approaching Archives - Inner Confidence

Why is approaching so important for building confidence?

You’ve heard me say it over and over, but if you expect to get results and you’re not crushing approaches or already dating multiple women, it’s just not gonna happen.

If you wanna get good at basketball you’ve gotta take a ton of shots right? You can’t expect to show up at the court, stand around with the ball and expect to improve can you?

Well, that’s what many of you guys are doing, and then whining that you suck and the program isn’t working. That line of thinking is actually offensive to guys who have put in the work. Robbie crushed 10k approaches by the time he was in his late 20’s. Now he never has to approach anyone because he paid his dues.

Confidence isn’t a switch you flip because you feel like it. It’s something you develop over thousands of repetitions. Confidence occurs as the byproduct of developing your skills.

Here’s what you can expect in terms of objective results when you start making approaches:

1,000 approaches get most guys past anxiety.
The next 2,000 get you more comfortable being in the moment.
The next 2,000 after that get you dates with 6’s, 7’s and occasional 8’s, as long as your fashion, accent, body language and fitness are on point.
Once you hit the 5,000+ mark, it becomes almost silly to day game anymore because odds are you’re crushing social circle and night game much harder, because you have a much hotter pool of women to draw from.

“Fake it till you make it” really means perform an action repeatedly until it becomes a habit. You can’t fake an action and expect it to work long-term, but you can keep performing an action until it becomes comfortable.

Let’s take Leverage Program member Joe as a case study. I met him in 2007 at a workshop Robbie was leading in Phoenix. He didn’t sign up, and didn’t reach out again until 2014, when he signed up for the Leverage Program. He spent his first six months in the course downloading lessons into his brain and getting crushed in the group for douchey behavior. He did a great job taking the feedback without getting angry or salty. He lost some weight then grew a cool beard then approached like crazy. Now he’s consistently banging 6’s and the occasional 7+. See how that works guys?

Meaningful life change isn’t something you develop instantly as a result of being motivated. It only comes through baby steps and daily habits. You have to improve your social skills, physiological state, building relationships, and objectively achieve success with women. Focus on getting more reps, but ignore the 10,000 hour rule, because Malcolm Gladwell got it wrong.

Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you have the eye of the tiger. The eye of the tiger is an expression we use for a guy who has a lot confidence, has fucked a lot of women and isn’t intimidated by women.

When you reach this point in your game, you tend to use eye contact as your number one tool for approaching. Women will smell your confidence and you’ll notice them checking you out. You throw a seductive look their way and see how they react. If she gives you love, you walk over and just say hi. It’s often a done deal from there, granted you don’t say anything stupid.

Essentially, being an active member of the Leverage group and hitting on a TON of women will help you develop your eye of the tiger.

True confidence only comes from demonstrated performance. It’s hard to fool your subconscious mind, which is why gimmicks like NLP and positive affirmations are just a band-aid that ultimately fails.

Most guys overestimate how different they are from others. What this means is that you can simply take someone else’s path to success, and emulate it. Take the same actions that they took. Look to your mentors to build your identity. Do what they did. Do what works.

3 Reasons Why You Don’t Do Day Game (even though you know you should) and what you can do about it.

by Robbie Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following Inner Confidence, you know that day game is the easiest way to meet high quality women without the hassle of online dating, Tinder, and spending mad cash at bars and clubs.

But here’s the thing: If you know about day game, and you still aren’t approaching regularly, odds are that you’re not going to start without making some changes.

Here’s why you probably don’t approach:

1. You haven’t reprogrammed the irrational parts of your brain. If you approach 10 girls, 9 reject you, and 1 becomes your girlfriend, you’ll forget about the rejections and whole thing will be well worth the effort. But your primal brain doesn’t view it this way. In the hunter-gatherer tribes of our ancestors, one bad approach didn’t just mean an embarrassing rejection — it meant a spear in the chest from the local alpha male. You probably haven’t made the effort to rewire these instincts.

2. You’re trying to rely on willpower. Your willpower is limited, and isn’t strong enough to overcome a lifetime of habits that do not involve day game approaches. You have to create new habits and make approaching second nature.

3. Your personality type likely falls on the passive, introverted corner of the Inner Confidence alignment grid. This means that your analytical brain – which makes you a great lawyer, investor, or engineer – is also unusually good at coming up with excuses for why you shouldn’t approach.

It took me a while to figure all this out. The reason is that, when I first learned about day game, I actually started going out right away and approaching any girls that I wanted to talk to. I would even leave my miserable office job during the day and hit on girls at the UTC La Jolla mall.

I was absolutely awful at first. Back then, the only real dating advice out there came from the ridiculous PUA crowd that had become popular with The Game. I’ve probably heard “Aww, that’s sweet but I have a boyfriend” 5,000 times.

Still, I was smashing reps and learning through trial and error. Over time, after having hundreds of girls blow past me when I tried to stop then, I figured out techniques like the “hook and swoop” and learned lines that were congruent with my personality.

It was only really after I became a dating coach that I realized how unusual my experience was. There’s a small percentage of guys who are self-motivated to go out during the day proactively and approach, and aren’t too bothered by the repeated failure that is part of learning.

The vast majority of guys, though, go through a different learning curve. A lot of them actually improve quite quickly once they start trying – sometimes within a few hours. The hard part for them is overcoming their initial approach anxiety. They are willing to read and study enormous amounts of material but can’t get themselves to approach in even the easiest situations, like when they’re out running errands.

If this sounds like you, don’t feel bad. It’s completely normal. I regularly coach guys who take enormous risks in other areas of their life but struggle with day game. They won’t hesitate to run onto a battlefield in Afghanistan or quit their day job to start a business, but they’ll hem and haw before saying hi to a girl in line at Whole Foods.

While there’s no way around the effort that goes into learning day game, I’ve found that you can hack approach anxiety and make rapid progress with the right strategy.

The single biggest thing you have to do to overcome your fear of approaching is to put something more valuable on the line.

An easy way to do this is an approach bet. Tell a friend that you will give him $100 if you don’t make a certain number of approaches. Your fear of losing the $100 will probably outweigh whatever fear you have about approaching.

I think a better, more long-term solution, however, is to surround yourself with other guys who are as good or better than you at day game. As I look back on my own experience, one of the things that kept me going was my friend Jason, who was learning day game at the same time I was. He always had the most hilarious lines. I think part of the reason I kept approaching so persistently was because, even though I didn’t like the rejection, I valued the conversations we would have about our latest approaches.

Guys in the Leverage Mentorship program tend to do well at day game because they have a system and infrastructure in place that basically makes success inevitable. I set up monthly approach competitions, pair guys up with wingmen of similar skill level, and encourage everyone to go out and bust through social anxiety.

We make it a game, share stories, and laugh about the ridiculous encounters that ensue. It turns an otherwise uncomfortable experience into a positive, fun environment. They get the instant, personalized feedback that is critical to mastery.

Here’s what two of my clients posted in the Leverage forum this past week about their recent daygame outings:

Joey “I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, it’s really liberating to give 0 fucks and hit on random girls. The more I hang out with the guys in the group, the more I learn to ignore other people’s reactions and just do me.

Interesting start to the day game was when Sergio and I got there early. We walked around and ate lunch, but were pretty hesitant to approach at first. This only changed when Sergio saw a girl and said, why don’t you hit on her?”

This for some reason is a real hack for approaching, if you have someone to push you to approach, you will end up doing it because you will feel like the biggest bitch if you don’t.

Just a bit of wisdom I picked up from the experience”

Derek “I have wasted so much time thinking that I could get great with girls/socializing without actually doing it. Of course in hindsight it seems so clear. How would you get better at anything without doing it? While working on the fundamentals like lifestyle, voice, fitness, travel etc It is still imperative to keep on taking action and doing daygame and go out at least once a week. Just hanging out with the folks yesterday I learnt so much about how to make a great event/ dinner/ drinks and what are the logistics which go into it.”

I would obviously love for you to apply for the Leverage and I think the program would be a particularly good fit if you live in New York, LA or Western Europe, where a lot of Leverage members hang out together. But even if you’re not ready to join Leverage, I’d encourage you to think about ways you can create new habits and accountability in your journey.

If you’re not sure where to begin, I’d be happy to give you a free 15-minute consultation to help you get started.

Your friend,

Robbie