David DeAngelo - Double Your Dating - How To Change Yourself | Page 5

or consciously redirect your
thinking.
Subconscious patterns or drives come about unnoticed and

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mysteriously grow inside us without our even realizing it. Yet, they
wield a profound influence on our conscious life. It’s possible to
reverse this process and use conscious thoughts to influence our
subconscious, but it requires concentrated and attentive effort.
Changing your subconscious patterns is a constant cycle of
vigilantly looking for them and making the effort to reprogram them.
If you catch yourself entering into a negative state of mind, e.g. “That
woman probably wouldn’t be interested in someone who looked like
me,” you have to break down consciously the associations that are at
fault and change them, e.g. “She would probably be attracted by my
killer personality and that’s a more important issue for women than
physical appearance.”
Even when you’ve caught them though, change takes time to
become permanent so keep watching for those limiting beliefs. These
subconscious limiters have been developing in hiding for years.
Take a moment to reflect on how huge a role the subconscious
plays in all aspects of your life, not just in dating. Now reconsider how
valuable the ability to change your subconscious is. If you agree that
this power is worth the effort it requires, then make the commitment
to start wielding conscious control over your subconscious.
Re-Interpretation to Eliminate Failure
Once we’re programmed to interpret things we see out in the world
a certain way, sometimes, we have to reprogram ourselves. Most
guys see a really attractive woman, dressed beautifully sexy and think
she must be powerful and intelligent. If no one told you that a lot of
women dress sexy because they’re insecure, you wouldn’t think about
it in this way.
The most critical reinterpretation you need to make is to use failure
to create change towards success instead of accepting the situation as
a permanent state. In the words of the publisher Malcom Forbes,
"Failure is success if you learn from it." As long as you’re learning
from it, you’ll improve. As long as you improve, failure becomes
gradually less likely while the chances of success become much higher.
The fear of failure and the resulting feelings of depression are
mostly because of a limited perspective. Wanting instant gratification
means that any result other than success is a totally negative
experience. Looking beyond instant gratification and instead towards
learning a set of skills to gain an eventual mastery of the situation in

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general let’s you see value in failure. Recognizing that you can turn
failure into something positive is a huge leap forward in overcoming
your fear of it.
Part of the instant gratification mind-set is the belief in a “magic-
bullet”, some mysterious technique that is guaranteed to work all the
time. Because they think such a solution exists, they’re either waiting
to learn it before even trying anything or attempting something that
completely fails. Rather than learning from this failure, they expect
whatever they did to work always. This is childish wishful thinking –
real world interactions are just too complex.
This doesn’t mean you should run off and try to learn 100 different
approaches to every situation. Start with one good default thing to do
in each situation and practice until it’s solid before you try to become
the show-off guy that knows 100 ways to do something.
The point is that nothing is going to work every time, but you can
learn how to improve your approach by seeing it fail. You’ll have far
more success focusing on one technique and improving it than diluting
your efforts trying everything at the same time.
Failure is viewed as a totally negative thing for most people
because they give up easily and don't learn from obstacles, setbacks,
and challenges. They assign meaning and generalize far too
much—“She rejected my advances so she must not like me, so most
women must not like me.” Learning to take an "investment"
perspective, realizing that setbacks will occur, learning to expect them,
and looking for lessons contained in them can do wonders for
diminishing both fear of failure and failure itself.
The Influence of Others
In his audio tape series “The Psychology of Achievement”, Brian
Tracy talks about the concept of the “Reference Group.” The idea is
that you become like those with whom you spend time working,
talking, and associating.
Eliminate the negative people that you don’t want to become like
and surround yourself with those who are successful instead. You’ll
unconsciously become more like them just by being around them.
If you’re not good with women, but know or meet guys that are,
have the courage to tell them that you’d like their help. As long as
you openly ask, they won’t think you’re trying to take advantage of

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them by wanting to hang out with them. Wanting to be successful
yourself and trying to learn from those who are already successful is
both good for yourself