The Reality Method 2.0

How to Talk to Complete Strangers Without Anxiety

Pop quiz. Have you ever seen a beautiful woman on the street and wanted to do something about it, but didn’t, because you thought stopping a woman on the street to talk to her would be “creepy”?

If you answered Yes to any part of the above question, get ready to banish those regrettable moments from your life forever. This article will show you how to employ a 100% FOOLPROOF method of starting conversations with complete strangers — yes, even ravishingly beautiful women wearing next to nothing — without the tiniest trace of anxiety, and WITHOUT the help of alcohol.

“Approach” Anxiety
Hopefully the above was enough hyperbole to get you interested. Now for the reality, eh?

There’s a lot of talk about what’s called “approach anxiety” — the fear of talking to beautiful women. I don’t like the term “approach” (as I discuss in this article), but it’s a good succinct phrase for my purposes here.

A lot of the fear that occurs in ‘approach anxiety’ is related to fear of rejection, and social ostracism. Addressing them one at a time:

1) Rejection — nobody likes to be rejected in any way, especially not out in public (or in a club, or party, or other social gathering). “Rejection” in this context is a catch-all phrase that can be anything from a backturn, subtle eye-roll and “We have to go dance now” to a slap on the face (that last being very rare and actually sort of hard to achieve). If you approach a woman in the right way, and all your other ducks are in a row, the chances are very slim that you’ll be flat-out rejected.

2) Social ostracism. This fear is much older, and makes more sense in an evolutionary context — if there were only 5 or 6 viable, fertile females in your small tribe, and you messed up the courtship with one of them, odds were that she would gossip (most things about women haven’t changed) with the other 4-5 women in the group, telling them how klutzy you were, and then you wouldn’t get ANY — because women, being are so associational (”herd mentality”) are extremely reluctant to “go out on a limb” in fucking anybody but the clearest, most obvious choice (the Alpha male).

The disconnect that so many guys face (and I was no exception to this) is that they initially fear women.

The fear of women, which I cover in some depth near the end of this post, basically stems from social conditioning (and the two concepts addressed above). Because it is such a hardwired social fear, the best way to defeat it is simply by taking that “old” portion of the brain, the limbic system and hypothalamus, off-line for the duration of the “approach”.

Silencing Your Inner Voice
We all have a little voice inside our heads: it is frequently critical of us, especially during approaches to beautiful women. It will say things like

Don’t mess up dude…don’t mess up….is your fly undone? Do you look cool enough? Wait, shit, what if her boyfriend is around?

Or, even worse, before we even set one foot in front of another to go TALK to a beautiful woman we see, it will start yapping at us, as soon as we see her:

DON’T go talk to her. DON’T. She’s way out of your league. Anyway you might look stupid. What if she REJECTS you? You’d look like a FOOL. The ENTIRE PLACE WOULD LAUGH AT YOU. DON’T DO IT MAN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. IT IS SU-I-CIDE.

And what can you do but LISTEN to that negative little guy? I mean, he’s INSIDE your HEAD. You can’t exactly shut him up, can you?

Except you can….by using his own strength against him.

Here’s how.

I submit to you that the best way to do anything that frightens you is to treat it like you would a sport.

I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out.

In this context, talking to new women is just like catching a football — or hitting a baseball, or returning a tennis serve, or blocking a punch. It’s not something you really need to talk to yourself or think about a whole lot. It’s not something you need to have intense inner dialog about.

Picture this: you’re playing tennis. Your opponent serves; you see the ball coming into your court over the net.

Is there any major internal dialog going on as the ball comes into your court? Are you trying to decide the best part of your tennis racket to hit the ball with, or the best angle? Or how should you jump and land to reach the ball, to make yourself look coolest to all those TV cameras that might be trained on you? What about the wind? Is your hair looking good?

None of this dialog happens. You just hit the ball, automatically and unthinkingy. You return the serve. Maybe it’s a good shot, maybe not; but the point is, there’s no need to TALK TO YOURSELF or even THINK about it. At all.

What do you naturally do to the ball? Hit it. What do you naturally do to beautiful women? Talk to them. Naturally.

If you’re not at that point yet, believe me when I tell you that sex with beautiful women will be 550% easier when you get there.

Reprogramming the Brain
When in a social situation where you might meet a beautiful woman, you need to take your conscious, self-critical mind off-line for the duration and act in a more or less totally spontaneous way.

Old-school seduction methods called this the “3-second rule” — you need to approach and start talking to a beautiful woman within 3 seconds of first seeing her. I don’t like this phraseology, since to me it just makes me start counting, and by the time I’ve gotten to 3 I’ve had a long-winded internal monologue about my chances, my relative social value at that instant, reasons for and against approaching this particular woman, my state of satiety and the amount of laundry I have to do at home, and a half-dozen other topics.

If you have this sort of intense, extremely loquacious inner voice, you need some serious intervention, in the form of frontal-cortex executive-function reprogramming.

Which is just a fancy was of saying, you need to change what your brain does when it sees a beautiful woman.

More specifically: you need to change the mode in which your brain operates in that instant.

The executive functions, located in our most recently developed prefrontal cortex, gift us with the ability to plan, reason, sequence complex multi-step tasks, and keep track of our place in those sequences. However, walking up to a woman and saying “Hi,” is not complex OR multi-step.

I tell guys trying to learn this to “get out of your head” — but what I really mean is “get out of your prefrontal cortex and INTO your limbic system or hypothalamus”. Basically what I want is for them to regress to the most primitive, automatic parts of their brains, for best results.

These “primitive” or older parts of the brain are what give us the motor coordination to hit the tennis ball, or catch the football, or hit the baseball without thinking about it. They are hard-wired motor coordination skills. They have nothing to do with our internal self-talk.

By taking the “approach” function out of the Executive Function forebrain and putting it back online in the autonomic nervous system, we are making it reflexive, spontaneous, and involuntary.

There is simply no time for the self-talk to intrude.

Instead of having an internal dialog that deals *logically* with the logistics of approaching, our internal dialog becomes:

Move feet. Walk towards. Navigate obstacles. Move feet. Open mouth: (return process to frontal lobe)

Of course, even that much dialog could become troublesome — your physical movement can be done entirely on autopilot — but actually “telling yourself”, or using your mental voice, to say the words “move feet…..left, right, left, right, left, right, grab countertop, sit on chair, open mouth…” you are PREVENTING that same inner voice from saying things like, “Don’t do it….you’re gonna look like a fool…STOP NOW….”.

The strength of your inner voice — that you have one — in this situation can be turned against itself — you only have one. He can only say one thing at a time.

For Every Action, an Equal and Opposite….
Some people will say, “Be a man. ACT now. When you see an opportunity, like a beautiful woman, you must LEAP INTO ACTION. Go, GRAB IT NOW.”

To which I reply, Bollocks. Action takes planning and reflection. Talking to women shouldn’t.

I’m splitting hairs here, but with an important point. Talking to beautiful women should be closer to the level of a REACTION than an ACTION.

That is, a REACTION is an action without thinking. And since thinking (negative self-talk) gets so many guys defeated before they’ve even had a chance to compete, it’s best NOT to think (in this one particular case).

Think about Neo in the Matrix; on the rooftop, with the Agent and Trinity, when the Agent shoots at him. He’s just emptied his guns into nothing but air; he shouts “Trinity help!” signifying a total and complete lack of ideas, or confidence in his own ability to get out of the situation. He thinks he is about to be killed.

The Agent pulls his gun, fires….and Neo, without a whole lot of thought, reacts with preternatural speed, dodging the bullets.

What do you imagine his self-talk was at that instant? I can guarantee you it wasn’t “Well, I don’t want to fall over backwards, that might look silly.” It might have been closer to “Oh SHI-” but in reality his mind probably didn’t even get the “OH” out because it happened so fast.

That’s where you want to be with women: UNCONSCIOUS, not SELF-CONSCIOUS.

Being Open
I wrote an entire post on what I view as a distinction between “being open” versus “approaching” a woman. I did so because I felt that this fundamental conceptual difference can be used to reduce anxiety greatly.

In other words, having an “open” mindset that helps you get into conversations without the anxiety of carrying the burden of initiation.

For instance, a lot of guys will go out socially at night and go to a venue, and think, “Okay, well I’m here now. I gotta get ready to switch into ACTION-MODE. I gotta go APPROACH now.” And it’s a totally different MINDSET they are trying to prepare themselves to get into.

Honestly, the way it’s conceptualized for a lot of guys, it’s like shifting gears on a freeway — they are by default stuck in PARK, and to do any socializing at all they have to shift 5 times to get into their SUPER HAPPY FUN SOCIALIZING MODE.

What I’m saying is, forget all those gears. Forget the “APPROACH MODE” and “psyching yourself up to go DO IT”. Instead, just be open. Keep an open mind; have open body language; open your eyes and mouth and open conversations with people. If they snub you for it, they’re being antisocial, and why the hell are they out and about? and without even bothering to answer that (rhetorical) question, continue being open with someone else. It’s all one state, and it encompasses your friends and strangers alike.

This sounds groovy in a conceptual state, but it needs some practical warm-up. It helps to be social and talkative before you go out at night, or go out at all; if you spend your entire day locked in a cubicle not interacting with people, it’s going to take some time to “flip the switch” no matter how “open” a person you are. Our brains do have tracks for socializing and tracks for being quiet and thoughtful, and never the twain shall meet.

So ultimately, the best way to get yourself in the “open” state of mind is to hang out with other “open” people, get talking, get active and emotional. Move around, get your brain working, get into some complex conversations; call your friends on the phone, call your mom, talk to the homeless people if you have to (the crazy ones will challenge your conversational dexterity).

===

Hopefully one (or more) of these concepts was helpful to you. Remember, like anything, reading isn’t enough….you have to put it into practice to reap the rewards.

Related Articles:

• Why You Should 'Sarge'
• Social Energy in Seduction
• The Basics of Rapport
• How to Withstand Social Pressure
• Overcoming Anxiety
• Subcommunication II: Body Language