I'm a bad man - leaving them better than you found them: September 24, 2007

Our fear or anxiety response is actually designed to help us survive in a fight or flight scenario. Believe it or not, the symptoms detailed earlier are all beneficial to us in times of survival. Perspiration occurs to help cool us down, heart rate increases to improve blood circulation, muscles tighten as they are filled with oxygen in preparation for use. Unfortunately these are not particularly beneficial when we are looking for something witty to say during a conversation with someone.

In short we learn the fear through a number of negative experiences and then reinforce them by not doing anything about it. The body’s natural reaction towards a fearful situation is the feeling we associate with approach anxiety or the fear of the approach. The way to overcome this is to reverse the learning.

All of the common problems detailed above can be directly related to either "magical thinking" in the form of a false belief that failure is almost certain due to some form of connection to a previous situation that failed or pure fear learnt and reinforced by not approaching. These are both forms of self fulfilled prophecy. Unless you actively do something to fix it they will continue to support themselves. The good news is that this problem is far from unfixable.

The bad news is that it does take time. The easiest way to fix this is to actually go out and meet new people. The problem is that when you do this, any negative experience you receive is likely to reinforce the previous attitude or fear you had before.

As I've mentioned before one of the easiest ways to get around this is to simply meet people for the sake of meeting people.

Most of us are actually more than happy to talk to other people, especially on boring long journeys or when waiting in a long queue. Get used to talking to absolutely everybody, male or female, young and old. This should help you generate a great deal of positive responses to your approaches and help curb some of those negative connections.

I hope this helps guys. As usual, if there are any questions, just ask.

AFC AdamLondon