Yesterday, I went out to tread the streets of London and talk to attractive young women with another guy I’ve been mentoring.
He’s at the stage where he’s been able to overcome approach anxiety by going out with a wing and taking it in turns to push each other, but he finds it impossible to force himself to approach women on his own. He’s not got many mental hang-ups which will hinder his progress and he’s a good listener, so I don’t think it will be long before he’s able to accomplish this and push on from there.
This post summarises and expands upon one particular thing that happened whilst we were walking along Oxford Street looking for women that we’d like to meet. When you get to a certain level, it’s sometimes hard to realise that some concepts and strategies that you have internalised and take for granted are not so obvious to less experienced guys and this was a particular case in point.
How I Coach Guys to Approach Girls
The way that I usually deal with a guy who has a problem motivating himself to approach, is just to ask him what kind of girls he likes and to tell me if he sees one.
Often his mind will stop him from verbalising when he sees a girl who is attractive to him, but I’ll usually see him do a double take (he looks at a girl, looks away and then looks at her again) on a particular girl and I know what’s up. Either that, or when I see a girl who comes close to his description of what he likes, I’ll point her out and ask him if she’s his type.
Whatever happens, once we’ve identified a girl for him to approach, it normally just takes as little as a physical push in the back and for me to say “Go!” to get him to take action. Sometimes I have to use other methods, as the mind is a powerful thing. For example, I’ll ask him what’s stopping him. It’s usually something really trivial and a bit of logic is usually enough to break it down. Sometimes it takes a little motivation or philosophy.
I’ll always do a few approaches myself before I expect anybody to trust me enough to push them into doing something that they’re scared of. Once you see someone do something that you fear and emerge unscathed, you start to reverse the damage that an overactive mind can do to your motivation levels.
This is why it’s important to concentrate during your first few months on approaching as many girls as you can, because what you are doing is convincing your mind that going up to an attractive woman and talking to her isn’t going to hurt you.
There are other reasons to approach a lot of girls. For example, I’ve talked before about how to learn any skill, whether it’s seduction, tennis, writing, cooking or anything; you have to practice over and over again.
You have to take action, observe the result of that action and compare the action and the result against the ideal action and the ideal result. So for example, when you do a Yad stop* on a girl but you don’t leave enough space (the action), the girl will be startled (the result). So, you analyse this, and you modify your next approach (action) and see if you get a better response (result).
This brings me on to the subject of the post, which is to do with hesitation.
Kill Your Hesitation
When I see a girl that I like, I have trained myself such that I will immediately, without thinking, start to make my way towards her. How one comes to this stage is something that I’ll go into throughout this post, but to get back to me and my protege standing on Oxford Street, I saw a young looking, tall blonde (his type of girl) walking away from us, down the street. I pointed to her and said to him “There! Go and talk to her.” He’d already done a few approaches that day, so he didn’t have a problem to just start running in her direction.
I say ‘running’, but it was really a kind of fast walk, as anybody who has been to Oxford Street on a Saturday evening will testify; it’s often difficult to move because of the throng of people. We’d mostly been doing Front stops or Yad stops* since we met up as it’s my policy not to go to Oxford Street on a Saturday until after 6pm, as during the day, there are noobs and boot-camps going on there which can taint some of the girls.
We’d been spending our time wandering around Soho, Covent Garden, Seven Dials, Chinatown, Leicester Square, Piccadilly and the bottom end of Regent Street and there was plenty of room to Yad stop any girl we wanted to meet. In contrast, once we reached Oxford Street, it was still busy enough to make it difficult to catch the girl and almost impossible to get in front of her and do a proper Yad stop.
As he was in pursuit, I followed him to hold him to task if he didn’t approach and to be able to give him some feedback if he did. He was following her for ages through the horde of people, trying to find an opportunity to get past her, get in front and do a Yad stop. It must have been a couple of minutes that he was walking behind her looking for the opportunity and I knew that the longer it took, the less likely it was that he would approach.
Limiting Beliefs
When you’re inexperienced, if you wait before approaching a girl, your mind will start giving you excuses as to why you should give up, and the longer you wait, the more these excuses compound. The way that you defeat these experiences is by facing them head on.
If for example, your mind tells you that she’ll think you’re weird, you approach anyway, charm her and take her number, then go on a date with her and bang her. At some point, you’ll talk about guys she’s met before and she’ll compare you to the weirdos, firmly placing you in the ‘not weird’ camp and other guys in the ‘weird’ camp. The more times a hot girl reassures you that in actual fact, approaching and seducing her like you did was far from weird, the more likely your mind will be to accept it.
If for example, you think you’re too old, too short, too ugly, or whatever physical attribute you have that your mind is telling you will stop a girl liking you, then the solution, as always, is to take action. When you get a good response from the girl, it’s like you’re slapping this limiting belief that you have in the face. When you’ve slapped it enough times, it’ll say “Okay! I give up. I was talking shit.”
You can follow this path with every limiting belief you have. You’ll be amazed at the sheer number and variety your mind can conjure up.
Also, to get back to my protege, he was walking right behind the girl.
Even I know when there’s somebody following me, and I’m a guy. A woman will know very quickly if she’s being followed.
It’s called stalking. Don’t do it.
Stalking and Losing Sight of the Girl
Even if you do a flawless approach, if she thinks you were stalking her, she’s going to blank you and walk away. A woman’s intuition is ten times more powerful that a guy’s, so if you’re going to follow a girl while you look for an opportunity to stop her, you’ve either got to ensure that it’s only for a short period of time, or you have to drop back and keep a couple of people between you and her, but keep her in sight until the time is right.
One other thing that often happens is that the girl goes into a shop or turns a corner while you’re distracted and you lose sight of her. Obviously if you see her go into a shop, you can approach her in the shop, but this is often beyond limits for beginners. Don’t worry, you can fix that too. Just concentrate on street approaches for the time being.
To get back to our story, the girl crossed the road to a section of pavement where there were less people. I lost sight of them both, but moments later I saw my protege coming back and I asked him what happened. It was a combination of excuses that got the better of him, plus her going into a shop and one other thing, a lack of…
Knowledge
What knowledge was he lacking? The Yosha Stop*.
You’ll notice the asterisks after I talk about a specific method stopping a girl. This is because I’ll talk about these stops at the end of the post. After all, the post is about hesitation. As you can see, hesitating before you come face-to-face with a girl can be deadly (not literally, of course). You have to be able to limit the amount of time between you seeing a girl that you want to meet and actually meeting her.
There are four things that you can do to lessen the likelihood of you not talking to the girl:
- Start walking in her direction immediately after you see her.
- Approach her as soon as you can.
- Have a variety of methods of getting her attention.
- Be able to approach in any environment.
The way most people learn to approach in the beginning is by getting someone to push them. When you don’t have a wing to help you out though, you learn to adopt the ‘Three Second Rule’.
This is a rule which was first espoused by Mystery for nightclub game, whereby every time you see a girl that you like, you make yourself start walking towards her before you can count to three. This stops you from convincing yourself not to approach and over time it becomes a knee-jerk reaction, almost like a Pavlovian response.
As I’ll talk about at the end of the post, there are a number of ways to approach a girl in the street, depending on circumstances. There are yet more ways to meet a girl in other places, like a cafe, a women’s clothing store, in a tube train, etc, but I won’t go into those here. I’ll save that for another post.
The important thing to remember though, is this:
If you hesitate, you masturbate.
Stopping the Girl
*Here follows a quick recap on the three main methods of approaching a girl on the street, if you’re not aware of the definitions.
Before I start, I’m going to say something that I believe, but which few people talk about: I think that when you approach a girl, the effect is considerably more powerful if you do it from directly in front of her. The further you are from being face-to-face when you deliver your line, the less powerful your approach will be. All three of the following stops try to facilitate that.
The front stop is usually used in one of two scenarios.
The first scenario is that you see a stationary girl who is facing you. You walk up to her and start talking to her.
The second scenario is that you’re walking along and you see a girl that you like in the distance, walking towards you.
As I said above, you have to make sure that if you’re not directly in her path; you navigate to ensure that you are on a collision course with her. Then you keep on walking until you come close enough for her to notice your intent. You give her strong eye contact, smile, put your hand out in front of you, stop at a comfortable distance and deliver your opener in a strong, clear voice.
I usually only use the front stop on stationary girls or girls that I have absolutely no doubt that I want to meet. It’s actually a really nice way of stopping a girl as you can feel the hairs on the back of your neck bristle when you lock eyes with her. You really get that heightened feeling of tension and anticipation because you both know what’s about to happen.
The Yad stop is an approach that I first saw demonstrated by Yad, who is the founder of the London Daygame community.
The scenario is that you see a girl that you like; it can be from the front, from behind, from across the street, wherever. In essence, you get in front of her and stop her like the front stop, but she doesn’t get a chance to see you coming and prepare for it. This is the stop that I use the most on the street. Let me explain.
For me, what I really like in a woman is a nice pair of tits, a slim figure, long black or red hair, pale skin and a classy, feminine way of dressing. A skirt or dress is almost a prerequisite. That’s what I like, but the main thing I don’t like is a big fat arse.
This makes the Yad stop ideal, because if I see a girl walking towards me, I can study her and check whether she matches the criteria that I’m looking for and then let her pass and look back to see if she has a fat arse. If has a cute arse, then I’ll do the Yad stop.
So, I see her coming, I look her up and down blatantly, maybe give her eye contact to suss out potential interest levels, let her walk past and then check out her arse. If she checks all the boxes, I’ll immediately break into a run or a pacey walk depending on how quickly she’s moving and catch up with her.
As I’m passing her, I look at her ready to engage eye contact. Once I pass her, I hold out my hand, partly to stop her and partly to gauge my distance from her. The aim is to be at least an arm length and a half in front of her. Then come round in an arc, turning my body as I go, until I’m facing her, directly in front of her, not at an angle. I stop moving and deliver my opener in a loud, clear voice.
As I’m in the state of movement, I’m mentally checking my posture, making sure I’m smiling (if she’s hot you’ll smile anyway) and thinking about what I can use in my assumption stack.
The other reason I like this approach is because I imagine that for a girl it can feel quite romantic. It conjures up all of those romantic books and films that she’s read or watched where a guy sees the girl of his dreams and although he’s stunned by her beauty at first, he runs after her and woos her with his charm and masculinity.
The Yosha stop seems to be rarely used or talked about. I’m not sure whether many people use it, but if executed correctly, it can be a useful tool. It’s named after Andy Yosha (who now calls himself Andy Moore, his real name), Yad’s first wing, who formalised the Daygame Blueprint (which is a structured approach to meeting girls on the street), and who runs Daygame.com.
I only ever use this approach in the scenario that my protege found himself on Oxford Street, where you simply can’t get in front of the girl.
You approach from behind and once you come level with her so that you’re shoulder to shoulder, you turn towards her. Then you gently put the tips of the fingers of the hand that was furthest away from her in the crook of her elbow and apply some pressure so she feels you physically stopping her, but not grabbing her. Simultaneously, you point backwards with your other hand as if motioning that something has happened behind her, which you are bringing to her attention.
Of course, as with all approaches, you should have good posture, a smile and give her direct eye contact when she looks toward you.
If you do all this correctly, she will stop and turn to face you, so that you are now face-to-face, at right angles to the direction she was originally travelling. More often than not, she’ll look in the direction you are pointing, but as she stops, you have to immediately deliver your opener in a loud, clear voice which will be a variation on this: “I just saw you back there (in the direction you’re pointing) and”.. blah, blah, blah. The usual stuff. Now you’ve stopped her, she’s facing you and you’re delivering your opener.
Perfect.