signals far more reliably, and shorten your seduction learning curve, if you first learn a simple little trick: how to predict with accuracy.

At the carnival, there is often a man (called, like all carnival workers, a 'carny') who will offer to guess your weight or age.

Sometimes carnies use trickery. For example, one might offer to guess your birth month, then write down something like the scribble on the right. That, of course, could be said to say January... or June... or July. If you say your birth month is any month other than October, the carny will have 'guessed' within two months of your actual birth month, and keeps your $2.

However, not all carnival guessing games use tricks. Some actually do rely on skill.

What is the skill involved in guessing someone's age or weight?

While there's no skill I know of to accurately guess someone's birth month, you can get scarily good at guessing weight very quickly... and guessing birth year (not month) is not nearly as hard as you'd think.

In fact, over the years I've developed the ability to guess women's ages with startling (even to me) precision. I am good enough at it that about 3 out of 4 times I guess the exact to-the-year age of whatever girl I am talking to, or am within a year of her calendar age, so long as she is somewhere between 18 and 36.

How do you develop this ability to accurately guess age or weight?

You do so by making predictions, and discovering if you are right.

You can make predictions about a whole lot more than just age and weight, too.

And the better you get at making various kinds of predictions, the more easily you will tend to discover things about whatever it is you've learned to predict.

You won't always be super active with approaching new women.

You'll go through stretches where you're focused on work or other things. You might only approach opportunistically, to girls who show a lot of interest. Or you might break off approaching entirely for a time.

After you take a little time away like this, after a while when you want to get back to approaching, the rust comes back... and you have to deal with approach anxiety all over again.

When you're not in the habit approaching a lot, especially when you're not in the habit of making uninvited approaches (where the girl hasn't signaled you to open), there's anxiety.

• What am I going to say to her? you'll ask yourself.

• I'm not warmed up, I don't feel confident using one of my regular openers.

• I'm not sure what I'll say to her AFTER the opener.

• She's not in an easy place to get to, if she isn't into me it's going to be awkward to move away from there.

You might go out intending to chat up women, and end up chatting to no one.

Yet, there's something you may have once known... something you forget when you don't approach as actively.

And as soon as you remember it, you can be fine.

You start approaching again in earnest, shake the approach anxiety off, and have no trouble meeting girl after girl.

That one thing you can remember (or learn, if you hadn't previously known it) -- the one great trick you can use to get yourself approaching after a hiatus from it -- is the difference between creating attraction and finding attraction.

If you want to be smooth with women and life, you won’t get there with snappy one-liners or good looks. True smoothness requires a much finer grit.

A while back, I wrote about how to be smooth with conversation. With this article, I want to expand the dialogue on smoothness and get your interactions slathering with smoothness on all sides.

Let's make your entire demeanor smooth.

It’s the way you talk (your voice tonality, rhythm, etc.), the way you gesture with your hands, the way you move your eyes and face when you speak (and when you listen), the way you walk, the way you shake hands, the way you touch a woman who is sitting with you at a bar.

That’s what we want to make smooth. And how do we make this smooth?

Well, smoothness in a sexy man can be expressed in many ways.

Smoothness is one facet of sexiness, and there are many levels to sexy. I always tell my students they need to find a way of expression that fits them.

Once you find your style, you must do three things:

1. Master the fundamentals of your style; become the best version of your ideal man

2. Master the conversation of your style; become the best conversationalist you can be

3. Master your mind; see and know that you think like this man

The technicalities of smoothness are:

• Fundamentals
• Conversation
• Mind (inner game)

In my experience, these are not enough to make a man truly smooth. The final two recommendations of mine are to:

• Spend time with women you love
• Have a mission

We will focus on these final two later. First, let’s look at the most crucial areas, the technicalities.

Social freeze-ups can happen anywhere, even venues you’re familiar with. So here are more ways to set things in motion and turn a sour mood into a sexy vibe.

Hey, guys. Welcome back. Last time we discussed overall strategies to prevent and handle potential freeze-ups when frequenting new venues. Today we will delve deeper into this topic. Let’s focus on practical tools that can help you counteract potential anxiety in the field.

Last time we focused primarily on dealing with new venues, since these are usually a source of potential nervousness. You do not feel fully at home in new environments, and they can be a bit scary.

I’ve mentioned that freeze-ups can also happen in familiar venues where you do feel at home, too.

Even though you’ve been to a place many times and have had great nights and much success there, there can be nights where you still struggle and have a hard time interacting with others. So here are some more general solutions that will also help in familiar places.

The experience you gain by going to different venues is invaluable, but it’s easy to freeze up socially in new environments. This is normal, but not untreatable.

Hey, guys. Welcome back. Today, I’ll discuss club game issues that are relevant to everyone at any level. What do you do when you experience a “social” freeze-up at a club?

Sometimes guys freeze up when entering a club. They feel unable to approach women or groups. Their anxiety rises, and they start feeling anti-social, and not in the mood.

If you are experiencing this, you are likely entering what psychology calls “freeze mode.”

Guys freezing up will often rationalize that the venue is bad for hooking up and start seeing negativity everywhere:

• Every girl is in a big group
• Too loud
• Too many guys
• Too many mixed sets
• Bad general vibe
• Women are only there to look for attention
• Too many gold diggers

The list goes on.

When you enter freeze mode, and you don’t feel social, you start seeing negativity everywhere. And most of the time, it’s just a bias created by your mood.

So let’s discuss what causes this mood and then discuss some solutions to help you successfully move forward in these situations.