I interview Ryker Koh of Asian Dating Superstars

Here’s a link to his site: Asian Dating Superstars

This is an interview I did with Ryker, who currently lives in Singapore. The text is transcribed from a phone conversation we had. Ryker’s a great guy and has provided a lot of useful dating advice here for men of any race. I hope you enjoy it.

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Derek: First of all, Ryker, just tell me about yourself, how long you’ve been in the game, and what’s your story?

Ryker: All right. Thanks for having me on this call, Derek, I’ve been in this game, this whole game of seduction and pick up, for close to about four to five years now.

The way I stumbled in is the way most guys enter the game. I saw a lot of chicks, a lot of beautiful chicks, in my college, and just, you know, I wanted to approach them. I wanted to get better with them, but initially I was… well, most guys start off extremely shy, I started off extremely dominant.

I started out extremely overly aggressive, okay? But I noticed that girls were turned on by my dominance, by my aggressiveness, but they actually reacted inversely because of my aggressive nature. They actually got a little scared off. Then I would always hang out with a group.

Derek: So you are using direct game, it’s what you’re saying? Real direct.

Ryker: Yeah, I was just plowing. Some people call it joke game whereby you just go up there and say ‘I like you.’ You know, you have nice ass, nice body, that kind of thing. So it kind of scared them off. There is no game, just going caveman.

I’m from Singapore. I actually hung out with a few Asian guys and some of them were the reverse, the typical weak agent neo-stereotype. They were very nervous. They were very needy, very nerdy, very geeky, but among our group of friends, there was one guy who was extremely well calibrated.

Derek: What do you mean by calibrated?

Ryker: By extremely well calibrated, I mean that when this guy speaks to girls, he knew when to soften his approach and he knew when to be firm and dominant with them. So he had everything under control. He was not too weak, such that he will be a total pushover, and he wasn’t too strong and aggressive such as he would scare them off.

So immediately when he started talking to girls, the girls got comfortable with him, but at the same time, in everything that he said they could sense his dominance.

You roughly get what I mean? So at that point in time, most of us were kind of trying to figure this thing out. This guy was a complete natural. He didn’t even know what he was doing and some of us went to him for advice. So how did you get good with girls? All he said was, “Well, be yourself. It’s easy. Don’t over think too much.” Which is a very generic advice that works for him, but it might not work for each of us in our unique situation.

Then I read ‘The Game’ by Neil Strauss and went on his whole journey. At first development, then eventually I adjusted my entire approach and to kind of mix and match. So that’s my entry into the game.

Derek: So you’re over in Singapore right now. Have you been to the States? Have you dated women in the States?

Ryker: I haven’t actually been to the States, but I’ve been to a lot of countries around the region. I’ve been to Australia. I’ve been to Europe and I’ll say up front to everybody that there is a difference in the way you have to approach, when you approach in Western countries. In Western countries, the thing is everyone there is a little more liberal.

Now, I’m not going to generalize and say that every person there is liberal. There are still some people who are a little bit more conservative. People who need a bit more time to warm up, but in Asia, as a whole, the culture is a little bit more held in.

So if you are to do a cold approach and try to be kind of funny or go extremely direct on the streets of Asia, the girl maybe turned on by your directness, by your dominance, but she maybe scared off. So what you’re now having is a girl who is turned on, but yet because she is not used to the whole direct approach, she may give you a quick excuse and hurry off. And what a lot of guys teach is that when a girl hurries off, you must further indicate your directness.

So you start following her or maybe you start going louder and the outcome is you scare her off even more. So there is a calibration. By calibration, I say there are things that you need to adjust accordingly to fit them by their culture.

Derek: So, what you’re saying basically is that if you’re going too direct with Asian women, you’re going to scare them off or you’re going to be turning them on at the beginning but then scaring them off later down the line. What is the best strategy then? What’s the correct way to do it?

Ryker: All right, that’s a great question. This is my take on how to push with Asian girls. First of all, you have to look at the girl and allow her body language, her nature, her entire mannerism to kind of give you a sense of if this girl is more held in, more submissive, more quiet, or is this someone who is a bit more expressive, more vocal, more energetic.

Now, the thing about energetic, vocal, and expressive girls is you can enter at a level that is slightly higher or slightly lower than theirs and have them respond to your high level of energy. But if the girl is kind of held in, she’s kind of shy, kind of timid like most girls in Asia. I’m not generalizing, but most girls in Asia are kind of shy and kind of held in, you don’t want to go in there and be extremely high energy because you don’t want to scare them off.

You want to pace it at their current level of energy. Let’s say she’s at a quiet place and that kind of timid, shy, girl, you want to go in and build comfort first. Allow her to not see you as a threat then you can build attraction along the way. So it’s better for guys who kind of notice the difference in their entire mood and nature and not just follow a particular system just wholeheartedly here.

Derek: Does this work for non-Asian guys? You know, for travelers who say, “I’m going over to Singapore. Is this the type of game that I should try to do in Asia?”

Ryker: Actually, I think this works for every single type of guy because it actually depends a lot on the nature of the girl that you are approaching more so whether you are Asian guy or a White guy or a Black guy or Hispanic guy. It depends on the mood, the mannerism, the nature of the girl you are approaching, and also it depends a lot on the nature of the mood of the entire environment.

For example, if you meet her in the library and she is a shy girl, the worst way you can approach is to go in loud and kind of put a whole spotlight on her because by nature, she is shy and by her environment, it is a quiet. By being loud, your dominance may turn her on, but the fact that the spotlight is on her may scare her off.

But if it’s a club and the girl is loud and expressive girl and you go in louder than her, then she will get turned on. She’ll like you and she will be extremely receptive to you, so it’s very important to kind of adjust and mix and match the kind of environment first and then the nature of the girl you are approaching.

Derek: Okay, cool. What’s the single most important thing a guy can do or change about himself to attract more women?

Ryker: The first thing that a guy can do to kind of get better with girls as a whole is actually to talk to more girls everywhere. Just get out there and practice. There is an interesting story I’d like to share with you. Among my peer group, there are actually guys who have purchased a lot of seduction materials, a lot of courses, a lot of books and I’m not against courses because I produced one called Asian Dating Superstars.

You have a great course called the 007 Lifestyle. But the thing is a lot of guys end up reading a lot of materials, but not actually talking to girls. Instead they spend all their time on the course. They’re reading, and kind of analyzing instead of going out there and kind of speaking to girls and the end outcome is they get a lot of book knowledge, a lot of theory, but very little practical practice, which actually is the thing that counts the most.

So my advice is for all the material you read, for all the stuff that you read, go out there and try it out. Go out there and practice. Now, the thing that holds a lot of people back from practicing is fear, is hesitation, and the worry that another girl will slap them, may scream at them, “Oh, get away, you creep.” Let me tell you something, hardly happens.

Derek: It hardly ever happens.

Ryker: Actually most of the time you’ll realize to your surprise that the girl will actually react extremely well with you because most of the time nobody approaches them. You know, the guys who approach them are obnoxious. But if you come in and you are funny, you are entertaining, you make them feel comfortable, make them feel attractive; you’ll actually find out that actually they want to talk to you more than you want to talk to them. In fact, you are rarity. You are a scarce and wanted commodity so it makes you feel really, really good.

So just go out there and practice to see how it works.

Derek: This might be a weird question, but do you have any James Bond-like stories you can relate? Any type of, you know, 007 moments?

Ryker: All right, definitely. Everyone who has been in this game of seduction and pick up, has had a bit of a 007 story. In Casino Royale, you know the scene where Bond was playing Texas Hold ‘Em to win the other guy’s car, remember that? After he lost his car, out front of the hotel, his girl was standing there and Bond said very few words and she went with him. Then eventually they went back to his villa and they got it on. So I have a story that’s a little similar.

You don’t have to say so much. There was one time at a bar. I was kind of tired after an entire day’s work, I walked up to the bar to buy something to drink for myself purely because I just wanted something to drink. I was thirsty. I wasn’t feeling that good. I just wanted to get out. So I walked to the bar and while the bartender was making my drink, I turned to my right and saw this girl and I just remarked something. I said, “Nice earrings.” That was all I said. Then she turned and looked at me and something and my mind told me that this girl was attracted to me. I had two options.

Number one, I could have just dived into all the materials that I had and kind of started talking and trying to build attraction. Or I could just physically escalate on the spot and something told me in my mind that it was better for me to just physically escalate and shut my mouth rather than get myself in a deep hole.

I just didn’t know why but there was something in my mind that told me that I should just shut up and physically escalate. So I looked at this girl. She was giving me the look in the eye. So we went on the dance floor. We started dancing. I said very little. I think I said less than thirty words and well, at 6 AM, she left my house. Sometimes guys over talk and you talk yourself in a deep hole. If it’s on, it’s on. Say less, do more and just get it on done. Big advice for those guys out there.

Derek: Haha. Thanks Ryker. You were talking a little bit about the product you just released, Asian Dating Superstars. Can you give everybody a breakdown of it?

Ryker: Okay, yeah. What I’ve done is I’ve released a product called Asian Dating Superstars. Now, the chief reason I released this product is because a lot of Asian guys, in Asia and in the States and just all around the world, have actually felt that being Asian is a strike against them and I actually think that the reason is because of a negative media portrayal of the Asian male. I’m not sure if you have watched a lot of Western movies but the Asian is typified in a couple of ways.

Number one, he is the laughing stock of all jokes. Usually, mocked and humiliated.

Number two, they are either martial artists who spend the entire show just kicking butt with anything on anyone. Not exactly very positive image for the Asian culture. We are actually brought up more submissive, more obedient. We are taught to follow rules, which doesn’t actually carry well over to dating and seduction and interacting in social settings with women because most Asian guys play it too safe. They play it too quiet. They play too stoic and the girls don’t hate them, but they don’t like them, they just completely overlook them. They are like the invisible background, the invisible back drop. No one notices them and it’s a very sad place to be.

A lot of Asian guys just kind of feel like being Asian is bad and they will never have success with women and what I want to do in Asian Dating Superstars is show that it’s not the case. I got some dating coaches to review a lot of methods and techniques about how Asian guys actually overcome a lot of these mental barriers in their brain and I have a lot of techniques for them to express their true personality and their natural masculinity and be naturally attractive to women.

So I think the most important thing that Asian guys can get from this is that they can see actual role models and actual people who started out about the same or worse off than them but eventually gained success.

So it kind of measures all limiting degrees and stereotypes they have about being Asian. A lot of the coaches are very famous like Daniel Ross from the Sex God Method, Troy Dizon, Mr. M, and Jerry Musso from Love Systems. I urge guys to check it out. It’s at $77 now, but I’ll be raising the price to $97, so do check it out. If you’re Asian and you’re listening to this, then check it out because I’m quite sure it will clear up a lot of things in your head and make you more comfortable.

Derek: Very cool. Thank you so much, Ryker.

Ryker: All right. No problem. Take care, buddy, and keep living the 007 Lifestyle. Cheers, man.

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If you’re interested you can check out Ryker’s Asian Dating Superstars here:

http://bit.ly/6h1SRf

Today we’re going to answer the question: “Is dating is a numbers
game.”

I’m sure you’ve heard this before but today I want to tell you the
low-down-dirty truth.

I’m going to try to shed new light on the concept (this is actually
something I recently discovered myself) and also I’ve got a cool
surprise for you at the end.

Make sure you read all the way through… and I’ll
also warn you, the surprise ending might disappear soon.

(I know some will just skim so for the impatient ones, just click the link below)
http://livinglikejamesbond.com/vin

Ok, so this is obvious right…you approach more girls, you’ll have
greater odds of getting a phone number, or whatever you deem to be
success.

Say for every 10 girls you approach you get 1 phone number. If you
approach 100 girls you’ll get 10 phone numbers.

And I’ll tell you something a lot of dating gurus wont tell you -
even for them success with 1 out of every 4 women they meet and
approach is good conversion rate. 75% rejection rate is pretty
normal.

WHY is this?

Because even with:
Awesome opening lines
Fashionable clothes
A cool attitude,
or _____

EVERYONE is different…

You are not attractive to everybody.

For example, let’s turn this around. I absolutely think Angelina
Jolie is gorgeous. But my friend, thinks she’s ugly and
unattractive and kind of dirty. I understand the ‘dirty’ part but
she’s like the pinnacle of hot in my mind.

Another example – I dated a girl who told me to stop working out
because I was getting too big. She didn’t like the bigger bulkier
look.

But then I had another girlfriend awhile later that couldn’t stop
touching my muscles and complimenting them.

(Major Disclaimer: I am not claiming to be too muscular. I don’t
date these girls anymore, probably because they were both crazy…
this is pure example.)

The point here is that every girl has different interests and
definitions of what she finds attractive.

Different strokes, different folks.

So dating truly is a numbers game…right?

We should approach as many women as possible and hope for the best
right…?

Well kinda right…

What if you knew what type of woman you were approaching and
dealing with…and what type of thinker she was?

What if you could, in a sense, read her mind?

If you knew what kind of woman she was you could instantly adapt
your techniques to suit her interests. And then you’d avoid missing
out on women who would otherwise find you unattractive….cool
stuff right?

A guy named Vin DiCarlo has figured that women have 3 ‘lines’ of
thinking in mind when it comes to dating & within each of these
lines of thinking, women think in one of 2 different ways.

1) The Time Line – Women want to find the right partner before her
“youth” starts to fade. So, she either dates around or she finds a
guy and settles down. All women fall into one of these two choices,
and this Line tells you exactly how to approach.

2) The Sex Line – women have risks associated with sex. Risks much
bigger than a man’s risks, including pregnancy. However, sex still
feels very good and she’s driven to crave it. So, she’s going to
justify her decision to have sex in spite of the risks, or she’s
going to deny that there are any risks involved, at all. All women
are one of these two types, and this Line tells you how to get her
into bed. (This line is the trickiest to
read – and also the most useful)

3) The Relationship Line – women have two different views on
Relationships. One woman wants to settle down with a white picket
fence. The other woman wants to focus on her career and be
successful. All women want a relationship

So if you know where she stands in each line of thinking you can
tailor your game to meet her mind-set. Effectively read her mind.

And then BOOM – you wont need to approach as many girls because
you’ll be able to attract women that otherwise would have rejected
you by ADAPTING. You’ve increased your conversion rate – no need for
large numbers of approaches

This is pretty powerful, cool stuff right?

The surprise bonus I mentioned before is this:

Vin is getting ready to release a really big program on this called
Pandora’s Box and he just recently released a free report called
One Minute Mind Reading where he shows you how you can figure out
her 3 different ‘lines’ and thus tailor what you say to her.

Pretty sweet.

Go download it here – I’m not sure how long he’ll leave this page
up:

http://livinglikejamesbond.com/vin

Talk to you soon,
Derek

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I’ve got James Bond lifestyle awesomeness to report!

Paul Kyriazi (How to Live The James Bond Lifestyle audiobook) and I have teamed up for the holidays, providing you with a Double-Shot-Bond experience.

This is exciting! For details go here:

>>James Bond Lifestyle Double-Shot<<

A little while ago Paul contacted me and we exchanged products. And let me tell you, I loved Paul’s take on the James Bond Lifestyle.

The James Bond Lifestyle Audio Book is an 8 part CD collection. This is pretty much a self-improvement super-course with James Bond as the sign-post (very similar to my product).

The only difference is that Paul focuses much more on the mental aspects of what makes Bond successful and so ‘cool’. My course focuses more on the real-life strategies you can take to emulate James Bond. Both of our courses are very heavily directed towards the self-improvement crowd, but I’d say Paul does a better job of getting deep inside Bond’s mentality than I do. But it’s not a competition, I think our products compliment each other very well.

There are 8 CD’s each about an hour in length and each containing solid bits of self-improvement strategies. The production quality is great and I found myself getting really involved in the tracks and laughing at some of Paul’s anecdotes.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s covered:

1. Disc 1 – Why James Bond’s Lifestyle, Your Base of Operations, & Bond Symbols for Change
2. Disc 2 – Bond and His Cash
3. Disc 3 – The Bond Personality, Your Appearance
4. Disc 4 – Q Branch, Bond Girls
5. Disc 5 – More Bond Girls, Your Mission
6. Disc 6 – Hotels, Casino Gambling, Villains
7. Disc 7 – Bond with People, Bond on the Job, Upgrading Your Image
8. Disc 8 – Rules of the Bond Lifestyle, The Greatest Adventure, & Clearing the Subconscious

The last CD has a hypnosis track for clearing the subconscious and relaxing. I’m not opposed to a little hypnosis every once in awhile so I enjoyed it.

My only complaints come from the Bond Girls section. I think Paul focuses too much on pleasing women and entertaining them, which can lead a lot of guys to appear like try-hards. This is not the mentality a Bond wannabe should adopt. I did agree with his take on dating and keeping the romance fresh and exciting though.

Overall, The James Bond Lifestyle Audio Book is worth a serious look – I think it’d make a great gift this holiday season as well. It’s fun and entertaining like any course on James Bond should be.

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To defeat your approach anxiety you need to expose yourself to gradual increasing doses of social pressure. The lowest form of this may simply be talking to a clothing store clerk and the opposite end of that spectrum might be smacking a girl on the ass. Between those two polarities you can expose yourself to gradual increases. Keep doing the same one until the anxiety it gives you is either manageable or non-existent. Once you hit that threshold, move on to the next thing on your list that gives you an increased dose of social pressure.

The more times you expose yourself to these situations, your brain will calm down and you will start to pick up conversational reference experiences. After numerous approaches over several weekends you will become bored just approaching and walking off. You might get nervous on the first few of each night, but most of them will feel like nothing.

Every time you approach and start a conversation, no matter how short or long, it’s like going to the gym for your brain. You will literally build conversational muscles. The first week you do this, you may run out of things to say after 5 seconds! However, as your mind calms down in these high-pressure situations, your brain will allow you more access to the creative side of your brain. It’s not about memorizing more lines, it’s about being calm in those situations so you can access what you already know. The more calm and the more internalized your openers and transitions become, the more material you can add if you like.

Please please trust me when I say that you will never memorize 300 routines and be able to go out into a bar and use them. Memorizing 300 routines is NOT a remedy for approach anxiety or a recipe to get laid. If anything, they will make things worse because your brain will feel clogged. You don’t need to memorize 300 lines to talk to an old friend, you just relax and talk to one another, right?

You will never completely eradicate your approach anxiety and that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to get it to a manageable level. The absolute ideal state is indifference. This is the feeling you have when you are talking to a friend or acquaintance. When you are talking to a friend or an acquaintance you are not to worried about what they are thinking and you have little or no concern about what the room is thinking. Putting yourself in these gradual-increasing levels of social pressure will help you reach indifference much faster.

Facing the harsh reality of “No, I’m not interested in you”: The fear of rejection can be a heavy feeling when you first start out. This one single factor is enough to keep most guys on the sidelines their entire lives. Because of this fear/pain they will be relegated to dating the women that come on to them or they will have to build a dynasty of a social circle and hope it creates enough gravity to draw women to them based on their lifestyle and social alliances.

Even if you are a guy who is lucky enough to have been extremely successful with women in your social circles, you will have to get used to hearing “no” in cold approach. You will hear “no” from beautiful women and from women you wouldn’t even consider dating anyway. This can be a mind trip, because you may be used to beautiful women in your old social circles being all over you or even nervous to talk to you. In the sloppy world of cold approach, it is not the least bit uncommon to have below average women look at you like you have a dick growing out of your forehead when you approach.

If you are not used to dating very many women or you are new to cold approach, then getting over the fear of rejection can feel daunting. Many guys take it personal. They assume that the woman sees some deep internal character flaw in them that must be true. They assume that if several women reject them, then most/all women must not like them.

If you are not careful this can create some deep seeded inner game issues that are hard to unwined. At the end of the day, it is successful reference experiences that breed confidence. You can only pump yourself up for so long and keep telling yourself that it will be ok or that “it’s not you, it’s them.” This is why it’s so crucial that, especially in the first 6 to 9 months, you write out clearly defined, measurable, and realistic goals. You can gain a ton of confidence by hitting small goal after small goal. These small goals, slowly give birth to bigger and bigger goals. While you may not be getting laid or getting the women you want for that time, you are still hitting those small goals and this is the path that will lead you to dating those women by giving you the positive reference experience you need to build durable confidence.

If you are new and you have MASSIVE approach anxiety..STOP MAKING YOUR GOAL TO GET LAID!!!!!!!! Ready for some real talk??? You are not likely to consistently get laid or get an extremely hot girlfriend through cold approach for several months or longer if you are at the stage where you still suffer from severe approach anxiety. So, stop beating yourself up with ridiculous goals and feeling bad when you don’t have some epic sexual conquest or get 5 phone numbers.

Step back and draw up a realistic 6 month game plan where you can have success. If you wanted to become a millionaire, would you get your feelings hurt and become deflated if you weren’t a millionaire tomorrow? 3 months from now? 6 months from now? Of course not. You would set up a game plan and a business strategy full of subsidiary goals all leading to the attainment of the big goal, a million dollars. Do the same with your dating life.

You can do this, just step up and make it happen!!

More on Approach Anxiety >>click here<<

If you really want your approach anxiety to go away it simply requires you develop a new habit. You must cultivate the habit of right action over emotion. Realize that everyone feels approach anxiety and those who feel the least, are the ones who have done the most approaches. These guys are not super human, they have just desensitized themselves to the pain through repetition and carry a mindset focused on long term gratification over short term gratification. They have faced that fear so many times, that it has lost its hold.

If you rode a roller coaster 500 times in a row, you would eventually lose the ability to get a rush from riding it. If you only ride that roller coaster one or twice a month, then you will surely feel the rush with the same intensity as you did the very first time you ever road it.

If you wanted to help a friend get over the fear of riding roller coasters would you have him read 300 books and spend 5 years on a psychologists couch or would you put his ass on a roller coaster again and again?

Just like any other habit you want to create in your life this is done through repetition. The fastest way to ensure that you have approach anxiety for the rest of your life is to only do one or two approaches every now and then.

My favorite self help guru Brian Tracy says, “Fortunately, the habit of courage can be learned just as any other habit is learned, through repetition. We need to constantly face and overcome our fears to build up the kind of courage that will enable us to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life unafraid.”

While there are infinite things we could be afraid of, at our core we are crippled with fear of rejection and fear of failure far beyond all else. The fear of rejection is the most damaging because it can literally be crippling. It is a cancer that can literally hold you in a self-imposed prison keeping you from taking the necessary action required to meet a specific goal.

Usually there are several factors in regards to approach anxiety that make this fear of rejection heightened. Some of them are unavoidable and in regards to those you need to man the fuck up. However, several factors are within your control. Remember, there are certain factors that predispose us to heightened levels of fear or anxiety. By removing those factors we reduce the level of anxiety to a manageable level. Remove the road blocks in your mind that are holding you back, especially early in the learning process.

Let’s look at a few that you can remove:

1. Approaching In Front Of Old Friends: We all know that failure is unavoidable in any new endeavor and that the lion share of failure takes place at the beginning of learning something new. This means, that your fear of rejection is not completely unfounded. You will in fact get rejected quite a bit when you approach women, especially in the beginning. What can make this even worse is the fact that you are trying to learn this in front of old friends who have never seen you behave in this new way. You have a well-defined role within that circle and to get rejected in front of them could create a level of social pressure from them that you are not sure you are willing to accept. You don’t want the role in your group to change, you don’t want to be openly ridiculed by them, and you don’t want to be ridiculed behind your back.

Remedy: Knowing that you are trying something new and scary, the last thing you need is extra pressure from your friends. On the nights when you are going out to work on this stuff don’t go out with the guys who add to your stress. Go out with the one or two guys who you are most relaxed around and don’t feel like you would be judged. Once you are over your approach anxiety you can start chasing girls in front of those guys and it won’t be such a big deal. When I was first learning this stuff, I couldn’t go out with my older brother and his friends because I couldn’t stand the thought of looking bad in front of them. As ridiculous as that frame of mind might be, by simply removing them on the nights I wanted to work on this stuff I was able to fight just one demon that night, my crippling approach anxiety. By going out with them and wrestling two demons at once, I was paralyzed into doing nothing. This was retarding my growth on a massive level. We all thrive when we deal with people who we feel understand us, respond well to us, and aren’t judging us. While this is less important in most situations, it’s very helpful when attempting something new and stressful.

2. Approaching In A Local Venue: I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life studying every book I could get my hands on that had to do with the brain and how it works. One thing that I see consistently in the books I’ve read on neurobiology is the brain is a horrible multi tasker, especially in high stress situations. An area of our brain that this drastically affects is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Dr. Richard Restak says, “The MPFC springs into action whenever we direct our attention inward and think about ourselves or outward and think about others. As we interact with colleagues, compete with opponents, or watch our friends and family experience their own ups and downs, having insight into the feelings of others enables us to understand what they value, how they feel about us, to offer appropriate support or gain competitive advantage, and to predict their future behavior.”

The medial prefrontal cortex fires up not only when we actually experience an event, but also when we ‘think’ about experiencing an event. It also fires off when we think about putting our self in the shoes of another person looking back at us.

The more we are concerned with what the other person thinks about us, the more our MPFC will fire off, scanning to assess how they ‘might’ feel or what they ‘might’ be thinking. This means, that our attention gets scattered and fractionated like crazy in high stress situations. If you are scared of public speaking and you are speaking to a group of important clients your MPFC will be doing back flips trying to assess how they feel about you. You will osolate between: full attention on your speech –> What they are thinking about me? –> full attention on your speech –> What are they thinking about me? …Over and over etc.

Each time this happens, you are obviously pulled away from your speech and you lose focus. You become more and more self conscious every time you lose your place in your speech and the MPFC fires off more concentrated and much more often. Before you know it, you are so concerned with what the crowd is thinking that you can’t even talk. This is essentially like driving drunk. Your mind can’t keep up with all the inputs and it’s almost impossible to focus. You feel disoriented and anxious as a result.

This explains why you feel like you are naked on stage when you are in your local bar trying to approach. You are in a bar full of people you either know, kind of know, or have seen multiple times. Now all of a sudden you decide to approach either these groups of people or approach strangers in front of these people. The fear of rejection and failure kicks in and fires off your MPFC. Now you can’t stop thinking about what all these people in the bar who you kind of know are thinking about you.

“What if it goes wrong? I’ll never be able to show my face in here again. What if I use a line and she’s hear it before? She’ll tell everyone in here. What if I get blown out and she knows someone I know? My ex girlfriend is in here, what if she or one of her friends sees me get blown out? That asshole I knew in college is in here. If I get blown out in front of him, he’ll probably say something smart ass to me.”

Now your MPFC is scanning the room at lightning speed trying to assess the feelings of everyone in the room. You now feel like you have 50 video cameras on you and the thought of approaching feels about as scary as pulling your cock out on national TV.

Remedy: DON’T PRACTICE IN THESE PLACES!!!!!! It’s that simple. When I was learning this stuff and approach anxiety was my number one concern I would drive to cities 1 hour, 2 hours, sometimes even 4 hours away so I could practice in a place where I didn’t feel like I was on national television. Yes, you will still feel the pressure and your MPFC will still scan the room, but not wish such ferocity. You will be more apt to keep your composure and stay in the moment. You may still feel like you are on TV, but it will feel more like public access channel 13 at 3am, instead of HBO on Sunday night at 9pm.

Once you get comfortable with your approach anxiety in these places, you can slowly test the waters in the places that gave you the most pain. Eventually, your local bar won’t seem that daunting and you will have little or no trouble approaching a woman in these venues.

3. I don’t know what to say: This is a pretty common, yet avoidable cause of approach anxiety. You might be thinking, “Any idiot can get the balls up to go over there and make a fool of himself. I don’t want to be like that. If I’m going to go over there I want to at least have something to say. What kind of fool goes up to a woman and says, hi, and then stands there like a moron?”

That’s actually a fair point. I know I felt the same way when I was learning this stuff. Sadly, this kind of thinking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Thinking like this can cause more long term damage than you can imagine. What this causes is the death of action and the birth of a guy who reads for months and never actually approaches.

You begin to think that you should read and study pickup eBooks and memorize every possible routine and funny line. Then at some undetermined time in the future, you plan to start approaching.

What really happens is that you read an insane amount of information and NEVER digest any of it. Your mind never hardwires any of the concepts and you become a master of theory and you actually get worse with women instead of better.

Reading without practical application through real world experience causes you to develop major gaps in your learning. You become over stuffed with random knowledge. You need to start with small amounts of knowledge and digest those and really master them before moving on to the next piece. The act of actually approaching and interacting with women, bad or good interactions, will help you connect the dots between each piece of new information you acquire.

When you just read all the time or talk pickup all the time, you simply play a guessing game in your head. You read and assume. You build false constructs in your mind of what the author really means and you create some weird mutation of reality. When and if you ever do decide to take action your brain locks up and gives you massive approach anxiety because you have all this information in your head you have no idea what to do with it or what order it should go in. You are so nervous because you haven’t approached in a long time and when you finally do it goes either horribly bad or just ok. You feel guilty inside because you feel like you should be really good considering you know theory better than any dating coach on the planet and you wonder how it is possible with all that reading, you still can’t think of anything to say. This makes you feel anxiety and frustration so approaching the next girl makes you even more nervous, because each experience seems to validate that you are completely lost.

Remedy: As the quote goes, “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Take one piece of information and go out and master it before moving on to the next. If you can’t open then there is no reason to be reading about the newest qualification technique or sexual framing. Your approach anxiety will go away in direct proportion to your amount of women you approach and your ability to master one step at a time.

Give up on the idea that you need to have the perfect thing to say before you approach a woman. While the lines and routines are extremely powerful, they are worthless in bulk. Pick one or two things to open with and one or two things to transition with. Stick with these 2 things for a while. Stick with them until your approach anxiety drops to a reasonable level and you feel like you have those down.

Change your mission. Take the 1,000 things there are to learn in game and learn them 1 at a time. Approach anxiety is the first one on that list. Advanced concepts mean nothing if your brain and body are engulfed with crippling anxiety. Give yourself a break and tackle this one thing first. Go out give yourself mini missions.

Also, realize that there is no reason why you can’t just walk up open, transition and then politely eject. The women won’t care and it will take tons of pressure off of you. You do not have to stand there like an idiot for an hour having awkward conversation. Yes, in time you will obviously need to stay longer, but for now you are just working on beating approach anxiety, right? As you become more and more relaxed with this process, you can begin to stay longer and longer.

(Next Part: The Recipe To Kill Approach Anxiety)

More on Approach Anxiety >>click here<<

Some of the worst feelings in my life have come when I have chosen to avoid something I wanted out of fear. Knowing that I logically wanted something and then didn’t go for it because I succumb to a bunch of emotional rationalizations that are 95% bullshit, is killer. It reminds me of the Jim Rohn quote, “We suffer one of two things. Either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. You’ve got to choose discipline, versus regret, because discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons.”

As we all know, more often than not emotions steer the ship of our life and especially our day to day and moment to moment decisions..not logic. I feel like one of the biggest life challenges we all face is cultivating the ability to choose right action over fear. Fear can come in many forms, actual gut level pain, rationalizations, excuses, deflecting, blaming, comparison, etc. No matter what form it takes on, one of the greatest handcuffs we face, especially in the dating world, is overcoming that fear.

Sadly, the raw emotion of fear, is much much worse than the actual root of the fear. Actually approaching a woman is actually not as painful as the raw emotion of thinking about it. It’s strange how much your life changes when you learn to control this emotion and move more effortlessly through the world.

While the emotional feeling inside will never go away completely, you can condition your body and mind to be almost numb to it. Much like when you play baseball as a kid. It’s scary the first time you step in the batters box and have a kid throwing a ball at you. But after several years of playing, the fear melts away. Strangely, in the example of baseball, the fear should actually get worse being as the pitcher throws harder and harder as you get older. Even though you know this logically, your mind is numb to the fear.

What happens is that you develop a new habit. A habit of right action. If you always choose right action over emotion, you take the guess work out of it for your body and brain. Eventually your body and mind calm down and get on board through desensitization.

Guys come to me on bootcamp and think there must be something wrong with them because they have such bad approach anxiety. There is nothing wrong with you just because you have approach anxiety. If I took the best dating coach in the world who says he has zero approach anxiety and threw him in the batters box against a major league pitcher who throws 100mph, would he feel anxiety? Of course. If I took the most calm, cool, collected major league baseball player, who never gets nervous in the batters box, and took him a bar and forced him to approach a beautiful woman he didn’t know, would he feel anxiety? Of course.

You are feeling nervous for a whole host of reasons, which I will explore in great detail later in this article, but mainly it’s because you are doing something you have very few reference experiences for in a situation where you feel like you can’t make a mistake. In baseball, you get to start off on a tee, with no one watching. Once you have that down you can start hitting soft toss. If you mess that up, no big deal. No one is watching and no one is judging you. Once you have that down, you can move to the pitching machine, then a real pitcher. You can do all of this in the off season with noone watching. By the time the season rolls around, you are ready.

In pickup you don’t get to slowly graduate up to the wold series. The first woman you approach feels essentially like it’s the world series. On bootcamp we almost always cure 85%-90% of a guys approach anxiety by the end of the weekend. The weekend forces the guys to get mass exposure like they’ve never experienced. Sure, you will always feel something when you approach, but you can make it manageable.

(Next post: Develop The Habit of Right Action Over Emotion)

More on Approach Anxiety >>click here<<

Carlos Xuma

Note: This is a guest post from Carlos Xuma. He runs CarlosXuma.com where he gives dating advice for men on becoming an alpha man.

I was always a shy kid. I was embarrassed easily, and I always wanted to avoid those situations where I was put at the center of attention.

(But secretly I wanted to get that attention without all the feelings of people “seeing” me in the wrong way, if you know what I mean…)

So I’d be very quiet when I went to gatherings or social events like my friends’ birthday parties. Eventually, I’d come “out of my shell” when I found out the other kids were cool and wouldn’t make fun of me.

But every time I was in front of someone new – BOOM! The shyness would come back.

And as I got older, that shyness started to get in the way of me meeting girls.

I started noticing the girls very early, too. I was attracted to a girl in my 1st grade class, believe it or not. Her name was Julie, a raven-haired beauty.

I mean, there were dozens of cute girls around, but I couldn’t seem to get anything started – even in high school – because I just didn’t understand WHAT the heck I was supposed to be doing.

I knew a lot of girls at the time that I really didn’t want to date, but these girls also told me they felt that sense of “I’m so confused… what am I supposed to DO?”

Stay with me here, because I want to give you some information that will clear some of this up for you…

Do you think of yourself as “shy”?

Do you consider yourself “introverted”? (By the way, shy and introverted are not the same thing…)

Do you still find yourself having a tough time handling social situations with people?

Or maybe you have a tough time handling interpersonal conflicts…

Or maybe it’s just handling all the people that seem to want to help you, but you know they really just want to GET something from you…

I want to share something with you that I didn’t really come to appreciate until just the last few years, and it has made ALL the difference in my social life. And it’s made me a more positive person and much less cynical and angry at the same time.

It’s going to sound pretty harsh when I first say this, but if you think about it for a second, and open up your mind to the possibility, you’re going to know what what I’m saying is true.

It’s this:

People play games with you.

Every day, and in very subtle ways.

Now, we all think of “playing games” as being a BAD thing. After all, guys feel like girls play games with them when it comes to romance. Women feel like guys are playing games with them.

And it all feels like some kind of mysterious conspiracy to keep us from being successful with the opposite sex, doesn’t it?

The fact is that playing social games is NORMAL.

Not only is this normal…

It’s absolutely NECESSARY.

If I were to just walk up to you on the street and say: “Hi, I’m Carlos. I’m a man of my word, and I’m very trustable. I’d like to be a very close friend of yours, starting right now.”

After you stopped looking at me like I’d just escaped from the local insane asylum, you’d probably say, “Yeah, whatever.” And then you’d walk away.

Well, if that’s not the way that we become good friends with another person, how DO we do it?

Well, we usually go through a process. This is called the “friendship” model of how we allow ourselves to get closer to someone. And it has 4 important steps.

THE 4 STEPS OF CONNECTION & FRIENDSHIP

STEP #1: Attention

This is where we get a person’s attention. For a guy, it might be going up and introducing himself to a girl. For a girl, it might be getting her friend to introduce her to a guy.

Whatever the means, we know that the first start has to start with an introduction or approach of some kind.

That’s gaining the other person’s attention.

And since we use a variety of methods to get over our fears of rejection and our shyness, you might have to call these methods ‘games.’

After all, when was the last time you walked up and told someone exactly what you were thinking and why you wanted to meet them?

Mmm hmm. Thought so.

Some people call this being “indirect,” but it’s still a kind of game.

STEP #2: Connection

After you meet a new person, whether it’s for friendship or more, the next thing we need to do to create a friend is to find something in common. This is part of building a “connection.”

You may think of it as “building rapport,” or something similar.

And since we are – again – indirectly searching for these things, we might consider that a bit of a “game,” too.

I was just talking to one of my female friends today about this, and she used to subscribe to a “service” where you would actually be given coaching before you go on a date. They would give you relevant news stories to talk about, and each one of those stories was chosen so that you could find out the important things about your date, like if they wanted kids, like pets, etc.

Hmm.

Sounds like a bit of a ‘game’ if you ask me.

But a good one, because if she were to ASK those same questions, she might have gotten any number of answers.

STEP #3: Commitment

This is the step where you get to take your connection to the next level. If you’re a guy trying to get a date with a woman, you’ll probably need to get some level of commitment from the woman, usually by getting her phone number so you can reconnect and move up to a date.

“We should do something … sometime. What’s your number?”

If you were a woman, you might point out convenient parts of your connection and gently ’suggest’ that you two could “do something…”

… “Sometime.”

We put these things out there lightly like this to minimize our risk of getting hurt (i.e., getting rejected or turned down).

This is a kind of a game. But again, it’s a GOOD game in that it gives us the freedom to explore possibilities and still feel safe at the same time.

STEP #4: Action

Now that you’ve gotten them to commit to doing something with you, it’s time to make them take ACTION. Whether that’s to follow your plan – maybe a date, or just to show up, they have to DO something to make the connection real.

They have to act on it.

This is the ‘moment of glory,’ as they say. The small games we had to play to get here are now acknowledged as being okay, because they got us to the goal of finally getting together with someone so that we can now – hopefully – drop the games and get REAL with the other person.

But unfortunately, many of those games don’t necessarily go away here – or in other parts of our life.

The truly unfortunate part of this is that people very often play negative games with us, too.

I used to feel really “played” by other people. It got so bad that I started to get very negative about interacting with others, because it felt like they were just out to get something from me.

And then I started learning some very important techniques for handling people in social situations.

Now I’ve been talking about this concept in terms of creating a new girlfriend or boyfriend, but this is really applicable to ANY area of your life where you’re trying to create a “relationship” of some kind.

It could be a business relationship, between you and your boss…

It could be a romantic relationship between you and a lover…

It could be a sales relationship between you and possible client or customer…

Whatever the motive, we need to go through these steps to create something REAL between people.

But when the games start to become negative, and we feel like we’re in over our heads, the only thing you can do sometimes is to grab on and hope that you can avoid getting “played” by these people.

But very often, they are not people we can escape from. Sometimes we can’t get away from our boss, or we don’t want to throw our relationship with someone out the window just because we haven’t been able to figure out the game they’re playing and put an end to it.

I’m also here to tell you that these situations can be AVOIDED.

All it takes is some special understanding of what it takes to get power social skills and awareness that you can bring to ANY situation.

Because when you know how to handle the games that people play, you will finally start to feel more in-control of your own life.

I was out at lunch with a friend of mine, and her daughter was having problems handling some kids in her high school that were giving her a hard time. She asked me what her daughter could do when they were being mean. When my friend heard my solution, she told her daughter: “See! That’s why it’s good to ask Carlos… He always has a good solution to these problems.”

I’m not telling you this to brag or pat myself on the back. It’s to let you know that just a few years back I was completely clueless with what to do in these situations. And that is what inspired me to learn these social skills. I was sick and tired of feeling manipulated by other people.

If you’d like to stop being “played” by the games people play – and learn how to take POSITIVE control so that you can start winning – without deception or manipulation, or sinking to their level – then you owe it to yourself to take a look at my Power Social Skills program.

It’s taken me 5 years to learn all the best ways to handle difficult social situations, and I put everything I knew into this program.

When we start socially interacting with another person, our instincts will tell us everything we need to know about them in just a few seconds – IF you know what to look for.

And your gut never lies…

After all, this is what most of your brain evolved to do – to figure other people out!

The way we do this is through intricate and subtle social GAMES.

If you’d like more information on how to approach and meet women, and have the kind of confidence you dream of with women, I encourage you to go look at some of my dating programs for men.

No tricks, games, or deception. This is REAL success with QUALITY women.
I’ll teach you the very best techniques, secrets, and strategies I’ve got for you to start getting results IMMEDIATELY…

Your friend,

Carlos Xuma

PS: Don’t let another minute go by where you get anything less than what you deserve with women.

For more dating tips on Is Social Awkwardness Holding You Back? , and a free e-book…Go here right now – Carlos Xuma.

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