Are You Willing To Be A Loser?
by 
Eric Disco
Every day on the streets of New York City I see attractive women.
I hardly have to turn my head to look at one because another cute one will walk by.
Why don’t I approach more of them?
Why am I afraid to approach a harmless girl?
If things don’t go well with her, I’ll probably never see her again in my life. It doesn’t matter.
Four million women in this city and I’m afraid to approach one.
What am I so afraid of?
When a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder avoids touching doorknobs, he isn’t really avoiding being contaminated. He probably logically knows that he won’t get sick from touching the doorknob.
The obsessive-compulsive is avoiding the negative affect–the thoughts and emotions–associated with touching the doorknob.
Just the same, I am avoiding my own psychological and emotional experiences when I decide to not approach a woman I am attracted to.
It is the avoidance of experience that is at the root of my fear. I am in fear of fear. Or more precisely, in fear of the negative affect.
How do you cure approach anxiety? How do you defeat approach anxiety? How do you overcome approach anxiety?
These are perhaps the worst questions to be asking. They all carry the premise that you want to avoid feeling anxiety.
I read a lot about approach anxiety and have talked to many guys.
There are a lot of things out there to help reduce your anxiety. Breathing techniques. Warmup Sets. The 3-Second Rule. All these things are helpful.
But reducing your anxiety is secondary. By focusing on reducing the anxiety, it’s possible you are still avoiding the experience of feeling the anxiety and rather than accepting it as part of yourself.
It may seem that I put approaching women into too much of a negative light; i.e. fail over and over and over again. But to me these negative experiences are part of the whole experience.
Alongside the joy, pleasure, love and understanding I feel in my interactions with women, I feel fear, pain, hurt, loss, rejection, loneliness and frustration.
I am a winner because I’m willing to be a loser.
Are you willing to be a loser?
If so, what is the best strategy for getting there?
If you try to manage your fear by yourself all in one step, you will fail.
Anxiety becomes palatable only in small increments. If you expose yourself to your own fear a little bit at a time, you learn not to be so fearful of your own emotions and reactions.
If you are able to do it, the best way to go about changing your behavior is to approach one woman every day. You learn how to deal with your fear a little at a time.
Day by day.
Learning how to be a winner because you are willing experience every aspect of your interactions with women, win or lose.
Posted in Acceptance, Initiative and Inhibition | 
11 Comments »
“Every day on the streets of New York City I see attractive women.
Why am I afraid to approach a harmless girl?
What am I so afraid of?
The obsessive-compulsive is avoiding the negative affect–the thoughts and emotions–associated with touching the doorknob.”
Approaching random women on the street is the same as a bum approaching random people for money. It reinforces the fact that you are IMPOVERISHED: you don’t have your OWN cool social circle or tribe from which to select a wealth of women.
If you’re already the alpha of a great social circle reaping the benefits of hot women, approaching random women is fine. You don’t need to do it to get laid, you do it because it’s a fun SPORT.
Otherwise, most guys are in the “community” because they are DESPERATE social outcasts who don’t have the skills to acquire and lead a social circle with hot women. How else do you explain the hordes of college boys who can’t even tap into the coeds that they are surrounded by 24/7 and have to approach random women in the street like beggars?
That actually used to be a fear of mine. I FELT like I was BOTHERING people by approaching them.
But once you learn how to do it correctly, that fear becomes less of an issue.
Once you begin to put smiles on these girls faces, you realize they WANT to be approached. It’s refreshing for them that a guy has the cajones to come up to them and say hi.
Yes, it’s socially acceptable to approach women in bars. However, I meet 80% of my girlfriends by approaching people during the day.
It’s because it’s a better way to have a GENUINE and SINCERE conversation with her.
Most girls RARELY get approached during the day. So if you do it right, she loves it and enjoys it. Even if you don’t get a date or a phone number, she often walks away glowing, with a smile on her face.
amen.
What I think is sad are the guys out there that are really naturals and diss the afc’s as to add insult to injury. I applaud your abilities in meeting and picking up women, really I do. It is a skill I wish I had, but like the multitude of other skills out there, I might not not be any good at it no matter how much I practice. This is where I am. I read The Game, applied the rules to meeting women and nada. It has helped me in no way at all. I just got rejected like a million times over and over again. I got a few dates that led nowhere and now I am back to my afc status. Still I realized one thing. If all you have is picking up women then I feel more sad for you than I. See I have real creative talents and I spend a grip of time on all of that. Art and specifically music have always saved me when nothing else could. It means a lot to me that those skills and what you create with them will stand the test of time and seemingly move beyond our surface and materialistic world. I don’t think the pua studs around here can say that about their skill set …
Please can someone help. I have read your blog and your incites make good sense. But what if you are an obsessive compulsive who has a problem not so much speaking to women but more how tolook at them before I even speak I feel anxoius because I feel I have already done something wrong before I even speak. How do I get passed this first stage of just appreciating there beauty without me thinking they think I am staring at them this has been the bain of my life for the last 15 years. It stops me been able to speak and if I do try a conversationI feel so uncomfortable all im thinking is im staring im looking to much I noticed her breasts or legs I feel terrible then beat myself up the rest of the day. What do most people do when they are talking to a beautifull girl in a low cut top how do you control the anxiety that she might have noticed you look or you may be doing something wrong. Or that she even cares.
I’ve read the game, seen hours of videos on puas and I noticed that first thing to do is relax yourself and set your mind for ‘No big deal’ and it’s ok to be rejected. I found it extremely difficult to do so at the beginning. Personally I found some of Ross jyfferies excercises to calm me down, tapping helped tremendously for me, then i’d set my mind for a positive mood and approach 1 or 2 girls a week. It worked!! Now i’ve been watching alot of rejection videos to put my mind into rejection mode and it’s ok to be rejected. Slow baby steps. simplepickup also has a greatt recipe for this. Watching ppl in action then implimenting. Life is so short. Think back 25 yrs ago. Your life is flying and all the strangers you came into contact with don’t remeber you, and you don’t remmeber them. Atleast look back 25yrs from now and know that you tried..or you’ll regret it
The PUA “Community” with it’s gurus, junk “science”, and advice that is often predatory (and in some cases, criminal) is no less a scam than pyramid schemes.
Most have probably heard the viral anecdote of the insurance sales V.P.who gave new recruits the following cold call “line” during telephone solicitation.
“Hello. I’m with ABC Insurance. You wouldn’t want to buy any insurance today would you?”
Remarkably, while the “no’s” and hang-ups far outnumbered the yes’s, the recruits found that simply by running the numbers eventually some people responded they had just been thinking about
that and the caller had his foot in the door.
Toss enough men into the PUA meat grinder and you will have your
“Beauty and the Beast” success stories.
The method for approaching even the most stunning woman is the essence of simplicity:
1. Pro football players dread the summer-camp “two-a-days” in full pads that are often experienced under the most painful conditions.
(see, “Death Crawl” from “Facing the Giants” for instance on You tube.) Rookies and undrafted free agents will put themselves through hell–physical and psychological–to be an NFL player. Why should it be any different with women. Approaching a beautiful woman and getting blown off, ignored, or the equivalent of a kick in the balls is the equivalent of “two-a-days”. Do you want it bad enough? If you do and you catch a break, make it through the relationship equivalent of Seal training than you’ll take the pain and abuse, the payoff will be
worth every second of emotional and physical agony.
2. Win, lose, or drawer, approach a woman with only ONE goal: to make her smile. Why? Science has discovered some amazing facts about the power of smiling.
1. As many as one out of every seven humans smile less than five times a day.
2. Smiling is evolutionaryly contagious. When you smile at someone it paralyzes the muscles that make them frown.
3. Neuroimaging has demonstrated that ONE smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as 2,000 bars of chocolate–a demonstrated pleasure enhancer and British researchers discovered that smiling once gives the same feeling of happiness as winning 16,000 pounds sterling.
You don’t have to be Jerry Seinfeld or Mark Twain to do this. It doesn’t require great wit or a killer pickup line. It only requires a sincere smile on your part and something that brings a little light into someone’s life.
3. Know how to take a hint. Put yourself on a timer. The “three-minute-dating craze” has proven a woman can decide to take things to the next step in less than it takes to make a hard-boiled egg if the right psychological buttons are pushed–and it’s ususally a casual toss away line can do the trick. “Having fun?”, believe it or not, is a killer opening line. Most importantly, as someone suggested, whatever you say, tailor it to the person; do not make it a generalization. Would you tell Sean Connery you though he was the beat Bond if you met him at a wedding or that you thought his most unforgettble character was the Arab Sheik in “The Wind and the Lion”? Which do you think would get a better response from him?
Don’t complicate it.
Take the pain. Use every rejection as a rung on a ladder and make them smile.
I remember thinking exactly like this. I was meeting girls and having fun. From this I extrapolated that that’s all there was to game – being bold, being friendly, developing a willingness to take chances. But my game really took off when I realized that everything I was doing was what I now call demonstrating social comfort. Men can get pretty far on social comfort alone, and, for most men, it’s as far as they will go. Newbies who develop social comfort will totally transform their lives. All this having been said, there is something beyond social comfort. Whether you call it game or technique or whatever, when I finally got there, I saw a different level of success.
I think you have made some interesting points John, I think your right that it really comes down to “wanting it badly enough” and that if guys approached approaching women with the intensity of a Navy SEAL approaching his training they would kill it hands down with no training (a bit of an extreme example though lol!)
This sentence stuck out for me:
“Do you want it bad enough? If you do and you catch a break, make it through the relationship equivalent of Seal training than you’ll take the pain and abuse, the payoff will be
worth every second of emotional and physical agony.”
I have to say that your dramatising it here John, the (unavoidable) physical pain that you get from intense exercise ABSOLUTELY DWARFS the “pain” that you get from rejection.
When you really break it down, getting rejected by a woman is really pretty irrelevant and so petty in the grand scheme of your life and should ideally be thought of as much. Its. Really. Not. A. Big. Deal.
And I’m not just talking from a theoretic perspective I mean LAST WEEKEND I got shot down hard by this stunning barmaid, but did I care? Did I let her spoil my day, or even my hour?
No! To hell with what she thinks! :-)
Mr. Crebral – It looks like you changed your life around completely! Is
there anything you did in your professional life to contribute to this changeover? What did you do?
The single biggest thing I did was get some personalised coaching.