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So, how exactly do we cure approach anxiety? Well, first of all, approach anxiety is a fear of approaching women. And arguably, this fear is almost as bad or, if not, as bad as the fear of public speaking.
So, I’m going to share three funny stories from the training courses that I’ve hosted over the years, and off the back of the stories, you will be able to work out what strategies I implemented to help my clients overcome approach anxiety.
And what this means is that, subtly, you will also understand ways that can work for you. I always believe in the power of influence rather than just directly telling you what to do. I always feel like stories are just a much better way of implementing things into your life. So, let’s begin with the first one, which is about an investment banker who came to one of my training courses.
So, we were in central London and we went to Trafalgar Square. This was about four years ago when we used to do training courses, taking people out onto the street and help them overcome approach anxiety.
Now, in this situation, this guy was extremely wealthy, lived offshore and very, very confident, wore a really nice suit, nice watch, nice shoes, good haircut, good style, looked like the real deal. I always find it interesting when people come to my training courses where they just appear so confident on the outside and then the reasons why they booked onto one of my courses become apparent. So, we headed down to Trafalgar Square, which is a really good place of practising speaking to people. And as usual, we run through the normal procedure, get to know each other. And when we arrive there, I just asked him to ask someone to take a photograph of him.
So, I said, “Just just go and ask that guy to take a photo,” and he said, “No, no, I can’t do that.” And I said, “You’re in a tourist area. Just ask someone to take a photo of you.” And he said, “No, no, no. No, no. No. I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” And it was such a paradigm shift for me in the way that I viewed this guy that I couldn’t help but start laughing, and it’s the first time I’d really lost my professional air of wisdom on training courses because I’ve seen everything so many different times. But in this situation, I just found it funny and I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, and he was saying, “You’re not taking this seriously,” and I couldn’t help but start laughing. And the interesting thing was that his fear wasn’t as bad as how funny I found the situation.
So, after a few seconds, he kind of loosened up and began to start laughing and he could see the funny side of what was going on. And I said to him, “Listen, I’m not laughing at you. It’s just the situation is amusing.” And I said to him, “Look, what we can do, if you can’t even ask someone to a photograph of you,” which there are many people that can’t actually do that and most people think approach anxiety’s about actually physically starting a conversation and continuing it. It’s not. Approach anxiety is just the fear. And what we did is I just said to him, “Well, are you happy getting close to someone just within a metre and a half of them?” And he said, “Yeah, I am.”
This is known as getting proximity and it’s probably the first step for a lot of people in overcoming their fear, and it’s really simple.
You just break it down to the simplest step. What’s the first step of speaking to someone? Well, really, you have to get close enough to speak to them. Once you’re close enough, you can then start a conversation. So, getting physically close to someone is a really good first step. Now, if you’re listening to this and you think to yourself, “Well, I can’t even get physically close to someone,” the step before that is to imagine it.
So, as you listen to this, if you just imagine yourself physically getting close to someone. And by physically getting close, I mean close enough to start a conversation. You don’t want to get too close to someone, but about a metre, metre and a half away is great. Some ways in which you can do this, as you walk into a cafe or bar, most guys that see attractive women tend to rush onto the other side of the bar and then go, “Right, how do we go about doing this?” And that’s just going to make your anxiety worse.
So, the easiest thing that you can do is just to physically go and get close to someone. And when you walk in, if there’s a chair near someone that you find attractive, just go and sit in that chair, and that’s a great first step in overcoming your fear of starting a conversation with women. Now, onto my second story, which is about a Russian girl when I was hosting a training course in Bucharest.
Now, I did a European tour, which was… I took my clients to three different cities over a three-month period over the summer period in the UK, and it was marvellous. It was such good fun. It was just great team-building and just a wonderful experience.
Here’s what happened. It was quite amusing. I arrived in Bucharest before everyone else because I’d never been to a foreign city and hosted a training course. Now, I assumed within a couple of days, it would be no problem. I would be thinking, “This will just be the same as what it is in the UK.” And what I found after a day is that it was a million times harder. Not only was the level of English lower than what I was expecting in a Western country, the people that lived there were very unreceptive to even asking directions or where things are, even though you were tourists.
So, this was a very difficult situation I found myself in because I now was beginning to feel anxiety about approaching people, and I found myself in a situation where the clock was ticking. And the following day, I was hosting my training course on how to do it. So, I won’t reveal how I overcame the issue that day, but what I will do is follow up with a story of one of my clients the next day.
And he’s someone who was about 25 years old, quite an energetic individual. And what I decided to do with him was to energise him to get him into a really high-end physical state, and the reason why you do this is because if you feel good about yourself, you’re going to have a really strong aura. And my belief is that if your aura is stronger than the person that you’re speaking to, then your frame will eventually come across. So, what we did, I taught him something called power posing.
Now, power posing is when you pull a pose with your body like you’ve won the hundred-metre sprint, or you’ve won the Olympics, or you’ve just scored a goal in a local football game. It’s almost like a celebratory pose, the idea being that you pull the pose as a champion and your mind energises itself.
So, what I did is I taught him about power posing. And the very first girl that he approached was a Russian girl who was on holiday in Bucharest, and he spent the next three days with her, which was interesting because, in my head, the course was going to go different to that. I was going to take them through step-by-step processes of energising yourself this way, this is a different way of doing it. And low and behold, the very first approach that he did made him have the ability to spend time with someone immediately.
I mean, this guy had done some courses with me in the UK anyway, so he was a very good communicator with women anyway. So, it was transferring that over to a different city, and that’s something interesting as well. Getting out of your comfort zone, if you think you’re good in any area of your life, push it further. Go to a different country and see how good you are over there. That’s an interesting facet of my life over the past five, six, seven years of coaching this in multiple places.
And the last thing I wanted to talk about was a story about a client of mine who came over from New Zealand and he was really laid back. I actually really like this guy. He was cool, calm, collected, but there was no rushing him. I mean, there’s no way this guy was rushing to talk to anyone. It was just… Unless someone was static or walking slower than him, which was quite unlikely, he just wasn’t going to start a conversation with someone, but he still had anxiety.
What I realised was that we’re not going to be able to energise this guy’s body because he’s just not that type of guy. He’s too laid back. So, what we did, we came up with the personal mantra.
Now, if you imagine a power pose energises your body, what a personal mantra does, it energises your mind. And what I wanted to do with this guy was to enable him to just get rid of his anxiety. And what we find with approach anxiety is that you’ve got a two to three-second window before it hits you. So, if you can do something within that two to three-second window, you can prevent the fear from coming up in the first place. And so what we did, we came up with a mantra, and as you’re listening to this, you can come up with your own if you just answer the following question.
“If I was holding a gun to your head and you had three seconds to give your only son one piece of positive advice, what would it be?”
And as you can imagine, multiple answers can come to you. A few good ones, “Just do it”, which is obviously the Nike slogan. Just do it, anything positive. Now, what this is, this is your own personal mantra. Whatever it is that you’ve got, you can also use a mantra of one of your icons in life. If you can imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling you, “You can do it,” then obviously that’s also very powerful, but the aim is to have some positive words you can say to yourself as soon as you see an attractive girl.
What happened with this guy from New Zealand is that when I taught him about a personal mantra, he literally went from having anxiety to none whatsoever. He was a smart guy, anyway. So, just giving him one basic tool that worked was fantastic. So, this guy went from having severe anxiety to none, and all you did was have a personal mantra, which was something like, “You can do it.”
And from that point on, although he wasn’t going to be energised, at least he was relaxed with no fear. And what I’ve done during this episode is just explained three different ways through three of the stories from my training courses on how you can overcome approach anxiety. If we just wanted to be on the nose with all of them, very simple. Number one is called getting proximity, and that just means simplify the process, go and get close to someone.
When you feel comfortable with just getting close to people, you can then start a conversation. But with approach anxiety, it really is just a case of getting physically close enough to someone to start conversation and that will really help. The second one was to energise your body through power posing, and that’s going to put you in a great mental state. And the final one was to energise your mind through a personal mantra.
Now, all of these have one thing in common. Ideally, you’d like to do them in the first two to three seconds of seeing someone who you find attractive, because the way that our minds work, we have a two or three second grace period before the fear sets in. So, anyone of these three is going to be extremely powerful if you’re able to implement it into your life.
Listen to The Gary Gunn Show Podcast #111 – Approach Anxiety Cured In Three Simple Steps
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