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My Story (Chapter 3)

I was afraid of getting rejected.

I felt like a little boy, not like a real man.

I was afraid of becoming embarrassed.

And I feared that OTHERS WOULD SEE THAT.

I was afraid of them seeing right through me… that I was an imposter.

That I just faked my confidence.

And I feared getting rejected by girls more than anything.

I feared that everyone would find out what a loser I was with women.

And that deep down I was actually this insecure guy.

Since that was my biggest fear I decided to focus on facing that one.

In hindsight, talking to women was actually only a small part of the problem I was dealing with.

And the real problem was much deeper…

But talking to girls was inconceivably scary and humiliating to me.

There was no place I felt more insecure than in front of a cute girl.

And I thought that if I could talk to women all my problems would disappear (was I ever wrong!)

So I focused on that.

My first few drunk attempts in a club resulted in painfully awkward rejections.

I tried starting conversations with no success.

Actually, no success would be inaccurate.

“The epitome of awkwardness” describes it better…

I got myself into some pretty awkward situations.

Got laughed at.

Got ridiculed.

Had people pity me…

Got a head turn when trying to kiss a girl I thought liked me.

And more awfulness.

Even though I was drunk, it still sucked big time.

Insecurity isn’t all that attractive to a woman.

And me trying to impress women while full of “liquid confidence” turned out to be even more repelling.

I had found some internet dating programs on the web that sounded incredibly promising.

I could become “suave with the ladies in a weekend”.

What they promised sounded brilliant.

I’d be super confident after a weekend of talking to girls.

So I paid a ton of money to fly over this self-proclaimed Don Juan to help me talk to girls.

One of the most awkward and uncomfortable weekends of my life.

I started with saying hi to strangers. No problem.

Next, I said hi and asked for directions. No problem.

Then, Hi and introducing myself.

Very awkward.

And then we stepped it up a notch…

I had to walk up to girls and ask them for their opinion on something:

“Who lies more, men or women?”

This would start a conversation, and I would then have to continue talking.

Tell stories.

Make jokes he told me I should use (his jokes he had tested with countless women).

In hindsight, he tried to teach me how a normal, confident man talks to a woman.

But it was structured.

And of course contrived and fake as the stories and jokes weren’t my own.

And, since I was so awkward and anxious, I was totally in my head.

And I was even more anxious because all this pressure was on me to do it right.

I had a gazillion fears running me.

I feared I’d run out of things to say.

I feared the girl must think I was the biggest loser.

Or that people surrounding us must believe I was such a pathetic weirdo.

I was absolutely terrified, but kept with it.

That first day I walked up -or was pushed into- maybe 25 girls and groups of girls.

Constantly the same routine way of going about it.

I felt a lot more confident at the end of the day.

Next day we would do this again. But now we would move to the next levels of asking for numbers and trying to kiss.

I dreaded this so much I didn’t sleep that night.

I was so dead scared of the next day.

And when the second day came, I was so afraid and awkward that I couldn’t do it.

Instead I asked for advice on how to talk to girls while traveling because I was about to embark on a 3 month backpacking trip. I had decided to go travel by myself to “get outside my comfort zone”.

Long story short – I felt a lot more confident after that weekend.

But unfortunately, most of my new confidence soon left me.

For the next 3 years, I continued facing my fears.

I did a lot of weird stuff during that time.

For example…

I was told I could get “rejection-proof” if I’d get myself purposely rejected.

So I walked up to 20 different girls, or groups of girls in Amsterdam.

I said: “Hey, you like me. Give me your number.”

I was horrified doing it.

I’ll tell you the whole story at some point as there are some profound lessons I learned I want to share.

I’ll shorten it for now because I’m trying to make a point here.

Basically, the first 10 times were massively painful and embarrassing.

After the 15th or so, I stopped caring as much.

After the 20th, I felt like THE MAN.

On top of the world!

But then a few days later I lost all my painfully gained new confidence again.

After all that effort…

I also did the thing I feared most: Embarrassing myself.

I put the brightest red lipstick on my lips and in circles around my eyes.

I looked like a total weirdo.

I then went to the city center in Malaysia and forced myself to start conversations with people.

I pretended there was nothing weird going on when they would ask me what’s up with me.

It was beyond awkward.

When they would say “what’s up with your face”, I’d ignore it.

I was mocked.

Made fun off.

Ridiculed.

The first 30-45 min sucked. Big time.

The last 15 min sucked a lot less.

At the end, I hardly cared. I felt pretty confident.

But then a week later, I was almost back to square one.

While I may have kept some of the new confidence, most of it was gone again.

So I did face my fears…

… but it didn’t work very well.

Or at least, it didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

It was too scary and took way too much out of me to consistently do.

(and many people that DO consistently face their fears are still anxious because it doesn’t solve the underlying cause of the anxiety. More in a bit…)

So I went back to feeling insecure, anxious and awkward.

Every time I made plans to consistently face my fears, I came up with excuses.

I self-sabotaged. As we all do when we try to overcome our anxiety.

Because we’re anxious for good reasons.

I talk in detail about how to eliminate self-sabotage later on.

You need to to eliminate it because otherwise the changes you make will only be temporary.

Anyway, in 5 years of facing my fears, doing affirmations until I was blue in the face, hypnosis, time-line therapy, changing my thoughts, journaling, NLP, and anything self-help I could get my hands on, I made only minimal progress.

Sometimes it felt like I was going backwards.

I still had massive anxiety.

And then in early 2006 I stumbled onto this technique that changed everything…

Still have any question? Get in touch with me now!