Low self-esteem is often caused by people being overly harsh on themselves. We all have rules for ourselves about what standards we should reach to be happy. A lot of these rules are excessively high especially with people studying self help material. Most of the time people don’t even know what “good” means when talking about picking up women. Some men think that getting every girl is the only successful outcome. Do you think that needing to pick up every girl in order to feel happy is a great way to base your self-esteem.

The reason that this community has a lot of perfectionists in it, is that, in order to improve yourself, you have to have goals and dream big. This will then make you feel bad for not having those things and push you across, as Tony Robbins likes to call it, “The indifference threshold”. This pain causes you to take action and set you on your path to making your dreams a reality.
The bad side to this is that if the interaction isn’t perfect or you don’t get the best response you beat yourself up about it. This definitely isn’t healthy thinking and is one of the quickest ways to destroy a persons self-esteem. Having negative thoughts and blaming yourself after you get blown out by a girl will only lessen your chances of improving in this area of your life. Instead you want to lower your standards for success to just opening and trying out a new technique. Anything else that happens doesn’t matter, you just want to open and then give yourself a massive pat on the back afterwards. This can be easier said than done and if you are struggling to make this transition then a bootcamp will fix this.

When I used to live in Kingston I noticed a really happy man that worked everyday in a corner shop on my road. He always had a massive smile on his face and said a warm hello to everyone. A lot of the, we’ll call them council estate people used to give him a hard time. They’d come into the shop and take the micky out of him and tease him. I always felt sorry for him but he never seemed to share my feelings. In fact he didn’t seem to mind at all. This drove me crazy because I couldn’t understand how someone so much worse off than me could be so much happier than I was. So one day I decided to ask him why he was always so happy. He replied, “I’m alive”. His rule for feeling happy was simple, if I’m alive, then that’s fantastic!

Now you don’t want to have people walk all over you and not achieve anything in your life. At the same time, you want to maintain your confidence and self-esteem. The best way to do this is by setting yourself small achievable missions each night that you go out. For example, talk to three new women. If you do this then that’s brilliant and anything on top of this is an excellent bonus. If you are new or even intermediate to this then threesomes, strippers and hot girls shouldn’t be your criteria to feeling happy. If these are your rules then you will never feel happy and these kind of women easily pick up on this stuff and are repelled by it. A never ending, self defeating loop of doom, its okay to fail or do something wrong.

Part One
Make a list of all the areas that you feel that you need to be perfect in.
“Other people will think less of me if I make a mistake” “If a woman rejects me then that is a failure” “I must be able to pick up every night”
Part Two
Now write down where you think these perfectionist views have come from. What parts of your past has shaped you to take on these core beliefs? Then below each one, list all the reasons why keeping these beliefs is beneficial to you, if it actually is….