Luke Murray spent $40,000 on pickup-artist boot camps and learned that discomfort is just an emotional signal, usually fear of rejection or unfamiliarity. The real problem wasn't approaching people but the mental overthinking that let him avoid feeling the actual discomfort of doing it.
I spent probably $40,000 going to different pickup artist boot camps, and the main thing that I learned was that the physical sensation of discomfort I originally judged as a bad thing. And then when I felt into that sensation and asked myself, what does this feel like? The discomfort came from, I don't know what I'm doing, or I'm afraid of rejection, or I haven't done this before. And so a lot of times I and other guys that I would do this with would ask a bunch of questions and say, well, what's the right thing to say? Or what do I do with my hands? Or how do I open? And what I recognized I was doing and what they were doing was going up into their heads so they didn't just have to feel the discomfort of walking up to a cute stranger and saying, hi, you're cute, can we talk? So you're not really avoiding an action, you're avoiding an emotion.
