Why Overthinking Hurts Your Approaches

I'm sure you can relate to this scenario: you see a girl, then decide to approach. You think of all the openers you can possibly use that would fit this context, but you're not sold on any of them, not because they're bad, but you just don't want to use the wrong one. You want the best one.

After battling back and forth about what to say for too much time, the girl you s

potted is long gone. You lost your opportunity.

What happened??? You were overthinking...that's what happened.

Overthinking is obsessively thinking over the right course of action long past what's actually needed to figure it out.

The reason why learn this behavior is because of our school system: having to get the right answer immediately and being punished for wrong answers, instead of learning how to choose a path and course correct as we go.

Overthinking is closely related to perfectionism.

How does this translate to cold approach?

• double, triple, quadruple thinking your opener instead of either trusting the experience you've complied to to give you the right one or trusting that you'll get it right/ make the situation right eventually

• obsessively running tapes in your head over and over again about what you could have and should have said and done

There's obviously nothing wrong with analyzing what you've done, but overthinking is analysis before action; it's course correction before making a move.

It's impossible to edit a document before you've created it; you must allow yourself to write it up, flaws and all, first then improve upon it.

Iterate, then reiterate, in business terms, ever so slightly getting closer and closer to the mark, the center, the best version of what you have.

To reiterate (in my own way!), you have to learn to trust the correctness of your initial decision OR trust that you can make your first decision right when given enough time to do so.

This comes out as trusting the first opener that pops into your head or one that comes to you after decent deliberation, knowing that with bad opens comes experience on what works and doesn't eventually, and durability for when things don't go your way.

It shows as having a line to say and saying it, knowing that it'll either prove useful or useless with enough repetition.

It comes out as just making a move to physically escalate whether you scare girls off our not because as long as you're paying attention to what you're trying, you'll eventually stop scaring girls off.

You let go of the need to succeed now and let things unfold.

Remember, calibration is in a set is done after course correcting form doing something wrong. It's not done ahead of time, and you don't need to calibrate when something is done perfectly.

To sum this all up, the reason you hem and haw way too much about when to approach what to say, what to do is from overthinking.

If you're experienced, trust yourself to say and do the right things.

If you're inexperienced, trust yourself to learn the right things to say and do over time.