Seems like for the past two weeks we’ve seen folks on here making posts about approaching that can be summed up as “Just be confident, bro!”, or “Don’t worry about what to say, just approach!” They don’t offer any advice. They just say to be confident and not much else.

I’m tired of those posts, so I’m making one of my own about how to handle anxiety when approaching. What I’m about to discuss isn’t just me giving my own thoughts; the advice I’m giving comes from Conversationally Speaking: Tested New Ways to Increase Your Personal and Social Effectiveness by Alan Garner. What I’m posting comes from chapter 12 of the latest edition of the book, called, Reducing Anxiety in Social Situations. This is a long post, and I’m not doing a tl;dr because if I can take three hours summarizing an entire chapter of a book, you can take ten minutes to read the entire thing (heh).

There’s three reasons why people have what the book refers to as “copping out beliefs” that keep you from approaching. They are:

  1. Catastrophizing
  2. Overgeneralizing
  3. Demanding

Catastrophizing is probably the most common reason we don’t approach. Most people on this subreddit say that they don’t want to approach because they’ll be seen as a creep. Basically you’re taking a rational belief (the other person might turn you down) and adding that if they don’t it’ll be “terrible”, “horrible”, and that you, “won’t be able to stand it”. You might imagine the person you’re approaching will scream, “Ew! I’m filming this and putting you on TikTok, you sick fuck!” (an irrational belief).

Catastrophizing self-talk causes the body to activate the fight, flight, or freeze response. In this case, you’re either choosing flight (leave the area) or freeze (stay where you are until they leave). Your body gets hit with high levels of anxiety until you can’t move.

You can challenge your catastrophic beliefs by first asking yourself, “How likely is it that the consequences I’m imagining come about?” If you decide that it isn’t likely, tell yourself that in no uncertain terms. If you think it’s possible that things won’t work out well, ask yourself, “What’s realistically the worst thing that will happen if I fail?” The reality is probably not as frightening as you might have imagined it would be when you thought in general terms.

After you’ve thought about what’s realistically likely to happen if things don’t go how you’d like, challenge your use of the words like, “terrible”, “awful”, or “horrible” to describe those consequences. Put them into perspective by telling yourself they’re better suited for things like 9/11, the Holocaust, or a mass shooting, but not at the possibility of someone you approach saying, “No”. Getting shot down isn’t even in the same league as those events.

Replace the emotionally charged words with less emotionally charged ones like, “unfortunate” and “inconvenient”. Imagine that you’re about to approach someone and say to yourself, “I want to chat with this person. If they don’t want to, it’ll be inconvenient, but I’ll survive. Anyway, I’m not getting a date with them if I don’t approach, so I’m going to go for it.”

Overgeneralizing: Overgeneralizing about yourself has you labeling yourself, such as saying, “shy”, “failure”, or “introverted”. All of these labels are based on past performance. When you use them, you make past failure an excuse for present inaction. After not approaching for a while, you may end up concluding, “This is just my nature”, and give up trying.

Look, you as a person, are constantly changing. You’re most likely not the same person you were ten or even twenty years ago. You might have chosen to be shy in the past, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t change now. If you let go of your past shortcomings, you can be free to change and grow and experience a world of exciting possibilities. Labels say that past failures determine how you’ll do in the future. If you look for evidence to support this, you’ll find none. If you search for evidence to support this belief, you’ll find none. In fact, you’ll find the opposite. A realtor has to show a house to twenty people, often multiple times, to get a sale. If you approach, you’ll have to do so a lot of times before you finally seal the deal.

Labels are irrational because they assume that past behavior determines future behavior. They wrap up your entire being into one word, making situational problems appear global. They confuse who you are with what you’ve done with one small area of your life. No one is totally shy, including you. There’s people in your life that you’re able to talk to without worry. Your coworkers, family, friends, all of them you’re comfortable talking to. So how reasonable is it to say that you’re shy all the time when it’s easy for you to carry on conversations with large numbers of people? Not everyone is going to like you. That’s not just you, that’s everyone. Think of any major celebrity in the world right now. They all have haters. Somewhere in the world, some idiot thinks that Jenna Ortega is ugly.

For that reason, no one is a failure. People who pin this label on themselves after failing in one area of their lives often have successes in other areas. They have friends, good careers, could be excellent cooks, gardeners, or athletes.

There’s also the danger of overgeneralizing about others. This is what creates incels. “All women are bitches that just want the top 5% of men” is way too common a statement on this subreddit. First of all, there’s no such thing as “the top 5% of men”. You don’t believe me? Show me the list of the top 5%. That’s right, it doesn’t exist. It’s completely made up, and if you ask someone what makes up the top 5%, you’d get different answers, all from other men. When people say shit like that, they’re writing off thousands of potential lovers as a result of unfortunate experiences with one or two.

To challenge overgeneralizations, ask yourself for the proof. Where’s the proof that you’re shy or introverted 100% of the time? Where’s the evidence that you’ll never succeed in finding a wonderful romantic relationship? You won’t find any, because past experiences are not proof of future events.

After doing that, find times when the reverse was true. When you were assertive. Times you succeeded. You’ll most likely find many times when you were and did.

Then, add a rational self-statement like, “I may have been held back by that person, but that doesn’t mean I'm shy. The fact that I haven’t been more assertive until now doesn’t mean I can’t be. It just means I need to talk more rationally to myself, challenging the nonsense I tell myself, and doing the things I want to do. I may have failed in this one instance, but I’ve succeeded in maintaining friendships, holding a good job, and am great at [x]. What nonsense for me to call myself a failure! Besides, I don’t like everyone, so how can I expect people to like me?”

Demanding: The main part of the book that applies to seduction is demanding obedience to self-defeating rules. The biggest rule we have is, “Society says approaching makes me a creep, so I must never do it”.

First of all, you learned that from social media, and social media influencers often exaggerate what’s actually happening, and sometimes they even lie about it completely. Remember the YouTube prank video era? We found out later the targets of the pranks were actors and the pranks were fake. Remember the video a decade ago of the woman walking in NYC for ten hours to film street harassment? Those guys were cat calling, which is creepy, and far different from going up to a woman, being genuine, and saying, “Hi”. And one of the ones that got accused of harassment in the video was literally just walking. Social media influencers exaggerate what they show to get views.

Besides that, it’s been ten years since that video, and since then we’ve been so into our phones that many of us are starving for real life, social interaction. I’m going to do a post one day about how social media kills game because of it.

But back to what the book says.

Another factor that limits approaching is waiting for everything to be perfect. You’re perfectly confident, know exactly what to say, and the person you want to approach has finally walked off without their friends. This perfect scenario will never exist. You’ll never be completely calm or confident. Every action requires time and effort and the passing of other opportunities. And every move we make carries the possibility of failure.

When you find yourself passing up social opportunities, ask yourself:

-Who made up this rule?

-Why should everything be perfect, anyhow?

-Why must I act this way?

-Other people don’t follow this rule. Why should I?

-Why should I continue to act the way I have been, even though it never gets me anything?

Trying to answer questions like these will help you to firmly establish in your mind the fact that there is no proof that you, others, or the world in general should be different and that these self-defeating rules are unworthy of your blind obedience. Further, these questions will help you see that the fact that you acted a certain way in the past doesn’t mean that you must continue to do so in the future.

Good luck out there.