As I have been interacting with many of you over PM and so forth I've been reminded of many lessons that I learned but are now so ingrained in me that I don't normally think of them consciously. There's a special word for that but we'll come back to it.

According to many of you approach anxiety seems to be a real sticking point and barrier. That's not really what's stopping you but we'll get to that too. You believe this, I suppose, because so much of what you've been told is dead wrong. People are offering you Band-Aids to treat and reduce the symptoms of a disease that doesn't exist.

Get ready to have your mind blown. There is no such thing as "approach anxiety". It's just anxiety. First lets define anxiety:

Anxiety

1) A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.

2) Desire to do something, typically accompanied by unease.

There isn't one amongst us who hasn't ever felt that. It happens all the time, close calls in traffic, unfamiliar situations, meeting all kinds of new people. Do you really think a big league hitter or NFL quarterback doesn't feel anxiety every single time before a 3-2 pitch and a 4th quarter drive. Of course they do. Yet they persist. The world is filled with almost constant anxiety so stop worrying about it. I think many of you have painted yourselves into corners where you're having "Approach anxiety anxiety".

Here's where you're at. You want to approach a woman to talk to her, you feel anxious and you use that feeling as an excuse not to talk to her. Do I have it right? You've been told to call that "Approach Anxiety". Sorry folks, that's just plain old regular anxiety, there is no need to put another word in front of it. It's a convenient scapegoat but that's not the reason you're not approaching these women. Here is the real reason.

You're incompetent. But don't worry, it's not hopeless. Don't take offense either, it's true of anyone learning a new skill. This is a fundamental lesson of pickup. It's a skill. It's not random chance, it not some chemical mix of pheromones, it's not a magical combination of words from a routine, it's not some biologically rooted facial symmetry. It's just communication. Communicating with people in a way that causes them to attribute value to you and to desire to continue the communication with you. That's a skill, plain and simple. And that is all pickup is, communication.

But why do I only feel anxiety when talking to women? I bet if you look at yourself objectively that's not exactly true. You feel anxiety when you're meeting anyone you value for the first time, be it a women, a celebrity, your bosses boss and so on. Now on to the truly important lesson. The degree to which you feel anxiety about a skill is inversely proportional to your level of competence. Less competence, more anxiety, More competence, less anxiety. Anxiety is never going to go away but it lessons significantly as you develop competence.

Having said that I guess you could just learn to stop valuing women, especially attractive women. Believe it or not this is the root of about half of the PUA advice out there and while it can work, I think it's counter productive. Believe me, I've been there. You go far enough down that path and you can pickup just about any woman you want but it no longer feels good or rewarding. It's a sickly ironic thing. You finally can have any woman you want and that's the thing you wanted your whole life but now you don't give a fuck about it because you don't value them. It's a very dark place to get to, it's bad for you and it's bad for the girls. A lot of the so called "naturals" are naturals because of this and a product of their home lives growing up. They instinctually don't value women and the resulting behavior leads to success. It's correlation, not causation and it's the reason behind "women love jerks".

What's the alternative? It's actually much easier than learning to stop valuing women. It's to become competent at communication. It's sounds simple and it is pretty simple. It's not fucking rocket science by any stretch. Why does everyone constantly blather about these things like AA, confidence, direct game, indirect game, inner game, outer game, and so on. It's because they want to sell you shit. They have a perverse motive to make this all much more complicated than it needs to be so they have opportunities to sell.

Now I can't make you competent in a couple of paragraphs but I can try and at least set you on the right track. One more precious belief I'm going to shatter for you. Confidence is a product of competence, stop worrying about it because you have no direct control over it anyway. What you have control over is your mastery of the communication skills, competence at them. When you become competent you will be automatically rewarded with confidence.

So I'm going to reference back to what I said at the start about being reminded of lessons I learned. That's because I'm at a stage of competence known as "unconscious competence". I perform the skills correctly without having to consciously think about it too much. Some people might even say it's become instinct (I don't like that word). I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, as long as people have been studying learning we've known that there are four major stages.

  • Unconscious Incompetence - you suck and you don't even know it. The AFC

  • Conscious Incompetence - you suck but at least you know it, you now after reading this

  • Conscious Competence - you no longer suck but you have to think about applying the skills you've learned very carefully

  • Unconscious Competence - where you want to end up, mainly a product of repetition.

So you're here, you've read this, you are now consciously incompetent. That's a good start and believe it or not there is not that much further to go. Just a couple of stages, grooming, opening, causing emotional investment, and fucking. When you're competent you're never more than about 7 hours away from fucking just about any girl you want. Yes it is that simple. If you really boil this all down that's all there is to it.

You've been told and perhaps even come to believe that approaching, opening, is the hardest step and the most anxiety ridden. That's wrong, the hardest aspect of all this is "causing emotional investment". Understand as well that these phases build on each other, each phase is a foundation for the next. Don't worry about the next one until you're there which should be very soon.

So many posts here are something along the lines of "I did X, Y and now she isn't Z". In broad terms a lot of the credible advice is essentially "move on and try again". That's mostly right but doesn't explain why many of us with experience say that. Why we say that is because 1) you didn't provide enough information about you and the circumstances and 2) you almost certainly screwed things up a full stage or two before where you are now and asked advice and it's too late.

Here is the best example I've ever seen on this forum of someone asking for advice and I think he got a good deal of what he wanted out of it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/13jbo2/game_on_part_1_an_amputees_seduction_experiences/

Here's what he did right. He gave a detailed explanation of what he was doing and the problems and he provided a picture (which happened to include his face). Trust me when I say I don't want to see a bunch of your degenerate faces around here, it's also unnecessary. 90% of what matters in terms of grooming is from the face down anyway.

Why is the picture important, because in one second I can tell that he has grooming down. Mind you his style is not my style by any stretch, but it's a style and a competent one. So that fellow is on to opening. He describes what he does and it's going fairly well. Where he is directly having trouble is in "causing emotional investment" and that really is the hardest part. At little bit of it is that a bad opener even if successful can make it impossible or very difficult to "cause emotional investment". Again these things are foundations on each other. He got some advice about both things and from his own posts it seems to be helping him move forward.

With all do respect to him, how can a one-legged guy have so much success with opening? Proof is in the pudding right there, he's competent at grooming and he's getting there on opening. That's it. It's a skill and he's down the path to mastery of it. Does he have anxiety going up to girls, I'd bet the farm he does, but it doesn't matter because he's competent at grooming and knows it and he's becoming competent at opening and knows it. I'll paraphrase the top comment on his thread, what's your excuse now?

So where does that leave you? Grooming. I'm going to cover that in another post soon in detail. Make sure your grooming is great or worrying about the rest of the stages is a little pointless. Stay the fuck away from /r/malefashionadvice , it's mostly irrelevant here and will do you about as well as asking /r/okcupid about your OKC profile.