Do you want to meet beautiful women without dating apps, but you're wondering: how can I overcome approach anxiety?
This is the post for you. I'm going to explain:
And so much more. Keep reading to find out:
Approach anxiety is the fear you get when you want to go talk to a woman and you start getting anxiety about it. Usually, you're not going to go do it at that point.
What causes approach anxiety?
Approach anxiety is caused by many different things, but most of the time it's just a fear of the unknown.
It's worrying about public humiliation, it's self consciousness, it's worrying about how you look. It also could come from a lack of knowhow.
A lack of knowhow on to how to start a conversation, how to stop a woman and start a conversation, as well as being worried about coming across as being weird or creepy or bothering people and a lot of other insecurities that are very similar.
But really all of this comes back to rejection. The idea of rejection.
If you knew 100% that you could go approach any woman and she would not reject you and you would not face any public humiliation, then would you go do it? Obviously the answer is yes.
If you saw a beautiful woman and you had no chance of getting rejected, of course you'd go do it.
Rejection is not as bad as it seems. It feels like it's such a terrible thing when you're thinking about it ahead of time.
When you see a beautiful woman, you think she could reject you, but it's not that bad.
The vast majority of the times when you "get rejected", it's a woman who says she's busy or she has a boyfriend, she has a husband, or whatever.
And most of the time that's going to be coming from the fact that she's not into your approach.
Maybe you need to refine your approach. You might need more confidence, or you're not her type and there's nothing wrong with that.
Or, she may actually have a boyfriend or a husband. Again, things that are out of your control and aren't rejections.
The worst case scenarios rarely happen, women are rarely rude or mean if you make a sincere approach. Even if they're not interested, they're actually very nice about it.
Here's a short list of different things you can do to overcome your approach anxiety.
There's going to be more things related to lifestyle as well and building your confidence as a man.
When we invest a lot into this idea about the fear of rejection and this approach anxiety, we're giving other people too much power. We're putting too much weight on their opinions.
For example, if you go talk to a woman and she's not interested, well, what are the consequences?
There are no consequences, but there are a lot of positive benefits from making the effort as well as potential positive outcomes from getting dates and relationships.
There is so much more you can gain from trying to make that approach and risking rejection than if you reject yourself and not try at all.
If you don't go and try to talk to women because you have approach anxiety, you have this fear of rejection, you're already rejecting yourself.
You're already telling yourself, "I'm not worthy. I can't do this". You have no idea what she might actually think about you. She might be very interested.
She might be your wife or your next girlfriend or you might get laid or even having a nice conversation.
You need to give yourself a chance first before anybody else is going to give you a chance.
Don't reject yourself before you talk to somebody. Give her a chance to possibly have a date with you.
You're already in the habit of not talking to women. You get that approach anxiety and so you stop yourself from going to talk to her.
You have to change that habit and start getting into the habit of doing the opposite. Start talking to people when you come across them.
Or if you have a friend, a cool friend who knows how to talk to women, you may want to go and get him as your win.. It could be anybody you bump into.
Chat with the barista when you're getting your coffee or with the waitress when you're ordering your pizza.
If you're waiting at a crosswalk and there's somebody standing there, it could be an old lady, doesn't matter. Make a friendly comment. Be social.
You also need to change your thinking habits as well. Every time you get that approach anxiety or any kind of negative thoughts, you need to conquer that.
Look at something positive. Look at the flip side.
Get into the habit of flipping that idea around that you should be rejecting yourself, or the idea that she's going to reject you, or the idea that you're not worthy or you don't look good enough or any of that kind of stuff.
Flip that around. Look for a positive, whatever it may be.
Get a better thought in your head and don't allow the negative thoughts to have control of you.
The idea about not rejecting yourself, about flipping negative thoughts and looking for something positive. That's all about mindset.
Another mindset which would be very useful for combating approach anxiety is looking at women as people.
No matter how beautiful they are, they have all the same problems that everyone else has.
We put women on a pedestal, generally speaking, but we also put especially a really attractive woman on a pedestal.
That kind of thinking is probably the worst. That's going to stop a lot of guys from making that approach and give them more anxiety.
Because "Wow, she's so beautiful, she must be something special". But you have no idea.
She could be a bad person, a good person, she could have a great personality, a bad personality, or she could be married and she's not even on the dating market at all.
Change your mindset about how you look at women. Just because they're attractive it doesn't really mean anything.
Yes, it's nice. We're attracted to attractive women and that's what we want. But don't put her on a pedestal.
Don't look at her as some kind of superhuman because she's really not.
And if you give her a chance and talk to her first and then you know who she is and if you're going to be interested in even pursuing or not, because you may not be after talking to her.
If you want to go talk to someone right now, here's a quick trick that you can use to calm your anxiety and go talk to her.
It's not going to work 100% of the time, but like everything else, it takes practice. Take deep breaths and let it out slowly.
This has a great effect on calming the nervous system. A lot of times, when we get nervous or we get approach anxiety, we start rapid breathing.
Rapid breathing will make you more nervous and that sucks. It compounds the whole experiment and the negative experience.
Take control of your breath first. That's usually the easiest thing to take control of, even if your mind is racing.
Start breathing slowly, deep breaths and then slowly exhale. And do that five or six times if you have time.
And that usually will calm yourself down enough so you can go talk to her.
You may not have time for five or six breaths because these opportunities usually pass really quickly.
The longer you're standing there staring ahead at her, the less chances are that you're actually going to go talk to her.
To make it quick, you might make a couple of quick breaths, but you need to calm down your nervous system. That will help a lot.
And actually I did this on my very first approach. I had been trying for a couple weeks straight and I had not been able to go approach anyone. I'd walk around for hours every day.
I didn't have a job at the time and so I had a lot of time to go invest in this and I was walking around for hours and just couldn't do it.
Finally, when I saw this beautiful girl wearing a short skirt, she walked into this coffee shop.
It was at the end of another long day, not talking to anybody, even though I had that intent.
She walked in and of course I procrastinated for her to go instead of talking to her right away.
I read my book a little bit longer outside on the patio, but when I walked in and she was still there, I knew I had to do it. I took a big deep breath just to calm myself down.
I even chugged some ice water to cool down that burning nod on my chest and I went and talked to her and had some beginners luck. Ended up seeing her for a number of months.
Don't focus on worst case scenarios. Usually that's where our mind is going to take us.
We're going to be focusing on possible humiliation and rejection. Focus on your goals instead.
Look at her and think, "Hey, how does she fit into my ideal lifestyle?"
You want a beautiful date. Obviously ,that's a really good motivator.
Focus on how attracted you are to her and the potential positive outcome of talking to her.
Don't focus on potential negativity or the fact that she might reject you, she might not be interested or she might have a husband or a boyfriend. None of that stuff really matters.
Focus on your goals and what's the outcome you want. That's going to make it a lot easier to take your mind off the negative.
If you're having a lot of trouble and you just can't get yourself to follow through with it, then approaching anxiety is already too strong.
Get a dating coach such as myself or someone else to help you go follow through.
You can usually get "infield coaching" with a guy to actually go out with you and demonstrate. That's what I do.
I demonstrate as well as encouraging my guys and getting them into action so they can go talk to women and overcome that approaching anxiety.
It is a lot easier when you have professional help.
That's something I did in the past as well, when I was struggling for months and months.
Even after my initial beginner's luck, I struggled for a number of months afterwards on and off of being able to approach, but most of the time not approaching.
Finally I did get a dating coach and had this small bootcamp that gave me a kickstart in the right direction. I was able to start approaching regularly after that point.
If you don't want to spend the money or you just don't have the money, get a friend who can help you with this.
Often there's guys out there who try to learn this as well. You can go learn together.
Or if you have a friend, a cool friend who knows how to talk to women, you may want to go and get him as your win.
Go slowly. Don't expect instant results.
This approach anxiety thing didn't happen overnight. It happened over years of conditioning, not talking to women and not talking to the kind of women you want.
It's not going to disappear overnight either. So, take it slowly. Look at the long game.
Don't expect to get instant results, instead be working on this on a daily basis over the period of months or even years.
It depends how good you want to get at this and what kind of results you want, how many girlfriends or dates or laids or whatever you're looking for from learning how to get over your approach anxiety.
In my experience of over eleven years coaching, it's always the guys who are in a rush and think they should have got their results yesterday who do the worst.
They're always in this constant state of pain, basically, frustration because they're like, "Why can't I do it yet?"
You haven't done it for your whole life and that's why you can't do it yet. Give yourself time and you will get there.
Learn the mechanics of how to approach. This includes:
If you can learn the mechanics of an approach, the technical stuff, it's going to give you a lot of confidence and help you overcome your approach anxiety, too.
You have to get a thick skin. You need to grow thick skin through your experiences, handling rejections, and going through rejections.
There's no other way around it. If your fear of rejection stops you from actually talking to women, you'll never become a stronger man mentally.
You'll never become the kind of man who is able to go talk to who you want to and get the dates with the other women you want.
There will be perpetual frustration forever because this thing doesn't go away on its own.
You're not going to suddenly become confident talking to women if you don't talk to women.
You need to learn how to deal with rejection and accept that it's just a fact of life. Rejection is a fact of dating.
If you want the kind of woman that you want, then you're going to go through some rejections.
If you want a high quality woman, you want an attractive woman also with a great personality, obviously, they're going to be more thought after.
You're going to have to have a sharper game, basically.
And for more information to learn exactly how to approach to overcome some of your approach anxiety, to get some of the technical details on this, check out this post.
Here's what you can do to overcome approach anxiety:
If you have any questions, leave a comment below.
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