Don't Think, Just Do

I have received quite a few of e-mails asking for more advice on the fear of rejection in approaching new people, so I’ve decided to write a more in depth post and try to really see if I can find surefire way to get people through this.  So, here we go.

The most basic key factors I see in this issue are confidence and self-discipline.  To boost your confidence in approaching people, you obviously have to have confidence in yourself.  Once you build confidence in yourself, you can build confidence in approaching new people by taking the leap and just doing it.  So, first build confidence in yourself, and then build confidence in meeting new people and practice, practice, practice, which will take great self-discipline.  So let’s break down how we’re going to approach this.

Personal Confidence Mindset – Let’s start by writing down all your positive qualities and negative qualities.  Then write down what you can do to work on your negative qualities.  Now you have to start actually working on these negative qualities and keep at it (self-discipline).  Now you can reflect on all your positive qualities which you have practically memorized and can recite, and you can reflect on how you are getting rid of your negative qualities.  Use visualization to see how you will be after all your negative qualities are gone.  Visualization is an extremely powerful tool that, if used enough (self-discipline), can slowly change your whole mindset and turn you into what you dream of becoming.  The mind is a very powerful thing, use visualization to unlock some of its power.

Personal Confidence in Practice – Now we need to get you confident not only in your qualities, but the quality of your works.  Write down all of the great tasks you have completed in your recollection.  Bask in these tasks.  Whenever you are assigned a new task, make sure that you go above and beyond to do an excellent job on it.  There are theories that children that do well in school often started at a young age and because of the positive reinforcement of their great work they strive to do just as well or better the next time they were given an opportunity.  I have absolutely no facts to back that up, and cannot find the article I originally read it in.  Either way, I like the value it is teaching here, and positive reinforcement will surely come from good quality work, which will boost your confidence.  So let’s strive for that.

Confidence in Meeting and Approaching People – This will be the hardest part of this because there is an element that you cannot control.  In my original post, I told you about the extremes I took my research to.  I would go around a shopping mall and spontaneously approach and say ridiculous things (decided by my friends) to the most beautiful women around (the hardest type of person for a straight male to approach) who were picked by my friends for me.  This, in time, made me completely confident in approaching anyone.  If I had to walk up to random beautiful women and say ridiculous things to them, you bet starting a normal conversation with anyone at that point seemed like the easiest thing in the world.  Like I said in the original post, you do not have to go to these extremes.  I just want to make the point that you have to get out there and do this.  There is no way (that I know of) that you can build confidence in meeting people without going out and meeting people.  If there is another way, please share it!  There is a lot of self-discipline to be used here (damn, he is using “self-discipline” a lot in the article) and you’re not going to get positive results with everyone you approach.  If someone snubs you, don’t read into it and don’t let it stop you from practicing this (I plan on writing more on this particular topic)!

Self-Discipline – I have been looking onto this a lot.  Self-discipline is what will bring this all together.  You need to be disciplined enough to actually do all this and work on yourself constantly.  There will be no boss, teacher, or deadlines to strive for here, it’s all you.  I wrote out a monster of an outline on self-discipline, but in researching it online, I came across Steve Pavlina’s article on the topic.  It covers everything I was going to say and more.  It is lengthy, but I think it is worth your time (I wouldn’t refer you to it if I didn’t).  The willpower can be used perfectly with having the willpower to actually get the ball rolling on this and persistence with the persistence of keeping at it.  So I highly recommend you read his article here and take some of the advice he is giving out here.

Please, let me know how you guys do with this.  From what I am getting in e-mails, it seems like this is the hardest topic for everyone so far.  So please let me know if there are some holes here (I’m sure there are).  And of course, have fun with this!