Evening lads. I would like to talk to you guys a bit about outcome independence and how i through many years of conscious effort finally rid myself of approach anxiety. I take it for granted that the community know that there is no magic pill and that all changes in behaviour, new routines, gains etc, take work, often years of work. But if you can do this stuff consistently, you will reap the rewards.

First, let us look upon Anxiety and some of its causes. It can be worry (anxiety about a future event) or regret (about a event in the past). Approach anxiety is about the threat of rejection (worry) and is a very rational fear, if you are a caveman and rejection ment being outcast from the tribe, but in modern society we no longer live in small tribes and rejection practically means nothing. The biggest cause of Anxiety is a lack of confidence.

Life will offer you situations, almost every day where you can either choose to respond with Cowardice (Anxiety) or with Courage (Self confidence).

  • Every time you chose to answer a situation or a challenge with cowardice, your self confidence shrinks. Like the death spiral on a plane, your anxiety will grow, making it even harder to make courageous decisions.
  • However, every time you respond with courage, it grows...

What does it mean to respond with courage? Let me try to clairify with a few examples.

  1. "You're out with friends and there's a hot girl looking bored by a table, your eyes meet briefly".

There's alot of feelings and rationalizations going on inside your head, depending on your self confidence. If it's low thoughts like "it's too late now, three second rule, my friends will laugh, she's too hot/out of my league, she'll think i'm awkward, etc" these are all excuses, and watch out, they can be extremely sofisticated and outright lies your mind is rarely your friend in cases like this. Once you recognize these thoughts in a simular situation it most likely, a challenge has presented itself to you.

In this case the courageous thing to do would be to approach. However it would need to be a genuine attempt, half assed attempts are cowardice disguised as courage. You would have to apporach with all your heart, with a genuine attempt until either acceptance or concrete unmistakable rejection is delivered to you. Then, you must acknowlege that you did the right thing (courage) and your confidence gains will be delivered to you.

  1. "There's a social gathering and after a beer run, your seat is taken by somebody, maybe a girl or a beefy guy".

If asking for your chair back is hard for you, i'd hate to break it to you, but your confidence is very low. Here you will gain anxiety/lose courage if you do nothing. It may seem like a trivial matter, but this is in itself is none the less a challenge.

  1. "You are in the middle of telling a story about your exploits the previous night to a group when another guy steps in and says "that's cool, that reminds me of when I-"

If you have a social life, your life will be filled with situations like this. Every time you can act, Courage or Anxiety! Every time you'll grow stronger or weaker. As your confidence grows strong, the more trivial events like a stolen seat or the interrupting dude from example 3 will become automatic, like a learned skill, your action wont even be conscious. But watch out, this also applies to low confidence actions based on Anxiety.

Summary/TLDR:

Every time you act like a coward you become more of a coward, and every time you act courageous your self confidence grows. Your crippeling anxiety is caused by your low self confidence, grow it by doing courage where you usually would do something cowardly.

End note:

I think this stuff is broken down to theoretical levels in Dr.Paul's Mind OS (a archaic self-dev dvd)

Sorry for the spelling and oher grammatical errors, new pc doesn't have office and also, first post :D