Some motherfuckers are always tryin’ to ice skate uphill.
-Wesley Snipes, Blade
There has been much discussion on this site, and those like it, of approach anxiety.
In fact, there may be more ink spilled on this one topic than any other single topic in the whole canon of seduction literature. I have a whole host of articles that deal with it on this very site (from How to Talk to Complete Strangers Without Anxiety, to Why You Should Sarge, and all the way through to Art of Conversation: Opening, a perfect companion piece for the Top 100 Universal Conversation Openers).
One might imagine that we write about approach anxiety so much because it’s so damnably common. (Without the weight of any statistically-significant randomized survey data to back me up, I would guess that anecdotally, approach anxiety affects approximately 5 out of 5 would-be seducers).
One might also imagine that fear of approaching beautiful women is a constant, something that we all must battle through and deal with, and therefore perhaps a measure of our seduction chops — do we go out and do cold approaches? Are we man enough?
One might imagine this, but one would be wrong.
It’s become clear to me over the past several months that what we call “approach anxiety”, i.e. that flutter of fear we feel in our stomachs, that rising tide of anxiety that blocks our throats when we go to talk to a beautiful woman, is actually not necessary.
It’s a trick.
It’s a false fear.
We don’t actually need to face it. We certainly don’t need to do battle with it.
Since this concept is an anathema to conventional seduction literature, I’ll spend the next few paragraphs explaining how our brains trick us into being afraid of approaching women….and how you can re-program your brain and your behaviors to never feel approach anxiety again.
Test Case #1: Approach Anxiety Analyzed
Let’s look at how Approach Anxiety most typically manifests itself. We’ll start with our test case, Casey.
Casey has read a lot of seduction material over the past 6 months, and is just now forcing himself to go out to bars and clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, in hopes of meeting and picking up a hot woman. His goal isn’t really to become a master pickup artist, at least not yet — he’d be happy getting his first same-night lay.
So Casey decides to go out to his nearest local martini bar, Venue. He pumps himself up while showering, shaving and splashing himself with cologne, listening to his favorite heavy metal or nu-trance band — but it takes him some time to get downtown, and by the time he reaches the front door and is waiting in line, his pulse has quickened notably. Will he score tonight? Will the hot chicks talk to him? Will his material work?
He walks in, trying to look aloof and “cool”. He confidently walks to the bar and, trying to calm himself, orders a dirty martini, shaken not stirred. He looks around the room and almost immediately spots a gorgeous 10. She is about 5′6, 110 lbs, is wearing a slinky black dress that accentuates her enormous bosom and a perfect angelic face. She is chatting with a 6′1 musclebound young man.
Casey imagines walking over and interrupting her conversation to introduce himself. His palms are instantly sweaty.
What should he say? He should try the “who lies more” opener. No, no, that’s too tired and cliche. He should use the “badass little kid” story. No, that’s a piece of attraction material, not an opener. He needs a good opener. What’s the best opener to use? Wait, there’s a bad-ass looking guy talking to her, maybe he needs to start AMOGing that guy right away.
Casey’s heart is racing.
In his mind’s eye, he is picturing the long, slow walk across the room, dodging other patrons, cocktailers, and a busy busboy. He can’t decide if it would be better if SlinkyBlackDress looked over and saw him approaching, or if neither of them noticed him until he was ready to pounce. He is picturing himself delivering an opening line. He is picturing himself flubbing the delivery, stammering, sounding nervous, and the hard gaze of SlinkyDress and her RippedMaleFriend as they both turn to him, the Outsider, the Invader, rudely Butting Into Their Conversation.
He imagines himself getting bodily thrown out of Venue by the other male.
He envisions a drink thrown in his face.
He envisions the snickers and politely-averted gazes of other bar patrons.
His mind rapidly and categorically flips through all sorts of nightmare scenarios.
Because he is not in control of his mind, his emotional state is now fluctuating wildly, and he is telegraphing his insecurity and anxiety to everyone around him. Although he may have had a chance of chatting up SlinkyBlackDress, he is now such an insecure wreck that any approach attempt is almost guaranteed to fall flat.
He chugs his drink to suppress his anxiety, and orders another one.
Four hours and $40 lighter, and having not spoken to a single woman, Casey staggers home, trying to imagine the value in his having gone out that night. He danced with some chicks on the dance floor, and some of them even touched him. He got more comfortable being in nightclubs. All in all, a success, he tries to tell himself, except for one glaring feature, one that he cannot rationalize away: he didn’t approach.
Angry and despondent and drunk, Casey comes home and logs onto internet chat-boards, his virtual solace of pimpitude. He fires off a new post to his favorite forums: Why can’t I conquer my approach anxiety?
Frustrated, our hero Casey jacks off to pictures of Maria Sharpova and goes to sleep.
The next morning, his PUA query has been answered by a handful of gurus: some suggest not drinking. Others suggest inner-game tapping. Still others suggest he “just do it”. None of the advice seems particularly helpful; but Casey is happy to know he’s not alone, and that approach anxiety seems to affect everyone.
Does that sound like a story you’ve heard before?
Let me tell you a different one.
Test Case #2: Approach Anxiety Banished
Let’s look at our second subject, Daniel.
Daniel doesn’t know anything about the seduction industry. He does know that he likes women and getting laid.
After breaking up with his girlfriend of 8 months, Daniel realizes it’s time to go back “on the prowl”. He’s never had very long relationships, but has always had a vague idea of how to put himself out there with women, mostly gathered by stumbling through clumsy telegraphing of attraction in high school, middle school, grade school, kindergarten, and preschool. In other words, Daniel knows, fundamentally but dimly and on some subconscious level, that he is attractive to women — but he is not terribly deliberate about trying to “create” attraction. Having grown up in a rural area, Daniel is more accustomed to bucking hay than spitting game.
Daniel is new the city, and not sure where to find the hottest women. He doesn’t read Style or GQ or Maxim, so he doesn’t know how to “pimp himself out” like most men in his city do. He goes out for some beers with a few buddies on a Friday night at a local sports tavern, but, searching for something more, parts company with them after a few beers, and stumbles across a dark martini bar. He enters, and stops just inside the doorway — it is very dark inside, and he gives his eyes time to adjust.
As his eyes adjust, he lets them wander across the gathered patrons, automatically scanning for beautiful faces. He spots one gorgeous girl standing at the bar, apparently by herself. She happens to be looking his way, and they lock eyes for a moment. When she breaks eye contact demurely, he walks over to her, positioning himself a few feet away from her. He orders a bottled beer and looks over at her again. She looks back at him, and smiles. He says “Hi”.
A half hour later, neither of them feel Casey’s nervous eyes flitting over them, because they are locked deeply in intimate conversation.
Two hours later, Daniel and the girl are making out in front of her house. Two minutes later, she is inviting him up for a nightcap. And he never felt even the slightest approach anxiety.
The Cold Approach is Dead. . . Long Live the Cold Approach
Contrived examples? Deliberately contrived, in order to prove my point:
What we IMAGINE as “approaching” is not how “approaching” actually happens, in the vast majority of circumstances in which men and women hook up.
In other words, approach anxiety is a condition generated by our misidentification of what it is we have to do in order to get women in bed with us.
The cold approach, defined as being walking up to a woman we don’t know and starting to talk to her, is rapidly becoming a dead technique. Even though it was championed by several successive waves of pick up arists, it was never, and is still not, a practice that will generate a high percentage of successful closes.
This is because the cold approach generates anxiety for everyone involved. It causes anxiety to you, because your mind is evolutionary programmed to fear rejection, and to warn you of that danger over and over again as you struggle to put one foot in front of another on your way over to her. This anxiety can’t help but bleed out of your body language and general vibe, and women will pick up on this, and mistake it for anxiety about your value as a potential partner, setting up a drain on their potential attraction to you from the get-go.
Cold approaching also generates emotional flux for women, and typically not good emotional flux, because they are put under pressure to respond and handle any number of totally inane, inappropriate, vaguely threatening, or embarrassing things you could say. From the perspective of a woman you’ve approached cold, the subset of things you could say that would actually feel emotionally OK for her to hear from a complete stranger is much, much smaller than the set of things you are likely to say that will make her feel some sort of bad emotion. And this is from her experience being approached by inane and unskilled guys all her life, getting cat-called, “holla”‘d at, etcetera.)
Think about it like this: if a cold approach (i.e., walking straight up to a girl whose never seen you before in her life and hitting her with an opener) is successful at a default rate of 50% of the time (a generous offer — and modified of course by your skill with delivery, body language, your general attractiveness, the venue, the lighting, the music levels, the girls’ mood, her sobriety level and time of the month, and a whole host of other factors), you will have to open 10 girls to get 5 numbers.
If, on the other hand, you use another technique (not a cold approach) that is successful at a default rate of 75% of the time (which technique I will explain momentarily), you will only have to open ~7 women to get the same 5 numbers.
At root, it’s a question of time and effort. How much time and energy do you want to spend spinning your wheels, as opposed to staying in good interactions?
Change your Behaviors, Change your Results
I’m not saying cold approaches are totally ineffectual (obviously, they’re not). My argument is that they are one of the lowest-probability methods you can use to meet women.
Cold approaches run contrary to the natural path of attraction. Attraction’s natural path begins with awareness and continues through contact to closure. The recommended path of the Pick Up Artist is to put contact BEFORE awareness. There is no reason for cold approaches to exist at all. Except, perhaps, as an arbitrary method by which guys who are otherwise not very confident could gain confidence through repeated exposure to a difficult task (as in, “I used to be paralyzed by shyness, but I did 100 cold approaches in a row and conquered my fear.”)
But what about the seducer’s creed? “I can pick up any beautiful woman, any time, anywhere?” Doesn’t that neccessitate a cold approach? What if you see the most beautiful woman in your city walking away from you down the street? Wouldn’t you have to approach her cold?
Well, yes — if the above creed was your goal. My question is, why on earth would that be your goal? As goals go, it sucks — not only is it not specific, it’s wholly unachievable. There is no man on earth who can pick up any beautiful woman in any situation, simply because we as humans can only control a very few factors in our environment, and in order to fulfill the above creed you’d need to be able to control them all. And no pick up artist can do that.
“Okay, 30,” I hear you saying, “This is all very well and good. But what are the practical take-aways from this article?”
Here they are:
Finally, resolve to greatly reduce the number of times you execute the “attraction ambush” — approaching women from behind, breaking into conversations, or otherwise opening a conversation without some clear awareness and/or attraction signals. With this step alone, you will greatly improve your success, both in terms of subjective feelings of acceptance and attraction by women, and in terms of the objective reality of the number of good interactions you will get into.
Follow those four steps, and I can guarantee you that the quality of your results will begin to change immediately.