State Control

[SheepSter]

Now what I mean by state control, is the ability to remain relaxed, and not freak out at the prospect of approaching women. In fact, a lot of guys, clam up just seeing an attractive women, let alone approaching one. In my eyes it is key to have state control. Because that is exactly what makes approaching easy.

**For reasons beyond me the word: out ward, is censored instead I now use ovtward**

Situational Comfort

What I want to talk about is something I call “situational comfort”. Ever walk into a bar or club and feel uncomfortable or out of place? I mean, can you stand in a nightclub, all by yourself, with no agenda and be perfectly comfortable? Or how about this… have you ever been in a women’s clothing boutique by yourself at the mall? Think you could do it? Or would you be embarrassed looking at women’s clothes. Could you walk around a Victoria’s Secret lingerie store, inspect the women’s lingerie, and be perfectly comfortable? These are all places you might not normally visit or just hang around in. You may feel awkward being there, especially since you’ll be surrounded by attractive women and you may have no particular true reason to be there. Walking through Victoria’s Secret, you may be uncomfortable and think to yourself that everyone is wondering why you’re there. At the very least you may find yourself walking a little faster than you usually would and not be relaxed.
Almost everyone has a situational anxiety problem in certain situations. Even the most outgoing, sociable people encounter anxiety in certain settings. Just because you get anxious in certain situations however doesn’t mean you’re shy. Situational anxiety and shyness are completely different things. You can be an outgoing and easy person among your friends, and then become anxious in certain situations like being in a club, a women’s boutique store, the mall, or when an attractive woman passes by. Your common sense becomes heavily distorted by the anxiety, you lose your ovtward focus and begin the internal self-talk of internal focus. You become paranoid that people are noticing you.

This is all an illusion. You’re making assumptions based on your fight or flight response, rather than on the facts of the situation. Hence, your social individual skills break down as your body language takes a defensive posture. When you start to avoid situations, like going to a club or a party even when you’re invited, the anxiety is to said to have become “phobic”. I call this passive phobia where we’re making choices that avoid social situations when we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. Like we start going to bed early when we could have stayed up late and gone out. Or when we prefer to play video games or watch sports rather than go out and meet new people.

And yes, it's curable. You can get rid of your situational anxiety and it’s important that you do so if you want to move to the next level with approaching women. The number one phobia of people in the Western world isn’t death, its public speaking and they’ll tell you that the basic way to get rid of your fear of public speaking is know the room, know the audience, know your material, and know how to relax. For dealing with situational anxiety, the same elements apply. Know the room, know the audience, know your material, and learn how to relax.

I have this friend who can have a good time and is comfortable just about anywhere. He can walk into a sex toy shop and talk to the sales clerk lady as if he was in a pet food store. He can walk into an expensive women’s clothing boutique, be the only guy there, and act like he owns the place. However, he’s not the kind of guy who goes out to nightclubs. So when we went to a club together, he became uncomfortable and couldn’t relax.

That’s NORMAL though. If you’re not used to something, if you’re in a new social experience, SURE you’re going to be uncomfortable. That’s a normal HUMAN response. And you are human, right.

The only way to become really comfortable and at home in a nightclub, or a mall, or a women’s clothing store is to actually spend time in one. You actually have to walk in there and just spend time there, putting no pressure on yourself to do anything or be anyone.

You also need to know your audience, so you need to spend time in the presence of people and attractive women and learn that they’re not going to bite you. They won’t even notice you. The key is to just blend in, relax, and get use to being in the situation that you’re at a club or that you’re looking at women’s lingerie at Victoria Secret.

And then, and only then, will you be relaxed enough to approach women in such a way that you can consistently and successfully elicit a good, positive response from them.

Ovtward Focus vs Inward Focus

Now another important aspect of state control is having an ovtward focus instead of an inward focus. When you’re inwardly focused, it’s your internal dialogue or self-talk that’s controlling you. When you’re inwardly focused, you’re consciously weighing risks, analyzing the situation, and basing your actions on preconceived judgements, which usually translates into hesitation and fear.

Now being able to inwardly focus is an incredibly useful skill to have when say, writing a research paper or working through a personal problem in your life. Being able to inwardly focused and not being distracted by outside stimuli can mean better success at school or at your work.

However, when approaching women, that inwardly focused state really isn’t useful. Approaching women requires an ovtwardly focused state of mind, where your focus isn’t on thinking about the situation, but rather acting on it.
Here’s the difference. When you’re inwardly focused, you’re paying attention to the self-talk going on inside your head. But when you’re ovtwardly focused, you’re paying attention to what’s right in front of you.

When you’re inwardly focused, you’re thinking about a goal or a result, like “I have to get her to like me.” But when you’re ovtwardly focused, you act.

When you’re inwardly focused, you’re nervous or trying to whip up confidence. But when you’re ovtwardly focused, you’re relaxed and natural.

When you’re inwardly focused, you’re analysis oriented and reacting to the situation. But when you’re ovtwardly focused, you’re action oriented and leading the situation.

When you’re inwardly focused you think about all the things that could go wrong or what you say. When you’re ovtwardly focused, you run on auto-pilot and are relaxed in knowing that whatever you say will make a good impression.

Think about it, everyone spends part of their day at least ovtwardly focused so it’s a state you’re already very familiar with. For example, when you’re hanging out with your best friends, you’re not concerned about what they’re going to think of you if you do this or if you say that. It’s just natural, you’re just comfortable with them. You’re not thinking to yourself, “Okay, so what do I say next.” The conversation just flows on its own.
When you walk, you’re not inwardly focused on where your legs are moving. They walk one in front of the other, naturally. It’s not a conscious process, you’re not dedicating that internal voice, that self-talk to directing your legs. That internal voice doesn’t say to you, “uh oh what if I fall down, then what.”

Here’s the killer. You might spend most of your day internally focused, you’re job might require that you spend most of your time by yourself doing a repetitive task over and over again, or a thinking task that requires almost no distraction. So you get a lot of practice at being internally focused, and it can be hard to break out of that pattern when it’s that time in the day that you want to go out and meet women.

Flipping The Switch

So you go out to approach and open women, and you have all this internal self talk going on that’s creating doubt and hesitation. You’re internally focused inside your own head and you can’t get out of it. You need a fast, quick, reliable way to switch from being inwardly focused to being ovtwardly focused where you’re just running on adrenaline and action.

What you need is a way to FLIP the switch of inward focus to ovtward focus instantly at once, in an ovtwardly focused way.
It’s not alcohol. Alcohol is a depressant and with most people actually makes them more reserved and less talkative.

The way to violently and rapidly and reliably flip that switch, to go from internal focus to ovtward focus, is to actually do an approach. Or what I like to call a bullsh*t approach.

 

[SheepSter]

The Bullsh*t Approach

The first approach you do, you’re going to be in the wrong state of mind. You’re going to give off the wrong kind of energy. Most likely you’re going to come across as less than eloquent to women, perhaps nervous sounding, almost as if you’re fighting yourself to go through with the interaction.

But a really amazing thing happens after that first approach. No matter what kind of response you get from the woman, good or neutral, your brain switches into a pumped up, adrenaline packed ovtwardly focused state of mind that makes the next approach much, much easier.

And then, after the second approach, you’re even more high and the third and fourth approaches become even easier and easier. By the time you reach 10 approaches, you feel like you’re on top of the world, like you can do anything and it doesn’t even matter if the next woman doesn’t give you the ideal response because you know it’s a breeze to approach the next 10 women.

However, it’s that very, very first approach that’s the hardest. Here’s the paradox. You want to be in a great, playful, take action kind of state when approaching women. But it’s damn near impossible to get into that kind of state UNTIL you do your first approach.

So everything hinges on getting past that first approach. And to take the pressure off, I like to think of that first approach as a “bullsh*t approach” in that I know it’s going to be garbage. I know I’m not projecting the best state to that first woman. I know that I may even stumble over my own words and forget everything I’m supposed to remember. I know that nothing is going to come out of that first interaction.

But that’s okay. The first opener is always the bullsh*t. The first approach you can always expect to suck. Don’t worry about it, just make it a piece of garbage, have no expectations of the outcome.

The only point of the bullsh*t approach is to FLIP that switch, to get your brain from internal to ovtward focus, to get the hormones and serotonin levels, the natural drugs of your own mind, up and flowing.

What If I'm Caught Off Guard?

Sometimes, you’re walking along perhaps lost in a thought or anxious to get somewhere when all of a sudden you’re caught off guard… out of nowhere an extremely attractive woman walks by.

Suddenly, you break out of your internally focused state but for whatever reason you’re not in the mental state of doing an approach.

For most of us, going from that internal focus to an outgoing, ovtward focus approach mode in mere moments is too abrupt.
That’s why one thing that works for me, is I trance ahead.

Meaning, as I’m walking down a grocery store aisle for example, I imagine in my mind that an attractive woman will appear as I turn the corner. If it turns out no attractive woman is there, so what, but if there is, I’m mentally prepared for it, I’m mentally ready to do the approach because I visualized it only moments before it actually happening.

In fact, you can practice being in this ahead-of-time ready-for-anything mode for a few hours at a time as a way of training your mind not to be lazy, as a way of training your mind to be ovtwardly focused on doing the next approach… because you never know when that next attractive woman will be just around the corner or show up in your life in the next moment. Visually trance ahead so you don’t miss that next opportunity simply because you were caught off guard.

You Start The Day Back At Zero

Now one thing to keep in mind that this barrier, this issue of hesitation on the first approach of the day, will never go away. Every morning, no matter how many approaches you did the previous day, you start the next morning back at zero. Because after you sleep, the mind has a tendency to go back into that internally focused state by the time you wake up the next morning.

So every day you’re going to have to do that bullsh*t approach again just to get back into that ovtwardly focused state. That’s normal however, and it will get easier and easier with time.

 

[dearsappho]

I like this post, but it fails to explain how to practically overcome the hesitancy...like most paradox posts on this board, what it comes down to is the notion of JUST DO IT...and that isnt really helpful to someone that just doesnt understand the concept of how...

 

[Miles Davis]

Originally posted by dearsappho
I like this post, but it fails to explain how to practically overcome the hesitancy...like most paradox posts on this board, what it comes down to is the notion of JUST DO IT...and that isnt really helpful to someone that just doesnt understand the concept of how...

Well the concept of "Just Do it" is clearer when you understand the idea of inward state vs ******d state. ******d state effectively preaches the "Just Do It" mentality, but SheepSter has explained it in a more logical way. I have been internally focused for the past couple months a majority of my day and it's something that I was not even aware of. When you are in your thouhts that deep, you need something to snap you out of it. That's what this post did.

Good job.

 

[thefonz]

this has always been one of my biggest problems....flipping the switch that is......sheepster, is there any general timeline for how long i will have to go practice BS approaches before i wake up in the morning and can flip the switch automatically??

 

[SheepSter]

Originally posted by thefonz

this has always been one of my biggest problems....flipping the switch that is......sheepster, is there any general timeline for how long i will have to go practice BS approaches before i wake up in the morning and can flip the switch automatically??

I wouldn't practice several BS approaches. Do one, then get the real game going. Doing a BS approach is the easiest way to flip the switch. But always realise that the BS approach is nothing more than a way to state change. It is very important that you look at it this way.

There is another way to flip the switch, automatically. It's simple: get alot of succes. Once you start having alot of succes there's no need for state chance, because you're already feeling your best, which effects your state on a constant basis and keeps you ovtwardly focused.

I already answered your question, since flipping the switch automatically in the morning, goes hand in hand with having succes. The feeling and state are pretty hard to describe. But I think that at it's best it comes closest to the state when you're walking in the sun after you just layed a girl.

A good indication is when your first BS approach actually goes very well, and you actually close. Then it's safe to say you can switch it automatically.

I also read that with NLP it can be done automatic using something called "uptime", but I don't use that stuff, so you'll have to search for that yourself.

 

[Stackthestyles]

bump