Summary: A lot of approach hesitation comes about because of untested assumptions. An easy way to approach that bypasses fight/flight/freeze mechanisms is by seeking the truth about it through action.

I'm going over some basics, hopefully nothing revolutionary.

Approaching can be done without any anxiety, hesitation or extreme excitement given the right mentality + experience. How you get there is by testing out the validity of negative assumptions by searching for the truth.

Fear to initiate a conversation can start with general uncertainty. For someone who hasn't approached before, "I don't really know what will happen once I do it" which isn't pleasant to begin with, creates hesitation by itself.

Often times we fill in that uncertainty with scenarios of what might happen, which typically deviates towards the negative because of risk aversion. "Since it could go bad, what are the ways it could go bad?" is what's going on underneath. Because of the desire to avoid negative outcomes, possible negative outcomes are assimilated in this thread, adding more hesitation and emotional resistance. What causes anxiety is the uncertainty in the probability of each case, given you lack experience to assess their true probability. You don't know how probable they really are, most likely, so you assume how probable each case will be.

If, for some reason, you develop certainty over any possible scenario, you've developed an untested assumption. Any scenario you fear may happen, you probably haven't tested for the probability of it happening.

What should you do in that case? You simply test those assumptions. How? By approaching with the intention of finding the truth about approaching. Once you act with this intention, your attention will be on how what happened differs from your fears were afraid might happen, reshaping your emotions around the action.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, your intention shouldn't just be on finding out the truth about approaching in general, but finding out the truth on doing it in a way that works, about doing it well. The process, with this mentality, becomes a learning experience that ends when you become comfortable with the action and successfully initiate conversations with some consistency.

Whenever your thoughts start going down the path of "What if..." immediately go to, "let's find out the truth," and do so by approaching. It's better to know reality than live in a fantasy land, especially an unpleasant one.

What are some truths? Spoiler: women get a thrill out of being approached, especialy when they don't expect it (day approaches get more powerful reactions than bars/nightclubs). Some women are rude, some aren't. Negative experiences aren't that negative, are bearable and usually insignificant.

Some words to say? Direct usually works well. Something that says I thought you were attractive so I decided to talk to you, but not necessarily in those words.

When you approach, you don't need to hype yourself up to approach confidently. You can do so calmly just by knowing the truth about approaching, not intellectually but emotionally, through past experience. The time needed to get that comfortable in acting initially shouldn't be more than a month with that intention, finding the truth.