The Master’s Secret: How You Can Beat Feeling Anxious About Approaching Women

by E

I’m always amazed just how badly guys fear approaching a strange woman. If you look at all the things we have to deal with over the course of our lives – driving high speed motorcycles, going off to war, being mugged in a dark alley – approaching a woman you don’t know seems pretty tame. That’s why it always amazes me just how badly guys fear actually walking up to a woman to talk to her.

Love Lost

I’m no different. I remember back in high school being really interested in a girl in my math class. She was on the soccer team and really popular, but also really sweet with a golden smile. She made me weak in the knees, so I knew I had to do something about it. The next Tuesday I passed by her locker a few times between classes in the morning, each time she was getting books, or checking her makeup, or talking to a friend. I was nervous as hell. “Would you please like to go on a date with me, please?” I pictured the entire scene going down, and it wasn’t pretty. Finally, that afternoon I got the guts to walk up to her while she was standing at her locker, alone. She was shoving a bag into the bottom of her locker, when she noticed me step towards her. Her smile was warm. I managed to eek out a “Hi…” before scurrying off. The scene repeated itself twice more that fall, before she was finally asked out by a guy a grade down from me and then getting knocked up just after graduation.

Even Your Grandpa Gets Anxious

The nice thing to know is that everyone is anxious about approaching women they don’t know. It’s not just me and you – some of the guys who I consider gifted with women are filled with anxiety before they approach, guys like Mystery in Toronto, and even our own Martin here in Asia. Kane Vast, on the other hand, might not get flustered before approaching. That guy has ice in his veins. For the rest of us, though, it’s good to know that there is a “master’s secret” for beating that anxiety we feel before talking to a girl. It’s a secret that I’ve been lucky enough to be let in on, and I know that Martin uses it constantly.

It’s made things a lot easier for me as well. When I first got started I used to have a phobia of everything going wrong, and I would use this as an excuse not to approach. I would see a girl standing at the subway entrance, or waiting for a train, and well up with anxiety. Deep down inside I had all these beliefs about what I knew would happen – except that what I thought would happen rarely did…or only happened within my own head. I had gotten a lot better by the time I met Martin, but what he said had a large impact on how I thought.

At first he said, “I still get anxiety before approaching a girl…” Think about this for a moment – this guy has been at it for over 10 years… that’s 10+ years of self-improvement, of walking up to strange women and starting conversations he hoped would lead to a relationship. That’s 10+ years in which he’s seen pretty much every response you can get, 10+ years where he’s been shown time after time that those negative little assumptions about what would happen when a guy approaches a woman are wrong. Yet despite all this, he still gets anxiety.

Here it Is

Moments later he revealed the master’s secret. Are you ready for it? Alright, come in close to the screen, pop your hand next to the article so nobody else can see the text.

Ready?

Good.

He said, “…I just ignore it and approach.”

Ignore it and approach?! How could something so simple be a master’s secret? Sure, it’s true that when someone gets to the top of their craft they become all philosophical, and their concepts and theories become a lot simpler but… “I just ignore it and approach”? I thought there was a little more too it than that.

In Action

Over the course of my development, though, I’ve found myself slipping into this state more and more. While I have all sorts of reasons not to open – anything could happen, I guess – and feel a wall of anxiety at times, I’ve found my self just ignoring it all and starting conversations with women I’m interested in. And you know what? It’s worked.

Take my fear of how others would see me, for example. Whenever I approach a woman, I constantly have the fear that I’ll look like a fool, that she’ll reject me, that people around me will know exactly what I’m doing, and that the result of her harsh rejection will be a room, train car, or city square full of people who find what happened to me hilarious. What could be more embarrassing than that? I’d look like a complete ass. It’s at that point that I tell my self that if I’m going to get rejected, I should just go get it over with. I ignore the worst case scenario, or any possible bad scenario, and just start talking to the girl. It never fails.

The longer you spend building competence with women, the more you come to realize just how unlikely those nasty little outcomes really are. In my experience, while I’ve definitely been ignored, nothing really bad has happened to me …and I’ve talked to thousands of women by now.

In the end, approaching women comes down to having the will to do it. While forcing yourself to talk to a woman you don’t know can be brutally hard at first, it gets tremendously easier to do it, no matter what you might be feeling. Next time you’re struggling with a lot of anxiety, don’t waste the chance. Just remember the master’s secret – just ignore it and talk to her.