I concur with Mr. Jibbles (I love that name).
Most of you know I am a strong supporter of taking tiny little steps toward mastery. Smaller than you would normally think.
I'm convinced that many, if not most of us here suffer from social anxiety. There is something in many of us that causes us to feel dreadfully uncomfortable in social situations and meeting new people. I stress that this is not all of us, but I would venture over 50%.
In psychiatric circles there is a defined phenomenon called "habituation". Picture yourself moving into a new apartment. You go to sleep at night, and you hear the oil burner turn on and find that it's way louder than you're comfortable with. It keeps you awake. Several nights go by, and the discomfort lessens until a week or two later and your inner psyche (whatever that is) has totally accepted the noise and has erased it as an annoyance. You have "habituated" to the noise and it simply doesn't register in your consciousness anymore.
Now apply that to talking with women. Habituate yourself to asking for the time, saying hello, how are you, saying wow, that's a great color for you.
Understand that you will be met with a smile maybe 25% of the time, and the rest of the responses may be less than ideal. You are training yourself to NOT CARE.
I repeat: You are habituating yourself to dispassionately ACCEPT that most interactions will not be ideal. Once you completely accept that fact without self-judgment, you will go on to more involved conversations because you will feel more comfortable.
Our greatest enemy is outcome-dependance. It stems from the ILLUSION that most of us hold that men are able to be universally attractive, as women are. It ain't happenin' folks.
We men are visually attracted to feminine affectations. That means makeup, body shape, hair style, etc. The person inside doesn't even matter till later. The fact is that we will be initially attracted to ANY woman who visually displays attention to looks. Therefore almost any woman who is not fat can go to CVS and purchase UNIVERSAL attractiveness at the makeup counter. She puts her makeup on and she is UNIVERSALLY attractive.
Not so for us men. Women respond to different types. Only a small percentage of men are able to be universally attractive on the surface, and that boils down to genetics plus a sense of style. Most of us don't have that, and therefore we will only be attractive to a certain subset of the female population. We cannot, by and large, be universally attractive as women can.
Therefore, when we approach, we know that we absolutely MUST, without fail, experience frequent rejection. It then behoves us to not give a **** about this certainty in life.
Our downfall is that we care. We have to stop caring and instead create a frame where we know full well that we will only appeal to a percentage of the female population. It then really does become a numbers game.
Accept rejection. Rejection is an inescapable certainty, and therefore we should embrace each rejection as another rung on the ladder toward mastery.
By caring about rejection we are literally feeling bad about somebody rejecting us who we have no idea under the sun who they really are. Bad grammar, but you get the point. We respond to feminine affectations, without regard for the personality. Personality comes in after the physical.
So Atom Smasher's new axiom is "Don't give a sh!t."
Make approach mechanical; make it something you do in order to climb up to where you want to be. You are stepping on the heads of those entitled, arrogant princesses in order to climb up to finding a girl worthy of your respect. You are trampling them underfoot for not seeing the greatness in you.
Failure and rejection are absolutely unavoidable. Therefore, we must embrace failure and rejection and regard them as the mechanism or vehicle of our growth and ultimate victory.
Do not care. The dynamics of male/female relations is a fact of life that is written in stone. Therefore USE it, and don't be used by it. In the beginning the woman has the upper hand (choice) but she gives up everything in submission to a man later.
You cannot be universally attractive. It will never happen. Women in fact can be. We must not let that fact discourage us. We are the ones who have built this world, we are the ones who take the hammer to ourselves to forge ourselves into men of substance. We are the ones who strive to live by principle. We are the ones who own and rule this world. We have so many advantages that trump women's ONLY advantage, which is universal attractiveness via looks.
We have a pretty sweet deal when we learn to accept these facts. Fail your way to success. Learn to absolutely LOVE failure. Failure is the very structure upon which you are building a life of ultimate success. Every great man who stands at a great height is standing on a mountain of previous failures.
Don't strive to be universally attractive to women. Strive instead to be the best man you can be. In so doing you will be attractive to a larger and larger subset of women. By habituating yourself to rejection, you will be unstoppable. After all, why should the opinion of a lump of flesh with makeup on matter at all? You have no idea under the sun who that person actually is. More than likely (by the law of averages, and by the fact that she is unfriendly toward you), she is a vapid shell, just doing and thinking what the media tells her to do and think. She is worthless to you.
Only the ones who respond positively to you are worth anything at all to you. Don't fret over the worthless. What a waste of emotional energy! The worthless ones are the majority, the dirt you have to dig through to find the diamonds.
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