Are You Willing To Be A Loser?

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.

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posted in Acceptance, Initiative and Inhibition