Getting Over the Approach Anxiety

Approach anxiety is a term commonly used in the pick-up and seduction communities to describe that first twinge of nerves or fear you feel when approaching a total stranger. This is natural and nothing to be ashamed of. For all the progress society has made, we still have millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our brains telling us to follow certain concepts despite the fact that they are no longer as important as they used to be.

Approach anxiety comes from the old tribal days of the cavemen. Such small bands of hunters and gatherers operated similarly to a wolf pack, with a structured hierarchy based on merit. We felt approach anxiety because it forced us to make a critical cost/benefit analysis. If you asked one of your tribesman for a favor or tried to court a member of the opposite sex and they rejected you, everyone would see it and your status would take a blow as a result. Back in those days taking a moment for that brief analysis in your head to determine if success was likely enough to risk the approach was very important. But not anymore.

The truth is that most people are not going to be crass with you just because you said hello. A lot of people would like to have an interesting experience, have a friendly conversation, or just meet a fascinating new person. So what are some ways to overcome approach anxiety?

Start small and work your way up. Maintain eye contact when talking to people. As a little tip, focusing in particular on a person's right eye when they're speaking tends to create more of a bond while looking directly between the eyes suggests that you are in a position of dominance or control. Hypnotists use the latter frequently, but for everyday conversations it's preferable to go with the former instead.

Eye contact and a sincere smile will go a long way. As authoress Leil Lowndes once wrote, many people are too quick to smile and it comes across as fake. If you smile too quickly, people think you're only doing it to humor them. Learn to realize that you don't need to rush yourself to smile. Make eye contact and let it come naturally, slowly. That might sound counterintuitive, and I have had people tell me I'm crazy or an idiot or whatever for doing this, but the results don't lie.

Ask every person how their day is going. "What's up?" Most people are happy just to have someone ask that of them. Do this with people on the street, on the bus, the wait staff at a restaurant, the cashiers, everyone. The point is to condition yourself to remove the anxiety of approaching a stranger.

As you get used to this, you can work your way up to having brief conversations with people on the spur of the moment. It will seem awkward and counterintuitive at first, but you'll get used to it. It's all just repetition, repetition, repetition until it becomes second nature.

By getting rid of approach anxiety, you can apply this to your magic. A good performer needs to be approachable himself. I know a lot of you out there probably like the idea of the detached star or the distant mystic or the reclusive wizardly type. But take it too far and no one will want to talk to you or watch you perform because they can't get any sense of who you are and you end up looking a bit creepy. I'll let you in on a little secret: you can be approachable and sociable and still have an air of mystique to you. That will be discussed in a later post, however.

For now, make a promise to yourself to leave the magic paraphernalia at home for a week and just work on being a more socially stand up guy using some of the exercises talked about above. If you can do this with 50 people in one week, you'll notice a difference almost immediately. In Pavel Tsatsouline's book "Relax into the Stretch" he talks about how most inflexibility is the result of involuntary muscular tension and that if you gradually widen your legs as they relax, you'll eventually be able to do a full split once you show your body and brain that nothing bad will happen when you do this. Same thing here. Approach anxiety will vanish and you'll feel much more confident approaching strangers (and doing magic for them) once you've shown your brain that all the bad things it imagines are not going to happen.

Until next time.