How To Conquer Approach Anxiety

 

Approach anxiety is and unusual or unpleasant nervous feeling that you get when approaching people or strangers you’ve never met before

 

This is particularly common for men when approaching a woman they find attractive

 

The reason I want to talk about this is I just actually caught up with two of my private coaching clients independently and they both brought up the topic of approach anxiety

 

They both said “You know I don’t know what it is but why is it that I still find it so hard just to go and talk to someone?”

 

There are scary and dangerous things we do in life every day that logically are definitely scarier than just talking to a random person

 

A lot of guys struggle to overcome approach anxiety. I know it was really big for me as well when I was first learning to meet women

 

It seems really hard to just ‘get it into your head’ that you can just walk up to a complete stranger and start talking to them and hope that it goes alright

 

I’m going to share with you guys a few of the ways that you can minimise the horrible feelings of approach anxiety

 

Practice Experiencing Social Pressure

I do a lot of filming in public places and often I’m standing talking to a camera somewhere and people are all walking past and looking at me like I’m crazy hahaha

 

That can definitely help you just to get used to the idea that plenty of people will be looking at you and help you to become comfortable with attention being on you

 

Seek out situations where you can practice doing silly things where lots of people are looking at you. This trains your mind to become comfortable with social pressure

 

An extreme social pressure exercise would be lying down on the floor in the middle of a busy shop while shoppers look at you

 

Accept the Reality of the Situation

Another really good thing that you can do is when you actually go and start talking to people, just accept that you’re meeting them for the first time

 

It seems so obvious. Of course you’re not necessarily going to be completely comfortable with someone straight away when you’ve only just met them for the first time

 

Also, why would you expect it to be any different for the person you’re meeting?

 

It’s going to be unusual for them as well so know that it’s something that you have in common with them. You’re both feeling that kind of awkwardness of just getting to know someone for the first time

 

So give yourself a break

 

Remove the Expectation of Perfection

Take the pressure off yourself

 

So many guys try to make everyone like them, and we all know having everyone like you is impossible

 

I don’t even like everyone I meet so why would I expect people I meet to be any different when they meet me?

 

HUGE REVELATION COMING UP!

 

Not everyone is going to like you

(Read the above a few times if you need)

 

Regardless of how good a person you are or how ‘good your game is’ or for any other reason some people just are not going to click with you

Start getting over it right away because as soon as you do, that’s real freedom and a new calm comes to you as you let go of the impossible task

 

Embrace Randomness

The next suggestion is to embrace the random factor of meeting complete strangers

 

Let’s be real here, would this even be any kind of fun if there wasn’t some challenge or some excitement involved with not knowing what’s going to happen?

 

It would be like watching the same movie over and over again and always knowing what was going to happen when and where. It would get pretty boring pretty quickly

 

When you embrace the randomness, when awkwardness or challenges arise, it makes it into something fun you get to overcome instead of meaning you ‘failed’ because everything didn’t work out perfectly according to some completely bogus, unrealistic standard of perfection that you or someone else made up

 

It’s impossible to control everything. What you can control is yourself. Your thoughts. Your actions

 

Put your focus and energy onto what you can control and let the outcome be as it may

 

Failure versus Lessons

The last bit of advice I will give that was a HUGE turning point for me was the concept of failure

 

What is failure really? It’s just when you don’t get the desired outcome

 

Does that mean that nothing is to be gained from the purpose of the exercise when you don’t get the outcome that you want?

 

For example, whenever a plane crashes it isn’t simply ignored and just called a failure. One of the most important outcomes of an air accident is the following investigation. Months, years and thousands of man hours and huge expense go into investigating the cause of the failure to be able to get valuable lessons. These lessons will be applied to future scenarios to ensure the negative outcome is avoided in future

 

Imagine you applied this kind of approach to your social interactions?

 

Instead of writing off an outcome you didn’t want as a failure, instead you sought the learning every time, how much would you learn? How much could you continually improve if you applied the lessons and learnings from every past negative outcome to future interactions?

 

Well it’s something that I and my clients do and it creates rapid and dramatic improvement

 

Along with this important habit comes the attitude of “You either win or you learn” which is what one of my mentors taught me when I used to beat myself up over ‘failure’

 

The only REAL failure is to fail to recognise what can be learned from every negative outcome

 

When you do this, failure disappears. Another mantra I heard for this is “There is no failure, only feedback”

 

Apply the above and notice how you feel so much more relaxed approaching perfect strangers. And even if there are still some very rational nerves when meeting complete strangers, know they become less and less with practice as you get used to it