What to do?
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Before we talk about direct vs indirect, let’s go back to the main point of my book. You’re in Starbucks and you see this hot girl on the other side of the room. You feel like you should ‘approach.’ The point of my book is to avoid the binary decision of ‘do it or don’t do it’. Instead, you want to break down ‘the approach’ into manageable increments. What could you have done?
Firstly, you were out, but it sounds like that was incidental. You didn’t go out specifically to work on meeting women. That’s okay. The second step is to position yourself within her vicinity, close enough that you could talk with her if you wanted to. Is there any excuse you could have used to get to where she was? Maybe you walk by her table to go to the bathroom and when you walk by, you stop for a second and pull out your phone to look at it. Or maybe you check out something on the wall behind her table. Or you get a napkin from a dispenser near her. Or you grab a seat next to her. Whatever it is, the idea is that you’re not standing on the other side of the room thinking about doing ‘an approach,’ you’re breaking it down into manageable steps, the first of which is putting yourself near her.
Once you’re near her, the next step is to say something to her. This is where I start to lean toward indirect approaches if you’re trying to get past your anxiety. For most guys, it’s much easier to say something like “Do you know the wifi password” or “Do you know what time this place closes?” than being direct and showing interest. Being direct and showing interest has the advantage that you don’t need to make up any excuses to walk over to her, but there’s also a much bigger hurdle. When you’re trying to get your body comfortable with these situations, you want something *gradual* rather than a gian hurdle to get past. If you’re scared of heights, it’s better for you to go up one higher flight of stairs every day and get comfortable at each height than to go to the top of a building and look down. By making this gradual, your body is less likely to tense up and you’ll be able to deal with those challenging emotions a little bit at a time instead of getting overwhelmed.
That’s why I lean toward indirect if you’re trying to get past your fears. When I first started, I did a lot of direct approaches. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. And I got a lot more confident for it. But it didn’t do a lot to reduce my fear. It was still a huge hurdle for me to get past every time I wanted to interact with women. It was only once I started breaking up these approach into smaller increments that I lost my internal inhibition.
Keep in mind, maybe you couldn’t think of a reason to position yourself next to the woman in Starbucks. Maybe you felt too much inhibition to do it. That’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up over it. You don’t have to take advantage of every opportunity. You’ll miss some and that’s okay. The main thing is that you keep practicing, preferably every day, and you keep putting yourself into those challenging situations. Keep positioning. Keep asking easy questions. Keep climbing up that ladder and your body will eventually get comfortable in those situations.
Eric
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