For the uninitiated an ‘approach’ is going up to and talking to a ‘set’, which is a girl or group of people that you want to ‘game’, which is talk to, amuse, work and chat-up. One of my goals when taking the Bootcamp was to work on my AA, which stands for ‘Approach Anxiety’ and is the fear of going up and talking to people or chatting them up. I had a pretty severe case of this and I think I really had AP (Approach Phobia). Reading The Game it fascinated me that these guys took time out of their lives to work on this problem, and did THOUSANDS of approaches to banish their AA. In fact this really excited me. Good Lord, I thought, say if my current level is chronic PA then how much AA will I have after say 100 approaches? Probably not much. “I can cure this” I thought. All I have to do is repeatedly go up to and speak to people.
Ahem. Cough cough. Wood. Trees.
“Even by approach number thirty I probably won’t care 20% of what I did at approach one“. Wow. I can just get out there, swallow a bitter pill and plow through this! Imagine being able to go up and talk to anyone. To have no fear of ANYONE. (except dangerous looking people of course). God that would be awesome.
Doing the Bootcamp some of the trainers mentioned they’d done over a thousand approaches. A thousand! These numbers started to turn me on. God if I talked to three women a day in a year I could have approached a thousand women! I’ll have no AA whatsoever by then!
Well my goals have mellowed a bit by then, and I don’t think the numbers game is a long term plan, but at the minute will do me a bit of good. I’d like to do at least a hundred approaches. Not in my life, but in the next few months. To me that’s a huge achievement. Especially for someone who has probably in their life ‘cold’ approached women, goodness, I dunno.. maybe five times? It’s hard to work out.. it happens so rarely I can’t even remember.
But hang on, not all approaches are equal. Let’s focus on two kinds of approaches.
Type A (“The Inner-Game Approach”)
You approach a woman as a confident person. You are not apologetic for talking to her. You are not blabbering nervously or saying stupid things. You do not ‘want her to like you’, you are not in that frame. You take the mindset that you are you, you are funny and cool and nice, you are talking to a girl who looks nice. If she also is a nice person then maybe you’ll click and hit it off. And although you aren’t needy and dependant on the outcome you are totally at ease with the fact that you are attractive to some women and it is perfectly normal for a woman to find you attractive, and that if you were to get it on with this woman this would not be an exceptional, rare event.
Type B (The AA Approach)
You are terrified of approaching. You stare a lot at women in bars but are too shy to speak to them. You constantly drift near them and try to engineer little situations where you can have an excuse to speak to them. If you do ever pluck up the courage you are riddled with nerves and don’t enjoy the situation. You’re doing it because you feel you should, not because you want to. You don’t want to talk to her, you just want s*x or a girlfriend. When you do talk to her you’re jumpy, nervous and say stupid things. You have low self esteem and find it hard to imagine a girl really being attracted to or wanting you. You just hope some woman will see something in you and decide you are her type.
So bearing these two types of approach in mind now I can ask myself again “how many Type A totally cold approaches have I done in my life?“. (by totally cold I mean with no introduction, connection or excuse to talk to her whatsoever)
That’s easy…. no more than ten.
So 1991 (age 16, about time to start) to 2010: <10
2-day bootcamp in March: 13
Result.
So getting back to the 100 approaches it’s a big goal to me. I’m going to keep a record of them on this blog and track how my confidence levels, state, skills and results change over the course of it.
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