Federico del pueblo

Which part of my post indicated to you that I concur?

Ok. Thanks for sharing your views on these things.

For sure. But wouldn't you say that this is just as true for these other pursuits like attaing status, being well connected, making lots of money, having an amazing life style. Will most guys (you try) attain that?

How did you arrive at the conclusion that most guys who do pick up for five years do not get good game (no offense here, just pure curiosity)?

That's what I thought lol Maybe he should just get a job in sales haha

https://youtu.be/bmav517MQJc Regarding the necessity of a great career or a lot of money to pick up girls, just watch this...

Ok, then it looks like this: You're career is something you perceive to be "not good enough" and this affects your confidence to some degree. And your confidence that is already affected by the career is also something you perceive to be "not good enough". Now here my question would be, if the career was already where you want it to be, would the confidence thing still be an issue by itself, because it's this specific approaching and attracting girls kind of confidence or would it be pretty much sorted out? This way or another I can tell you that the career thing is a limiting belief. Whilst it is great to have a good career you do NOT need one to attract girls, unless you believe that you need one, then you really need it. You already seem to have a legitimate plan and are on your way of executing it. That's good enough.

@Jacob Morres What do you think you are lacking?

Great shift of perspective! ?

@Illusory Self You simply have a whole bunch of limiting beliefs and conditioned emotional responses stored in your subconscious mind. When the stimuli arises (e.g. a group of girls), your negative beliefs and emotions get triggered and start to sabotage you. Do research into different things related to making changes to your subconscious mind. There are lots of things but I'll only name a few that I know of. - one of the most beneficial things to have as a skill is a release technique I'm personally only skilled at one, which is called EFT (aka tapping). You'd have to search for YouTube videos if you want to learn it but here's just quickly how it works: You intentionally engage in your negative self talk while doing the tapping technique. This will trigger exactly the unwanted emotions in your brain, nervous system and body. But the tapping technique has a calming effect on your nervous system (especially the amygdala in your brain) and thus the trigger and it's corresponding emotions get reprocessed so that you affect permanent change to your subconscious mind, i.e. the problem is weaker or sometimes gone (usually you'd have to do this several or even a few dozens time for your strongest negative beliefs/emotions). Like this you could work through all your limiting beliefs. I think what JulienHimself teaches nowadays is also a release technique, the letting go technique from David R. Hawkins. Here you will also intentionally feel in your negativity to then release it, I don't know exactly how it works though. From my observations here on the forum I conclude that "shadow work" serves a similar purpose too, but I don't know anything about it so you might wanna ask other members. If I remember this correctly @flowboy knows about this stuff and other inner game related things. Other possibilities to change the subconscious mind are (self) hypnosis and visualization, but from my experience it can be tricky to affect change with them when your triggers are strong and for me EFT works much better to reduce triggers. But once you've weakened your negative triggers a lot hypnosis, affirmations and visualization can be amazing tools to help "installing" more positive programs in your mind, and to get a good physiology going. I think you should also make use of "outer game strategies to affect inner game". So think of different social challenges that help you to progressively desensitize. Just search for "comfort zone challenges". I think because of your beliefs and messy emotions you're still taking yourself way to seriously... you'd like to look high value and non needy and ironically this makes you needy. Be a bit weird and needy and awkward on purpose. Think of challenges where you'll likely get rejected or weirdly looked at etc You must teach your brain it it's ok to look stupid, nobody gives a fuck about you.

@ValiantSalvatore Ok thanks I'll check it out.

What's that local app that works well in the south of Germany?

@spinderella I mean spirituality is all good and fine, but you have to survive first you know? You could as well argue "oh...so if I don't eat I'll die, but does it matter?! Death is ok too, no need to be scared of death, let's just surrender to it". Look, you are a mammal with a mammalian brain. In this brain are areas that motivate you to secure your survival and these areas are connected to your "higher thinking and planning ahead" areas that only humans posses. When these areas sense that your survival or "future" survival is under threat they will activate a stress response in your body which makes you feel anxious so you start to take action to secure your survival. This is normal and fine. I don't think that spirituality is about not having survival needs anymore, it's about being less attached to all kinds of things. If you don't survive you won't practice spirituality. Now could you still be less emotionally reactive to all these things like goals, attaining things etc.? That surely is possible. Feelings of lack or being separated from a material thing can be transcended (probably in many ways) for sure, but I think you could still attain things even when you're unattached to the outcome, just for the fun of it, you know? A feeling of lack is basically a feeling of inadequacy of some kind. You feel like not having the thing devalues you whereas having the thing would "upgrade" or enhance you in a way. In a way this is linked to the phenomenon of status (just in my opinion), because the more we feel like we have all these different things that enhance us the better we feel about ourselves and our status in society. Status is a survival thing. It is engrained in your brain to seek to improve your position in the tribe. A fear of loss of status because of a lack of something is something that again is being processed in the kind of primitive parts of your brain, it's just a fear response telling you "look out, if you don't have thing X you might be perceived as inadequate and maybe your position in the tribe will decrease", it's just a bunch of stress hormones. But all of this can be transcended too. Then you just do these things for the joy of doing them. Letting go of these rather unhelpful fearful emotions is possible and there are many ways to do so. Observe them, be very aware of them while just letting them be. Just become an expert of your mind that is able to observe without creating resistance against the emotion. Or use a release technique like EFT/tapping.

Well, your experience does exist right? You know that you have an experience of consciousness or don't you? It doesn't matter if you and your family and others are just dream characters or "real", because for you the experience is real this way or another. I don't know about the enlightenment people question, probably several answers could be true. Maybe they would just love them in return, maybe they would speak up in a calm way, maybe they would abandon them. You should do whatever is possible to change the situation and if nothing helps then leave.

All I can contribute here is some story of someone I knew some time ago. He had severe PTSD from long term sexual abuse during childhood. What was astounding was that until about his early 30s he did not know of these horrible events during childhood. He clearly felt that something was wrong, but had no idea what it was. He felt anxious and stressed, but there was no obvious reason for why he felt like this. No psychologist could help him. Then one day in his early 30s all of a sudden he had a flashback, and could remember all of these events and re-experienced them in his mind so to speak. Of course he was severely re-traumatized, and he had to go in the psychiatry and be medicated etc. 20 years later, when I first met him, he was still dealing with PTSD, it wasn't as severe anymore, but he was still far away from being able to live a normal life.

@softlyblossoming You should make a living off of giving advice (if you don't do so already). No seriously, I appreciate the effort that went into writing such an elaborated post, so thank you a lot! And yeah, I kinda feel like I'm getting a hang of not feeling pressured by (perceived) expectations, like I'm gradually giving less of a fuck about it. Just to give you some background info because you seem like you're genuinely intrigued about self help related stuff and maybe how the brain works and all of that stuff. It's been a shit ton of work for me to not be bothered by others' standards and expectations, because this was probably my major issue for a lot of time. This was highly exacerbated by the fact that I've been living with a nasty chronic illness for many years that affects the nervous system in a very unfortunate way. So basically my nervous system is in a condition where survival is highly prioritized, meaning that all the pathways for arousal/stress are very strong or overdeveloped, which leads to a state of sympathetic dominance in the nervous system and is also considered to be a dysfunction of the limbic system in the brain. This exacerbated my emotional symptoms so much that I can't even begin to explain how much work has gone into "overcoming" (sorry) these challenges described above, but I'm very far now. Luckily I know of effective techniques to affect change on an emotional level myself. I feel like I only have to keep going because everything is going in the direction I want it to go.

There are lots of things you can do. When it comes to responding to negative/condescending posts what you want to develop is meta awareness. Instead of just reading the exact comment, understand what format of communication the other one is using, just wonder " What is it that he/she is doing/trying to achieve?" e.g. "he's trolling" "she got triggered and tries to attack me" and then call out this behaviour without engaging in that same type of communication like "hmm...sounds like you're just trying to trigger egos...where does this need stem from"? You'd have to read a little bit into frame control to understand more about this, there are many ways to change an unhelpful frame into one that suits you well. Then when you see good responses of other people you can look at them and wonder "why is this response so good?" "How did he change the meaning of the exchange?" and like this start to recognize patterns of successfull communication. Don't overdo it with frame control though, because it can become very negative, like people just trying to dominate each other, people getting triggered etc.

@Ineedanswers Let me just assure you that "I" have a consciousness that is reading your posts. I don't know if this helps or just adds to the confusion ? I also don't know if it's like this because I'm dreaming that it's like this or because you're dreaming it or someone else is dreaming it

This is just how it generally works. The more options guys have the more they want to capitalise on them and have sex with many of them. But this is just a tendency and a over generalisation. So it is possible to find "hot guys" who will commit, but it requires effort to find them.

@Derek White how about you release a new video?

Thanks for all your insights. I don't know if I communicated this clearly in the first post, but my main issue here was basically just feeling pressured in some way to have to live up to certain expectations and that these expectations can increase when you engage in self help. So there isn't any problem of whether or not the things I'm doing are meaningful, for me they are. My conclusion is that I simply have to apply personal development to overcome that perceived pressure of having to achieve certain things or having to live up to certain standards. I mean of course I want to achieve certain things, I just don't want to feel like there's somebody standing behind me looking above my shoulder, evaluating how well I'm doing and then saying "hmm...I think you can do better". But in reality there isn't this somebody, there's just me. Other people actually can affect me to a certain degree with their views (judgements, expectations etc.), but it's my responsibility whether they actually affect me or not, so I just have to let go of this mental pattern of perceived expectations etc.

The number one thing is to engage the friends too. Ideally you manage to befriend them and in the best scenario they start to support you with your girl (can't expect that though). So you keep talking with everybody of the group. To the friends you're just really nice, friendly and positive, with her you're a little bit more flirtatious/polarizing (even though there's a limit as to how much you can escalate in front of the friends). At some point you could ask her if she wants to have a drink with you at the bar, which ideally is so close to where you were standing before that your friends can still see you two. Then (if she agrees) tell her to tell her friends that you go to the bar, let HER tell it the friends so it looks like she's fine with it. In the night you can't just get rid of the friends in many cases, so you need to know how to work the group.

Well, many guys who you could meet in bars and clubs (or anywhere in life) are also just looking for a fling. But there are other dating websites too and you can definitely find a bf on one of these.

That's great. What are you doing to achieve these goals and what is it that's really troubling you?