•“I can’t just walk up and talk to her, I’ll look foolish.”
You can calm your anxious mind by repeating to yourself, “I can handle it.” “No matter what happens, I’ll handle it.”
For example, when you are interacting with a woman whom you find attractive, your anxiety level will begin to skyrocket. The powerful board members of your mind immediately go into action to get your anxiety back down. They start whispering to the other board members, “She’s out of your league,” “You’ll be intruding,” or “She probably has a boyfriend.”
Because your mind doesn’t like feeling anxious, and asking this woman out could lead to all kinds of unexpected results, you believe all the things your mind tells you. You either don’t ask her out or you ask her indirectly and nothing ever happens. (To the board members of your mind, this is success!)
Here is what you can do to soothe your anxiety enough to approach this woman. Talk back to your mental board of directors, “That may all be true, but I can handle it.”
As you interact with a woman you are interested in, keep repeating to yourself, “I can handle it.” Repeat it as many times as is necessary to keep you moving forward.
Remember, your goal is not to make your anxiety go away. Your goal is to move forward EVEN when you are feeling anxious.
It is amazing just how repeating, “I can handle it” can help you move forward and take action in situations that would have previously kept you frozen.
Stop Thinking and Start Acting
Since your mind is a problem-solving machine, you analyze and think a lot. Unfortunately, the more you think and ruminate about something, the more your mind becomes paralyzed with “what ifs” and anxiety. Have you ever noticed that the more you think about a particular situation or a particular woman, the more your anxiety goes up and the more you actually avoid doing anything?
Here’s some good news – thinking causes anxiety, but acting cures it.
One of the most powerful ways to soothe your anxiety is to not let your mind freak itself out by thinking too much. If there is something you need to do, do it now! That’s the most effective way to bust anxiety. Act!
Let’s say you are standing in line in a coffee shop and an attractive woman is standing next to you or you are in a club and a woman looks your way and smiles. Don’t wait. Don’t think too much about it.
Follow the “3 second rule.” If you think about approaching a woman, do it in 3 seconds or less. Waiting longer to act will give you too much time think about everything that might go wrong, and you’ll get uptight and not do anything.
Another rule is that you can’t spend more time thinking about a woman than you have actually spent with her.
Many bad daters get obsessed thinking about some woman whom they have never actually talked to or dated. Sometimes this woman doesn’t even know the guy exists or that he is interested in her. This is a waste of time and creates tons of unnecessary anxiety.
Waiting for anxiety to go away so you can interact with women will never happen. The only way to bust the anxiety is to repeatedly interact with them. And just for the record, attractive women make all men nervous. It is amazing how once you stop thinking so much and start acting how much your anxiety will begin to abate.
That is why all of the tools and assignments in Dating Essentials for Men are geared toward getting you to take action. The more you act, the more confident and comfortable you will become with doing things outside your comfort zone. So stop thinking, start acting!
Treat Dating Like a Scientific Experiment
When you interact with a woman whom you find attractive, you have already given her a certain amount of power to “accept” or “reject” you. That’s why you have anxiety. A great way to soothe this anxiety is to look at dating as a scientific experiment.
Instead of interacting with women hoping you don’t get rejected, try interacting with them and experimenting with what seems to effectively get their attention and what doesn’t. Don’t worry about outcomes. Be a good scientist. Just observe responses.
Keep a tally of high and low interest responses. Don’t take anything a woman does personally, because it’s not. She’s just a subject in your research study.
This attitude helps lower your anxiety and increases the likelihood that you will interact with women more naturally, boldly, and effectively.
For example, talk to women and ask them a poll question just to see how they respond. Practice teasing women and observe their reaction. Kiss women on the cheek to see if it seems to increase their interest level. Do it in the name of science.
When you test for interest with no attachment to outcome, you will be able to take more risks, appear more confident, and interact with a lot more women. So, put on your lab coat and grab your clipboard and get going.
Soothe Your Anxiety, Don’t Manage It
Anxiety is a part of life. It won’t kill you!
As long as you are moving forward in life and pushing your edge, you will experience anxiety. Everyone does. If you feel a little bit excited and a little bit scared, it is a sign that you are alive and kicking and challenging yourself.
To blast your dating anxiety, practice the following basic social skills every day.
•Consciously expand your route every day. Go places you don’t regularly go. Get out around people.
•Ask people you don’t know how their day is going so far (men, women, children, etc.). Do this daily.
•Make eye contact with and smile at people (men, women, children, etc.) every day.
•Every day, start a conversation with someone you don’t know (man or woman).
•Get to rejection quickly.
While you are doing these things every day;
•Practice soothing your anxiety rather than managing it.
•Feel your fear and do it anyway.
•Lean into anxiety.
•Welcome the opportunity to blast away your self-limiting beliefs.
•Don’t give up.
•Don’t let one bad experience or one rejection inhibit you.
•Don’t take one woman’s rejection as proof that you are a loser and will never find love.
•Keep at it until it feels second nature.
•Most important, have fun.
Chapter 6 presents more self-soothing techniques to help you follow through on the suggestions above.
Chapter 6: Take a Breath and Soothe Yourself
Breathe up through your asshole.
This chapter presents a number of techniques you can you use to soothe yourself anytime you feel anxious. Any time you get outside of your comfort zone, you will feel some degree of anxiety. This is normal. This is what life is about.
As long as you are growing and challenging yourself, anxiety will be a familiar companion. Remember, we aren’t trying to eliminate anxiety, the goal is to learn how to effectively soothe it as you take bold action in life.
Breathe Using Your Diaphragm
Diaphragmatic breathing is the healthiest way to breathe and is a first step in normalizing your nervous system in order to soothe anxiety or panic symptoms.
Diaphragmatic breathing is the most natural way to breathe. Observe how a very young baby breathes – they will use their diaphragm/belly with each breath.
Years of poor posture, anxious thinking, tension and pressure will usually result in breathing patterns which are less-than-ideal and which will commonly involve:
Rapid, upper chest breathing, leading to ––>
Over-breathing, leading to ––>
Depletion of carbon dioxide stores
Relearning to use your diaphragm in breathing and to reduce your rate of breathing is an important first step in soothing the symptoms of anxiety, anger, panic, etc.
Upper chest, rapid breathing gets rid of too much carbon dioxide causing us to feel agitated and breathless. It causes our nervous system to go into overdrive.
To check how you are breathing:
&nb
sp; •Rest one hand on your upper chest and the other over your navel area.
•Breathe normally for a minute or so
•Notice which hand rises first when you inhale.
If the upper hand rises first you are using upper chest breathing. If the lower hand rises first you are breathing with your diaphragm. If both move at the same time you are using a mix of both.
How to Use Your Diaphragm
Spend a few minutes a couple of times a day practicing using your diaphragm:
•Sit in an upright position looking straight ahead. You can close your eyes if it helps you to concentrate on the process.
•Put one palm on your upper chest and the other over your navel. (Your objective is to have the lower hand rise first when you breathe in.)
•Breathe out gently and effortlessly. Now wait for a second or two until the body spontaneously begins the inhalation - this will occur naturally and of its own accord.
•Allow the air to naturally flow in again until it stops, again of its own accord. Make no effort whatsoever to deepen the inhalation. You are allowing your body to find its own natural rate of breathing. Relaxing into the process, allow your breathing to slow down and become more and more shallow.
•Continue doing this for about 4-5 minutes.
•Hint: Pretend you are breathing up through your asshole!
Whenever you feel stressed (or anytime you think about it), take a moment and slowly take a few breaths from deep down in your diaphragm. Notice how you immediately feel calmer and your mind slows down.
Visualize Positive Results
Your mind is a problem-solving machine. When presented with a problem or challenge, it will tend to analyze and predict every possible outcome – positive and negative. In most social situations, your mind will do this in a split second.
Unfortunately, your mind can’t tell the difference between real and perceived outcomes. It treats them all the same and believes that they are all equally possible.
Your mind creates its own reality based on what it can imagine. These imagined outcomes are often influenced by self-limiting beliefs and past experiences.
In addition, your mind doesn’t distinguish well between past, present, and future. Imagined future outcomes feel exactly the same and carry the same weight as experiences from the past and present. Your mind can’t tell the difference between a well-imagined thought and reality.
The brighter and/or more creative you are, the more possible outcomes to any situation your mind can imagine. Because you can easily imagine all the possible negative outcomes of any personal endeavor, you get overwhelmed and typically do nothing.
Your creative mind is extremely capable of creating lurid, nightmare scenarios and negative consequences to pretty much every new or unfamiliar life situation. I call all of these possible negative outcomes “trap doors.”
•“What if she has a boyfriend and he beats me up?”
•“If I approach a woman, I probably won’t be able to think of anything interesting to say and she’ll walk away.”
•“What if she thinks I’m intruding? I hate it when people intrude on me.”
•“What if I we go out and I end up breaking up with her and she goes ballistic?”
•“What if I can’t satisfy her in bed and she leaves me for another man?”
Whether you realize it or not, your mind is probably extremely effective at creating trap doors. Since your mind tells you these things could happen, your mind believes they will. Your mind creates so many possible negative scenarios that no matter which way you go, you see potential trap doors awaiting you.
Why not visualize positive results instead? Since your mind will believe anything you tell it, it will assume that what you are telling it is true.
Here’s an example of the power of visualizing positive results. Researchers divided basketball teams into two groups. They had one group practice shooting 100 free throws at the end of every practice. They had the second group just visualize shooting 100 free throws at the end of every practice. Of course, the visualizing group never missed a shot in their visualization while the group shooting free throws missed several actual shots.
When it came to game situations, the visualizing group actually made a higher percentage of their free throws than the group that shot 100 at the end of every practice. That’s the power of visualization!
Instead of rerunning old scenarios of rejection and past failures whenever you think about interacting with women, visualize success. Create a visual in your mind of women smiling and responding positively when you interact with them. Keep visualizing until your mind becomes comfortable with these outcomes.
In the Dating Essentials for Men Workbook, I give an assignment to help you practice some positive visualizations.
Practice this: Visualize a woman you find attractive but have never interacted with in a direct way. See yourself interacting with her and asking her out for coffee. See the smile on her face as she replies, “I’d love to.” Repeat until you overcome the resistance of your mind (remember, even in fantasy, your mind wants to hold on to its old ways of protecting you from anxiety). I encourage you to visualize this scene several times a day until this scenario actually becomes plausible to the committee in your mind.
Stop Trying to Figure Out Why Women Do What They Do
Several years ago when my stepson was in his early teens, he was watching a teen drama on television. One of the female characters on the show was creating all kinds of emotional turmoil – drama. In frustration, he turned to his fourteen-year-old sister and asked, “Why do girls do that?” His sister in all of her adolescent female wisdom replied, “How the hell would I know? I don’t know why I do what I do half the time!”
Most people don’t know why they do what they do. Most behavior is controlled by unconscious factors. It is a waste of time to try and figure out why people do what they do. Bad daters spend way too much time trying to figure women out. They often ask “Why did she do that?” I usually respond with “Who the hell knows and why do you care?”
Don’t analyze women. Don’t try and figure them out. You have no idea what is going on in their lives or in their minds. Their behavior has nothing to do with you. As David Deida, the author of The Way of the Superior Man puts it, “They are the weather.”
A woman either has high interest in you or she has low interest. It isn’t personal either way. Don’t try and figure out why.
For example, a while back I left a restaurant with a group of friends. Several people were standing outside about to enter. I approached one of the women in a friendly manner. She was abrupt and turned away. I started to walk away when she turned back to me and said, “I’m sorry, we’re in the middle a crisis here. My friend just lost her wallet.” Then the woman proceeded to chat with me for several minutes and introduced me to some of her friends. If I had taken her initial behavior personally or tried to figure it out, I would have completely misinterpreted her response.
When you stop trying to figure out why people do what they do, your anxiety level will go down. When you quit taking things personally and realize that what a woman does has much less to do with you than you imagine, you will be able to interact with them with more confidence and less anxiety. This in itself will increase your likelihood of success.
Get to Rejection Quickly
Most bad daters interact with women hoping to not get rejected. This is like going to bat in baseball hoping you don’t strike out. It will make you timid, guarded and anxious. It is better to get into the batter’s box looking for a pitch that you can take a good cut at. It relaxes you and helps you do your best.
Interacting with women trying to get rejected is one of the most effective ways I know to calm anxiety. If you are looking for the one technique that will revolutionize your dating, this is it. This is the nuclear bomb that will obliterate your anxiety and turn you into a true dating machine!
Since you are trying to get rejected, you have nothing to
fear when you interact with a woman. If you have nothing to fear, you appear and act more confidently. This will allow you to take more chances. By taking more chances, more doors open up to you. This cycle repeats itself over and over.
Whenever you find yourself feeling anxious about interacting with women in general or a specific woman, tell yourself, “Okay, let’s see if I can get her to reject me.”
Then lean into the anxiety and see how quickly you can get to rejection. Not only does this lower your anxiety, it will lead to a lot of women responding with unexpected high interest!
Chapter 7: Use the Secret Women Don't Want You to Know to Your Advantage
“A woman’s greatest asset is a man’s imagination.” Anne Corio
Odds are, a primary reason you are reading this book is that you have an unrealistic and unsubstantiated fantasy about women and what they can do for you. If you are like most bad daters, your distorted beliefs about women create several problems for you.
These distorted beliefs:
•Make you anxious around women.
•Make it more difficult for you to approach women and talk to them.
•Make you care way too much what women think about you.
•Force you to hide your perceived “faults” from women which makes it impossible for you to be honest and transparent.
•Make women seem powerful and unattainable.
•Create feelings of helplessness, rage, and resentment toward women.
•Keep you from setting the tone and taking the lead with women.
•Make it difficult for you to have an intimate relationship with women.
•Keep you home playing Xbox or surfing the net, fantasizing about finding the woman of your dreams, but never actually doing what it takes to meet her.
Myth’s About Women
Many of your distorted beliefs about women are the result of a feminine mythology that permeates our culture. Literature, poetry, music, movies, advertising, pornography – all create an image of women as objects of mystery and desire. If you have bought into these beliefs and stereotypes, welcome to the club.
On one hand, this feminine mythology does a disservice to both men and women. The myths actually get in the way of women finding the deep connectedness with a man that they crave. The mythology also keeps men confused, insecure, and anxious around women. Neither of these situations serve women or men well.
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