We live among a generation of men who are so afraid of social confrontation that they avoid assertiveness like it’s a plague.

 

We’ve learned to value pleasantness over honesty and vulnerability. We keep it to ourselves when we disagree with someone, we keep it to ourselves when we want to say something controversial, and we keep it to ourselves when we have a crush because we are afraid of the social consequences of vulnerability.

 

We don’t admit to ourselves that we do this, because to do so would be to accept a narrative that your ego is extremely fragile and easily damaged, which is a narrative that your ego is far too fragile to accept.

 

When attempting to become more aware of your own limiting beliefs, analyzing your thoughts is an important tool. It does have limitations, though. Your thoughts are not nearly as trustworthy as you’d like to believe.

 

Your conscious thoughts explain your emotions in a way that reinforces your self-concept. If you have a negative belief about yourself, your thoughts will be warped by that belief. It’s important to question your thoughts, but the most effective tool for doing so is often through reading your emotions. For example, if you believed that rejection wasn’t a big deal, the following would be easy for you: Go to your college campus, a mall, or a bar and make new friends. Introduce yourself to at least three people.

 

For most people, this challenge isn’t just hard, it triggers paralyzing anxiety. Hell, I tried this when I was eighteen. I still hadn’t even kissed a girl so I gave myself a mission to approach women in hopes that I could get a date.

 

I went with a friend, we gave each other four hours to get some girls’ numbers at our university campus. We were both nervous, but we figured with four hours we’d be able to make something happen.

 

As we walked around the campus, we saw girls we wanted to approach, but we always had an excuse: “She’s too tall.” “She’s in a hurry.” “She’s looking at her laptop.” “She looks like a lesbian.” Etc.

 

Most of these excuses were bullshit, but they were compelling to us because they provided an opportunity to avoid our paralyzing fear of social tension and rejection.

 

After we spent two hours meandering around the campus, we had a realization: this wasn’t going to work, we needed to change our approach. We decided to make our task easier by using a crutch. We absconded to a nearby corner store and bought two Four Lokos (which if you don’t know, are 24 oz beer-like drinks with 12% alcohol content). This was enough to get us both drunk. We slammed down the drinks and felt reinvigorated due to the social lubrication.

 

We returned to campus midday, drunk, and… we repeated the same pattern (only this time we felt like idiots because we were drunk in the middle of the day). After two more hours of meandering around campus we walked home severely disappointed in ourselves.

 

We both avoided trying to meet women again for months. This should be an embarrassing anecdote that highlights an unusual social phobia that was shared by my friend and me. But it’s not, because our social anxiety was in no way unusual. It’s the norm. I’ve seen it time and time again, most guys become paralyzed with fear at the thought of saying hello to a stranger.

 

Logically, this behavior is absurd, there’s nothing to be afraid of from approaching a girl. The worst-case scenario is that she isn’t interested in talking to you and brushes you off. So what? Our egos are a lot more fragile than we like to think (our ego has a strong desire to think that it isn’t fragile). We give the simple act of meeting strangers tremendous meaning, thinking that if we’re rejected we’ll be humiliated or our reputation will be ruined.

 

The more desperately you avoid rejection, the more emotionally painful the thought of rejection will become. A man with deep inner confidence doesn’t care about or avoid rejection; he has experienced it enough in the real world that it no longer means anything to him. He’s okay with risking a socially tense moment by being assertive because he’s been assertive enough times that he can’t possibly buy into the delusion that boldness can lead to painful consequences. A man of confidence is able to accept the fact that a stranger might be uninterested in meeting him, that his boss might not give him that raise, or that his crush might not like him back. Because he’s okay with the idea of rejection, it doesn’t mean anything. Therefore, what for most people would be emotionally paralyzing is a non-event for him. He doesn’t have an emotional need to be pleasing.

 

We don’t protect ourselves from real social consequences; we protect ourselves from imagined social consequences. We do this so effectively that many people NEVER put themselves in a vulnerable position. The truth though, is that by protecting ourselves from rejection so desperately, we constantly reject ourselves.

 

If you’re afraid a girl won’t like you, you make her lose interest in you by playing it safe with her. If you’re worried people won’t like you enough, you make yourself less likeable by trying too hard to make people like you. Modern men put so much effort into keeping a pleasing mask on that they forget there’s something better beneath that mask. In college, I had a friend who gave zero fucks. What would have been extremely embarrassing for most people, was just a fun anecdote for him. Once, he walked up to his TA and asked her on a date in front of hundreds of students. He got brutally rejected, but the next day he told us the story while laughing about it.

 

I also had a TA I was attracted to. Unlike my friend, I wanted to ask her out in a pleasing way. I planned my big move throughout the semester. I considered asking her out during office hours, but I thought that would be too awkward for her. I told myself I’d wait until the last day of class and then ask her out when it ended.

 

After class, I sat in the hall and told myself I would wait for her to leave and then I’d ask her on a date (I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of her students, after all). Of course, I hesitated and never ended up taking the risk. If I had asked her out, she probably would have rejected me, but so what? I cared so much about whether or not I got rejected, that I rejected myself. I rationalized excuses that were profoundly stupid for an entire semester of college. If I had just stepped up, I would have had an anecdote about getting rejected that I could have laughed about later.

 

Or, I might have gotten her number and ended up dating her. Now there’s no way to know.

 

Since then, I made a rule for myself that has led to crazy (and sometimes embarrassing) stories. Whenever I get a gut feeling for a moment that I should approach a particular stranger, or ask someone out, or do anything that causes me to feel emotional resistance, I ask myself, “What would make the better memory?”

 

I don’t always take action because of the question, but when I do, I never regret it. The answer to that question is almost always the best course of action to take.

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