Approach Anxiety: Overcome It Today

The journey of one thousand miles starts with one step. And in the case of the thousand-mile journey of attracting beautiful women, that first step, and often the hardest, is approaching women.

Fear, doubt, and anxiety all poke at your weaknesses and cripple any momentum and drive to take control of your life. But, they don’t have to. You don’t need to suffer through approach anxiety. You can overcome it, but you need to know how.

I’m going to make this really simple.

I’m not going to go into complex theories and silly pranks to overcome your approach anxiety. Instead, I’m just going to give you the 6 things that you can use to eliminate approach anxiety forever:

1. You’re not genetically programmed to experience approach anxiety

Your approach anxiety has nothing to do with your fore fathers being afraid of being kicked out of a cave somewhere is sub-Saharan Africa or any other evolutionary psychology phenomena.

If it was genetically programmed, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.

You can’t change your genetically programmed eye colour. You can’t grow another arm.

If approach anxiety was genetically programmed, there’s no way you’d ever be able to eradicate it. Heaps of people have so the fact that some people are saying it’s genetically programmed is ridiculous.

2. Approach anxiety isn’t caused by anything outside you

Beautiful women don’t make you experience anxiety, you make you experience anxiety. Beautiful women aren’t programmed with some kind of gamma ray that makes you anxious when you see them. God doesn’t look bestow the gift of creating anxiety in someone to everyone who achieves an 8 or higher on the objective look scale (because beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder).

Approach anxiety is something that you create inside yourself when you think about taking on a task that has specific requirements (see next point).

3. The amount of anxiety you experience doing anything in life (especially approaching women) is determined by your perception of your skill and the challenge of the activity

Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi coined the term Flow to describe his scientific investigation of ‘being in state’ or ‘being in the zone’.

One of the key elements he discovered in his studies that ran for over 30 years is that the key to getting into state is having the perceived level of challenge in an activity equal to the perceived level of skill at a challenging but achievable level.

When you get this challenge/skill balance, you experience flow/state.

The other thing he discovered was that an imbalance in challenge and skill results in a different experience. When skill exceeds challenge, you get bored. When challenge exceeds skill, you get anxiety.

4. To overcome your approach anxiety, you need to change your perception of skill and/or challenge

If your perceived skill level matched your perceived challenge level for seducing a woman, you would be ‘in state’ every time you approached a woman. If you’re reading this, then it’s obviously not.

If you’re getting bored when you’re approaching women, it’s because your skill level is too high for the perceived challenge.

If you’re experiencing approach anxiety, it’s because your perceived challenge level is higher than your perceived skill.

If you want to overcome approach anxiety forever, you need change either the perceived challenge level or your perceived skill level.

5. Trying to change your skill level to eradicate approach anxiety forever is a flawed method

Most people think that the easiest part to change in this equation is their perceived skill level.

They go out and either try to prove to themself that they already have the skill to talk to women by doing warm up sets or they try and increase their skill level by practising techniques and methods on set after set.

This is a flawed method to overcome your approach anxiety.

If you rely on other peoples responses to change your perception of your current skill level then it might work once, or twice, or even a few times, but what happens when it doesn’t (because it’s going to)?

What happens when someone doesn’t want to talk to you? Then you’re right back at square one again – massive approach anxiety because you perceive your skill to be less than the perceived challenge level.

6. To overcome approach anxiety forever, you need to change the perceived challenge

The challenge level you face in any activity is determined by the purpose you have for the interaction. Whatever you’re trying to achieve determines what you have to do to achieve that goal.

If you’re experiencing anxiety then it’s clear you’re trying to do something that pushes the perceived challenge out of your perceived skill range – like trying to make her attracted to you.

What challenges do you face in trying to make a woman attracted to you?

You have to get within physical proximity of you.

You have to get her attention.

You have to be able to communicate with her.

You have to work out what kind of man she wants.

You have to attempt to demonstrate those characteristics whilst simultaneously hiding who you really are.

This is why you’re experiencing approach anxiety.

You don’t know how to work out what kind of man she’s attracted to and you don’t think you can demonstrate them whilst hiding who you really are, long enough for her to want to be with you.

If you change your purpose to something achievable, then the perception of challenge will drop and so will the anxiety.

If you change your purpose to ‘Trying to find out if she’s the kind of person you want in your life’ then what kind of challenges do you face?

You have to get within physical proximity of her.

You have to be able to communicate with her.

Anything else? No. Nothing.

If you change your purpose to this, then what you’re more likely to experience is boredom due to the lack of challenge and you’re only going to be really interested in women who’re able to really challenge your verbally.

Sound like the kind of life you want?