Fuck Inner Game. Try Outer Game.

Before I began doing pickup, I had it in my mind that women didn’t like me. If a woman caught me looking at her, I thought I’d creeped her out.

No matter what I did–if I worked out, if I dressed well, if I changed my style–the best I could do was try hard to get women to like me. I thought that if I could talk to a girl long enough, I could possibly convince her to like me.

I’ve had a number of girlfriends. And the funny thing was, it felt like with these girls, I wouldn’t have had to do much anyway, that I somehow could have gotten those girls from the start.

And then I realized, wait, maybe I did get that girl from the start.

What changes when you start doing pickup? What changes when you begin talking to attractive girls every day?

When you are approaching women you don’t know, during the rest of the day when you look at other girls, you realize, “Hey wait, those girls don’t dislike me. They just haven’t met me yet. That snarl on that girl’s face isn’t for me. I’ve walked up to girls with snarls on their faces and that snarl usually goes away.”

I was phobic of women. And I didn’t know it. My fear was below the surface. Every time I passed a cute girl I would think to myself “That girl doesn’t like me.” I didn’t verbalize it in my head. But that’s what I felt. And it wasn’t true.

I am now getting looks sometimes from girls. Positive looks. I wasn’t getting looks like this before. What changed?

I changed my look, my posture, my gaze, my body language, everything. But the most important thing that changed was that I stopped believing that girls disliked me. And I started believing that any girl, anywhere could like me.

I hate the term “inner game.” “All game is inner game,” they say. It annoys me when people talk about inner game. I want to punch them in the face and claw their eyes out. Because like most guys, I read this as some kind of zen crap that if you believe strongly enough that you’re great, all of a sudden it will change, that you can just be confident. But this is not the case. And everyone knows it.

What has to change is your actions. What has to change is your habits.

I hate doing mental exercises. I hate the idea of mental rehearsal. I don’t like the idea that I should sit in my apartment and try and think through things in my head until I get it right. I don’t believe it works.

What needs to happen is a process where you take action in the real world. That’s the first step to changing your behavior.

You will never have true confidence by telling yourself over and over and over that you are confident. You will never have confidence by reading a thousand books or going to a thousand workshops. The only way to get true confidence is by going out and doing it over and over. It doesn’t sound easy, does it? Maybe that’s the point.

But if you are willing to do whatever it takes to get yourself there, you can do it.

I did. And I’m still doing it.

It’s possible to get there. Not only is it possible to get there, but you will become a hundred times the man you are for doing it.

I used to have HUGE approach anxiety. To walk up to a girl I didn’t know and try talk to her was torturous for me. There was Hell in Hello. A huge part of me was content and completely resigned to never talk to a strange woman ever again.

I didn’t know that it was possible for it not to hurt. I didn’t think it was possible to get there. I had no path.

I had some inkling in my mind that if I could talk to ten women every day, after a while it would get easier. And I even set out to try and do it.

And I always failed.

But with the loving help of some great coaches, I figured out how to do it.

I don’t have a secret formula to make it easy for you. Because it’s not easy. It’s difficult. Very difficult.

I’m not asking you to do something that’s impossible to do. I’m not asking you to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

I’m asking you to step out of your comfort zone a little bit at a time. And to do it consistently. The small changes begin to add up, most of it unnoticeable to you, until eventually you will find yourself at the top of the mountain.

And all of this can happen a lot faster than you think.

If you need a coach to kick your ass, find one. Or if you have a friend who can help you, call him up. Make a plan. Do SOMETHING. Just take that first step and keep taking those first steps. For me the first thousand steps felt like the first step. There are days when it still feels like the first step. But you can get there. It’s just a matter of your willingness to go out and do it.

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posted in Initiative and Inhibition