I had a phase in my life where I had no female friends and only use cold approach to meet girls, and I did badly. Then I built a social circle with girls in it, and got into salsa dancing where I met girls. Then when I did cold approach again, I found I did a lot better at cold approach than before.

I had been brainwashed by some PU gurus into thinking the only way to meet girls is through cold approaching and all other ways are ineffective and shouldn't be done. But now that I have a social circle with girls in it who introduce me to other girls, and I have the social hobby of salsa dancing to meet more girls, my cold approaches are actually a lot better than they used to be when I only relied on cold approaching.

(I need to clarify that I spent a lot of time practising cold approaching, and saw some small improvements. Then when I did the other stuff of warm approaching, I saw my cold approaching got a lot better. I didn't see the big improvements just from doing warm approaching and no practise in cold approaching. It was doing both that led to big increases in my cold approaches.)

Has anyone else experienced something like this? Was my improvement in cold approaching due to the fact there was less pressure on me now to meet girls through cold approaching, and that caused me to perform better? And having female friends gave me more practise and made me less intimidated to talk to girls? Or was there some other reason?

I had the realization that one way to get better at cold approaching might be to set up other ways to meet girls. As in combine both warm approaching and cold approaching, rather than just rely on cold approaching like some PU gurus say. But I'm not an expert on this, and am curious to hear what others think.