Fear Management, Part Two

In the first article, I reviewed ways our body sends out fear signals to the world, and how we try to pacify ourselves involuntarily to alleviate this fear. Now we’ll review the many ways to get our fears handled, including the single most powerful method.

A Dozen Ways to Deal with Fear

1. The Blinders Effect: Med school and Bikram yoga
Don’t look for potential risks; put on blinders and push forward. If you had asked me while I was in college, or in med school for that matter, how many years I had left before I could practice, or what classes I’d need to take, or what grades I’d require to advance to the next level, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I set my intention – become a physician – and I did whatever I needed to do to advance me towards that intention. Fear never took over, because I never ran an analysis of what would be required. It simply didn’t matter; I was willing to do whatever it took.
Recently I signed up for Bikram yoga. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the yoga where you spend 1 ½ hours in an extremely hot and humid room posing in often painful contortions. Sounds fun, eh? When I signed up for it, I bought a full month of classes. That is, I committed to it with blinders on, knowing that I might get scared away after my first attempt. When I bought the month I was telling my fear to fuck off, I was giving this activity a fair chance.

2. The Cold Pool: Committing to the intention
If I asked you to get into a cold swimming pool, you can do one of a couple things. You can put your toes in, then step in up to your knees, then wade in so your waist is underwater, then finally submerse your entire body. Or you could simply jump right in.
Whether it’s a cold pool or anything else uncomfortable and scary, diving in fully without hesitation will bypass all fear. Set your intention and then go for it 110%.
Approaching is like swinging a bat. You don’t swing half-way and then tap the ball. You commit to the swing fully, so even after contact the bat keeps moving to the end of the swing. Likewise, when you see a hotty, make it your intention to walk up to her and get her attention. She may ignore you or blow you off, but that’s not relevant. All that matters is that you do everything in your power to make your intention a reality immediately, and not take the time to mull over the potential discomfort.

3. Snorkeling and Horror Flicks: What is the actual risk?
I flew all the way out to Oahu one summer, and found myself gazing at the sea with a sense of intimidation. What if a shark was out there? What if a jellyfish floated by? What about eels? What if, what if?
I almost didn’t go snorkeling, but thank god I did because it was one of the best experiences of my life. I took control of my fear by assessing the actual risk. There rarely is a shark out in popular snorkeling areas. And all my other concerns were statistically highly unlikely to ever materialize as well.
Yes, there may be risks involved in certain activities, but be realistic about them. The risk of air travel is minimal, the risk of public speaking is nil, the risk of approaching is practically non-existent.
Recognize when the danger is to your body, or just to your ego. Public speaking is the number one phobia of people, but why? No real harm can come to you while speaking in front of crowds. Perhaps what you fear is rejection, humiliation, loss of respect and acceptance, or accidentally offending people. These are all worries of the ego, and have nothing to do with your physical well-being. They are all manufactured and can be just as easily dissolved with will.
I love horror films. I could watch them every night. They never get old. Horror films pose no true risk that I’ll be killed by the undead or the demented psycho or the plague. I may startle at times or feel dread for the characters, but I’m never actually personally afraid.
You see a dude in set, and you tell yourself, “he’s just a coworker” and you go in despite the fear (the "fuck it" moment). The coworker is not a real threat to you, not unlike the slasher in the horror film. You can certainly generate all sorts of potential repercussions in your head if the guy doesn’t welcome you in, but you also can set aside those voices and remind yourself that this risk is pure fantasy. Nevermind all that community AMOG bullshit, and instead, view him as another potential friend to help you get the girl.

4. Boxing: Gathering cues
I took up mixed martial arts about a year ago. As I threw punches, I often found myself turning my head away and shutting my eyes, because I knew my trainer was most likely avoiding my jab and about to clobber my head.
Though I wanted to shut my eyes and lean away while I swung, to punch effectively required me to keep my eyes focused on the opponent so I could see how he’s gonna react. I am, in effect, reading my adversary for cues. Will he move left? Will he duck? Will he throw a cross? Will he deflect my punch and rotate away from it? If my eyes are averted, I can’t gather information and then respond in turn. I must not only have a good offensive, I must always be on a fact-finding mission at every moment.
The only way to manage any interaction strategically – whether it’s boxing or evaluating cues a girl is sending out – is to look at it head-on with total presence. Move into the fear with open eyes, in spite of the risks.

5. The Proud Piano Student: Positive reframe
A friend of mine teaches piano to kids. I asked her once how she deals with their fear of performance, and she described a kind of reframe. Rather than think about a performance as possible rejection or failure, she has the kids think of it as proving to the audience how much they’ve learned. They then go on stage with a sense of pride, not fear.
Every perceived failure is an opportunity to learn. Any night you totally bomb is still a good night, as it provides insights for you to help progress. Without failure you can’t grow. To quote the granddaddy of the community, Ross Jeffries: “The difference between winners and losers is that losers don’t fail enough.”
Another powerful reframe is accepting that your role is simply to give value to others. Believe that you are a man who loves to make others happy, and who expects nothing in return. Make that girl’s night. With this belief, it’s impossible to consider your approach as anything but positive. You aren’t bothering people, you’re only adding to their experience. If they don’t accept your value (and some people won’t), then it doesn’t hinder you. You simply move on to find those who will.

6. Be Prepared: The stack
Going into a set without knowing what to say is scary as hell. But when you have a pretty good idea how the first few minutes are gonna play out, you feel secure and ultimately less fearful.
I’m a fan of routine stacks for guys who have problems vibing or approaching. Having the first coupla minutes in set prepared helps reduce that fear of the unknown. Likewise if you go for a kiss and get her cheek, having something ready to say to reduce the awkwardness of this moment will make you feel more confident pulling the trigger. Have a detailed game plan, accounting for all contingencies.

7. Visualization and NLP
I don’t have the space here to talk about neurolinguistic programming (NLP), but it can help get your inner game on track. One tool NLP employs is to run movies in your head that minimize your negative emotions. For example if a boss yells at you, you can then reimagine the scene with him having a cartoon voice and wearing a clown outfit.
In sports, trainers use visualization techniques to enhance performance. Athletes imagine themselves winning the race, hearing the crowd roar, et cetera. You can apply this to your interactions with broads, seeing yourself as the man you want to be and envisioning the women you wanna attract into your life. Before your encounters, visualize how they’ll go. As your mind begins to believe these images, fear dissolves.

8. Passive Value: Dress for success
Looking your best will boost your sense of confidence. Dress well, have some accessories that add color to your personality, make your avatar stand out, go lift weights. In addition to fashion, address bad breath and a lousy hair style. Do anything you can to make your passive value as appealing as possible.

9. Reward Yourself
Create an incentive for facing your fear. “Even though I’m claustrophobic, I’ll get this MRI and then buy myself ice cream afterwards for being brave.” Don’t beat yourself up for being afraid, but do negotiate a system of rewards with yourself for acting in spite of your fear.

10. Hypnosis
Often the conscious mind isn’t the problem, it’s the subconscious which is too resistant to change. You may need to talk to it directly. That’s where hypnosis comes in.
There was a time I was doing really well with night game, but I couldn’t for the life of me approach during the day. I sought out a hypnotherapist and within a month I had no fear of going direct on super-hotties during the day. What she did under hypnosis was have me think of something I was highly confident about (practicing medicine), and then link this via anchoring (squeezing my hand) to the situation which gave me fear (daytime approaches).

11. Desensitization
A commonly used tool in alleviating anxiety is called systematic desensitization. In pick-up, this means you keep approaching more and harder sets until the anxiety fades. This is how I primarily dealt with my own AA, and over a couple years, I went from being paralyzed with anxiety to being able to easily work a room.

All of the above can be effective coping strategies to get you into the right head space, but I haven’t yet mentioned the biggest, baddest, most effective way to reduce fear in your life. Here it is.

12. Find Your Center and Live There
When I ask you to identify where in your body you feel your “being” resides, where do you point? For many guys it’s their head. For some, their chest. If I ask you where your physical power is mostly generated from, you might show me your guns.

I want you instead to focus on your belly as your center. Make it a few inches below your belly button. Let your energy transmit out from this point. Send your breath into it. When you think of power, shift your focus away from your upper body and down to your core and lower body, where masculine energy is concentrated. Feel the ground while you stand and walk, how it contacts your feet, and how your legs move. Slap your thighs if you have to. Own the ground you’re stepping on. This is your ground. Be gracious enough to share it with others, and welcome them onto your ground.

In martial arts, a man’s core is down in his belly, not up in his head. You don’t have time to think about each moment of the spar; you must always feel the energy and movement of your opponent and react immediately from your core. It’s no different when talking to women. Just as soon as you get out of your head and start living in your body, everything begins to flow with far less effort.

Likewise, when you generate force to throw a punch, that power is coming from your core primarily, and then transmitted upwards through the chest and out the arms. Your greatest power in moving women emotionally isn’t generated from your head or your chest, it’s from your core.

For those of you living in your head and placing your center of power in your upper body, you are in essence, walking through life off balance. And guys who aren’t balanced are easily thrown, whether that is by physical confrontation or a shit test. Dudes who are centered are far less easy to topple. Out of being centered and grounded comes the feeling that you can take on the world, that you are unflappable and in touch with yourself, the earth, and ultimately the universe. In short, you are living without fear.

And so fear management starts outside the venue. It’s a way of being. You can’t suddenly switch this confidence on when you approach a girl. Instead, it carries over into your interactions, because that’s the way you move through life.

Any physical activity can get you into your body and out of your head, but specifically activities like yoga and the martial arts will place the focus where you want it. So now you know what to do. Get off your computer and go hit the mat.

Back to that night I did my first Bikram yoga class. It was 45 minutes in, and the instructor had cranked up the heat while the poses got more difficult. My heart was pounding, I could barely catch my breath and my water bottle was nearly empty. Would I pass out or collapse from heat stroke? Panic set in. But then, I pushed those thoughts from my head, explained to myself that I wasn’t overheating internally but that I was just experiencing a sudden spike in room temperature. I talked myself down and focused intensely on my breathing and my heart beat, clearing my head of all noise. And in that moment I conquered the fear, settling peacefully back into my routine.

Fear Management, Part One

It’s the Ultimate F Word.

Fear.

That dirty, four-letter word. It’ll try to hold you back from the things you desire and stop you from fully appreciating all that life can teach you.

Guys new to the community are often controlled by fear: their beliefs, their behaviors, their thoughts. Fear is why they don’t open the mixed set, don’t go for the make-out, don’t head to the club alone, don’t call the chick on the phone. So what exactly is fear, and more importantly, how can we take charge of it?

The 3 Fs

In the beginning – and I mean the very beginning – animals on earth were controlled by their limbic brains. If they saw something that could kill them, they responded without thought. Primitive animals didn’t yet have the higher level of problem-solving that man possesses. They weren’t capable of analyzing the entire scenario so as to elucidate the best course of action. The little fuckers simply reacted instinctively, and as a result, they escaped harm.

The limbic brain is there to keep us humans alive as well. If there is a danger in your proximity, over-analysis could lead to death and injury. So you react to perceived dangers very swiftly. If you hear a gun go off near your head, you’re gonna startle and move away from the sound without thought.

Fear is handled by the limbic brain using three responses:

1. Freeze. The first strategy you’ll usually use if faced with danger is to freeze. Since movement attracts the attention of predators, freezing makes us invisible to them. It also gives our higher brain time to come up with a strategy.
If I tell a guy with approach anxiety to go talk to the three-set of 9s, the guy will initially freeze up. His breath will get shallow, he’ll avoid eye contact when he does approach, and if he sits down he’ll lock his feet together under his seat. In effect, he is making himself smaller, less noticeable and ideally invisible, all indicators of the freeze response. Even evasive eye contact is his way of “hiding” in full view.
If one person in the tribe suddenly freezes when he sees a lion, the others will mimic his behavior. This mimicry is in place to help survival of the group; hence, fear is contagious. Going out and trying to be sociable with anxious wings will make you more anxious. A better strategy is to hang out with guys who aren’t as nervous as you.

2. Flight. When freezing won’t assure survival, we flee. In the wild, we would run from a lion that was pursuing us. In the modern world, we can’t literally run from everything that scares us, but we can evade in other ways, called distancing and blocking. The goal: to create space between us and the danger.
Distancing is seen when we turn away from people who are annoying us, lean away from someone confrontational, point our foot away while legs crossed from someone offensive.
Examples of blocking include briefly covering your face with your hand when somebody says something you don’t like, closing your eyes almost as if to make the world momentarily go away, and holding a drink or cell phone up in front of you when a sexy mama walks by.

3. Fight. When freezing and fleeing don’t cut it, we fight. In the wild, we turned fear into rage and fought our predators. In the modern world, we can’t fight physically so we tone it down, and instead we argue. Insults, sarcasm and other verbally aggressive tactics are manifestations of our desire to physically fight. When we feel the urge to fight, our subcommunications tell the story: an aggressive stance, clenched fists, gnashed teeth, hard eye contact, getting up in the other dude’s grill.

Pacifying Behaviors

Your subcoms will vary depending on whether you’re comfortable or uncomfortable. Comfortable people give off a sense of high confidence, well-being and contentment. Those who are uncomfortable appear to have low confidence and seem stressed and possibly afraid.

To assuage ourselves of this discomfort, we employ pacifying behaviors. In kids, these maneuvers are easily apparent, such as thumb-sucking. But as we grow out of these babyisms, the pacifying becomes less recognizable: chewing gum, biting fingernails, munching a pencil. While the child tries to hide from a stranger behind mom’s leg, we as adults use our beer bottle to hide behind. When we don’t have a beer bottle, we touch briefly at our nose or throat. Different behaviors, same drive: to alleviate our discomfort.

Types of Anxiety

Anxiety is a constellation of symptoms including elevated heart rate and breathing, excessive sweating, sometimes chills, a racing mind and oh yeah…all those voices. Our discomfort may not always escalate to the point of anxiety, if, for example, we defuse that fear with self-pacification.

In many cases, the anxiety is so deeply ingrained subconsciously, that it is completely unreasonable. You are incapable of resolving the anxiety by talking yourself out of it. In other cases, the fear is not as deep, driven instead by too much mental noise, which can be voluntarily quieted. See my post, “Clarity,” for further discussion of this.

Social anxiety. This encompasses any fear of interacting with people, and at its extreme can include agoraphobia, the fear of leaving your home. One aspect of agoraphobia is the shame involved in having a debilitating panic attack out in public. Normal kids can have a degree of developmental social anxiety, but when it persists into adulthood and impairs social functioning, there’s a problem. Often, it appears as shyness, stage fright and avoidance of public gatherings.

Approach anxiety. One form of social anxiety is AA, the fear of approaching people. You may do well when introduced to a girl in your group of friends, but the thought of approaching that same girl as a stranger in a bar would trigger anxiety. That fear can affect you simply asking a waitress for a napkin or a checking out at a supermarket. AA is to be distinguished from a mild version which has been called approach reluctance. AA is truly paralyzing, whereas AR is a nagging internal dialogue around which you can still function.

Trigger anxiety. Not much is said about this fear, that of “pulling the trigger.” But fear of escalating is every bit as real as AA. It happens when you’re having a great interaction with a chick, and when that impulse comes to escalate, you don’t do it. You get in your head and in spite of the cues, the set fizzles out. You get angry with yourself, she simply assumes you’re not attracted to her. Getting past TA involves a series of verbal and physical steps, a thorough game plan designed to handle both the escalation and the potential rejection.

Sexual anxiety. You may be able to get a girl into bed, but then blow it because of all the crazy talk in your head. You get flaccid, which makes matters worse, making you feel like less of a man. Huge frustration for all parties involved. Often, the mere anticipation of sex can trip you up, long before the opportunity actually arises. SA is a kind of performance anxiety, but largely is a result of you not being present with the woman (or women) in bed with you. That is, rather than clearing your mind and only acting from your core as a sexual being, your mind is distracted by crap like your cock size.

In my second article on fear management, I’ll discuss methods of getting a handle on your fears.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

What are the chances you're gonna find your soulmate or potential wife in a bar or club? I've been told these aren't the places to go if you want a lasting relationship, but until this recent match.com study, I didn't know the odds.

The website partnered with a research firm and surveyed 7000 married people to see where they met their match.

38% at work/school
27% through a friend/family member
17% online dating site

Wait, where's bar/clubs? Oh yeah, here it is...

8%.

A very tiny part of marriages began in the bar. Now, keep in mind that the survey is sponsored by a dating site and this may affect the results. Also realize the number might be low because responders may not be totally truthful ("I met my husband in a club" may still be a taboo).

But still, that number does reenforce my suspicion that you probably aren't gonna find the girl of your dreams out in the bar or club. It suggests that women who want to get married either don't hang out much in these places, or these women will fuck dudes from the bar but don't as a rule take them seriously as a potential spouse. The study doesn't appear to shed light on the reasons.

The big winners for LTRs, it would then seem, are social circles and work/school. For sure, those are the places I always met my girlfriends.

I don't recommend giving up cold approach in bars, which I still feel is an essential skill for many reasons not least of which is inner game development. But you may want to invest more energy into growing your social circle. I personally am not in school, but if I were I'd certainly be making the most of this as should you. As for work gaming, I am opposed to it (though back when I didn't know any better, I dated plenty of work chicks). If you don't care, then go for it. That's probably where you're gonna find your next ex-wife.

http://cp.match.com/cppp/media/CMB_Study.pdf