Turning Fear into Confidence

Below is a newsletter I recieved from Pickup arts. It is always worth reading articles on building confidence and eliminating fear. These are probably the two most important skills in succeeding as a PUA.

Fear into Confidence by Jay Valens

“Scarface” had it all wrong. Well, not all, but at least this line from Al Pacino’s character, Tony Montana:

“In dis country, jou gotta make da money first. Den when jou get da
money, jou get da power. Den when jou get da power, den jou get da
womens.”

Hey, not to disagree, but it’s a great way for me to intro my own
mantra:

“First you embrace the fear. Then you get the courage. Then you
get the confidence and when you have the confidence you get the …
womens.”

There you are, at the grocery store perusing the cereal isle, when
you catch a glimpse of the possible love of your life walk by.

You hesitate putting down the box of “Cap’n Crunch”, thinking to
yourself “I would love to talk to her” as visions of licking her
earlobes and making sweaty love to her dance in your head.

You think for a moment, look at her again from a distance, and
start to think about what to do. What is there to do? How are you
going to talk to her?

You begin to make yourself nervous and think about how you would
feel if she rejected your approach. Your thoughts become negative
and filled with fear and even when you try to step forward to say
or do something you feel your legs shake a little.

It becomes too much pressure for you, there in your head, and
finally as she walks away, to a different isle, out of sight, and
you finally find a means to calm and relax yourself. The fear is
gone….

Then again, so is the girl, and you and your box of “Cap’n Crunch”
are going home alone today, just like every other day.

If you are subscribed to this newsletter then chances are you could
relate on some level to the story above… I mean, who doesn’t love
“Cap’n Crunch”? Seriously, how many times have you seen a girl
that you knew you wanted from the first moment you saw her but
never had enough nerve to even make the first step of talking to
her?

Let us put aside for a moment the topics of how to build attraction
or interact with women on dates and focus on one of the things
which feels daunting to most men – approaching a girl in the first
place, the actual first moment of walking up to her and opening
your mouth to say something.

If such moments always make you nervous and hesitant, maybe even
fearful, you are not alone. Even men who have dangerous jobs like
firefighters, oil drillers, and bridge builders, feel the same
fear, as if some soft spoken pretty girl could cause more harm than
a blazing inferno, rig explosion, or collapsing metal framework
falling on a guy’s head.

First let’s understand what causes such seemingly illogical fear in
the first place.

It is actually is logical, it has a biological purpose.

I could talk about evolutionary psychology for pages, but to keep
things simple, just realize that at a certain point, because of our
big brains, humans have evolved socially. This means that our
biological (not just our social) actions and responses to the world
around us, especially with other humans, is conditioned primarily
on the evolution of our social behavior.

Many living creatures are also conditioned in this way, but not as
nearly as intricately as humans. However, the way our human
culture and society has evolved most recently causes direct
contradiction to our evolved biology.

We are surrounded by social situations in everyday life that causes
certain biological reactions in us that do make sense, but only if
we were still living in small tribes, wearing animal skins, and
scrawling pictures on walls of caves.

The reason the fear exists is to protect us. But from what?

The fear would not exist if there were no bad consequences, but
those consequences, which aren’t necessarily risks to us today, may
have been real dangers thousands of years ago.

Those dangers were primarily social.

– We might be ostracized from our own tribe, one of the primary
means of our existence and survival, if we failed in our attempts
to mate.

– We may display poor social skills, the knowledge of which quickly
spreads to the whole tribe, reducing our viability as a mate to not
just the female we pursued but all the other females in the tribe.

Those dangers were also sometimes physical.

– We may choose a female who already mated with someone of higher
standing and put ourselves in actual physical peril.

– We may cause other, lower status yet more violent, males nearby
to become jealous, and endanger the pursued female and ourselves.
Any combination of these things could have created a potentially
dangerous situation, and so humans evolved to have a fear condition
associated with approaching a specific female for the first time.

This type of fear is no longer practical, but it does have a
biological and logical evolutionary root, so it makes sense.

It makes sense, but it’s still there and gets in our way.

How do we get rid of it?

First, we DON’T get rid of it because we simply CAN’T. It is part
of our biology and, although we can condition ourselves to get past
it, we can’t completely remove it.

Knowing this, and accepting this, we can ease the fear by simply
accepting it.

When we feel the fear in illogical situations like approaching and
talking to a woman, we know something worthwhile is in our
vicinity, and we appreciate and accept it and move on anyway.

The most common question I am asked about approaching women, from
men who are most afraid to do so, is “How do I gain the courage?”
In other words, how to get past the fear?

You do the thing you’re afraid of most, and then you get the
courage. That’s why it’s courage, that’s how it works. If you
weren’t afraid to do something, it wouldn’t be an issue for you to
do it, right? Then it would take no courage and the fear wouldn’t
exist in the first place.

Courage is being afraid to do something that you know isn’t bad and
won’t physically harm you, but doing it anyway because you know
it’s right or will make you a better person or the lives of other
people around you better.

The fear is there to guide you, not discourage you. Without fear,
nothing meaningful is accomplished. Embrace it and move forward
anyway. Then you will have courage, as your reward.

Courage doesn’t come before doing something you’re afraid of. You
can’t train yourself to be courageous in order to do something that
might require such courage, you simply do it regardless and it is
only then that you achieve courage.

Courage is not something you have, it is a reward for getting
through and past a temporary fear. That fear can come along again
and you will need to, again, embrace the fear as inevitable, get
past it, and achieve courage as your reward.

When you grasp this concept, you are able to do things that make
you afraid.

However, don’t confuse this with confidence or competence.

First comes fear. Then you blast through and do something anyway,
which is the definition of courage. When you are able to do that
as a regular behavior change (even with the fear still there, it
never really goes away completely), then you will be building
familiarity with situations.

Familiarity breeds competence.

Finally, when you become familiar enough with something that you
are effectively competent in it, you will have natural confidence
which vibes to others.

After that, the things which cause you fear will gradually minimize
– they won’t confront you so often, because you have both the
ability to get past any fears, and will have the confident vibe of
someone who does not allow fear to get in his way.

Along the way, you will stumble and make mistakes.

The great part is that the courage you build is not dependent on
the outcome, only that you took action in the first place. You are
rewarded with courage either way, and so long as you remain
persistent, you will achieve familiarity and competence, eventually
leading to natural confidence.

So to wrap up, if you ever catch yourself in a situation where you
see a girl you might want to approach and feel that you might
hesitate, just imagine Scarface saying “First jou embrace da fear.
Den jou get da courage. Den jou get da confidence and when jou have
da confidence jou get da womens.”

Your enCOURAGing friend,

Jay Valens

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