Tactics Tuesdays: Girl Blinders

Do you want to talk to a girl, but there’re people around and you feel unconfident? Put on ‘girl blinders’, and make your audience disappear.

You’re out in public. Could be on the train, on a street, in a bar, in a café, in a grocery store. You see a cute girl. She gives you a coy glance and you think she’d like to meet.

Only then... you take a glance yourself at all the people around you. There are a lot of them. If you approach that girl, they’ll notice.

You’ve never spoken to these people before. Odds are good you won’t see any of them again. Yet, they’ve immediately become the biggest obstacle to your approach. You may not even talk to this girl you’d like to meet, who looks like she’d like to meet you. All because there are people around, and you’re hesitant to approach in front of an audience.

There’s a simple little trick to get around this specific fear.

I call it ‘girl blinders’.

What Are Girl Blinders?

In horse racing, blinders (or ‘blinkers’) are accessories horse trainers place on horses to keep them focused on their objective. Without blinders, the horse has a wider field of vision, and can get spooked by crowds around it or diverted by other distractions. With blinders on, the horse cannot see behind or to the side and is much harder to spook or distract.

There’s a naturally-occurring phenomenon in humans (no accessories needed), called tunnel vision. You get tunnel vision in the build-up to a fight, as you focus on your opponent and ignore the outside world. Tunnel vision so focuses your attention that street-fighting classes have to teach you to “keep your head on a swivel” to prevent you being blindsided by foes you didn’t know were there (thanks to how narrow your focus becomes).

Tunnel vision kicks in in other areas too. If you’ve ever read a gripping book, or been engrossed in an absorbing movie or video game, only to have someone startle you out of your skin when she says something right next you, that was tunnel vision in action. You didn’t even see her enter the room.

Another term we’ve used for this on Girls Chase is awareness radius. Shrink your awareness radius down narrow enough, and you’ve got tunnel vision. Expand your awareness radius out far, though, and you notice everything around you.

When I talk about ‘girl blinders’, all I mean is a tightened awareness radius on the girl – tunnel vision for her. You narrow your focus such that she is the only thing you pay any real attention to in the environment.

You’ve probably experienced this naturally before. That super cute girl you immediately felt a powerful attraction to, where the whole world fell away. All at once, she was all there is. It’s much easier to approach in this scenario, because there are no other distractions.

Just you and her.

Of course, girl blinders don’t deal with other sources of approach anxiety. If you’re intimidated by a girl’s looks, or you lack confidence in your ability to open or hook, or any of another you-her concerns, girl blinders won’t rid you of that.

However, if you’ve got the rest mostly handled, and you’d be fine to approach in a less crowded environment, but take pause in a more crowded one, girl blinders can be just the trick you need.

Do You Approach Willy-Nilly with Blinders On?

No, you don’t just walk up to girls brazenly simply because you have blinders on.

If you’re on a crowded train, and you hesitate to approach that girl who gives you looks because of all the other people there, you won’t put girl blinders on, puff your chest out, and march through the crowd to deliver a loud direct opener.

They’re ‘blinders’, not ‘eliminators’. You know the other people are still there. And those other people are still part of the environment, and you do still need to include them in your planning.

What blinders do let you do is block out your biggest other-people-related trepidations and commit yourself to a good approach.

Even with blinders, you’re still going to use tact in your approach.

So, for instance, on the train scenario. Without blinders, you might have the long and tangled process of, first, look at the girl, then look away to not look too obvious to the crowd, then scan the rest of the train briefly to make sure no one saw you look at her, then surreptitiously check her out again, hoping no one sees you. With blinders, you throw your girl blinders on and make eyes at her the way you would if the only people on the train were you and her.

Now that you’ve established some nonverbal communication with her (e.g., you and her eye contact flirting), you can figure out the best way to approach her, given the environment.

You may want to move over close to where she is on the train, for instance. Then wait a minute and open her casually. Sure, anyone on the train who’s watching you will pay attention to this... but if you aren’t paying attention to those people (thanks to girl blinders) you won’t even notice.

Girl blinders let you avoid distractions that might otherwise spook you.

How to Put on ‘Girl Blinders’

Think of any tunnel vision experience you’ve had before.

Preferably with a girl, but if you can’t think of any with a girl, any tunnel vision experience will do.

Remember that feeling you had? It was a distinct feeling. It was a feeling of complete, total zeroing in on just this one person or thing. Everything else in the world falls away.

You can replicate this with anything. Try it with something right now. Pick some object in your environment, like a book, a pen, or a phone. Put it on a surface in front of you at some distance, or just hold it out in your hand. Now focus on it. Focus intently... let everything else around it melt away.

...

...

...

That’s tunnel vision.

If you just did the exercise, you just experienced tunnel vision. You reduced your awareness radius; you put blinders on.

You probably didn’t experience it as strongly as those times when tunnel vision hits you naturally: right before you’re about to fight, or when you see that girl so stunning she actually stuns you (smack into tunnel vision).

Nevertheless, you just effected it to a degree. You summoned up blinders.

You’ll do this same thing with girls. It’s not hard; it’s just as easy as with the object you just practiced with.

It only takes realizing you want to put blinders on, then putting the blinders on. Focus in on her and let everything else fall away.

You’ll notice a curious thing happens when you do: girls get a lot more flustered. If they like you, they flirt harder, make more eye contact, and send you more signals. If they don’t like you, or they aren’t sure if they like you, they may look uncomfortable, close their body language off, and look away. Either way, the intensity of your eye contact and other nonverbals goes way, way up, and women’s responses grow more excited or more awkward accordingly.

Times Not to Use Blinders

Blinders work excellently in big, anonymous cities where you’ll only see a girl once, and only see the other people in the crowd you’re in once.

They’re an easy way to ignore people who are, in effect (though I’m sure they’re all wonderful people), ‘distractions’, and focus on the girl you want to meet.

I do not recommend you use blinders usually in scenarios like these:

• At school
• At work
• At a group dinner or happy hour
  
• At a party where you know a lot of people
  

You can, and you will see some prolific seducers who do. However, when you are around people who know you, girl blinders paint you as a playboy (especially if they see you put on blinders for numerous girls, or for girls they know you don’t want as girlfriends) and risk making others feel ignored by you.

People who might like to talk to you who see you put blinders on to go approach some girl may think you’re just some shallow shag-machine. People who see you put girl blinders on numerous times to talk to numerous girls will view that as your modus operandi: “He sees some girl, shuts out the rest of the world, then goes, flirts, and picks her up. That guy has a one-track mind.”

Unless you’re in hardcore seducer mode now (and some guys are, I realize), you probably do not want to sacrifice your social reputation in known circles just for stronger flirtations and more consistent hookups. It’s easier to meet women in social circle, even without blinders; you don’t need ‘em for social circle, much of the time.

So save girl blinders for those gals you really need them for: those cute chicks you see out-and-about whom you’ll never see again (or might not see for some time), when the other people around you are strangers and unlikely to affect your courtship or life in any way, even if they see you flirt with this girl and talk to her.

Those girls – those “out in public” girls you cold approach (or will once you have blinders on) – are the ones you want blinders on to meet.

Put your blinders on for girls you meet in (non-social circle) public.

So, when you spot a girl you’d like to meet, but you feel that “Oh no, everyone will be watching” fear slip into your heart, put your blinders on. You can make those observers just melt away – now it’s just you, and her. So get to it.

Chase Amante