My Approach Anxiety Antidote In 6 Steps!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WzwXeWreQ

I want to give you six hacks or six tricks to overcoming approach anxiety.

Now when I have a guy come onto one of my programs, one of the biggest sticking points he has is having approach anxiety. He has this severe fear that kind of wells up inside of him when he sees a girl, and that’s a natural feeling to have. But it’s something that can be overcome.

In this video, I’ll be giving you six cool tricks to overcome it. Without further adieu, let’s get started.

Approach Anxiety Tip #1. Approach Immediately

The first trick is to actually just approach the girl immediately. You spot that girl and without hesitation, boom! You do it. Then maybe a canned opener at your fingertips so you’re not thinking about what opener do I use. You just have a standard canned opener that you say right away.

Now the thing is when you wait, when you hesitate, you have these stress hormones, these stress chemicals into your body. As you’re looking at the girl, you’re just kind of taking a bath in these hormones of negativity and stress and you psyche yourself out of approaching.

It’s really not a good idea to be waiting. I mean I could be in a great state, approaching a ton of girls and then if you told me, “Okay, Jesse, I want you to look at that girl for 5 minutes. Not approach her, just look at her. And after those 5 minutes are up, then approach her.”

If I did that, I’m just looking at the girl for 5 minutes. Even if I was just killing it, approaching lots of girls with great momentum and great state, eventually I’m just going to psyche myself out. I’m going to have these negative chemicals, these negative hormones seep into my brain, seep into my body, and I’ll be more awkward or maybe I won’t be even able to do it because I’ve just been thinking about it for so long.

You don’t want to be in this mood of overanalyzing things or thinking things. There’s an old school game rule, the 3-second rule, which still applies today. You can follow that 3-second rule, 1-second, 2-second, 2-second approach you’re not giving yourself a chance to psyche yourself up. But more importantly, you’re not giving a chance for those that brain response that floods your body with these chemicals that are going to hold you back and stress you out.

Approach Anxiety Tip #2. Get Leverage

The second tip is that you want to get leverage on yourself where the pain of not taking action, the pain of not approaching is even worse than the pain of the approach anxiety. For example, when I first started out 15 years ago, I was like I’m going to cold approach a girl, my first girl. I was so nervous about it. I was dying inside almost.

But I went out for 3 to 4 hours every day, wandering around campuses, wandering around the mall, going into stores, going up to girls but just kind of chickening out. I get like right to the girl, and I won’t say anything. I will just freeze up.

I did that for 3 hours every day, not for one day, not for two days, not for three days, but not like 2 weeks like 15 days in a row where I just could not approach a girl. If you’re do math, 3 hours times 15 days, it’s like over 40 hours of just standing around, being in a stressed-out state, and it got to the point where I was like this was so painful, just wandering around, doing nothing, wasting all my time that eventually I was like, “Okay, fuck! I’m going to do it.”

I went up to a girl because the pain of just standing there and doing nothing and losing more of my time and just being in a stressful state was worse than the pain, than the perceived pain of having to go up to the girl, and the going up to the girl wasn’t so bad. Then it became really easy to approach girls.

You want to get leverage on yourself, maybe create a pain response even worse than the girl, so another trick is to go out with a friend and give him a $100 bill and you tell him, “If I don’t approach a girl today, you can keep that $100 bill.” Or you could say give the guy five $20s and tell him that for every girl you approach, he’ll give you back a $20 bill, o now you’ve got to approach five girls. That’s a common trick of getting leverage on yourself.

Now if you don’t have a friend to go out with or if you’re dead, dead broke and you can’t do that, just do what I did. Make a commitment to go out for 2 to 3 hours every day no matter what even if you just stand there, doing nothing. It takes you weeks and weeks and weeks to approach a girl. Make that commitment to go through the pain of losing your time, going through the pain of looking around for a girl to approach until it just becomes so painful that you actually force yourself to do it.

Approach Anxiety Tip #3. Change your standards

Okay, the third tip is that you want to lower your standards for success. Now again when I’m working with students on the program, they come in with this belief that they have to get the girl to like them or they have to get the phone number. They want to get to make out like they’re putting really high standards on themselves, even though they’re not experienced at all.

Even if you are well experienced, you don’t want to be putting high standards on yourself. That’s like living in an outcome, reaching for a really high outcome it’s going to psyche you out. It’s going to create approach anxiety because your expectations now are so high, so you want to change your expectations to something really simple, really easy to do, and that is to simply taking action.

If I go up and I approach that girl and I say hello to her, to me that’s a success because a lot of times, I’m really not in state. A lot of times, I don’t even feel like approaching the girl. A lot of times, it’s not even like ideal logistics or anything, and I know that it’s going to probably suck, so if I just go up and I say hello to the girl, to me I count that as a success even though I’ve got 15 years of experience under my belt.

You don’t want to be putting pressure on yourself. That’s no fun. That’s putting a high outcome, and you just want to avoid that. Lower your standards for success. That’s going to wash away a lot of the approach anxiety that you’re having. A lot of the approach anxiety stems simply because it had one thing you’re doing.

You’ve got to tweak that. Lower your standards of success, your approach anxiety, a lot of it is going to go away.

Approach Anxiety Tip #4. Don’t let your emotions decide for you

Tip number 4 is simply to man up, to harden up to the challenge. Now a lot of us, we face a little bit of discomfort, and to us, that’s a good enough excuse to just give up and go back to our comfort zone of watching television, or playing games, or going back to our normal life, but that really should not be an excuse not to take action.

For example, maybe eating vegetables and well-balanced diet is not as fun as eating sugar and cookies and hamburgers.

But as adults, we can make a logical, recent arguments inside our heads. Eat nutritious meals. We’re not children. We’re not 5 years old where we’re just going to go for the cookies and candies. Hopefully we’re not and we know how to take the long view of things and push through a little bit of discomfort to make our lives better.

Same thing, you can’t be in a mindset where I feel a little bit of discomfort. I see the girl. Okay, valid excuse to give up. I feel discomfort. I’m going to go back home. No, you really want to push through that and man up and harden up and kind of be okay with that chaos, be okay with those negative feelings, be okay with a little bit of adversity going on in your life.

For example I was watching the show Mountain Men on Netflix a couple of days ago, and these guys are out in the middle of nowhere like middle of nowhere Alaska and this guy, his snowmobile breaks down, and he’s 10 miles away from his cabin, hundreds of miles away from another human beings.

If he’s like, “Uhh, I don’t want to walk the 10 miles back to my cabin in the subzero temperatures. I’ll just hang out here.” Well, he’s going to die. He’s living that lifestyle maybe because he gets a thrill out of it.

But it kind of teaches an important lesson that there are men out there that will push through adversity, push through negative feelings. They kind of thrive on those negative feelings. They thrive on that adversity. It kind of them makes them feel alive. They don’t use that as an excuse just to give up. They kind of seek it out.

That’s a mentality that you want to change. You want to be seeking that discomfort, seeking that adversity, and manning up to the challenge. That’s what’s going to make you feel great. That’s what’s going to make you feel alive like you’ve had a life worth living.

Approach Anxiety Tip #5. Give your brain proof

The fifth tip for overcoming approach anxiety is simply that you are going to need experience to give your brain proof that you’re e not going to die.

You need to have some experience under your belt so that your brain has proof that just because you go up and talk to a girl that some other dude isn’t going to come along with a big rock and just whack you on the head and kill you.

It’s kind of like this old school concept that your brain wants proof not promises. You can read forms. You can read all kinds of field reports on pickup. You can do a lot of theory, but you’re still going to have approach anxiety because your brain wants hard proof that you are not going to get killed or socially ostracized by talking to this girl.

Just one thing to understand that you do an approach, you do a second approach, you do a third approach, the really difficult. Those would feel the most fearful, the most intimidating but once you get over that initial hump, it’s going to get a lot easier. It’s going to get a lot easier in the timeframe of a day where you do a couple of approaches. You’re going to build a little bit of state. You’re going like, “Okay. This is not so bad and no one is going to kill me. I feel a lot better about this.”

Over the long haul where you’re going months where you’re going to cultivate a sense of indifference, you might feel a little bit of approach anxiety at the start of the day, but a lot of the hard edge of it, the most difficult part will be taken off. It will feel a lot easier.

Just realize that your brain wants to have proof and that kind of works to your advantage because there’s this initial hump of approach anxiety.

Ninety-nine percent of guys won’t follow through with this because they’re going to be like, “Okay, this feels uncomfortable. I give up.” If you can get over that initial hump, you’re in that 1 percent and you’re going to really stand out. You’re eliminating 99 percent of your competition right there.

Personally, I love that guys have approach anxiety because it allows me to stand out. It allows my students to stand out, and you can really clean up very easily with women that way.

Approach Anxiety Tip #6. Feed your brain

Now the sixth tip to overcoming approach anxiety is to have good habits under your belt. Listen, if you’re not eating well, if you’re eating junk food. If you’re not going to the gym and you’re not feeling good about your body, you’re going to feel lethargic. You’re not going to have the energy to push through with that approach anxiety. You’re going to feel maybe not entitled if you’ve been sitting on the couch for days at a time.

It’s just going to be a lot easier to give in to the comfort, to go back to your comfort zone and to give up.

You want to have good habits under your belt ‑ eating good nutritious food, getting enough sleep, hitting the gym, getting some exercise, being physical. Being physical helps you in that habit of taking action because taking action with a girl is a very physical activity, feeling entitled to yourself, doing identity and affirmation in the morning. I spend 20 to 30 minutes every day just working on my identity, speaking out loud affirmations, getting my voice moving, unstifling myself. Mentally I’m kind of moving in the right direction because when I wake up first thing in the morning, I’m not in the mood to go approach some girls. That will be difficult for me as well, so I want to wake up my brain. I want to feed my brain healthy thoughts, healthy affirmations. Feed my brain healthy foods. Feed my brain with exercise, and then it’s a lot easier when I go up to that girl. I feel entitled. I feel worthy. I feel good. My mentality is on the right spots. I’m taking on the good identities of what I want to take on in terms of approaching that girl and it’s relatively easy.

If I didn’t do any of those things, I could still approach but yeah, I would have more approach anxiety.

You want to have the right habits under your belt and take care of your eating, take care of your exercise, take care of your brain with good affirmations.

Okay so that wraps up this video on my six tips for overcoming your approach anxiety.

Leave me a comment below. Maybe you have your own little tricks that you do that you can share to help other guys out with.