1) Taking pickup too damn serious - Fear is a manifestation of too much seriousness.

When you stop taking pickup seriously and you turn it into a joke, you'll be able to approach more and actually enjoy approaching.

Humor actually suppresses and displaces negative emotions. Humor demands pleasure from something that would otherwise be painful.

So, if you're sucking at pickup, you should ask yourself if you're taking pickup too seriously. Sometimes by making a simple tweak such as switching your frame from seriousness to humurous when picking up, can make a huge difference.

2) Weak relationship with reality - If you want to get good at pickup then you need to have an intimate relationship with reality.

You must accept reality, and respect it. For example, if you're not good-looking but you want to pickup chicks, you have to accept the fact that you're not good looking and focus on the other traits that can make you attractive to women.

I know guys who are not good looking so they just use that as an excuse of why they can't pickup chicks and they just settle for what they can get.

However, they fail to accept the reality that women are attracted to other traits such as, a strong sense of self belief, social intelligence, and a strong physical presence to name a few.

I know guys who can pickup chicks and even steal chicks away from good looking guys because they understand that women are attracted to other things that can be developed no matter who you are.

Everyone has the ability to increase their status, their social proof, and their inner confidence. If you don't have good looks it doesn't matter. There are too many ugly men who are getting 8s, 9s, and 10s for anybody to say that without looks you can't get quality chicks.

3) Respecting negative emotions - You are not your emotions.

When you feel fear that doesn't mean YOU are a pussy, it just means that you're a healthy being who feels emotions. When you feel an emotion, you have the choice to accept that emotion, or create a new emotion.

Have you ever sat at home and had an urge to go out and do pickup, but as soon as you get to the spot where you're going to pickup, you start to get "approach anxiety" and regret coming out?

Well, anxiety and regret are emotions that create negative energy and they're the antithesis of the emotions you were feeling when you were at home. So, when you go out to pickup, the right thing to do is to replace those negative emotions, with positive emotions.

So, instead of tucking your tail between your legs and running home, you must have a way of changing your emotional state instantly. I personally, switch out any negative emotions with humor. I quickly do something that I find funny, or I try to make a joke of the situation and "laugh at myself".

Most people take themselves too seriously and they have a hard time laughing at themselves or their situations, but if you don't learn how to deal with negative emotions, you will be controlled by negative emotions.

If you're controlled by negative emotions that neutralize your ability to approach then you're pretty much fucked, and you will continue to be fucked until you learn to either ignore or replace negative emotions with positive emotions.

4) Waiting for shit to happen instead of just doing it - Ahh yess... the only cliche advice of "just do it". I actually love and hate that advice at the same time. I love it, because if you apply that advice, you can literally will your way to success in pickup and other areas of life, however, "just doing it" is much easier said than done.

The real issue is how do you "just do it", when every fiber in your body is telling you "don't do it". That's the real issue.

Well, if you've read any Tony Robins you will learn that, in order to get yourself to take a specific action you must associate a ton of pleasure with taking that action and a ton of pain with not taking that action.

Tony goes into depth on how to do that but I'll give you some quick advice on how to do that here.

Reward yourself for approaching and punish yourself for not approaching. However, doing this requires a certain level of will power and is hard to sustain for a long-period of time.

With that being said, you have to create internal associations with pain and pleasure that will inspire you to take action on demand. This can be done by gaining references that support you taking action, and by rewarding and punishing yourself in order to train your mind to take action as a habit.

I hope you got some value out of this as this is all stuff that I personally experienced in my pickup journey and I've been able to overcome these challenges and take my game to higher levels.