Monday, March 19, 2007

A Guy, A Girl and Fear Walk Into a Bar…

The fear of failure is always worse than the failure itself.

This idea is at the core of every human thought and action. The mind’s ability to rationalize fear as something other than fear is astounding. The extent to which we as humans will go to avoid responsibility, evade personal truth and construct a false self is utterly perplexing.

Have you ever felt uncomfortable around homosexuals? Discomfort comes from fear and fear, at its inescapable core, is not about the object that you fear, but always, and without exception, about yourself. It is widely documented that homophobes are closeted homosexuals. There is much evidence to support this claim.

Alexander The Great said, “When you conquer fear, you conquer death.” Using the logic used in the gay example above, this stands to reason. The fear of death has nothing to do with death itself. After all, no one even knows what it is. What if death were, as some extremist Muslims believe, an eternal Xanadu of untouched virgins. Would we fear it then? The reason most people fear death is because they fear their own demise. They fear what it will say about them if they “die with their music still in them,” as Tolstoy wrote in the Story of Ivan Illych. Everyone fears dying with their music still inside them, not having realized the kiss of destiny God blew into them upon conception, instead having tread familiar and unchallenged terrain all their life and self-actualizing. As seminal psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “A man must be what he can be.”

The same principle applies with women. A Gentleman never, ever blames a woman for the inadequacies he feels. Why are most men afraid to approach beautiful women at a bar? Think about it for a second before you read on. Why are you afraid to approach a beautiful woman at a bar? Chances are, it is for several reasons. First, because you have not established your Metaframe strongly enough. Anyone who goes anywhere without spending some time meditating on the Metaframe he/she wishes to create—at a business lunch or at a bar, or wherever—they are leaving themselves susceptible to being sucked into the realities of someone who did.

In the case of a singles bar, most men are afraid of approaching the beautiful woman because they instinctively view her as the prize that they must win over in order to have a shot. This, as we’ve discussed at length, is strike one. If she rejects him, he sees himself as a failure. If she is interested in someone else, he sees it as an increased challenge to prove himself more worthy than his competitor. This is all very low-energy thinking patterns that women can sniff out and pounce on by sucking you into their realities of entitlement, free drinks, and “Dance, monkey, dance!” manipulation to feed their own egos.

The second thing stopping most men from making a strong approach at a beautiful woman is fear. Not fear like you typically think of it, though. This fear has nothing to do with the woman, or the drop-dead gorgeous friends around her, or how beautiful and intimidating they all look. The fear stems from the self. What will I think of myself if I approach them and they view me as unworthy? How will I view myself?

The self-actualized Level 5 Player will interpret their rejection of him as a wonderful sign that they are not worthy of the quality of person he is offering them, if they received his approach with disdain. This is very important here. It is not some hokie mind job you’re playing on yourself; it is a way of being that people, particularly women, can sniff out even when you think you’re disguising it well. It is at the core of why women are attracted to “assholes” or “jerks”. These men, for all their financial troubles and personal defects, have an attitude of deserving. An attitude of personal prizability that women will always favor over good looks or a slick car.

Reason being is that the former is biological and the latter is societal. Biological aches, urgings and cravings will always win out over societal ones. Just ask the guy with a billion dollars in his briefcase stranded in a 120-degree desert who runs across a lemonade stand charging a billion dollars per glass.

For women, their biological craving to be with a man who projects confidence without appearing needy or pining for affection, will always win out over their desire to be with someone with money or big biceps. Always! One is a biological need. The other is a flimsy socially constructed desire. That’s why you see the Desperate Housewives sleeping with the deadbeat gardeners and pool boys while Old Reliable (their husband) is out earning their next tennis bracelet. The need is biological and if you can tap into it, the garden of love and sex is yours and everything in it.

So, then, if attracting more women into your life is your aim, focus less on attaining more money or buying a nice car or impressing her with lobster dinners and champagne breakfasts. Put your time and energy into establishing a more impregnable Metaframe.

And for heaven’s sakes, write it down. Here is an example of one:

1.) I am the prize. She wants me since I am the prize for her.
2.) Everything that they do, say, act and imply is to get me to like them, hoping that I will eventually approve of them as cool and/or beautiful.
3.) Everything that I am saying to them, they are finding fascinating, so it is irrelevant what they think about what I am saying because I operate knowing they find it and me fascinating. And if they don’t, they are pretending to get me to like them.
4.) She will get more pleasure from kissing/sleeping with me than I will with her.
5.) Nobody has ever made her feel the way I will when I romance/seduce her.
6.) They are trying to get me to sleep with them and/or make out with them as a sign that I like them and think they are cool/attractive.
7.) We are going to sleep together, but only if she meets my standards/qualifications for women I will sleep with.
8.) They are my sisters and I love them all, hating not one of them no matter how they respond to me.

Remember, it is your own self-created, or rather self-imposed Metaframe that is causing you to feel rejected and/or fearful. It has absolutely nothing to do with the woman. This a very deep Level 4 notion that is not easily understood, and even less easily implemented. It requires assuming all responsibility for feelings, behaviors and actions on yourself, regardless of the cause. As a thought experiment, consider the following:

After spending two hours of enjoyable, lucid conversation with a hot chick at a bar and buying her a few drinks, you return from the bathroom to find her making out with some random guy.

Are you upset at her? If you are being honest, you would probably answer ‘yes’. Most men’s first instinct is to feel slighted, rejected, eschewed in favor of the BBD (Bigger Better Deal). Guess what? You have just been sucked into her reality. Her Metaframe has won out over yours.

The Level 5 thinker, conversely, would feel lucky enough to have walked out of the bathroom to witness what a piece of trash he was blindsided by and move onto someone more worthy of his time. If he still desired her, he could use some techniques to reconstruct the reality around him and suck her back into his Metaframe, however this is a lengthy discussion and we will save it for another article.

Nevertheless, let the point not be lost. Fear, at its inescapable core, is always about the person experiencing the fear, not the object of the fear. Fear of flying is not a fear of heights or enclosed places, but the person’s reaction to that stimulus and the agreement they’ve made with reality as to how they will react to that stimulus. Remember, it is a choice.

Make the choice to not be a results-oriented thinker, as that inevitably leads to resentments. Detach yourself from the outcome, assume responsibility for your fear, your emotions and your reactions and spend more time establishing your agreement with reality. Or re-establishing it.

It’s been said better by wiser, so I’ll leave with one of my favorite aphorisms by social thinker Dr. Wayne Dyer:

“When you seek to make truth your personal reality, you are strengthened and the universe conspires to furnish you with what you’ve asked of it”

-al

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