David DeAngelo - Double Your Dating - How To Change Yourself | Page 2

your best” and
resolve to “do whatever it takes to make this happen.”
Consistent effort creates “luck”, as in “let’s go get lucky” BY

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
CHOICE.
If you consistently make an effort at approaching and interacting
with women, you will also have consistent improvement. Eventually,
you can achieve a level of mastery where you rely more on your skills
than just luck. It may happen quicker for some and slower for others,
but it’s possible for anyone.
Constant improvement not only allows you to accomplish heights
you never imagined, but it prevents you from falling back once you’ve
reached them. Remember that time inevitably brings change, for
better or for worse. If something doesn’t grow, it will shrink.
3. Recognizing the Obstacles
Preventing Ourselves from Success
All change means is trying something you haven’t done, so
applying the concepts of Definite Major Purpose and Constant
Improvement means making the effort to change and getting past a
lot of inertia.
Have you ever been in a situation where you saw a woman that
you wanted to meet, but you didn't go over and talk to her? Of
course... we all have. I've realized that this happens to us all at
different times. The question I want to answer is "why?"
Why is it that we don't just walk over and start talking? What do
we do to prevent ourselves from being successful? More importantly,
how do we overcome this self-defeating pattern of thought and action?
The short answer is that most of us use our imaginations to create
horrible ideas that prevent us from taking action. We need to start
imagining good things happening, so we'll want to take action.
As you may already know, a bad habit isn't always easy to change.
If you've been imagining the worst for a while, then it might take more
than just some positive thinking to get this handled.
In the fascinating book, "Mean Genes," a couple of evolution
specialists point out that humans are horrible at assessing risk and
return, and that they often make horrible decisions for themselves.
But here's the kicker: we all make the same mistakes most of the
time, and this is most likely a GENETIC pre-disposition!

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
You might want to talk to that woman, but then imagine some
painfully scary but unrealistic ideas about getting rejected and walk
away instead. After these poor decisions we often say to ourselves,
"Damn it! Why do I keep doing that? I'm such a loser", and we beat
ourselves up even more over it. This way of thinking can turn into an
endless cycle of decline.
What's the answer? Well, first you have to learn to get out of the
habit of making yourself feel bad and afraid, and into the habit of
making yourself feel good and optimistic. Remember, you've been
doing some things for a long time now, so it might take some time and
effort to change your thinking.
Everything has a reason, even negative states of the mind, but by
understanding the reasons and seeing how they can be INVALID
REASONS, we can overcome them.
Common Reasons for Negative Emotional States
1. Most negative emotional states probably evolved as survival
states. Those who were afraid of dangerous situations were more
likely to avoid them. Thus, they were more likely to survive and more
likely to pass on their genes.
Fearing failure may have been advantageous at a certain time in
our evolutionary history. Fear, made us avoid risky situations—the
unknown or the uncertain—which could have led to unpleasant
physical states, such as injury or death. Our fear of failure, therefore,
could actually be more of a fear of the unknown.
2. Negative emotional states such as fear or unhappiness allow us
to draw sympathy from others. We learn to enter negative emotional
states in order to elicit attention, not because doing so has any
practical effects. Victim and martyr syndromes are thought and
behavioral patterns in which some people get stuck, because they’re
the easiest way they know to gain attention from others.
3. Mere habit can cause us to enter negative emotional states. If
some event caused you enter into a negative state, it becomes to fall
into this negative state each time a similar event occurs. This
repeated association makes the event an ‘anchor’ and ties to those
negative feelings automatically whether or not there is a valid reason
for them.
For example, if Christmas were a stressful time of year for your

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
parents, and each year they would get into fights, you might develop a
negative association with the holiday season. Even after you left
home, Christmas might still depress you because of years of
associating it with stress and unhappiness.
Identification Leading to Over-Generalization
To make sense of the information blizzard storming our brains, we
‘identify’ each part of an experience with the most similar one we have
had in the past. We link this current experience to