Feeling fear and acting despite it builds courage. Anytime you’re afraid to do something and feel some invisible force holding you back, yet you push through it anyway, you’re building courage within yourself.
Courage is a habit. Courage is a form of discipline. It’s taking a certain action even though you feel like doing something else. The difference here is that courage involves acting against fear, whereas discipline involves acting against laziness or fatigue.
Courage is built like a muscle. The stair-stepped exercises in the previous section are designed to progressively build your courage. The more courage you build, the more you’ll be capable of bold actions. Bold actions require a lot of vulnerability and build non-neediness.
Stopping a woman and asking her for the time requires little courage and is not a bold action. It’s well within social norms.
Walking up to a group of six people sitting down, asking to speak to the most attractive woman for a moment, telling her that you find her beautiful and you’d like to take her out sometime, is quite bold. It's bold because it requires a lot of courage to disrupt social norms and it requires quite a bit of vulnerability.
But there's a caveat here. You must know that you’re interrupting social norms. You must acknowledge that what you are doing is unusual. If you don’t, you’ll be seen as someone who is out of touch and oblivious, which is not attractive.
This is a common mistake that many of the Social Disconnect types of men make. Since they're so out of tune with social norms, they often have no problem behaving in a bold way. The problem is, they aren’t aware of when they’re being bold or not.
For instance, I once worked with a guy who was very socially disconnected. We were in a shopping mall and we were walking around talking to women together.
As we were going down an escalator, we saw a very attractive girl going up the up escalator on the other side. As we passed her I mentioned to him that he should talk to her.
He immediately began running up the down escalator and shouting to her trying to introduce himself.
Obviously, this is a very awkward and strange thing to do. And had he been aware of how awkward and strange it was, he would have been bold. But instead, he was just unaware, and as such he immediately creeped the girl out.
This is why if you’re ever going to do something that is unusual — approach a woman in a strange location, try to kiss her in a strange location, invite her out with you after just meeting her, etc. — It's important that you communicate that you realize what you’re doing is abnormal.
“You know, I’ve never done this before, and I know we just met, but why don’t you come to the restaurant with me?”
Excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to meet you."
The bolder your action, the greater attraction you’re going to create. The bolder the action, the more vulnerability you show, and the more you polarize responses.
If you walk around and ask women for the time, you are not polarizing them very much. Most of them will give you the time. The worst rejection you’ll ever get may be, “Oh sorry, I don’t have a watch,” or something similar.
But if you walk around and ask women on dates, you’re going to get polarized reactions — nervous and excited yes’s, and tense and reserved no’s. Or maybe a few angry no’s. If you go even further and try to kiss a woman at an unexpected time, you're either going to get a very enthusiastic yes or an enthusiastic no.
The point is: greater boldness leads to greater polarization.
This is yet another argument for behaving in an assertive manner. This is also why one of my mantras that I tell men is, “Always err on the side of assertivenes.”
Whenever you’re in doubt of what you should do, err on the side of assertiveness. Choose the bolder action. Because if you wait around for the safer and less bold opportunity to make a move on her, chances are the attraction will be less or may even dwindle.
But bold behavior by itself will only go so far. Boldness must be molded by charismatic and efficient communication. Just behaving recklessly and will attract some women to you, and will give you sexual opportunities (particularly in party environments), but without communicating in a charming and interesting manner, and without being aware of social norms, it’s unlikely you’ll get many women to stick around, and your relationships will not be that enjoyable.
You can build up an incredibly attractive lifestyle and persona, focus on the proper demographic, act boldly and pursue women shamelessly, but if you can't communicate to them your intentions and your personality well, then it will be hard to maintain their interest for very long.
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