Approach Anxiety

Guys who fear rejection from women can’t overcome that by getting more rejections. What they need to be aiming for, rather, is successes; victories; WINS.

A few weeks back, I responded to a reader named Zucchini with an admirable amount of courage and tenacity who, nevertheless, had run hard into a wall. He says:

For me, my biggest handicap was not being able to master fear. I genuinely tried to follow the advice. Years ago, I went out and approached a hundred girls, thinking "I just gotta approach to overcome approach anxiety! Confidence will naturally follow, right?" Then I burned out because I was so nervous on every approach I ended up ejecting early, half-assing it, or getting brutally rejected (those rejections STILL linger in my head as fears years later).

Ever since, he’s wondered why he’s so afraid, why he can’t overcome his anxiety, if he has too little self-control, if he simply doesn’t want it enough, or what the real problem is.
                                                                                                     
He studied courses, took trainings, mentored under coaches, and eventually threw himself back into the gauntlet for another pass:

So I pushed myself harder and harder. I was out in the field until my eyes would not stay open, my feet were blistered, and even walking seemed like climbing a mountain. I approached another hundred girls. I told myself I needed to push extra hard because I was so handicapped and weak. Most of time, I repeated the same mistakes over and over, not able to apply anything I was supposed to. Every failure reinforced this story in my head. Eventually, I burned out again, now even LESS confident of myself than before.

At the time of his comment, he'd just read my article on stuck man mentality, and realized he’d started thinking about his problem this way: as a special handicap he had, which other men did not have, that maybe made game impossible for him.

He says:

Now I have reached rock bottom again, and am opening my mind again. I came to the conclusion I am not fully ready to apply the lessons from teachers of seduction yet, so I have started taking advice from teachers in other disciplines - mindfulness, anxiety, behavioral therapy. Perhaps it is unwise to mix in advice from different sources...? I don't know. But I know what I'm doing isn't working. And I'm grateful to this article for opening my mind further and reassuring me that other people also have similar problems.

All this is good. I studied meditation and mindfulness before I started approaching in earnest (I used it to break free of depression). It makes a big difference.

That said, I want to highlight what was going on here with Zucchini (who you have to admire for pushing himself so hard despite crippling fear – lack of willpower is NOT his problem!). He’s switched up his strategy now, yet what he was doing before was trying to beat fear of rejection by, in essence, getting more rejections.

But you don’t beat fear of rejection by getting rejections – not usually.

You beat it by getting SUCCESSES.

Has anxiety to make an approach frozen up your attempts to meet girls? There’s a simple solution to getting around it: change up your objectives.

A friend of mine recently got back into cold approach after a long hiatus.

He’s made some approaches. Some have went well. But on the whole, he’s reentry into game has been stymied by something he never had to deal with much before: approach anxiety.

We discussed what the source of his anxiety was, since there are a few different flavors. Most guys get anxious about approaching girls… but the root “why” of it takes some slightly different forms.

In his case, he’s a bit out-of-shape and feels unconfident women will want to meet his unconfident (and now older) self. But on top of this, he fears that if he approaches unconfidently, and is rejected, he’ll grow even less confident… making his next approach even more likely to fail… making his confidence fall farther still.

I call this the “downward spiral” fear: if you start approaching without confidence in yourself, you’re only putting yourself on a downward spiral that leads to a total collapse in confidence and the inability to so much as look at a girl ever again.

You can get trapped with this form of anxiety for a long time, though.

That’s because in order to GET confidence, you have to have some successful approaches.

To have some successful approaches, you have to approach.

Yet… to approach… well… you can’t do that until you have the confidence you’d get from successful approaches, right?

It’s a Catch-22: you can’t do the thing until you get the results you get from doing the thing. But you can’t get results until you do the thing.

So, you’re trapped.

There’s a way out of this trap, however.

But to get there, we have to go deeper.

Are you scared to talk to hot girls? Don’t chicken out for the best-looking chicks. Use these 5 keys to chat up THE hottest girls today. After all – they’re only girls!

On a recent article of mine, a reader named Johnny writes

Hey Chase,

I noticed something in my approach with girls and even socialize.

I tend to hit on girls that are not super cute rather than going for the ones I find really good looking.

It isn't that I'm intimidated by hotter girls. I've eliminated almost all of my approach anxiety. I can chat them up, flirt with them.

But when it comes to pursuing them, I don't. And after drilling my thoughts, I realised that it's really about the fear of failure.

This is a very common sticking point guys have, especially guys who are active socializers enough to recognize their own patterns.

If you're regularly out there meeting new women, you may come to realize you're doing something like this over time: only approaching the 'cute' ones, because you are afraid to talk to hot girls.

Like our commenter, it might not even be that you are intimidated by the girl herself, but that you anticipate failure with her, and fear that failure... or don't even see a point to trying, because you KNOW (or so you think) that of course you will fail.

So you might as well stick to going for the girls you can get.

Well, it might blow your mind, but hot girls go for all KINDS of guys, including guys just like you... at least some of the time.

How're you going to find a good-looking girl who'll go out with little ol' you?

Step number one is you've got to talk to her. Because without that, you'll never get beyond a glance and a smile.

What can you do to get yourself approaching those knockouts and stunners you see, instead of letting them walk on by?

There are five (5) things you need to know that, once you know them, will make being afraid to talk to hot girls, or being afraid to fail with good-looking girls, a part of your distant past.

Anxiety is trying to imagine and solve every possible outcome, all at once. When you stop trying to control things you can’t, it’s like fixing a flat tire in your game.

Men often come to me in a desperate condition. They say, “I’m not that bad with women. If I could just destroy this approach anxiety, I’d be able to get all the girls I want.”

I feel like a car mechanic who specializes in changing tires. Every car owner may think their car is unique, but I’ve changed thousands of tires, to the point of routine. So while the student is saying “My father never paid enough attention, and my mother was overbearing, and I was a fat kid in grade 4, and…”

All I hear is “My tire is flat. Can you teach me how to change it?”

Women are attracted to confidence, and anxiety is the opposite of confidence. So if women don’t find anxiety sexy, but it’s a normal feeling, what can we do about it?

Having recently lost a lover because of anxious thoughts, I figured it would be useful to cover how to address anxiety with women and dating.

While anxiety is a normal human emotion, some people feel it more than others. It’s a terrible weakness to display around a woman and is the opposite emotion from a “turn-on” and sexual excitement.

Think back to your most memorable sexual experiences, if you’ve had some. Was anxiety present? Would anxiety have helped the experience? If yes, did the anxiety make the situation better?

Most likely, your best experiences around women involve no anxiety at all. But if you’ve had experiences that did include anxiety, and I’ve had many, I can attest that these moments become question marks in women’s eyes.

Anxiety, especially if it shows up at critical moments like the first kiss or the first escalation, can ruin your chances to get a woman and keep seeing her.

Men will often experience anxiety and nervousness in critical moments during a seduction:

• The approach
• The first date
• The pull home
• The first kiss and first sexual escalation

On the journey of getting better with women, men must train themselves to never feel anxiety around women, particularly in the critical moments mentioned above. As a rule, it’s best to avoid showing any anxiety around a woman you want to be sexual with.

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 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.