How to Approach More Often While Solo

I recently had a Skype call where the guy wanted to ask about how to improve his solo Daygame and to approach more. He was saying that he was fine while out with a wing, but that while solo, things didn’t click, and that he would often go home after doing one or two awkward sets. My response to him was partly vibe based – taking on the physiology of someone who’s relaxed and confident – and partly mechanical based. Today I want to go over those mechanical suggestions I made to him. Note that this post is mainly for beginners and intermediates who want to get over the hump and create a more consistent approaching plan.

There are a lot of similarities between the Daygame community and the bodybuilding/health and fitness/dieting community. One of those things is the forebrain/hindbrain conflict when it comes to approaching/eating. In the dieting world you have the notion of “intuitive eating” which is where you’re supposed to listen to your body’s hunger cues and eat appropriately. The problem is, if 99% of us were to eat intuitively, we’d all be morbidly obese, because we’d have given ourselves permission to give in to every fast food joint we pass by. That’s why it’s important to go through the long process of mechanical eating – eating so many calories per day, for example – to instill the correct habits.

The parallel with approaching solo is this: it would be great for us to go out, feel good about approaching, and just go off and approach exactly the girls we’d like to. Unfortunately, if we approached intuitively, then most of us wouldn’t approach at all, or at least not enough. As I mentioned on the call, a large part of Daygame is trusting the process, and consistently bringing a good product to market. If you don’t approach enough, you’re not trying to sell your product enough.

My mechanical solution is a simple one: make and stick to a to-do list. This is a good practice to have for your whole life, not just Daygame. Each day make a list of two or three things you want to do that day. Better yet, make it the night before. And they can be very simple: things like “do laundry” or “go to the supermarket.” It’s not the content of the goals that matter, it’s that you achieve them, because you’ll start to develop the mindset that once something is on your to-do list, you do it. Then when a Daygame-related goal comes up on that list, you feel compelled to do it too.

Setting small and achievable goals is very important, and this is another thing I raised on the call: it’s a form of weaselling to set an unreasonable goal, because, if you fail, you can hide behind the goal and say “Well I tried, but it was just too much.” Better to make a goal which is so ridiculously easy to achieve, then it should be considered a fail if you don’t complete it. The most important point is, then, to utilise progressive overload. Put those tiny goals into your to-do list such that they grow over time, and when you look back, you see how much you’ve grown.

What I recommend when it comes to Daygame is this: at the end of each week, on Sunday night, work out which days you’re going to go out for the following week. Then select a range for the number of approaches you’re going to do. So, for example, I might go out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so my to-do list, for those days, will be like this:

• Thursday: 1-2 sets
• Friday: 3-4 sets
• Saturday: 4-6 sets
• Total: 8-12 sets

Or if I was a complete beginner, or coming back from a break away from Daygame, I might go with:

• Thursday: 0-1 set
• Friday: 0-2 sets
• Saturday 1-2 sets
• Total: 1-5 sets

Start as small as you need to get yourself going, but just remember to apply progressive overload up to a reasonable amount of sets per week. I personally recommend a maximum of 30 sets per week. Beyond that, I think you’d be better off spending more time analysing your 30 sets rather than doing any more. There’s also the point that it’s not sets that allow the lessons to sink in, it’s time, so don’t fall into that trap. Lastly, if you do more sets than you planned on one day, you still need to hit your target range for the next day i.e. you can’t “make up” for it or “bank” sets for later.

Here are my recommendations for approach limits, which I originally wrote on Lee Cho’s 10 Questions post (these are written with a 9-5 job in mind):

• No more than 10 sets every two hours
• No more than 10 sets on a weekday
• No more than 20 sets on a weekend
• No more than 30 sets per week

If you live in a smaller city (<1mm inhabitants) then I would halve those numbers and understand that it really is quality over quantity.

Lastly, here are a few tricks you can use to get yourself to approach more, but remember that they are just tricks:

• Walk the same Daygame route each session as this will allow you to get into a rhythm easier and know when the areas of higher traffic are coming up
• Count “half sets:” if you see a girl you might have approached but decide to let her go, tell yourself that was a half set, and promise you’ll approach the next one you see
• Approach the very first girl you see, as this will jolt your adrenaline into life and put you in a position to approach more

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

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