The Rules of the Game. Neil Strauss
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own personal limiting mind, it’s more important to understand its structure. The limiting mind tends to feed on itself in a downward spiral. Placing blame on others or on yourself for the material in your limiting mind only serves to strengthen it. It’s best to forgive, forget, and move on.
The first step on most roads to recovery is acceptance—admitting that there’s a problem. The second step in overcoming the source of our anxiety is to bring it out of unconscious darkness and into the light of our conscious awareness. Only then can we begin to dismantle it, see how it works, and create procedures to nullify it.
The limiting mind may present hindering voices, images, or physical feelings when it’s time to approach strangers and make their acquaintance. Let’s identify the types of internal media it can use to intimidate you into aborting a social mission.
Voices of the limiting mind include:
Images of the limiting mind include getting ignored; being mocked or bullied; being sad and alone; being observed and judged; getting beaten up; being rejected; and seeing more qualified or successful men in the room.
The limiting mind also expresses itself through physical sensations. When a potential threat registers on your radar, the acute stress response (also known as the fight-or-flight response) releases adrenaline into your system. This hormone increases your breathing and heart rate; constricts blood vessels; tenses muscles; dilates pupils; elevates your blood sugar level; and weakens your immune system.
Awaken Your Freedom Mind
To abolish approach anxiety, convince yourself logically that the dialogue of your limiting mind is incorrect and in fact self-sabotaging. In your Day 1 reading assignment, several limiting beliefs were disproven. These are the kinds of rational responses your freedom mind can use when the limiting mind rears its ugly head.
For example, if your limiting mind tells you, “She won’t hear you,” your freedom mind should answer back, “If she doesn’t hear me the first time, I’ll smile and politely repeat myself more loudly, slowly, and clearly.”
If your limiting mind tells you that you’re going to get nervous, your freedom mind can say, “I may have a natural stress reaction to this situation because, after all, it is somewhat stressful. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to push through it. In the past, nervousness has given me the energy I needed to perform at my best and feel good about myself. So let’s do this!”
Take a moment to write down your own limiting mind’s reservations about approaching. Then write down corresponding freedom mind responses that empower you. Use the word you for the scripts of your limiting mind, and the words I and me in your freedom mind responses. This will help you disassociate from your limiting mind and associate more closely with your freedom mind.
It’s up to you to feed positive scripts into your freedom mind on a regular basis, to give it the power to overcome, persevere, and succeed. To do this, pick three freedom mind scripts or affirmations that you feel would best replace your specific fears, whether they’re the ones you just wrote down or ones included in this book. Write them on a single sheet of paper. Then read them out loud with conviction during your morning or evening freedom mind ritual, and run them through your mind over the course of the day. Once you start to feel the beneficial changes, switch to another set of affirmations according to your new needs.
Shift Your Submodalities
Submodalities are the media through which your senses receive, remember, and process information. For example, auditory submodalities include volume, pitch, tempo, and timbre.
To help eliminate negative internal dialogue, try adjusting the submodalities of your limiting mind’s voice. Make it quieter and further away; stammering and squeaky; or use the voice of a person you don’t like.
At the same time, give your freedom mind a strong, low-pitched, calm, nearby voice. Consider making it the voice of someone you respect: a mentor, an actor, or your future best self.
If these exercises seem at first glance like New Age tripe, that’s your limiting mind at work again. This process is exactly what trainers instruct top athletes to do to master their game. It’s also one way that therapists eliminate phobias.
Visually, put your mental pictures and movies through the same filters. First, overpower the images of failure in your limiting mind with the successful images of your freedom mind. Change a picture of getting ignored to one of being adored; change a picture of being rejected into a bright, vivid visualization of a beautiful woman pressing her phone number into your palm.
Now change the submodalities. Make the images in your limiting mind small, distant, black-and-white, slow-moving, blurry, and dark. Disassociate with these negative images by seeing them not through your own eyes but as if you’re watching yourself as a character on a movie screen.
Whenever your limiting mind images pop up, instantly replace them with large, bright, sharp, colorful pictures of successful situations. Associate with these images by seeing them through your own eyes.
These mental exercises are best done just after waking up or before going to sleep, because that’s when your subconscious is most open to changework. By repeating this exercise as often as possible, you’ll get to the point where you automatically reject the negative images your limiting mind tries to throw at you before each approach.
Let Go of Your Outcome
One of the biggest problems men have with approaching women is magnifying the meaning of the interaction and focusing too intently on achieving one specific outcome—whether it be exchanging phone numbers, making out, having sex, or beginning a romantic relationship.
Emotionally detaching from the outcome—while rationally working toward your goal—will significantly alleviate your anxiety. This is why the Stylelife Challenge offers small, easy-to-accomplish goals rather than large, unlikely ones.
People can be random, unpredictable, chaotic creatures. And sometimes you may truly be surprised. That’s why approaching is so much fun. So why constrain the possibilities of a new encounter by being dependent on a particular outcome?
Remove Failure from Your Vocabulary
The word failure has different meanings for different people. To most people, failure means approaching and being rejected. My definition of failure is quitting, giving up, or never approaching at all.
Rejection is another word that’s been misused and misrepresented. The dictionary definition of reject is “to refuse to accept.” So if you offer someone a stick of gum, and she says “No thanks,” you’ve been rejected. Do you feel an emotional sting? Probably not.
If you invite someone to a social event, and she says “No thanks,” it shouldn’t be any different. But for most people it is different, and here’s why: