taking risks Archives - Inner Confidence

Dealing with discomfort

What I’m about to say is sad, but not very controversial: most people would experience mild discontent with their situation than face the discomfort that’s necessary for improving their lives.

People just don’t want to tolerate discomfort, even if they have a guarantee it’s temporary.

Getting into shape is a prime example. Unhealthy people tend to know that getting into shape requires eating healthy, and physical exercise. The failure to act isn’t caused by a lack of information. It stems from an unwillingness to feel uncomfortable. Eating healthy is uncomfortable. Working out causes physical pain. Both of these are a struggle, and only when you choose to accept that the process is not going to be comfortable can you get into shape.

Most people make decisions based on how comfortable they think they’ll feel in given situations. This is why most people aren’t satisfied with their lives. Comfort is a terrible metric for pursuing a life of fulfillment.

Making excuses

Originally I intended to write about how you need to stop making excuses, but that’s not even it. The better advice is to stop letting the excuses you make prevent you from taking action.

Making excuses is normal. It’s a function of the human problem-solving mind.

What’s key is taking action despite those excuses. Don’t let excuses keep you in your comfort zone. People often think they need to be confident before they can face rejection or discomfort, but that’s backwards. First you do the thing outside your comfort zone, then you gain the confidence.

Especially when we’re talking about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone to improve your dating life, there is NO reason to hide any part of who you are from the world. You’re not doing anything wrong or shameful and you’re not violating the rights of others. You can make the decision to be completely honest and open with everyone. Vulnerability is tough, but it’s empowering. It’s how we grow. And if others are not upportive of your decision to improve your life, then the only thing they deserve from you is distance.

Get specific about your discomfort

When I advise that you should be willing to be uncomfortable, it might make sense but it’s still an abstract concept. To make it actionable, it’s helpful to put yourself in a difficult situation then ask yourself: “what sensations am I experiencing right now?”

When I feel anxious about approaching a girl, the main thing I feel is a racing heartbeat. Sometimes my throat gets dry and my hands get sweaty. It’s so much easier to approach if I can ask myself “Are you willing to feel a racing heart and sweaty palms for a couple minutes in order to get better talking to girls?” That’s an easy yes. When you can get very specific about what being uncomfortable means to you, it’s way easier to face than a big abstract concept like “approach anxiety.”

Emotional avoidance is an important idea to think about. When we do not want to feel our emotions, we try to push them away. It works in the short term, but emotions are like water in a pipe. You can block the pipe, but the pressure only increases until it eventually bursts.

Clean emotions versus dirty emotions

A great concept from the intersection of mindfulness and psychology is that of clean emotions and dirty emotions. Clean emotions are the feelings that come up for us naturally. Dirty emotions are what we get when you try to fight those clean emotions. The concept borrows from the Buddhist concept that while suffering is optional, pain is an inevitable part of life. In short, as turn our pain into suffering by resisting it, we turn clean emotions into dirty emotions.

For example, if I experience a rough breakup with my girlfriend, it’s natural and normal for me to feel sad. When we experience loss, we grieve the loss with a healthy sense of sadness, a clean emotion. However, if I were to fight that sadness by getting angry I feel sad, or worry about it and cause myself anxiety, that’s turning it into an unhealthy dirty emotion. One definition that distinguishes between sadness and depression is that when we fight feelings of sadness we become depressed. Depression is sadness plus avoidance.

An example from dating: it’s normal to feel fear when you’re approaching an attractive woman, but when you tell yourself that you shouldn’t feel that fear, it multiplies it.

Instead of classifying emotions as positive or negative, try classifying them as clean or dirty. Every emotion can be useful, even the painful ones. If you use your emotional intelligence then they can provide you with information about how you’re responding in your situation.

Research has shown that the people who are the most successful are those who have a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative emotions. Seeking psychological flexibility and wholeness is always better than blind positivity. Attempting to be happy and positive 100% of the time is a recipe for delusion and failure. Remember the ratio: 80% should be your goal.

Along the same lines, a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology has shown that emodiversity, or a life in which one experiences a balance of different emotions, is associated with better mental and physical health.

Get better; don’t be good

Top performers and athletes from all kinds of endeavors or sports tend to have one psychological factor in common: a growth mindset.

A growth mindset is built on the goal to “get better.” The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, which centers on the thought “be good.” When facing a difficult task, beginners often want to “do good,” coming at it with the mindset of worrying about how well they’ll perform.

There’s a great quote from Carlos Gracie Sr., one of the primary developers of modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu: “There is no losing in jiu-jitsu. You either win or you learn.”

Your challenge is to approach with the goal of “getting better.” Forget “being good,” because everything you do provides feedback. Every approach you make puts you one step closer to becoming a social beast. Every time you experience discomfort, you make it a little bit easier for the next time you’re in that situation.

The satisfaction, inspiration, and motivation that comes with going after your goals is an order of magnitude more valuable than actually achieving them.

What’s the point?

Connection and companionship are what bring purpose and meaning to our lives. If there’s anything in this world that’s worth experiencing some temporary discomfort for, it’s learning how to create genuine connections.

9 Ways to Create Enough Time and Money for a Quality Dating Life

by Robbie Leave a Comment

Recently, I asked for an update from some of my coaching clients in the Leverage Program. I noticed that almost all of the guys who are lagging on the dating front are also worried about their finances.

While it’s true that guys often use money as an excuse, I actually do think that it’s hard to get your dating life handled if your finances are also not in order. Financial difficulties are an emotional drain that affects our self-esteem and cause us to project insecurity to everyone around us.

The relationship between money and dating is an issue I started to think about in junior high. My plan growing up was to become a professional golfer on the PGA tour. Becoming a pro athlete, I assumed, would solve both my money and dating problems.

My plan, however, was upended in two ways. I started to lose interest in golf. And after that, I read The Game, which made me realize that there was a lot more I could to improve with girls that had nothing to do with money.

During the first few years after college, I worked in a variety of office jobs, but my main interest was learning how to improve with girls. My progress was uneven, both professionally and in terms of dating.

The issue wasn’t effort. I was working 11-hour shifts. But I also did day game approaches during my lunch break, hit the bars from 10pm-2am, and attended self-help seminars and pick up bootcamps over the weekend.

Within a few years, I spent about $82,000 on various self-development programs.

It was only after I transitioned to a more fulfilling career that my results with dating skyrocketed.

I discuss my story in some detail in this podcast episode with Y.L. Savitskiy. But basically, I negotiated a remote work deal at my venture capital firm, then became a dating coach, and then hacked the sharing economy.

Once I figured out how to stop trading time for money, I was able to leverage every single resource at my disposal, and then use the newfound time, money, and energy I had to date more women.

It took me many years to figure this out, mostly through trial-and-error.

Do I have a 4-hour work week? No. Do I make as much as my friends who stayed in finance? No. But I work whenever I want, wherever I want, doing a job that I love. All things considered, I think I’m living what Ramit Sethi calls a “rich life.”

No formula is going to work for everyone and I’m obviously not suggesting that you quit your job. I actually think the structure of a 9-5 job works for a certain type of person.

But if you’re looking to free up some time, generate passive income, and meet more women, here are a few tips that I’ve found generally work:

· Take advantage of money hacks

· Become a minimalist: I know it sounds ridiculous, but as my clients get rid of all their useless shit, their success with women starts to improve. The reason, basically, is that tidiness and control in our outer world frees up our mind to focus on our goals.

· Hack spending: Share your typical expenses with a trusted group of friends and advisors and take a hard look at what you can eliminate. You’ll be surprised how much cash you’re spewing. Some of my coaching clients use the Leverage Program for this purpose.

· Hack transportation with services like flightcar.com, relayrides.com, and turo.com/

· Ask for discounts

· Hack Credit Cards and Retirement Accounts

· Build passive income streams through the sharing economy

· Stop wasting money eating out by cooking at home. It’s easier than you think and way healthier.

· Leverage a skill: Think of all the skills and knowledge you have, then find a way to tutor, offer a class, or market them in ways that can generate money on the side.

As you hack your finances, you’ll start to take a more critical look at every other aspect of your life. Before you know it, you’ll be a “King of Leverage.”

You Should Dump Your Girlfriend

by Tyler W Leave a Comment

Guest post by Jay, Leverage Program member

It’s easy to fall into the trap of letting a girl who isn’t really a good fit for you stick around because she prevents you from feeling lonely.

We all feel lonely at times. It’s part of the human condition. And for guys who aren’t naturally good with women, it’s normal to feel lonely most or even all of the time.

When you start developing your skills, having success is inevitable. You’ll start to get numbers, you’ll start to get dates, you’ll start to make out with women, and you’ll start to sleep with ones you like.

Once you start sleeping with the kinds of women that you like, there’s a critical point where you have to stay on your path. It’s easy to get sucked into a relationship by default, that happens from settling with someone who makes you feel less alone. That feeling of loneliness? The novelty of a new sexual relationship is one powerful way to drown it out.

Too many guys end up dating girls long-term just by default. They never made the conscious decision to do it, but they end up with her because it fills a space in their lives, and the access to sex is a powerful motivator.

What they don’t realize is that space will always be there, and is part of being human. The only thing that you should attempt to use to fill that space is your drive to be better. Part of being a man and accepting your place as an adult is a constant drive for self-improvement. And that emptiness you feel will only get better through your journey of self-improvement, not by a woman.

Friday night dates. Complacency. Stuck banging one girl forever. Not having threesomes. Never traveling. Having the same lame friends. No self-growth. These thoughts seem like a great foundation for a happy relationship, so how could this touching story come to a bad ending?

Now of course if you’re not having these thoughts and are actually completely satisfied in your relationship with zero doubts, regrets, or insecurities, then I’m not talking about you. You’re already winning. However, if you are experiencing these feelings and emotions, stay with me. I’m not going to focus on the negative actions some girls do, because that’s playing the victim game- a game for losers. I’m just going to focus on things from a personal level. Your life is on you. No one else.

Nothing is worse in a relationship than that moment you realize you’re unsatisfied. Even if you get an attractive girlfriend, have a great time for a while, enjoy love, have weird sex, and experience shit together, eventually your insecurities creep back. That little voice in your head comes back and says “Hey motherfucker, I’m still here.” It’s not really noticeable when you’re in the early stages of intimacy, but as the excitement starts to wear off, the thoughts of being unsatisfied start to creep in.

There’s a number of reasons why you might not be satisfied. Your personal social circle isn’t fully developed. Your girlfriend isn’t cool and open-minded to threesomes and other sexual exploration. You feel like you deserve a better girl. You’re not getting better at the things that are important to you. You haven’t traveled and experienced enough. And on and on.

If you’re carrying these thoughts with you while in a relationship, there’s no way that it will have a happy ending, not with all that dissatisfaction. It’s unfair to the girl. No matter what she does, she can never make you happy. It’s literally impossible. The only way you can be fully happy is if you go hard on reaching your full potential and doing everything you actually want to do to resolve these issues.

When I was going through multiple relationships, I’d be initially excited in the honeymoon phase, lose some interest in the middle phase, and then feel married and not giving a fuck by the end of the relationship. The girls were attractive, had cool friends, and liked my personality. But even with all that, I just felt dead every time. I wasn’t satisfied on the inside. My real needs and desires weren’t being fulfilled, and so I wasn’t happy.

After having enough of these girlfriends, I finally started seeing the picture. I wasn’t into monogamy and jealous atmosphere it brought to the relationship. Threesomes and sexual exploration were important to me, but my relationships had been too tightly knit to allow those things to happen. My weekends were being sucked away with Netflix and pointless dates. My social circle was lacking. I wasn’t developing as a man and becoming a winner.

There was a ton of other shit I was unsatisfied with, as far as my self-growth, like lack of traveling and new experiences, poot fitness, bad finances, but one thing was killing me the most. I felt terrible about being unskilled with girls, and never having massive success with women. I was always having to fight hard just to get one girl, feeling like I couldn’t easily replace them or pick the ones I actually wanted. Just because I was able to repeatedly get girlfriends or hook up with a decent amount of girls (between relationships), it hadn’t resolved my deepest insecurity: my lack of skills and confidence with women. I was sick of it.

Even if the girl was cool, I just couldn’t live with the thought of never being 100% of what I could be. I wanted full control over my life. If I never developed myself into a sick individual and started becoming a winner who could actually get with the type of girls I deserved and wanted, I knew I would never be happy. That was the one thing I had to have to be able to die in peace.

When I finally dumped my last girlfriend, it was liberating. I felt relieved. I felt no pain. I gave no fucks. I could focus on my business, my dick (me), 24/7. I immediately improved my career and income. Started getting in shape again. I did some traveling. And more importantly, I finally found the type of coaching I was looking for and started addressing this issue. Have there been roadblocks? Of course. Am I doing the things I want at a high level yet? No. I fell in a couple gutters in the past year and had some hard times. But despite that, I’m pumped and feel alive every day, knowing I’m on track working toward my goals.

Look, I get it. It’s easy to be complacent. Who doesn’t like easy pussy? Your girlfriend might have a cool social circle and you might do cool shit together. But if you’re not satisfied, if you have insecurities and doubts in your head, don’t ignore them, even if your realizations are painful. You gotta dump your girlfriend and handle your shit until you can be satisfied with yourself. That way when you do pick a girl and hang up the jersey, you can do it without any regrets.

Don’t let validation fill the emptiness you feel inside. If you don’t, you’re basically gonna be 49, jacking off to weird porn in the shadows on Sunday at 2pm in your carpeted Downey apartment with erectile dysfunction, thinking about how you wish you had threesomes, had more weird sex, banged more girls, connected with more females, traveled more, did more self development, took more risks, etc. Don’t be that guy.

Validation gives you a temporary high. Settling in an unsatisfying relationship provides you with a dull numbing of that pain. In contrast, allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable rather than settling for whatever provides you validation or comfort, is scary. You’ll feel lost at times. You’ll feel like maybe you aren’t making the right choices, and that maybe you shouldn’t try to improve this area of your life. Your inner voice can be a nagging demon that holds you back.

But look past it. Never accept mediocrity. Understand that these feelings are part of the journey, and that this empty space will only be fulfilled by living a life of your values, and by always striving to be a better version of the man you want to become. No relationship or sexual experience can fill that void. The only thing that will do it is consistent hard work, every day for the rest of your life. That’s what’s truly rewarding and fulfilling about this journey. The relationships you’ll start to form are just a side effect of being a fulfilled man who’s living his purpose.

Bringing Day Game Into Your Everyday Life

by Robbie Leave a Comment

Guest post by Patrick, Leverage Program member

You’ve read our blog posts on why you should day game, you get the concept, but are you still struggling to connect with girls when you hit on them?

The game changer is that you need to start incorporating day game into your everyday life. Luckily for me, I live in New York City, where the opportunities for day game are endless.

While it is definitely important to set aside some time to go out and practice day game, especially when you’re first starting, your goal should be to incorporate practicing your communication skills on a daily basis. Do this and you will be surprised at how it will impact your life.

Let’s define day game first. Day game is just talking to a girl where it isn’t a generally recognized social practice to do so. Usually when we talk about day game, we mean taking time out of your daily life to hit on girls in the context of deliberately practicing your skills. This is still super important, because if you don’t set aside time to practice your skills, you are not going to grow and develop.

But day game doesn’t have to be limited to specific practice sessions. It can and should be incorporated into your everyday life.

Think about this the next time you see a hot girl. The minute you see someone you’d like to talk to, go do it! In addition to that, I’d also argue that talking to everyone you encounter throughout the day and striking up a conversation is also day game.

You need to turn yourself into a social person, and how can you be a social beast if you aren’t talking to everyone?

Let’s give a few examples of what I’m talking about here. You show up to Starbucks in the morning: while you are ordering you double espresso, don’t just order your drink and move on. Strike up a short conversation with the barista. Ask her what her name is and how her day is going. Ask her for a discount to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

Or maybe you go to the the same breakfast spot each morning. Ask the guy who’s cooking your bacon, egg, and cheese wrap his name and how his weekend was. This may be all you do the first time you go there, but each day you go back, you are going to start to build a relationship with these people. The conversations will get more interesting. Do this every day and I guarantee that your conversation and day game skills will improve.

Now, when you take your lunch break, you are going to be already warmed up because of your interactions in the morning. Don’t just spend your lunch break grabbing lunch and eating at your desk, go talk to people! I don’t care if it’s the hot girl crossing the street, or the fat guy making your burrito, just talk to them.

Say anything. It doesn’t matter. The more you do it, the more you’ll get feedback, and the better you will get. And expect to suck in the beginning. That’s just how it works, and we’ve all experienced it.

By incorporating day game into your everyday life, you are going to improve your skill 10x. It happens progressively over a long period time, and when you make consistent efforts, you’ll improve before you even realize it. You have to be talking to new people on a daily basis and put yourself outside your comfort zone to grow as a person and improve your skills.

If You Play it Safe You’re Boring

by Tyler W 1 Comment

When you look at guys who are great with women, or anyone with peak social awareness, they perform a bunch of smaller actions that add up to an arsenal of social skills. These discrete skills combine to form a killer ability to communicate with others and assertively get what they want.

When we’re teaching you to improve your dating life, we focus on a lot. Accumulating as much practice as you can and playing the “numbers game” is part of it. Developing your character is also part of it, and it can seem overwhelming to go from where you are now to the success you really dream of.

While it’s true that there are millions of little moves you’ve got to understand, it’s also true that what often looks like natural competence with women is the result of daily habits constructed over a long period of time. Guys who do well with women tend to have just naturally absorbed attractive behaviors from role models such as fathers, teammates, coaches, and friends. And one thing guys who are successful have in common is that they never play it safe.

Guys don’t take risks in conversation because they don’t want to piss people off, say the “wrong thing”, or get rejected. So they play it safe, and end up being boring.

When guys want to play it safe, the things they do in one-on-one conversations or in social situations are seeking a reaction, seeking relevance to whatever is being discussed, and to ward off FOMO. They’re seeking validation and avoiding taking risks. It’s easier to force a pity laugh by making a lame, non-risky joke than to take a stand and disagree with others.

It’s easy to say “stop giving a fuck what other people think” but that isn’t actually helpful because it doesn’t tell you what to do instead. Conversations are only hard or scary if you aren’t confident in what you’re discussing, so guys often ask for topics they should discuss. What they’re missing is that no one can tell you what to say. It’s something you have to develop on your own with a lot of practice.

That means a lot of trial and error. That means a lot of putting your foot in your mouth. Everyone starts out saying lame stuff, then they get better. Reading feedback is key, and since humans are naturally social, this happens automatically. You read the feedback of others you interact with and passively develop s sense of pattern recognition around having exciting conversations.

Talk to everyone. A study done at the University of British Columbia showed that if you interact with more people throughout the day, you’ll be happier and have a stronger sense of belonging, and it doesn’t even matter if they’re good friends or just casual acquaintances. Everyone wants to have fun conversations and you can easily be the guy who delivers that experience. Talking to everyone you encounter throughout your day teaches you how to push past fear, and you get tons of reps starting conversations with strangers.

Over time, you’ll start to surprise yourself with the things you say in conversation. You won’t really be sure where they come from, but you’ll spontaneously come up with great, witty content and banter. Being cool is when you’re not easily excitable about stuff that doesn’t involve you, and not being easily excitable in general, and eventually you’ll automatically reach this point.

Do this: Say more crazy stuff and stop trying to play it safe. You’ll get better the more you practice.

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

Why Your Life Depends On Being Assertive

by Tyler W 1 Comment

Like most guys on this journey of self-improvement, one of the hardest things I ever struggled with was overcoming social anxiety. Often I knew how I’d like my life to be different, and I recognized how I’d behave in a world where I had unlimited confidence. Some part of me knew what to do, but anxiety stopped me from doing it.

Getting past that anxiety and starting to develop true inner confidence and self-acceptance was tough. And not just tough as in the way our society views hard work, but tough in the way that only comes from challenging who you view yourself as a person. Tough doesn’t even begin to describe the challenge of challenging all your assumptions about how you were raised, who you are now, and really, what it means to be you.

When I look back at my own development of assertiveness skills, I was initially operating with some subconscious scripts in my head that held me back.

During times of self-realization, I could tell that I was more motivated by avoiding pain than I was motivated by going after rewards. To some extent, all of us are risk averse in this way: universally, losing $20 hurts more strongly than the joy we get from gaining $20.

But while this risk aversion exists deep within human behavior, some people are more biased towards taking action towards the things they want, while others focus on what could go wrong. I fall into the later category. It’s the same idea of playing not to lose versus play to win, and when you fall firmly into one camp, you have to overcome a ton of friction to behave like someone in the other camp.

So where does this come from? There’s some scientific evidence that suggests we have a biological predisposition to be one way or the other. And our childhoods also play a role.

A lot of us grow up not feeling like we have a legitimate right to put our needs before others. Instead of asking for what we want in a healthy, assertive way, we learn that there’s less friction when we put the needs of others above ours. We walk on eggshells to avoid conflict. And sometimes it’s not even avoiding something as strong as conflict. It can look like avoiding any kind of uncomfortable interpersonal situation.

Only partially aware of these ideas, I took baby steps to push myself out of my comfort zone. I purposely put myself in uncomfortable situations. I embarrassed the hell out of myself, as Inner Confidence teaches you to do when you’re improving your dating life.

When you follow the right process and learn from the right mentors, progress happens. You don’t always see it during the tough times, but progress is inevitable when you prioritize taking action over everything else. Things have gotten better for me, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be able to say that social anxiety will never hold me back in life the way it used to when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

And I’ll be clear: the goal isn’t to eradicate your feelings of anxiety. The goal is to transform your relationship with anxiety. Top performers don’t worry about anxiety, even though they feel it just like the rest of us. They just view it differently. Athletes get “in the zone.” Public speakers talk about being energized by their audience.

Anyone who tells you they don’t feel fear is full of shit. Because that’s the thing about negative emotions: we feel them the most strongly in the areas of life for which we care the most deeply. If I didn’t care about having close personal relationships then I would never feel approach anxiety. If I didn’t care about getting along with others then I would never feel uncomfortable when I have to assert myself and say things others might not like.

So what script do I have now in my mind that I didn’t have before? It’s one idea:

You have a right not to justify yourself to anyone.

Put another way: You have a legitimate fucking right to show the world who you are.

Your needs are valid. Your needs, preferences, and desires are all equally important to everyone else’s wishes. We’re so often taught that it’s selfish to express our desires, and as a result we become passive.

The idea that it’s selfish to express our desires is bullshit. There’s nothing selfish about fully expressing yourself. And if you’re not violating the rights of others, there is nothing wrong with showing others who you are fully. Ever.

Your survival as a man depends on you speaking up for what you want.

That means going up to the girl you think is cute, and letting her know how you feel. That means telling your boss what you’re worth as an employee, and tactfully negotiating for the salary you deserve. That means setting limits and enforcing boundaries with people in your life.

The antidote to feeling like you have to justify yourself to the world is a healthy sense of assertiveness. Assertiveness is about asking for what you want in a way that respects your relationships with others, maintains your self-respect, and is neither passive nor aggressive. Building assertiveness requires changing your thinking and developing new actions.

Reading posts like this and examining your thoughts are two crucial steps for getting the ball rolling, but alone they’re not enough. They MUST be followed by consistent action. Especially in this domain of life, that action is uncomfortable as hell for guys who were taught to be passive.

Being human means that you have values, desires, and goals, and yes, that you need things from other people. You do not ever have to apologize for your existence, or justify why you want something.

All you have to do is pursue your values wholeheartedly, and don’t ever let your subconscious scripts get in the way of building and expressing your confidence to the world.

Why You Aren’t Making Enough Mistakes

by Tyler W 1 Comment

We all know the cliches about how you fail your way to success, or how you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. It’s common knowledge in our culture that the way you get better at something is by making mistakes.

But is it really? A lot of guys don’t realize that they’re looking for dating coach because they’re looking for permission to make mistakes. They might “know” that they need to make mistakes to get better, but they don’t actually believe it. They get a coach because they want someone else to tell them it’s ok to mess up.

One area where this shows itself is when guys are too afraid to lead the interaction because they might make a mistake.

Leading the interaction is when you put out a feeler to where you want her to get to next. It’s making a statement or taking an action to get her to the next step in wherever you want to take the interaction. Then you wait to see when she gets there. If she goes in the opposite direction, then you have to readjust to match her vibe and then try again.

This means you’re going to be putting yourself out there and giving yourself countless opportunities to be rejected. When you walk up to a woman and say your first statement to her, she has the option to reject you. When you continue talking with her, she has the option to end the interaction. When you ask her to move to a different part of the bar, she has the option of declining.

Every time you lead the interaction, you run the risk of getting rejected. You run the risk of making a mistake. And even though guys think they know that they need to make mistakes to improve, they still fear leading the interaction because making mistakes like these are scary.

There are no guarantees that what you’re attempting will go well for anything worth doing in life. If something is completely guaranteed, it won’t make you feel any better about yourself. It won’t feel like an accomplishment.

The only real certainty in life is that if you work hard, you’ll eventually get opportunities for more success. But it won’t come the way you expect it to, and you have to make mistakes along the way.

The only way to improve your social awareness is by taking risks and getting it wrong. Often.

Social awareness is the ability to make the people around you feel understood and comfortable connecting with you. If you don’t make wild guesses about what others are feeling, you’re never going to get it wrong. It’s literally impossible to start getting it wrong without getting it right first.

I first learned concept this when I was in school to become a therapist. When we were learning how to convey empathy to our patients, we were told to guess a word for the feeling we think our patient is experiencing. Of course, everyone was concerned that we may guess the wrong thing. This is when I learned that we need to say the wrong thing at first. The only alternative is to not say anything, and that prevents you from improving.

Dating is about managing ambiguity and having good social awareness. Most of what we do with relationships and dating is subconscious. This is why you feel approach anxiety despite rationally knowing that it’s nonsense.

Remember that everything in the interaction is about her. The goal is to get to a point where you can mirror her communication and emotions without underdoing it or overdoing it. But the only way to get to that point is by underdoing it and overdoing it often.

Commit to making mistakes, because it’s the only way to improve your social awareness and learn how to lead the interaction.

I Don’t Ever Lie

by Carly Leave a Comment

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. has conducted research that shows how typical humans lie in one out of every five daily interactions. The type of lies we tell isn’t really important. What is important is to consider the ways we can’t help but cushion the truth.

It’s common for guys to only tell parts of the truth, and leave out the less desirable details because they’re afraid of difficult conversations.

So why do we do it? Lies occur for many reasons. Lying by omission, for instance, is often done to spare someone’s feelings from being hurt. Exaggeration and self-protection lies would be done in vain. Gossip, another form of lie, can be seen as cynicism. The important thing to understand is that the more you lie, the less people value your integrity.

Have you ever lied about something major and had to keep coming up with more lies to keep the story going? Yeah, me too. It’s exhausting, isn’t it?

Lying puts more strain and weight on your life. Every time you lie, it’s like carrying a rock on your back. Some are pebbles, like lying to your trainer about what you ate that day. Some are boulders, like lying to your boyfriend or girlfriend about your recent encounter with that cute Aussie at the bar last night. The more you lie, the heavier you feel. So how do you lose that weight?

Jumping on opportunities to look cool or high status is one way that guys often lie, and it’s always a losing proposition. When you’re interacting with new women, your only goals should be to meet people and to have fun, NOT to try to look cool or high status. Be honest and show who you are fully, without telling small lies to try to look cool.

Be conscious of your lies. First, have to be honest with yourself. Side benefit: there’s nothing sexier than self-awareness.

First things first, you have to come clean about past lies or hidden truths. The people you’ve lied to may get upset. That’s why you have to bring up the conversation, especially if it is serious. Let them know you lied, tell them that you want to come clean and not hurt them anymore by lying, and let them know what it was.

Being kind is a virtue, but it’s important to be choosy about who you are nice to. Far too often, people tell white lies because they don’t want to hurt other’s feelings, without really considering if it’s someone whose feelings they really need to protect. It’s more advantageous to be selective about who you invest in. If you can successfully tap into your assertive side or even your disagreeable side, you can leave everyone better off by bringing honesty to social interaction.

You will feel lighter, and the person you lied to will have an easier time trusting you knowing that you’re going through this life change. All relationships should be win-win, and the only way to truly accomplish this is by being brutally honest.

When You’re Objective, You Take More Risks

by Tyler W 2 Comments

One of the most effective actions you can take to improve your life is developing your ability to think objectively.

Most people think emotionally. Yes, this includes men, who often assume they are rational and impervious to the effects of emotions on their thinking. Men tend to have blind spots in this area just as much as women.

People usually look at their situation, whatever it may be, come up with one possible outcome, and only focus on that outcome happening. Emotions drive the estimate of the outcome occurring.

This human tendency is the reason why the mainstream news media focuses on catchy soundbites rather than objective statistics. Our brains just aren’t wired to naturally think in terms of statistics, and instead we latch on to the stories that are the most memorable.

Case in point: take all the recent media coverage of terrorist attacks, and their appeal to everyone’s innate fear of terrorism. Despite the fact that the odds of dying in a terrorist attack are 1 in 20 MILLION, it’s a natural human tendency to be TERRIBLE at estimating the real risk of low-probability events.

Ok, so what if I’m more scared of terrorism than I should be? Not a big deal right? Well, take a look at how this type of thinking carries over to other areas of your life. Most people don’t think probabilistically in any areas of their life. They look at the world through the lenses of their emotions, never challenging their deeply held beliefs about how the world functions. People overestimate their ability to predict the future, especially about the events in their own life.

This can screw you over in countless ways. In the Leverage Program, we coach guys to stop overestimating the risks associated with actions that can improve their lives, like approaching more girls, quitting a job to become an entrepreneur, or developing a more assertive communication skills. And we also teach people how they tend to underestimate some of the more dangerous risks that people overlook, like texting while driving and eating processed carbohydrates.

Remember how I said people make most of their decisions emotionally? That’s the reason it’s important to be objective about your emotional states.

So a guy who is afraid to approach girls focuses only on the outcome of it going badly, without estimating the likelihood that he will actually get rejected.

Most guys who are bad with women start out from a place of neediness. He needs attention from a woman. He needs to not be rejected. He needs to KNOW an approach will go well before he commits to it.

These are gut-level emotional reactions, and they’re difficult to overcome. But having that kind of emotional response doesn’t have to harm you. As long as you recognize that it’s just a thought and that it’s not actually helping you, you can begin to realize that your subjective emotional experiences are not always indicative of reality.

The more you put yourself in these challenging situations and come out the other side unscathed, the more that snap emotional reaction will lessen. But in the meantime, it’s crucial to remember that this inner dialogue is not helping you, and that if you fuse with those thoughts, they’re only going to prevent you from reaching your goals and improving your relationships.

Thinking probabilistically removes the reckless emotion from your decision-making habits. When you know that you went into a decision making the right call based on all the information you had available at the time, there’s no rational way to second guess yourself afterwards. You don’t regret things you’ve done that went wrong if you came to that decision probabilistically. But you do regret them when you let your emotions decide for you.

This also improves your life by getting you more of the things you want and value. Thinking probabilistically helps you take the right kinds of risk: the ones that have a huge upside of improving your life. Let’s face it, a lot of the things we want are risky. Become more assertive and confident. Making valuable male friendships. Building your career. Telling women how you really feel without being needy.

Socially agile people can be cooperative in difficult situations, use anger effectively when someone blocks them from reaching a goal, or boldly state unpopular opinions in group settings. These are all risk moves.

Do this: Take more risks. Play to win. Be objective. Remember that your thoughts are just thoughts.