Roell's journal

[Roell]

Hello friends;

I found girlschase through the biggest sheer of luck at the end of this summer. I was searching for a science article about monkeys and had included the word alpha in the search title. Ended up finding chase article on alpha males. I skimmed it and found it amusing, didn't bother looking into the site much more that day. The next I had a second look because my brain made a far off connection with something my friend had told me about picking up girls and him reading the game so I thought I'd give it a second glance. I came back and read some more articles, and some more, and more and I became somewhat obsessed... Chase story of how he struggled about with overcoming social anxiety and depression seemed to mirror my own very much.

After summer I came back to university which I'd started a year ago and up until this point was very seriously considering to drop out of because of lack of interest and motivation (One of the articles that made me change my mind was the article how to master anything, I recommend to read it if you haven’t). I was in our chapter room, cooking some food and one of the cute girls in my class came up and asked me something. I don’t remember what but remember I pulled off the most charming answer imaginable which now many months later I can't remember of course (which, expressed in text wouldn’t seem remarkable anyway since of course it wasn’t about the words , but was the way it was said). She walked away giggling, and as she walked away we made brief eye contact in which she gave this look like the women in film give as they walk away from meeting the charming protagonist who’ve just made their night and who they end up in the arms of later during the film… To be continued.

I remember thinking; Wow, what if I could repeat that with other women? Pretty self-explanatory then why I’m here; I want to get good with women and social interactions. I also find, and appreciate, that most people here are centered around improving their lives in different areas which for me has been a big priority ever since I overcame my depression.

I will begin the newbie assignments and use this journal as a medium to document it and my thoughts, perhaps sprinkled with a little tips here and there. Bear with me if my updates may come at irregular times as uni is grabbing a lot of my time lately. As well as life’s other chores.

/Roell

 

[Roell]

Day 1

Right, so scout at least 4 places. I wanted to find places that would be convenient for me to get to, and would work with my schedule e.g. school.

University - I go to uni and I think it’s maybe the best place to pick up girls. First, you have a lot of students, many whom are really cute and secondly, being students gives you something in common which you can use to break the ice. Add that lots of these girls are smart and driven, which I like, and you have a good prospect of finding a real nice girlfriend.

Chapter bars - Around the school there are many bars which you can visit if you like. They are generally open one day of the week, which is not optimal, but since they usually don’t keep open during the same week day it’s manageable. The bar of choice of course being my own chapter’s since it also happens to be one of the finest.

Mall - This one I discovered when shopping for christmas gifts. It’s huge and with what I’ve noticed: some really beautiful girls; browsing the latest fashion, enjoying a coffee in one of the many caffè’s or just simply strolling down the different places inside.

These three were really easy to find and I have to say, all great in the sense that they offer very little mental resistance for me to actually go out to since I can always make up an excuse for going there. The fourth one though was really hard to find.

Streets - I wanted somewhere I could go to on a friday- or saturday night for night game, either some bar or a nightclub. I couldn’t find an ideal place that I liked so I ultimately decided that just walking in the streets during night time would be acceptable due to the good amount of traffic from all kinds of girls it has.

So there you have it, four places! I think I might make an effort to find some other places later on, especially for night game, but this can do for now.

/ Roell

 

[Roell]

Day 2

So, it’s been a looong break

I’ve wanted to complete the assignment many times but due to overload of school work and other activities there’s always been an excuse to avoid it. Now that I have my semester I’ll try to push through.

So for today: Posture! Easy I thought to myself, not so it turned out…

Maybe I used to have good posture some months ago when I worked out more, but as of lately I’ve been off training and these last months, being bent over books studying, has not helped at all.

I started the day in my room using a camera filming myself to try to get a feel for the difference between a bad posture and a good one. After some tweaks(and noticing the difference) I went to the mall to try it.

Since first part of the assignment was observing other people’s posture so I did. I was specifically looking for people with good posture and confident walks. To my disappointment I saw very few of those. Instead most people looked like sleepwalkers.I have a theory that because today was a very hot and people usually have vacation right now they were in a much more relaxed state than usual which and therefore exhibiting what I saw. I tried doing a little walking around with better posture but didn’t get any results out of the ordinary.

I plan on going into the city later when the temperature has cooled down and try again.

Continue…

Yes I went to the city. I decided to go to the fancier business area because my impression of the people who hang around there tend to have better posture. I was mildly disappointed as I’d expect to see more people with powerful walks and great posture. Sure there were some good examples and I got my fix I think, but the ratio was much lower than expected. The best examples of good posture were owned by those who had above average physique. They seemed to have it more natural than others, therefore it would seem getting in better shape would be priority. I tried to apply some of what I saw on in others on myself with interesting results:

Firstly, I am a very anonymous person and people usually don’t pay any closer attention to me, but when I walked with better posture, slightly relaxed, some people definitely noticed me but they seemed to give me a sort of judging look that I don’t think I’ve experienced before. Very strange. I guess I need some more practice.

 

[Roell]

Day 3

Eye contact day.

For starters I feel a bit like I had an advantage today. When briefly looking at this challenge many months ago I read the part about looking sideways when breaking eye contact and really took it to my daily life. Being a commuter I’ve basically used it everyday since reading about it so it feels very natural to break eye contact this way. Maybe because of this I found it somewhat hard to leave the comfort zone and really push my own boundaries.

I went out with some friends to a place with bar and live music but got bored so tried making eye contact with the girls I saw in the venue. It somehow felt too easy because they generally didn’t mind it so much, just throwing casual glances smiling then looking away. In general people were just enjoying themselves and most didn’t mind or pay attention to my hard efforts trying making eye contact.

Not totally satisfied because I still felt like I hadn’t experienced anything too awkward(which I believe in the social game is when you actually make progress) I took to the subway and tried to make eye contact there with people both while both standing still and while walking towards them. I observed was that it was easier to maintain it when fixedl than when moving because when moving towards someone things sort of felt more tense and uncomfortable. Again I didn’t feel any intense awkwardness even though I tried to hold on to their eyes for relatively long times.

(this part is not so much about eye contact but more of a meta piece. )

So after writing this yesterday and today proofreading it I noticed it’s definitely on the shorter side. I read nino’s post about day 3 and the length and detail of it is miles ahead of mine. Now I wrote in the beginning that I used the advice on breaking eye contact much beforehand so it’s almost second nature to me. The conclusion that I draw from this is that I am having harder to pick out the details, probably due to internalizing the method over a long time and thus experiencing it on a more unconscious level. (Hope that sentence made sense...)

In buddhism there’s a concept called Shoshin - beginners mind - which is approaching learning something as if it is wholly new. I believe this should have been used in my case here. Comparing nino’s post to mine he can pinpoint a lot of things that slipped me by, not to mention he actually counted and recalled everyone he made eye contact with whereas I just made a number of tries(well over ten I’ll add) and did neither. I will try to do better in my next day’s assignment and be mindful of what I just wrote.

 

[Roell]

Day 4

Last time I posted which has been some time now, I wrote about how my ability to retell my experience was lacking due to my previous experience with the method of the assignments, eye-contact & walk. This time I went in with a blank state; no previous experience, and it made me more analytical and aware of the smaller details.

To prepare myself I read nino’s report of day 4 for. Two things stood out to me:

..."That was tough, really tough" (I agree)

..."I noticed a very important thing. In the 3 cases above where I did say "Hi.", I did so spontaneously and without thinking(again I agree)"


So I decided to go to the streets into some park which id seen before but hadn’t entered before. On the way there I tried the things I’d learned previously: locking eyes with people and using better walk. I don’t know why but I felt more confident. I had a spontaneous little smile on my face which is very unusual for. me. As i went into the subway I saw a girl with a very cute face. She was walking besides a tall good looking guy who I presume was her boyfriend and for a moment I didn’t feel like looking in her direction but then spontaneously and without thinking, well, I did just that and as our eyes looked into each others she gave me a warm look and cracked a smile as did I. Got a bit of a dopamine rush and felt really good about myself. That little smile I sported before seemed to widen a bit.

As I entered the park I felt nervousness creep up and I thought it I needed some way to warm up before. I saw a middle-aged couple walking their dog, at first I thought it was really stupid/silly and my body tried to stop me from going but I went forward and petted the dog without asking and then said hi and tried stirring up a conversation with them. To my suprise they weren’t that creeped out that some random guy was walking up to their dog and petting it and I managed to make some small talk: telling them how cute their dog was. I dragged it out a little too much and started to feel awkwardness creeping up so I excused myself and kept going. This helped me a bit with the nervousness I felt before. Lesson learned: dont try to force small talk but rather let it naturally die and a smile is invaluable in making yourself looking less like a weirdo. I think that’s actually what helped the situation from turning into something really weird.

Girl #1,#2,#3:
Speaking of weird, the first approach I did really was pretty surreal.

I was walking through the park, saw some people here and there, mostly folk sitting, and I felt awkward and intruding every time I tried to walk towards them. Frustrated, I sat down on a bench. Yeah, this assignment was truly challenging. I got up and started walking slowly looking for girls to approach. A group of three girls and a guy was doing something that looked like circus tricks using hula hoops. I walked past them but then I just said fuck it and walked back muttering “let’s just get this over with”. As I walked closer I noticed the girls were wearing some skimpy outfits that looked like they’d been taken from a fantasy movie. The best description I can give is if you imagine the green part Link’s(the videogame character) clothes and nothing else. Despite this weird surprise I actually did a good job not making a fool of myself. I said hi and introduced myself, told them I was curious about what they were doing. They seemed surprised but then got friendly and they told me they were doing a photoshoot and the guy picked up a camera and showed me some pictures of the girls spinning the hula hoops… which were on fire… damn. Things got pretty weird (and cool). I said it sounded cool and asked if I could watch. They said ok and told me to sit at a place that wasn’t in line of the camera, so I did. Sat down on the grass and watched as they lit their hula hoops on fire again and made tricks and poses for the camera. As I sat there looking both amazed and confused I noticed the weird trancy electronic music in the background that had been playing all this time. Sounded like the soundtrack to an LSD trip.

#4
Pretty impressed about everything but after 10 minutes or so I decided to get up and leave.
I went back to the subway and saw a nice girl walking towards a “ticket door” of the subway which was broken. I decided to use this as an excuse to get her attention,trying make eye contact and saying hi repeatedly to her. She looked annoyed and bumped into the broken door anyway. I smiled and tried to initiate something but she didn’t give me any attention and walked away still looking annoyed.

#5
After this I really struggled to find the both the guts and opportunities to throw out a couple of hi’’s to girls. It was late so not a lot of people were out and quite few I tried to say hi to had earphones in and I treated me like air. I finally saw one girl who was maybe around 18-20 standing by the water by herself and I threw out a hi to her but she looked confused and looked away. I walked around for a long time but it was really late so I found very few opportunities to say hello to anyone, and the few ones I saw I pussied out. Also backed down from one chance, due to respect of the girl, since the scenario was her and me alone in a park at night and I didn’t want to scare her.

So like nino I didn’t complete the task, I found it very hard. I’ve definitely learned a lot though. Gonna try to digest this experience and do better planning next time. Also I feel the need to make clear goals to myself so I can have a bigger picture and not get stuck on details like nervousness. I guess I'll post more on that next time.