"Approach Excitement"

If I took a poll to ask how many guys have felt approach anxiety before taking action, nearly 100% of hands in a room would go up?

But have you felt approach excitement?

Feelings are complex processes in us humans. There are times when we experience feelings of relief in losses, grief and sadness in wins, even full-blown depression after the biggest wins of our lives and professional careers. Most of our experiences on planet Earth are multi-dimensional. After achieving what was just a dream for so long, it makes sense to feel happiness and gratitude but also a sense of loss of direction, a loss of identity, a mourning because new goals and targets, new identities, new things to work for will need to be found to replace what we have already done. There is a death of the old self that precedes the new self being born.

Because we can experience a gamut of seemingly conflicting feelings and sensations at the same time, I want to call your attention back to the term I just coined. Experts on the emotional processes of human beings have often said that fear and excitement are exactly the same physiologically. Your stomach churns, your hands and other parts sweat, your mind races trying to predict what will happen, your heart pounds with nervousness...or is pleasant anticipation?

The actual only difference between fear and excitement is the interpretation of the experience. When all of the above happens before you get ready to take a cross-country voyage, you don't interpret it as fear, you tell yourself that you are extremely exciting to see what's out there. Likewise, when you hear a noise rattling in your backyard in the dead of night, you don't tell yourself that you're so excited to go see what that noise is.

One experience is automatically labeled as positive, and the other as negative. You use blanket statement to "cover" and color the entire experience in a certain light. The truth, even in those situations, is there might be some fear behind your emotions on taking that trip or some excitement in exploring the unseen culprit making that noise. Whether we acknowledge it or not is a matter of interpretation.

Let's go back to "approach anxiety". The standard interpretation of these feelings before approaching is that they are feelings of fear stirring to dissuade you from taking action, emanating from the survival center of your brain. What if you decided to reframe this? There are some people who don't approach a girl or set UNLESS they feel "fear" because they know that this feeling is a guiding light, a north star pointing to situations where they can advance their skill sets, self mastery and self knowledge. If they don't feel anything, these guys deem the set A WASTE OF TIME and will bypass it!

That's an example of reframing. What if you reframed your experience of "fear" feelings as "growth symptoms" or "excitement to explore"? What if every time your heart raced and stomach churned as you spotted a girl you liked, you thought to yourself "I must be really looking forward to meeting her! Let's see if she's as much of doll as I hope she is..."? What if every time you caught a glimpse of a tantalizing set, you said internally "yup! I feel it! I'm fired up to jump in there!" How would that change your experience of approaching, and ultimately, your skill set?

My guess is you would find more reasons to approach, more approachable sets, and the more conscious action you took, the better you would become. The better you became, the more you would want to approach, and soon this reaction would become a self-fulfilling loop. When we think in conventional ways about what we call "fear", it produces behavior patterns that SLOW DOWN the learning process instead of aid it. It makes our journey much more unpleasant and arduous. The funny thing about it all is, that's something we do to ourselves! We can always shift our interpretation of what we feel, we can always label it as a positive that inspires us to take action.

My injunction is try it! Try labeling your "anxiety" as "excitement" and see what happens. Remember, it's not a matter of right or wrong. Either interpretation can count as "right". What matters most is "is it helpful to me to call it fear or to call it excitement?" That's what I will leave you to answer for yourself.