“If I only do X amount of approaches I will be good”
“I have approached over 30 women today but no luck!”
I have heard it often and I have heard it tossed around a lot, the number of approaches and their value. While I feel like for complete beginners who are just shy about talking to women it can be a good thing to measure, for most guys looking to get results it is a bad metric. In fact, over the years I have found that guys who have high approach volumes are either not successful at all or they have results they are not too happy with.
Because mentally, you are in the wrong place when that is all you care about.
If you tell yourself that you will do 10 approaches today and say approach 3 goes decent, your mind will still be racing to get 7 more approaches and pull out of the interaction too soon. The frame you have set is the wrong frame because you are too hellbent on trying to rack up the approaches so you can write up a nice “field report” on how well you did. It’s stupid.
To make matters even worse, you stick out when you go around spam approaching that many women even if it is in a big city. I used to live in NYC and overtime, even in Manhattan, people knew of “that weird guy” who went around spam approaching women to where there were posts on NextDoor about it. Given that I lurk pickup forums, I saw the guy bragging about how he approached 40 women in Greenwich Village on a pickup forum but got nowhere. It’s almost the same as when I read about a dude who did 10,000 approaches but got no results.
You are too driven by the wrong number. In fact, the guys I know who have a lot of success with night game or day game to where they pull regularly rarely do a high volume of approaches. So what do they do?
They focus on making approaches that matter and worry about quality.
I have seen cases where a guy will do only 5 approaches and get lucky while another will do 40 in a night only to go home empty handed. Now I am not saying hold back and do no approaches, you obviously need to do some to warm up. Instead, the mindset they used was a lot more different. If I can do 5 approaches and make each a quality conversation, then that is better than just doing 40 spam approaches.
The guys who did fewer approaches but got luckier were more weary of their environment, paid attention to IOIs, and managed to make it smooth than just going around spamming women. Most were focused on having quality conversations and making them stick than just saying they spam approached 40 different women.
In fact, I feel like this is where guys who are beginners stay beginners.
If you have never talked to a girl who was a total stranger or interacted with random women much, then approach volume is something to consider so you can break the anxiety. After you have done a few approaches and gotten used to it, you are holding yourself back or just staying complacent by putting too much value into the number of approaches you do.
In fact, your focus should now be on how to make your approaches last longer and how to tell if a woman is going to be receptive to you or not. You should focus more on quality rather than quantity.
