anxiety of walking up to a woman or a group of people and I'm not going
to pretend that wasn't something that I struggled with for a little while.
Overall, once you see that it works, you actually give it a shot and you
try it out and you realize that, "Wow, that actually worked, these people
are talking to me." It starts to become easier each time. Your confidence
in yourself and in the material is building so the anxiety lessens. That
was probably the hardest thing that I had to deal with but I got past it
pretty quick. Ultimately, it was actually an easy step for me.
Stylelife: What was the hardest lesson for you to learn?The Sneak: Active disinterest, also referred to as disqualification, is
still the hardest thing for me to understand. I understand it now
intellectually after having studied this material for as long as I have, but
executing it is something that continues to require practice and every
now and then I get it right. When I do, I'm really excited.
Stylelife: What was difficult about it? What made it so hard to
learn, compared to the other material?
The Sneak: One of the first things that makes it harder to learn, is
that there's a certain timing that's crucial in practicing it. That timing is
not necessarily "right away". For example, learning an opener, you do
that first. So I can always go out and practice an opener. But, as you get
into things that happen later on, like active disinterest, generally you
want the people to be already talking to you, and in a good conversation,
before you start doing something like that. Even just getting to it can be
tough. Then once you're getting into it, it requires you to take risks a
little bit more, and try on a new behavior a little bit more than some of
the other steps. Being comfortable in accessing a different part of
yourself and expressing a different part of yourself that you're not used to
expressing that's very different from what you've done in the past, makes
it a challenging step to learn.