“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.

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

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. And so on.

But I 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…

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 got advice on how to talk to girls while traveling.

Because I was going on a 3 month backpacking trip.

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.

This actually deserves a whole story, as it’s a funny story and what I learned was profound.

But lets keep it short for now.

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 3 days later I lost all my painfully gained new confidence again.

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 freak.

I then went to the city center and started conversations with people.

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

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.

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

My new confidence was gone again.

So I did face my fears…

…but it didn’t work.

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

It took way too much time and energy to maintain.

So I went back to feeling awkward, but I hated it.

Every time I made plans to consistently do it, 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 more about self-sabotage on the next page. Because there is a powerful solution to it.

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 mediocre 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.