Hey PUA Forum people!

I'm Annihilation from Finland. I'm 25 and currently living and studying in the lovely city of Helsinki. For the last couple of months I've been getting more actively into pickup.

I read The Game a couple of years ago and found it really intriguing. I looked up some of the forums online back then and watched Mystery's TV show The Pickup Artist, but that was it – I didn't do much myself. I guess I kept some of the rules and tips in mind, but never really put myself out there to try the techniques out. Well, as you can imagine, nothing changed or improved in my life relationship-wise. So now, after years of just feeling crappy about my lack of success dating life, I decided to do something about it.

I reread the Game and started doing The 30 Day Challenge from The Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss (I'm now at day 24). I've also been listening to the Mystery Method and an introduction to NLP on audiobook and watching some pickup videos online, but as Mystery says (and I'm sure everyone agrees), the game is not played on the computer – the game is played in the field, so what I've found most helpful has been going out to do some approaches. Most of them end up in failure with me running out of things to say, but whenever I get a line down and deliver it in a way that feels natural and not awkward, it just feels like such an accomplishment. Like a few days ago, I managed to number close doing a cold approach, and it went exactly by the book. All of it was so scripted, yet didn't feel awkward at all, and it made me so excited (almost embarrassingly giddy) to see the techniques actually work the way they're said to. But even those "failures" I've had I am now trying to reframe in my mind as successes in having the guts to try something new and learn from it.

So, I am now taking responsibility and charge of my own relationships, and it feels right. Why have I spent so long just taking what's given to me, and not gone out there to get what I actually want and need?

I plan to report on some of my experiences here on the forum, and hope to get some feedback and tips for what I might be doing wrong or what I should be improving on.

Sarge on!
Annihilation

PS. If there are any PUAs here who live in Finland, let me know! It would be great to hear others' experiences of using pickup techniques in this climate, and I wouldn't say no to a wing either!