You Can't Beat Fear of Rejection with More Rejections

Guys who fear rejection from women can’t overcome that by getting more rejections. What they need to be aiming for, rather, is successes; victories; WINS.

A few weeks back, I responded to a reader named Zucchini with an admirable amount of courage and tenacity who, nevertheless, had run hard into a wall. He says:

For me, my biggest handicap was not being able to master fear. I genuinely tried to follow the advice. Years ago, I went out and approached a hundred girls, thinking "I just gotta approach to overcome approach anxiety! Confidence will naturally follow, right?" Then I burned out because I was so nervous on every approach I ended up ejecting early, half-assing it, or getting brutally rejected (those rejections STILL linger in my head as fears years later).

Ever since, he’s wondered why he’s so afraid, why he can’t overcome his anxiety, if he has too little self-control, if he simply doesn’t want it enough, or what the real problem is.
                                                                                                     
He studied courses, took trainings, mentored under coaches, and eventually threw himself back into the gauntlet for another pass:

So I pushed myself harder and harder. I was out in the field until my eyes would not stay open, my feet were blistered, and even walking seemed like climbing a mountain. I approached another hundred girls. I told myself I needed to push extra hard because I was so handicapped and weak. Most of time, I repeated the same mistakes over and over, not able to apply anything I was supposed to. Every failure reinforced this story in my head. Eventually, I burned out again, now even LESS confident of myself than before.

At the time of his comment, he'd just read my article on stuck man mentality, and realized he’d started thinking about his problem this way: as a special handicap he had, which other men did not have, that maybe made game impossible for him.

He says:

Now I have reached rock bottom again, and am opening my mind again. I came to the conclusion I am not fully ready to apply the lessons from teachers of seduction yet, so I have started taking advice from teachers in other disciplines - mindfulness, anxiety, behavioral therapy. Perhaps it is unwise to mix in advice from different sources...? I don't know. But I know what I'm doing isn't working. And I'm grateful to this article for opening my mind further and reassuring me that other people also have similar problems.

All this is good. I studied meditation and mindfulness before I started approaching in earnest (I used it to break free of depression). It makes a big difference.

That said, I want to highlight what was going on here with Zucchini (who you have to admire for pushing himself so hard despite crippling fear – lack of willpower is NOT his problem!). He’s switched up his strategy now, yet what he was doing before was trying to beat fear of rejection by, in essence, getting more rejections.

But you don’t beat fear of rejection by getting rejections – not usually.

You beat it by getting SUCCESSES.