Grow Your Game

One of the biggest problems people have when it comes to approaching someone they’re attracted to is actually overcoming the fear of the initial approach. I suspect every single man on the planet with very few exceptions has at some time felt the familiar fear associated with the idea of approaching a girl they’re attracted to.

Perhaps they’ve spotted her on a train, perhaps it was simply in passing down the street like the girl in the red dress in the movie Matrix. Whatever the situation was the symptoms were the same. Sweating, blushing, the fear of being judged negatively some people will actively search for signs of disapproval in others convincing them that they shouldn’t bother speaking at all, either way most people end up deciding to avoid the situation altogether and move on with their life. They leave the situation as a chance meeting that was never meant to happen. It registered as a blip on their life a small fraction of time, an event that has passed with no more meaning than the next one or the one after that. Each of which of course will be treated in exactly the same way.

These symptoms are what many people within the field of dating refer to as “ Approach Anxiety”, though they were not defined by dating and seduction experts. The roots of Anxiety and it’s symptoms where defined a lot earlier in our history by the psychological community at large including such greats as Sigmund Freud himself.

What we’re going to look at is the symptoms of Approach anxiety and then hopefully the possible solutions enabling you to approach anyone you want at any time.

Anxiety is a state which affects us on a psychological and physiological level. It’s symptoms include a number of different components including perceptual or cognitive components, physical components and even behavioural components. What this means is that we can not only use proven psychological methods to identify the state of anxiety but we can also use the proven solutions to remove it as well, enabling us the confidence to approach anyone we want at any time.

First, lets look a little bit more at anxiety itself. Anxiety is far from an unusual state to us as humans. In fact anxiety is a very normal reaction to stress it is designed to help us observe and deal with difficult situations. Amongst other things the state sends a burst of adrenaline to us to help us cope with the problems. However anxiety often becomes excessive, and rather than giving us the skills to handle the problem it can instead prevent us from even attempting to solve the problem. As soon as an anxiety affects our ability to make action. It becomes known as a phobia. In the case we are specifically looking at, if it were to prevent us from actually approaching someone we were attracted to then it would fall in the category of being a phobia.

Anxiety over meeting or interacting with people whom we do not yet know is a very common stage of development in humans. In fact in infants it is a very normal part of growth and is known as stranger anxiety, symptoms vary but a typical part of growing up. Sometimes this fear can persist into adulthood and then it can develop into social anxiety or even a social phobia. In adults excessive fear of others which inhibits the ability to interact with strangers is called social anxiety.

Social anxiety disorder or social phobia as it is often referred to is an fear of negative public opinion about oneself or a fear of public embarrassment. The fear is often associated with all social interactions however in a good deal of cases it can be specific to certain situations for example the idea of approaching someone you’re attracted to in the street. The experience of social anxiety is characterized by physical components such as sweating or blushing, perceptual components such as the belief that one might be judged in a negative way or perceiving signs of disapproval and finally behavioral components by simply avoiding a situation.

Clinical psychologists and researchers continue to this day to define the problems and definitions of shyness, social anxiety and it’s related assortment of phobias and problems. Many share similarities though also have distinct differences which causes difficulties in defining them. Esspecially the difference between anxiety and the positive feeling of anticipation. However for our purposes thankfully we don’t have to look too deeply into the categorization, what we’ve been concerned with is identifying whether we are suffering from “approach anxiety” the fear of approaching and then looking at the possible remedy’s to remove it and enable us to approach people we’re attracted to at any time.

So if you’ve been reading this and the symptoms do sound similar to those listed above and you have decided that when you see someone you’re attracted to you often do feel unable to approach whatever the reason may be, it may be useful to look at the possible solutions to social anxiety as a means to overcome the problem.

There are a number of different methods to remove anxieties. These range from exposing the subject to their fear directly right through to some more experimental methods of hypnosis. Many psychologists agree, that one of the best ways to remove an anxiety or phobia is by a type of behavioural therapy known as Systematic Desensitization. This type of therapy has its roots in pavlovian therapy or classical conditioning and was developed by a South African psychiatrist by the name of Joseph Wolpe.

This method is essentially a two part therapy. The first part involves teaching the subject relaxation skills so that they can control their fear and anxiety responses. These Can take the part of breathing excersises or focus games. Something you can try is to simply regulate your breathing to match a slow count of ten. By taking slow concentrated breaths and monitoring your own breathing patterns whilst exposing yourself to a fearful situation you can begin to slowly relax, even in the midst of a phobia.

However this technique does only work for mild exposure to a fearful stimulus. This is where the clever part comes in.

The second half of the therapy involves exposing the subject to fearful situations with an ever increasing hierarchy of fear. Starting by exposing them to the smallest fear stimulus and then slowly escalating it until they are ready to face their fear in full! The question still remains however, how can you use this method to help you overcome your fear of speaking to someone you’re attracted to?

There’s a simple five step method I’ve identified to guide you through the process:

Accept
Exercise
Identify
Overcome
Understand

Accept

Accept you have a fear. You realise that you want to improve yourself and do something to help you meet your ideal partner. You have a fear whatever it is and you’re looking to get over it. Buying this book is the first step towards wanting to do something, but it doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t willing to action the processes you’re learning. In this way Accept could also translate into action. As you need to actually do the things you accept you want to change.

Exercise

Develop an exercise to help you get over your fears. Focus your mind on your breathing, take a long slow count of ten while slowly and steadily breathing in and out. Concentrate on your own breathing, he sounds of your breath and the motion of your lungs instead of the fearful situation to hand. This will give you something to help you focus when you’re exposed to a fearful situation.

Identify

Identify your specific phobia or anxiety. What situation scares you the most? Meeting a stranger online? Talking to someone in your current social life? Whatever scares you the most identify the problem and then take steps to designing the best way to gently expose yourself to the fearful situations. For example lets say your fear is approaching in a coffee shop. You want to start by choosing the least fearful situation imaginable.

So perhaps begin by triggering a longer conversation with the shop worker. After this you can move on to perhaps talking to an older person in the same line as you. Then you can move on to talking to someone of the same sex. Eventualy you will move on to someone who you’re not attracted to of the same sex, until finally you’re speaking to someone you are attracted to of the opposite sex. Even if initially the entire conversation only lasts 10 seconds. Eventaully you will work it up until you’re incredibly comfortable talking to people in any coffee shop anytime.

Overcome

Once you’ve managed to build up the fearful situations to a point where you feel you can’t take it much further simple rely on focusing on your breathing instead of the situation at hand, until you realise that you actually can’t be hurt in the situation. Once you make this realisation you should find yourself calming down. Then you can begin to push things further again. You should be able to repeat this process for any of your fears to be able to overcome all of them.

Understand

Finally you should come to the realisation that fears truly are just that. Fears. None of them are actually dangerous enough to hurt you. And beside the odd bruised ego. You should come through every situation completely fine. Esspecially if you follow the advice in this book on how to approach someone you’ve never met before in the correct way. Eventually you should come to the understanding that situations similar to those you’ve already encountered aren’t to be feared and your phobias and anxietys will be a thing of the past allowing you to continue developing your social skills.

The second approach to remove anxiety is a little more drastic.

It is commonly known as flooding, the best way to explain it would be a comparison to the previous method. If you were attempting to overcome a fear of spiders then systematic desensitization would take the form of slow exposure to pictures of spiders, then eventually moving images until eventually you became so comfortable around the images that you were capable of holding a real spider and eventually you would get over your fear.

Flooding would involve throwing you into a bathtub full of spiders, and when you eventually calmed down due to your body becoming exhausted from the fear you would find that the fear disappeared as you observed that mere exposure to the spiders hadn’t actually caused you any permanent harm.

Right now I’m sure you’re thinking that being thrown into a bathtub full of members of the opposite sex doesn’t sound that bad. However unfortunately for the majority of you reading this you don’t actually have a fear of the opposite sex. Your fear is rather one of approaching them. So in that case the “flooding” solution would in fact be to make the approach so unbelievably uncomfortable that once you did it and realised nothing bad happened, doing it normally would be a walk in the park.

In the past I’ve made students wear funny costumes, speak in funny accents, and even begin the conversation using expletives. Though I’ve found the best way is to just wander up to someone and ask for their hand in marriage. It’s a scary situation enough, incredibly awkward but socially acceptable enough to not give you too much trouble with passers by who may over hear. The other benefit of doing this is that if the person says yes, you’ve saved yourself the trouble of having to move on to the next person, and you can finish your quest there after the one approach!

Whichever method you choose to use remember that your chances of success are zero unless you actually begin the conversation, so get over that fear, go out there and start getting the girls you want!