She's Six Steps Away: Get Past Approach Anxiety and Meet the Woman You Want

by Eric Disco

It would be great if you could just work through this, if you could keep doing it until it didn’t hurt anymore. But the more times you force yourself to interact with her while protecting yourself at the same time, the more you associate talking to women with painful rejection. You start to build a strong psychological response to this activit...

By doing this over and over and getting negative reactions each time, you’re teaching your body that you have to protect yourself when you talk with women. This puts you into a negative state and tends to increase arousal and negative thoughts whenever you’re about to talk with a woman. It makes ...

So how do you learn to talk to women without any rejection? Is that even possible? The answer, of course, is that rejections and bad interactions are inevitable. Whenever you’re learning a new skill, there will be failure involved. But what you don’t want is more rejection than you can deal with. You want to avoid overwhelming yourself with negative feelings. You want to avoid throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool before you trust your ability to swim. Ins...

To prevent overwhelming yourself, we’re going to break the “approach” into small, critical steps. You’ll be able to practice each of these smalle...

Each small step will be manageable. And each small step builds on the step before it. By taking smaller initiatives at first, you will find that people are generally positive—or at least not negative—in their response to your initiatives. This is because their investment is relatively small. For example, you are much less likely to get a negative response ask...

As you have more positive experiences, you start to view the social landscape as a safe place and expect positive reactions from others. When you expect people to be happy that you’ve started a conversatio...

The Six Step Method We now turn to the heart of the Six Step Method: the steps themselves. The first step is just getting to a place where women are—getting out of the house. If you don’t regularly leave your home and get into an environment with others, it’s impossible to meet anyone. That’s the foundation. The next step is to physically walk up to a woman and put yourself close enough so that you can speak with her. The next step is to open your mouth and say something simple to her. After you master each step, we move on to the next one.

By practicing small initiatives over and over, your body gets comfortable with each step before moving onto the next. You’re learning to accept the inevitable arousal that comes with the uncertainty of social interactions—but in small, manageable increments so that you don’t panic.

Breaking interactions into steps doesn’t mean you won’t experience any troublesome thoughts and feelings. It means that you won’t be overwhelmed. You will still experience some arousal. You will just start to experience it in small, manageable doses. Ideally, you will be “in the zone”—challenging yourself, but not overwhelming yourself...

The biggest inhibitor against taking action is trying to do too much at once. Because of this, I no longer use the term “approach” when coaching clients. I will avoid using it in this book. To do an “approach” implies you are d...

There is too much on the line with an “approach.” It’s an airplane aiming for a runway. Either it lands successfully or crashes horribly. It’s all or nothing. There’s no joy in that. Instead, we’ll have interactions. Some of them may be quick and minor. Others may involve more commitment on your part. But none ...

Principle #3: The greatest improvement comes from consistently taking small, manageable initiatives rather than large, overwhelming ones.

THOSE FEELINGS CAN HELP YOU In trying to take initiative with women, a guy will often experience overwhelming thoughts and feelings. His first inclination may be: how can I not feel this way and think these thoughts?

What would you do if you had no trouble talking to any woman anywhere? Imagine that I could say abracadabra, wave a magic wand, and suddenly you could start an interaction with any woman anywhere. You have no inhibitions and you don’t care about rejection or embarrassment. What would you do? How would your life change? How many women would you talk to in the course of a day?

Think specifically about the answers to these questions. Would you interact with women on your commute to work? At work? On your lunch break?

Would you interact with women after work or at after-work activities and social events? Would you go out specifically to talk with women? On weekends, would you go out during the day or to bars and clubs at night to m...

The answer to these questions is your goal for this program. This is what your life would lo...

Your goal is not to get rid of thoughts and feelings. As you progress through the Six Step Method and practice certain activities over and over, there may be a reduction in arousal. And we will certainly make...

But if your goal is to reduce negative thoughts and feelings, what usually follows is avoidance. Those thoughts and feelings are automatic. So the only way to avoid them is to avoid taking any action that triggers those thou...

In actuality, when you begin this program, you may likely start to feel more negative thoughts and feelings at first. That’s because you’re challenging yourself. That’s a good thing. You want to stay in the presence of your arous...

You did not pick up this book so that you would never experience uncomfortable feelings again. You picked up this book so that you can have more experiences with women. Your first and primary goal is to take action consistently. This can b...

Your thoughts and feelings are not a good judge of your long-term progress. It’s not accurate to say, I’m doing better because I have less negative thoughts and feelings or I’m doing worse because I have more negative thoughts and feelings. Taking action is a much better gauge of progress than judging how you feel. This is because whenever you put yourself in challenging situations and go aft...

In any new endeavor in life, you will have self-doubt. Even as you pass one hurdle, you start to feel uncertainty about the next. Once you become good at initiating interactions with women, you may have problems getting dates. Once you get dates, it may be a challenge to get sexual. After that it may be a challenge to maintain a relationship. Once you’re enjoying fulfilling relationships w...

You will always feel uncertainty when you’re challenging yourself or trying something new, often more so in the best opportunities. There is no endpoint in terms of the challenges you will face in life. Setting specific goals and achieving them is valuable. You should always have specific, achievable goals. But there will ...

Success is not necessarily achieving the goal itself, but moving toward the goal. While this may outwardly look like the same thing, it’s a world apart in terms of the gratific...

When you can appreciate the challenge as well as the result, you are living “in the moment.” You are enjoying the journey as well as the destination. You are accepting all yo...

When a performer did simple and familiar tasks, the presence of an audience improved his performance. But when a person did unfamiliar tasks, the presence of an audience tended to hurt his performance.

This is important. When you repeatedly practice specific techniques with your body so they become familiar, there’s more chance that the arousal will help you rather than hinder you.

Alternatively, in the best interactions, I feel like I don’t know what’s going to happen next. There’s some uncertainty as to the outcome. I’m challenged and thus engaged. I often surprise myself at the things I’m able to say and do.

Not feeling any arousal is not your goal. In fact, when you start interacting regularly with women, the best way to tell if you’re appropriately challenging yourself is to notice whether you feel some arousal.

we will focus on taking action while trying to minimize the amount of thinking you do. Too much thinking tends to be a problem. We talk more about how to minimize the time spent thinking in Step 2.

Learning to Accept Feelings When they Arise The first step in learning how to harness your feelings to work for you is to understand them. There is a fallacy that guys who are good with women are out of touch with their feelings. The opposite is true: guys who are great with women are in touch with their feelings and know how to use them to help propel interactions with women.

The Six Step Method will encourage you to understand and rely on your own feelings. Some of these feelings will be pleasant. Some of them won’t be. We’re going to identify and accept all of them. When you understand and recognize feelings, they don’t cause as much alarm when they do happen. You begin to accept these feelings, and you can start to use that energy to work for you.

The Moment of Truth You are going about your day when suddenly you see an attractive woman. You start thinking about what action to take. You’re focused on her. You may not consciously notice a physical change in your body. But this is the most important moment in understanding your feelings.

It is impossible to practice dealing with your feelings when you’re not feeling them. Simply sitting in your bedroom trying to figure out your feelings is limited at best. The only way to understand your feelings is when they arise—when you take action.

This can be tricky because the thoughts and feelings that arise are often unexpected. It is difficult to predict exactly when you will experience arousal in social situations or how much arousal you’ll have. So it’s impor...

Sometimes when I’m with a client and he’s about to try something he’s never done before, I catch him getting “lost in thought.” He’s mentally disconnected, trying to think through all the possible outc...

“What are you feeling right now?” I’ll ask him. “A little nervous.” “Okay,” I say, “where are you feeling it specifically in your body? Are you feeling it in your chest? In your stomach?” He begins to get in touch with his body and understand his feelings. Thi...

The psychotherapist Babette Rothschild calls the ability to read your own feelings your internal sense. This is in contrast to external senses, such as sight and sound, which allow you to monit...

“It is the internal sense,” says Rothschild, “that registers the state of the body’s internal environment: heart rate, respiration, pain, internal temperature, visceral sensations, and muscle tension. ‘Butterflies’ or an ache in the stomach is a familiar internal sensation. A ‘gut’ feeling is a summation of the internal sense. It is the internal sense that helps to identify and name our emotions. Each basic emotion—fear, anger, shame, sadness, interest, frustration, or happiness—has an accompanying set of disc...

You can use your internal sense to become more aware of your feelings. These bodily sensations happen whether you are conscious of them or not, and learning to be conscious of them can go a long way in minimizing the cycle th...

Instead of thinking in broad terms, such as “nervous” or “anxious,” try to notice what you’re feeling in specific areas of your body. The sooner you realize, “Oh, hey, I’m feeling butterflies in my stoma...

When you can notice these feelings and practice taking action along with them, you start to realize that simply feeling a certain wa...

When you are consistently aware of your feelings, you can start to interpret them in a good way, and then they can help you. You’ll notice the butterflies in your stomach and think, That me...

Automatic thoughts can occur just like physical feelings but can happen even quicker. The words “I’m an idiot” may pop into your mind. The sooner you catch these thoughts and notice them, the less likely they are to affect your mood. When you catch an automatic negative thought like this and r...

Even to this day I may catch myself thinking negative thoughts, particularly if I haven’t been social for a while. “She’s too attractive for me” may pop into my mind when I see an attractive woman. I don’t try to push that thought out of my mind. Nor do I consider this thought true. Just having that thought doesn’t mean she’s too attractive fo...

Principle #4: Learning to recognize and accept feelings and thoughts when they arise will allow you to take action more effectively.

EXERCISE: IDENTIFY YOUR THOUGHTS, FEELINGS AND BEHAVIORS In this exercise you’re going to go to a location where you might find an attractive woman, and you’re going to visualize initiating an interaction with her in order to understand the changes in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

First, go to a place where you are likely to find an attractive woman. This might be a mall, café, a bar, or a restaurant. Take a walk around the place and find the most attractive woman you can, someone with whom you would go on a date if you had the opportunity. You’re not going to talk with her. You’re just going to find her.

When you see this woman, take a snapshot of her in your mind. You should be able to answer the following questions: What does she look like? What is she doing? Is she standing, walki...