Let’s make the following thought experiment. You live the daygame dream, you can run up to girls, and opens don’t carry emotional costs. You can open anything, get rejected or not, and your inner core is immutable. It barely moves you, “this is just fleeting”, you think. Well… is this the dream?
Approach anxiety
Let’s think about it. At the moments leading up to the approach, your Ego has to make a decision. Is the result of this interaction going to affect your self-image?
If the answer is yes, then approach anxiety exists. Your being, consciously or unconsciously, understands you are about to get feedback from the world and doesn’t very much like it. Positive or negative, the feedback needs to be addressed somehow. A movement in the outside world produces a movement in the inner world.
Positive feedback can be rationalised as “I am awesome”, or “Game works”, or “there are good people in the world”.
Bad feedback is harder to rationalise; accepting it at face value means you need to change something in yourself. A blowout implies you weren’t good enough to get the girl. This leads to a cascade of questions to be answered: “Was it a Value issue? Can my Value even be increased?”, “If so, how? Is it the gym? Is it social status?”. There is also the chance: “the girl would never like me anyway”.
Maybe you shut off the feedback completely. You lock your Soul out of the world. You rationalize it in a different, impersonal way: “Game doesn’t work”, “she is a bitch”.
The whole point is that you have a stake in the interaction. The outcome of the interaction matters to you, and the result, positive or negative, needs to be addressed by your Soul. A word for this inner play is approach anxiety.
Aside: once we start taking the Ego into the equation, notice how the emotional results of the approach are predictable. This is the predictive power of psychology.
Stake into the outcome
Notice that we used a fancy word earlier. The idea of having a stake in the outcome. That is indeed the key to understanding approach anxiety. The intensity of approach anxiety is relative to the stake you assign to the interaction.
Not many people have understood this, and the ones who have preach for outcome independence. What we will show is that this is wrong; we should actually be thinking diametrically opposite. Let us not get ahead of ourselves and formalize our claim:
“If you have a stake in the interaction, then by law, some inner movement (in the soul) will happen to cause a pre-approach steer of emotions”.
Surprisingly, this can hold at the micro level, i.e., before the approach itself. But it can also hold at the macro level, for example, through a series of 10 blowouts (because you expected some results in those).
Absence and presence of Stake
The above statement is obvious; you might even call it a tautology (provides no deductive value). True, but we will use a corollary.
Absence of inner emotional steer, pre or post approach, can only imply no stake in the interaction. And if there is no stake in the interaction, well… then there is no reward out of the interaction.
There you have it, that is the 1 million dollar result. We can only eliminate approach anxiety by disassociating with the outcome. But this disassociation can only happen in two ways: defensive dissociation or true dissociation.
- Defensive dissociation: When we artificially create psychological distance from an event. As we discussed in the Courage essay, this can only be achieved by negativity and hence hurts your Game.
- True dissociation: This can only be true when you have zero interest in the girl. Simply put, it is a girl you fundamentally don’t like. The grannies, the fatties, etc.
It is there, plain and simple. If you are using excessive defensiveness, it is an Ego defence, and girls will smell it from a mile away. If you are truly disinterested, you shouldn’t be opening them. It is a meta-level weasel: you are hiding in a watered-down version of Daygame.
Take both observations together, and we can see that approach anxiety will always be present for the girls who matter. Precisely because they matter. It is unavoidable and structural.
Inner Game and Courage
What’s the deal then? Does Inner Game not matter? Had we been sold a lie? Yes and no. Inner game is the inner maturity of dealing with emotional feedback (positive or negative), not avoiding responsibility of it. Inner game is controlling your emotions and inner psychology, not reducing it to unimportant. If you shut yourself off from the negative, you shut yourself off from the positive.
Good Inner Game is the understanding that temporal feelings don’t change your long-term life plan, long-term value, or what have you. You can deal with temporal changes, but this doesn’t mean you don’t feel them. Stop denying your feelings to yourself as an excuse for not addressing them.
In short, Inner Game is Courage. The only way to deal with approach anxiety is via Courage. It is about acknowledging the bad scenarios and being ready for them mentally. Not looking the other way altogether! Inner Game is Courage.
