| One of the biggest
problems people have
when it comes to approaching someone they’re attracted to is
actually overcoming the
fear of the initial approach. I suspect every single man on the planet
with very few exceptions
has at some time felt the
familiar fear associated
with the idea of
approaching a girl they’re attracted to. Perhaps they’ve spotted her on a train,
perhaps it was simply in passing down
the street like the girl in the red dress
in the movie Matrix. Whatever the
situation was the symptoms were the
same. Sweating, blushing, the fear of being judged negatively some people
will actively search for signs of
disapproval in others convincing them
that they shouldn’t bother speaking at
all, either way most people end up
deciding to avoid the situation altogether and move on with their life.
They leave the situation as a chance
meeting that was never meant to
happen. It registered as a blip on their
life a small fraction of time, an event
that has passed with no more meaning than the next one or the one
after that. Each of which of course will
be treated in exactly the same way. These symptoms are what many
people within the field of dating refer
to as “ Approach Anxiety”, though
they were not defined by dating and seduction experts. The roots of Anxiety and it’s symptoms where
defined a lot earlier in our history by
the psychological community at large
including such greats as Sigmund
Freud himself. What we’re going to look at is the
symptoms of Approach anxiety and
then hopefully the possible solutions
enabling you to approach anyone you
want at any time. Anxiety is a state which affects us on a
psychological and physiological level.
It’s symptoms include a number of
different components including
perceptual or cognitive components,
physical components and even behavioural components. What this
means is that we can not only use
proven psychological methods to
identify the state of anxiety but we can
also use the proven solutions to
remove it as well, enabling us the confidence to approach anyone we
want at any time. First, lets look a little bit more at
anxiety itself. Anxiety is far from an
unusual state to us as humans. In fact
anxiety is a very normal reaction to
stress it is designed to help us observe
and deal with difficult situations. Amongst other things the state sends
a burst of adrenaline to us to help us
cope with the problems. However
anxiety often becomes excessive, and
rather than giving us the skills to
handle the problem it can instead prevent us from even attempting to
solve the problem. As soon as an
anxiety affects our ability to make
action. It becomes known as a phobia.
In the case we are specifically looking
at, if it were to prevent us from actually approaching someone we were
attracted to then it would fall in the
category of being a phobia. Anxiety over meeting or interacting
with people whom we do not yet
know is a very common stage of
development in humans. In fact in
infants it is a very normal part of
growth and is known as stranger anxiety, symptoms vary but a typical
part of growing up. Sometimes this
fear can persist into adulthood and
then it can develop into social anxiety
or even a social phobia. In adults
excessive fear of others which inhibits the ability to interact with strangers is
called social anxiety. Social anxiety disorder or social
phobia as it is often referred to is an
fear of negative public opinion about
oneself or a fear of public
embarrassment. The fear is often
associated with all social interactions however in a good deal of cases it can
be specific to certain situations for
example the idea of approaching
someone you’re attracted to in the
street. The experience of social
anxiety is characterized by physical components such as sweating or
blushing, perceptual components
such as the belief that one might be
judged in a negative way or
perceiving signs of disapproval and
finally behavioral components by simply avoiding a situation. Clinical psychologists and researchers
continue to this day to define the
problems and definitions of shyness,
social anxiety and it’s related
assortment of phobias and problems.
Many share similarities though also have distinct differences which causes
difficulties in defining them. Esspecially
the difference between anxiety and
the positive feeling of anticipation.
However for our purposes thankfully
we don’t have to look too deeply into the categorization, what we’ve been
concerned with is identifying whether
we are suffering from “approach
anxiety” the fear of approaching and
then looking at the possible remedy’s
to remove it and enable us to approach people we’re attracted to at
any time. So if you’ve been reading this and the
symptoms do sound similar to those
listed above and you have decided
that when you see someone you’re
attracted to you often do feel unable
to approach whatever the reason may be, it may be useful to look at the
possible solutions to social anxiety as
a means to overcome the problem. There are a number of different
methods to remove anxieties. These
range from exposing the subject to
their fear directly right through to
some more experimental methods of
hypnosis. Many psychologists agree, that one of the best ways to remove
an anxiety or phobia is by a type of
behavioural therapy known as
Systematic Desensitization. This type of
therapy has its roots in pavlovian
therapy or classical conditioning and was developed by a South African
psychiatrist by the name of Joseph
Wolpe. This method is essentially a two part
therapy. The first part involves
teaching the subject relaxation skills
so that they can control their fear and
anxiety responses. These Can take the
part of breathing excersises or focus games. Something you can try is to
simply regulate your breathing to
match a slow count of ten. By taking
slow concentrated breaths and
monitoring your own breathing
patterns whilst exposing yourself to a fearful situation you can begin to
slowly relax, even in the midst of a
phobia. However this technique does only
work for mild exposure to a fearful
stimulus. This is where the clever part
comes in. The second half of the therapy
involves exposing the subject to
fearful situations with an ever
increasing hierarchy of fear. Starting
by exposing them to the smallest fear
stimulus and then slowly escalating it until they are ready to face their fear in
full! The question still remains
however, how can you use this
method to help you overcome your
fear of speaking to someone you’re
attracted to? There’s a simple five step method I’ve
identified to guide you through the
process: Accept
Exercise
Identify
Overcome
Understand Accept Accept you have a fear. You realise
that you want to improve yourself and
do something to help you meet your
ideal partner. You have a fear
whatever it is and you’re looking to
get over it. Buying this book is the first step towards wanting to do
something, but it doesn’t mean
anything if you aren’t willing to action
the processes you’re learning. In this
way Accept could also translate into
action. As you need to actually do the things you accept you want to change. Exercise Develop an exercise to help you get
over your fears. Focus your mind on
your breathing, take a long slow
count of ten while slowly and steadily
breathing in and out. Concentrate on
your own breathing, he sounds of your breath and the motion of your
lungs instead of the fearful situation to
hand. This will give you something to
help you focus when you’re exposed
to a fearful situation. Identify Identify your specific phobia or
anxiety. What situation scares you the
most? Meeting a stranger online?
Talking to someone in your current
social life? Whatever scares you the
most identify the problem and then take steps to designing the best way
to gently expose yourself to the
fearful situations. For example lets say
your fear is approaching in a coffee
shop. You want to start by choosing
the least fearful situation imaginable. So perhaps begin by triggering a
longer conversation with the shop
worker. After this you can move on to
perhaps talking to an older person in
the same line as you. Then you can
move on to talking to someone of the same sex. Eventualy you will move on to someone who you’re not attracted
to of the same sex, until finally you’re
speaking to someone you are
attracted to of the opposite sex. Even if
initially the entire conversation only
lasts 10 seconds. Eventaully you will work it up until you’re incredibly
comfortable talking to people in any
coffee shop anytime. Overcome Once you’ve managed to build up the
fearful situations to a point where you
feel you can’t take it much further
simple rely on focusing on your
breathing instead of the situation at
hand, until you realise that you actually can’t be hurt in the situation.
Once you make this realisation you
should find yourself calming down.
Then you can begin to push things
further again. You should be able to
repeat this process for any of your fears to be able to overcome all of
them. Understand Finally you should come to the
realisation that fears truly are just that.
Fears. None of them are actually
dangerous enough to hurt you. And
beside the odd bruised ego. You
should come through every situation completely fine. Esspecially if you
follow the advice in this book on how
to approach someone you’ve never
met before in the correct way.
Eventually you should come to the
understanding that situations similar to those you’ve already encountered
aren’t to be feared and your phobias
and anxietys will be a thing of the past
allowing you to continue developing
your social skills. The second approach to remove
anxiety is a little more drastic. It is commonly known as flooding, the
best way to explain it would be a
comparison to the previous method. If
you were attempting to overcome a
fear of spiders then systematic
desensitization would take the form of slow exposure to pictures of spiders,
then eventually moving images until
eventually you became so comfortable
around the images that you were
capable of holding a real spider and
eventually you would get over your fear. Flooding would involve throwing you
into a bathtub full of spiders, and
when you eventually calmed down
due to your body becoming
exhausted from the fear you would
find that the fear disappeared as you observed that mere exposure to the
spiders hadn’t actually caused you any
permanent harm. Right now I’m sure you’re thinking
that being thrown into a bathtub full
of members of the opposite sex
doesn’t sound that bad. However
unfortunately for the majority of you
reading this you don’t actually have a fear of the opposite sex. Your fear is
rather one of approaching them. So in
that case the “flooding” solution
would in fact be to make the approach so unbelievably uncomfortable that
once you did it and realised nothing
bad happened, doing it normally
would be a walk in the park. In the past I’ve made students wear
funny costumes, speak in funny
accents, and even begin the
conversation using expletives.
Though I’ve found the best way is to
just wander up to someone and ask for their hand in marriage. It’s a scary
situation enough, incredibly awkward
but socially acceptable enough to not
give you too much trouble with
passers by who may over hear. The
other benefit of doing this is that if the person says yes, you’ve saved
yourself the trouble of having to move
on to the next person, and you can
finish your quest there after the one
approach! Whichever method you choose to use
remember that your chances of
success are zero unless you actually
begin the conversation, so get over
that fear, go out there and start getting
the girls you want!
|
CHAT
