Identity Crisis

Getting good at game is an identity crisis waiting to happen.

What is your identity? The thoughts, beliefs, feelings, actions, words that you routinely elect to describe your experience of life.

Someone who is a "cheerful person" is habituated to seeing all circumstance and occurrence as positive, regardless of whether it matches their desires or not. They always believe there is something of great value in what happens to them, and they focus on and savor this mentally.

Someone who is a "pessimistic person" has the habit of seeing, thinking, speaking, feeling and acting in a way that accentuates their focus on the negative in life, even in circumstances that most people would consider to be positive.

This means that our identity comes down to one thing: our focus. Whatever we habitually focus our attention on is what we move toward.

For example, suppose the world as we know it represents a full light spectrum: it contains every color in existence within it. However, we we look at the spectrum, we see only the colors that we initially look for or are open to looking for. All of the other colors in the spectrum do not disappear when we spot the one we wanted; they are still there but they fade into the background. Why? Our attention is focused on none other than the color we want to see, so the others get pushed out of our awareness.

Focus equals awareness. In Deep Work, author Cal Newport mentions science writer Winifred Gallagher's book, Rapt, written about Gallagher's experience with a life-threatening cancer. The essential theme that Gallagher hammers home is that even in situations such as a serious health scare, where we put our attention in our life matters most, decidedly more than circumstance itself. "Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience." Put even more succinctly by the author, "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on."

Let's tie this back to game. A beginner in cold approach is constantly searching for, and not surprisingly, finding evidence that women, especially the ones he thinks attractive, find him unattractive, hate him, run away from him, are not interested, are bitchy and terrible people, etc. His focus is totally skewed toward interpreting everything women say or do as meaning that she is not into him. Here's the thing: going back to the spectrum example, every color exists in the spectrum. What we see is determined by focus, awareness and interpretation of the sensory input. I am sure that if the beginner wanted to or knew how, he could find evidence that women love talking to him, find him cute and interesting on many occasions, but that's not where his focus lies. What compounds the problem is that he identifies himself by this interpretation, it isn't just seen as a situational misfortune. "This girl must be having a bad day" vs "This girl just can't stand me".

It requires a complete overhaul of perception to move past this stage; the beginner must change what he habitually thinks and feels and what he says and does in order to reap a different outcome. For the beginner to lose his self-depreciation, more positive experiences with women (which is an outer-inner solution) does help, but with the wrong mentality we can even turn a good situation into a nightmare. All lasting change is created from the inside out, as the newbie has to reframe the experiences he has already had in a more favorable light and fix his beliefs about women and his beliefs about his interactions with them to be able to live the dating and sex life he wants.

He must change who he is and who he is accustomed to being. In order to change, he must become aware of the patterns of though, speech, and action that he leans on for negative results and switch them for thought, speech, and action more conducive to his goals. Observe yourself, little by little, in all of your parts and you will come to an understanding of who you are, what you do and why you do it. What do you believe about yourself in relation to women, believe about women, and believe about your constant, continuous experiences with women? Write them down, study them, pay attention to these thoughts as they pop up in your head; watch what thoughts and feelings spawn the actions that you take in field.

Only from a solid self-understand can you hope to change your dating life, one small moment of clarity and tweak at a time.

"It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy."- J. Krishnamurti