Don't put pressure on yourself, bro. Be present, relax. You don't have to turn any instance into anything instantly.

Breathe. Socialize more. Trust the process and be aware so you can be more observant of social cues.

Listen, I had a friend he had so fucking bad approach anxiety, BRO I was opening groups of girls, I was showing off my friend and he is a break dancer, so capitalizing on his dance skills there was always one chick that was showing high signs of interest. But he couldn't get ONE straight sentence out.

A month later, he has a girlfriend. (Yeah he is bluepilled but whatever). Just being in the scenario of an approach even when he fucked up completely, was this CLICK he needed. And he approached his now gf himself...

I feel like there is something that needs to "click" in my head and then suddenly everything will be easy and natural.

Nope.

Being good with girls is a hundred small things, not one big thing.

You are definitely a bit blocked by something, which is probably fear of consequences - probably due to perceived low status due to the actions of others (parents, friends, peers) in your past.

No magic bullet to get past that.

"White knuckling it" helps a bit........ but better is to practice relaxing with it, and making progress while not alerting your fight/flight response.

Exposure therapy and zfg mindset. The obstacle is the way.

Is it just exposure? Do I need to forcefully "push through" the block and literally just practice till it gets better or what?

Yes.

You need some IDGAF attitude, force yourself to approach girls,to say what's on your mind (as long as it isn't creep shit) and get used to attention from everyone,be the soul of the party. It's not like the solution is out of reach, you have it in you,just do it

Stop hanging around girls and go hang out with some dudes. Go do bro shit.

I can't speak for everyone but I can speak for myself. The thing that I did was make myself do things I was afraid of. So yes, feal the fear and do it anyway.

Confidence for me came through accomplishment. I fear something, I met that fear head on. The reward was a desirable outcome.

You need to be fucking. The pressure is off when you’re routinely getting pussy, even if it isn’t of the highest quality. Find someone who is content just fucking you, then work your way up from there. It’s a game changer.

Confidence breeds success, success breeds confidence. You need to gradually inch your way into this feedback loop of success and confidence. Its no one thing but you may feel like success comes in steps rather than linearly.

Lay the ground. Do the training and you will get a performance gain. Don't focus on the times you are running but on how well you are doing your training. The times will come as a by product of the successful training. So just as you can't tell an athlete to go out and push himself in races till he gets confident and successful, so you can't really do it this way in other things. You will just get exhausted and demoralised if you only rely on push.

Push most certainly has its place, challenging yourself to do what you find hard helps but take that to all aspects of life not just to women and go easy on yourself 80% of the time so you are relaxed and energised for when you push. Just as an athlete might do strength training, cross training, training for form, training for speed, training for rehab, training for aerobic and anaerobic systems so you need to look at how to increase your value and success in many different areas of life and fix deficiencies. Then when you put it all together on race day with a bit of push, it all falls together easily for an improved performance and slowly the confidence rises -because you are that good. There is no need to fake it till you make it. You have earned it already. It feels like you pushed through a block but that block was by that time only in your mind. You had the worth to overcome the block, so it had to fall.