Approach Anxiety and the Fear of Rejection Read more articles for free at: http://www.mycollegepersonaldevelopment. blogspot.com For many men fear of approaching women is one of the biggest obstacles they put in front of themselves when it comes to having a successful love life. The man spots an attractive woman across the room and before he takes any action to approach the woman his mind clouds with feelings of doubt and all of the possible scenarios of what could go wrong. This of course leads to the physical sense of fear and nervousness and he never makes a move, effectively dooming him to repeat the same habits the next time he finds himself in a similar situation. The thing about this approach anxiety is that when you think through it logically it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense why you should be afraid. The fear that you are feeling isn’t due to a life threatening situation that triggers your body’s fight or flight response, after all she is just a woman and you are just a man standing in a bar, a club, a hallway at school, or wherever. There is no inherent danger in simply starting a conversation with this woman because rejection is not death, it is a learning experience. Ask yourself this question what do I stand to lose by approaching this woman? Obviously one answer is a potential mate or at least a sexual encounter or a good friend. Success with one woman out of one hundred is still one woman then you had previously even if the other 99 shot you down rather quickly. I recently started to play basketball a bit again after not really playing very much over the past 3 years or so. The first day back in the gym I shot around by myself, it took about twenty minutes for my shot to start having some consistency and with each basket I made the more my confidence grew which in turn allowed me to make more shots. The shots that I missed were failures but they didn’t discourage me from shooting again I simply had to make an adjustment for the next shot to succeed. This is how I approach personal development, the day by day incremental improvements that I make to myself and my confidence are like practicing for the game of life akin to shooting baskets in the gym. What does this have to do with approaching women? Let’s say as an example that you have never played basketball before and I tell you that you have an hour to practice today for your first game tomorrow. Now during this hour of practice you may start to get a bit better by the end of it but are you ready for the game? Of course not. You don’t have the skills to score, rebound, and play defense nor do you have the ability to keep pace, the
game is moving too fast for you. Should you still play the game? Yes, if you want to become a better basketball player. Sure, you’re going to get ran out of the gym but you know what to expect for the next game you play, you have learned from your failure. Now say that I give you a whole week to practice for your next game. Are you better prepared? Yes and while you won’t dominate the game your success rate will have increased quite a bit. What if you practiced every day for a year and increased the games you played in to two per week, how do expect to react to being placed in a game after that? Would you still have the fear of uncertainty? Maybe some but you now have developed the tools and the physical abilities to keep up with the other players. You get more comfortable with your shot each game that you play and your rate of success climbs to even higher levels. You will still have bad games but your past success makes it harder for doubt to creep in because education kills fear. Take this basketball example and apply it to approaching women. There is no substitute for game speed (the approach and conversation) and the only way to overcome the fear associated with it is to dive in and experience failure. The point of the failure isn’t to make you feel awful about yourself but to learn to correct mistakes and realize that it isn’t so bad to be rejected. Your practice time comes from all the things that you do to better yourself each day such as reading articles on confidence, getting in shape, developing a fashion sense, learning how to have conversations with people, being more social, etc. Personal development is an incremental betterment of yourself but you can only apply what you learn each day in real life situations with women or starting a new job or making new friends. All of this practice and experience in playing the game gives you more confidence and courage which leads to more success with women, that 1 girl out of every 100 that you attract now becomes 25 girls out of 100 and believe me you will find some great girls at that rate. Getting Past the Fear Completely getting past fear is a very difficult thing to do. There are plenty of times where I don’t feel in the right mindset to approach girls but those situations are a whole hell of a lot less frequent then five or six years ago. At age 18, I started to come out of my shell a bit and approach some girls with very limited success. From 19 to probably age 22 I understood things a bit better and could approach girls at bars and clubs with little problem and did very well for myself. Now at age 24, I am much more focused on the girls I do approach. When I was in that intermediate stage a few years ago it was a mode where I would just approach any girl who looked decent, kind of like in basketball just shooting as many shots as possible and scoring 30 points. Sure, you had success but with terrible efficiency. At my current stage in life I’m no longer looking for just any girl because I have experienced the type of relationships that I want so I only go after a woman that really piques my interest and while the number of women I get has gone down the quality and my success rate has sky rocketed. I couldn’t imagine what my life would have been like if I never decided to work on myself and get past my fear of approaching and talking to women. How long have you
held on to this fear of rejection and missed out on so many great opportunities in your life? You have been letting someone else’s approval of you dictate how you are living your life; being scared of girls has determined whether or not you take action. How screwed up is that? You must understand that success in your life is not to be measured in women, meaning your happiness should not depend on someone else. Women should enhance your life not make or break it and hence fearing rejection from a woman is ultimately ridiculous. To get past fear you must get to the root of what is causing the fear and then take the fear head on with what you have learned. Think deeply about your fear of approaching women does it come from past rejections? Inexperience? Or even the fear of success? Yes, you can actually fear being successful with women. Going from having no women in your life to plenty of women to choose from is quite a change and there is always good and bad that comes along with change. The positives are obvious, love, sex, companionship but there are also negatives that you may not be ready for such as jealousy, trust issues you may not have known you had, an inability to deal with the possible consequences or the experience of having sex. These are fears just the same as that fear of outright rejection and until you actively consider each one they may limit the enjoyment of your love life. You break down fears by progressively building your skills to deal with them and by making yourself more comfortable in facing them. You might be afraid of approaching women now but what about after learning more about relationships and improving yourself? How is the fear different now that you have talked to 100 women? From personal experience I can tell you that I still get the butterflies in my stomach when approaching a woman but I now take it as a sign that I’m going after something that I want in my life. It is the same type of feeling I feel before an important basketball game or a test that I know is important for my final grade. Yes, it is a nervous energy but I have been in those situations before and the fear of going one more round is something that I see as an obstacle to be conquered and not something to run away from. Conquering fear is a risk and approaching women is a risk with little real danger but major rewards to those brave enough to do it. You never win a game by sitting on the sideline, you don’t get the life you want by never taking a chance, and unless you get very lucky a great girl isn’t going to fall out of the sky just for you. Letting doubts creep into your mind about what will go wrong is more damaging to your life then what actually will happen. In the first scenario you don’t get any girl and your life stagnates while in the second scenario you go out and find someone to share your life with. Rejection is not the end of the world and if anything you should be accepting of it in your life because the greatest success can only come after the bitterest defeats.