I wanted to talk to women, I ended up talking to everyone and it freed me... (my story)

today i want to talk to you about how i was able to feel much more at ease talking to people because now you know you see me posting videos of me flirting with women talking to all sorts of people but the thing is i wasn't always like this and two i can pinpoint to one turning point that changed everything for me when i was younger i wasn't particularly confident i would even say that i was more under reserved shy side but i think that as a man uh the first pain point uh the first reason i started to think about all of this is because you know i wanted to be able to talk to girls and even though i had a girlfriend in high school and you know i would sometimes get lucky i never really felt socially free i was always stuck in my head overthinking everything but one day in my early 20s i started thinking about how do most men go about meeting women this was before any gaps and for the most part every weekend we dress up we go out we spend money we drink in the hope of feeling a little bit of courage and for what exactly i mean nine times out of ten you go home you jack off and you fall asleep and the worst part is you do it weekend after weekend at the same time i also noticed that every day without going out of my way just by going to school by going to work by running my errands walking around i see at least four five six beautiful women every day sometimes they're literally at arm's reach and the best part is no one's trying to talk to them then now i would love to tell you that that was it that this was my turn of event that from then on i was able to meet women left and right but that couldn't be further from the truth i did absolutely nothing i would even sometimes watch those youtube videos of guys you know picking up girls in the street and be pumped about it but then every time i would see a girl i couldn't do anything i would fix my hair worry that my nose was too big that i was too hairy that she was too beautiful for me you know what would i say anyway i would think of 100 different scenarios where everything would go wrong and at the end do absolutely nothing weeks went by months went by actually years went by and one day i woke up i was 25 years old i had just ended a long-term relationship and you know i knew deep down i knew within myself that i had this sort of unlived chapter of my life i wanted to write and so i sort of looked at myself and thought you know i'm 25 i'm not gonna get any younger so this is the time to do it so i grabbed my balls and went for it and the beginning wasn't very glorious you know sometimes i would walk around for like hours and not talk to anyone the worst was sometimes i would see a girl and you know start working towards her and literally three feet a meter away from her i would freak out and change direction i felt pretty useless but for some reason i kept trying it was very frustrating but i think that one of the things that kept me going was that ultimately i knew that it was all within my control when you see someone you want to talk to and you can't i mean it's never because there's a trap in front of you that you know you might fall into and die it's always because of how you perceive the situation and all of the stories you tell yourself in your head and so deep down i knew that this was me against myself and that it was within my control after some time i eventually did it i don't remember quite vividly but i remember being overly anxious i actually remember stuttering a few times and obviously getting rejected but the best part was that it felt amazing even though i was rejected the simple fact that i wanted to do something and i did it that you know i took action made me feel like the biggest bowler and you would think that that realization enabled me to then start talking to whoever i wanted but the weirdest part was that actually not at all when i saw the next cute girl around it felt like i was back to square one completely frozen and unable to say anything and that really troubled me because you know if i tell you that you cannot hurt yourself then you know maybe you're gonna try to do all sorts of stunts uh jump from building to building or whatever but uh here i was i was in a situation where i knew that taking action and going for it would make me feel amazing yet when i was presented with another opportunity i was still frozen but eventually after a few weeks i started noticing a pattern i noticed that you know i have days where i sort of randomly talk to more people than usual maybe i joke with someone in line maybe i talk to the barista and for some reason i realized that the days where i had more interactions i was just much more likely to feel the courage to walk up to a girl and talk to her as if the previous interactions were sort of a warm up to that moment and so from that moment on i started to look for every opportunity i had to talk to anyone so that i could basically warm myself up and as i started to become hyper aware of all of the opportunities around me i started noticing something surprising i basically realized that i would censor myself quite a lot and by this i mean that you know we'll have little moments in a daily life where you know there is someone next to you maybe it's an old man maybe it's a cute girl maybe it's a dude and for some reason you want to say something you want to make a joke you want to make a compliment maybe you just want to say hello and like start an interaction and for some reason you don't right like you think about it you look at the person and then you're like yeah whatever and you just keep to yourself and at first you know if you take each of those little situations independently you know they're worthless i mean who cares if you didn't make a joke to an old man in the bus or if you didn't give that compliment to that old lady with a hat but uh i started realizing that those moments happened to me very often and i sort of started wondering like you know what would be their compound effect over the scale of my life i started realizing that i was effectively censoring myself day in and day out and i started wondering about what impacts could it have on me and the first one i noticed is that you know you basically create this habit of censoring yourself i mean you want to say something you want to like throw a ball but instead you keep it in and you keep it so often that in the end it feels out of the ordinary to just say what you want to say and the second effect really happens over time because you know every time you want to say something but you don't uh you prevent yourself from experiencing something new from meeting someone from experiencing maybe an awkward moment and the thing is as those experiences add up you know they can change the trajectory of your life i mean who would you be today if you had expressed yourself even half of the times in the last 10 years i mean the way you feel about expressing yourself the way you relate to people all of this would be different and at that moment it hit me remember when i said when i saw the next cute girl around it felt like i was back to square one completely frozen and unable to say anything well i understood why self-expression is like a pipe so if you want to express something and you say it that thing you know leaves your pipe and your pipe stays clear but when you want to say something and you don't that an expressed emotion stays within your pipe and since you censor yourself all the time uh it ends up clogging you and this was the reason it was so hard for me to talk to the second girl it was because even though i had said something the first time and you know a little drop went through i was still very much clogged this realization was a huge turning point for me i basically went from being externally motivated by you know meeting woman getting her number feeling validated to something much more internal much more interesting am i able to express myself am i able to be true to myself and i started asking myself a simple question every time did i express myself or did i censor myself that single question allowed me to grow much more in tune with myself and feel grounded i think it's easy to forget that interacting with other people is first and foremost about expressing yourself and your ability to express yourself and to be true to yourself is really the foundation of all of your relationships by shifting the focus on myself i very quickly started interacting with much more people that i could ever imagine and i very quickly became much more comfortable and at ease that experience made me realize that my desire to engage with people should not be driven by the outcome it's not like oh maybe i'll make a friend so let's talk to this person or oh this person is probably not going to want to talk to me so i'm not going to say anything the reason you should express yourself is to be at peace with yourself to be able to live true to yourself and have your actions and intentions align the rest making friends finding a girlfriend getting her number uh experiencing an awkward moments those are just side effects now you might be very clumsy at first but you know it's like if you say someone who's gonna try to learn how to throw a ball you know you might not be able to throw the ball on the target the first time but as you focus on yourself and you iterate you'll be able to calibrate yourself until you don't really have to think about it anymore i mean you know when you talk to your friends you don't think about it so why should you think about it when you talk to new people i would say that as long as you don't have any bad intentions if you want to say something always go for it cultivating your self-expression is the process that is going to make you learn and grow because it will make you experience new situations that you will learn from it's basically the engine of your growth and if it's hard at first just start small you know just say hello ask a question just practice basically throwing that ball and cultivate your self-expression until you basically create this outward flow of expression you know when i was a kid sometimes my parents will bring me to the beach and at low tide with all the other kids we will very often build those damn right so we'd build a dam and the water would like flow down and at some point once the dam was full of water uh we had two ways of breaking it either we would basically just like step all over it and smash it or we could poke a very little hole uh and you know a stream would start coming out and the more water will come out the more it will push the sand and eventually the whole world will break up it's kind of the same thing with your self-expression so you know just focus on whatever you can express and one thing after the other you're going to create this outward flow of expression and you'll end up smashing that internal dam um so that's it for today let me know your thoughts in the comments uh you know do you feel clogged uh have you been able to overcome those limitations which kind of excuses are you telling yourself also i would love to meet everyone who's watching my videos so shoot me an email at ruben at socialanimal.us and we'll arrange a facetime that's it and see you next time

Channel: Social Animal

Views: 288,592

Keywords: social animal, socialanimal, social anxiety, social skills, how to make friends, dating, relationships, social confidence, social interactions, social experiment, talking to strangers, conversation, self expression, approach anxiety, self confidence, dating advice, fear of rejection, rejection, social freedom, how to talk to women, how to talk to people, shy, how to overcome shyness, how to flirt, how to approach women, how to overcome social anxiety, talk to women, dating tips

Id: 0lKRM76uFeI

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020