Becoming a Pickup Artist – A Core Skills Guide to Game by Pick-Up Evolution
Part 6: Overcoming AA
Legend:
Overcoming Approach Anxiety
Permanently overcoming approach anxiety comes down to progressively desensitizing ourselves to the approach. It will take a lot of work and many approaches, but I believe we can get there just like we can conquer any fear.
Dealing with approach anxiety in the field is only accomplished by pushing through the fear. Once we take action and start to approach it becomes much easier. Using tactics like immediately approaching the first group you see when you enter a venue and utilizing Mystery’s 3 second rule (where you see the girl you want and you immediately approach her, within 3 seconds) will help you immensely with approach anxiety.
If you follow the rule of always being in set (that is, always being in a conversation with people), even if you’re only talking to guys, as long as you are talkative and pushing forward you’ll avoid a lot of anxiety.
My simple advice: Act before you can think yourself out of taking action. Hesitation kills motivation.
Bottom line the more that you practice and gain reference experiences, the easier it will become.
Edge:
Getting Over Approach Anxiety Through Visualization
I heard about a scientific study that was done once regarding visualization and success. In the study, they split a gym class into 3 groups. Each of the 3 groups practiced free-throws in basketball and the amount of successful throws in each group was recorded.
Then, over the course of the month, they gave each group a different task. The first group did nothing. The second group practiced free throws everyday for 10 minutes.
The third group visualized throwing successful free throws for 10 minutes (they only visualized, they never actually touched a basketball.)
After a month, the practitioners tested each groups ability to successfully shoot free throws. The first group showed no improvement. The second group showed significant improvement.
But the astounding finding of the study was that the third group improved just as much as the second group at shooting successful free throws… and they never touched a basketball once during their 10 minutes of “practice”.
I am a strong advocate of daily visualization. I practice this myself – I even chart my daily practice of visualizations to record that I am indeed doing them everyday.
When it comes to women, I visualize that when I talk to women they have big smiles on their faces.
They’re excited to talk with me. They’re attracted to me – hell, they’re even throwing themselves at me. And it works – my abilities with women increased tenfold when I began visualizing success on a consistent, daily basis.
At the very very least, I would encourage you to STOP practicing “missing your free throws”. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that it is incredibly counter-productive to imagine things going badly before you approach a women. If you’re not going to take on the practice of visualizing success, at least find a way to interrupt and replace any habit you may having of anticipating failure.
I will add one final comment: This is NOT a replacement for taking action in the real world. This is a supplement to help you improve your real world results. You must be continuously and consistently talking to new women as often as possible to make a marked improvement in your skills and abilities.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Legend – nice choice on the picture.
Thanks guys for all the great posts.. Even though I don’t comment on them, I very much enjoy reading them and recognize a lot of truth in it.
I have a quick question for Edge; When you visualize, do you see yourself from a third person perspective, or do you imagine looking through your own eyes?
Keep up the great work guys,
TheMan
I will throw my answer up here and I am sure Edge will offer his opinion later today or tomorrow.
I do it both ways automatically but I try to do it from a first person perspective. I’ve been taught that its much more effective from a first person perspective as you are making it much more real.
Hey TheMan,
Thanks for the comment – I appreciate it.
When I visualize, I see out of my own eyes. In fact, when I talk about visualizing I actually mean to use every sense you have to put yourself in that spot. Some people have trouble getting a clear image, but are very good at “hearing” the conversation going well in their head. Some people are good at getting a sense of “everything just clicking” and feeling right with it.
I used to worry about my ability to visualize because I usually wouldn’t get a clear picture in my head of what I was visualizing – I would just get a general “sense” of it. This is absolutely fine… as long as your intent is to visualize and imagine (with every one of your senses) being in that place, you are visualizing effectively.
Also, a great tip I once heard on visualizing: A student said to an NLP practitioner, “Hey – I can’t visualize well.” The practitioner said, “OK stop. Imagine that you could visualize extremely well. What’s it like?” Immediately, the student was able to visualize extremely clearly – I’ve found thinking about this to be helpful when I need to “jump-start” the visualization juices.
Hope it helps!
I love vizualisation, you kinda get the feeling that everything is going to click well, but sometimes I stagnate and AA suddenly jumps in the picture.. Still trying to calibrate, awesome post tho:)
Hey Ramon -
Yeah, I’ve had that happen in visualizing, but I’ve practiced a lot and it happens much less these days. One thing to keep in mind is that thoughts only have power when you REACT to them. In other words, it’s one thing if AA creeps into a visualization and you just ignore it and pop your vision back to where you want it to be (even if you have to do it 20 times).
It’s another thing if AA creeps into the picture and, internally, you say, “This is hopeless! I can’t even VISUALIZE this, how could I do it?!? I’m a failure, I suck at visualization, fuck this, etc.” Get me?
So react to only what you want to give power and ignore that which you don’t want – that will empower the visions you want and drain the visions of what you don’t want of their power.