The advice every man finds first, and why it does not work the way he thinks.

A guy learns, realizes or believes that he is not good with girls.

It can be through a consistent pattern like being friend zoned, through a breakup, through his current dating life circumstance, or through seeing other guys getting girls.

Most likely the first thing he does is go online to find answers, read books, watch videos on YouTube or contact a dating guru.

In all likelihood he stumbles upon one thing again and again: cold approaching.

Apparently, if done consistently, cold approaching girls makes a man good with girls.

I know many men are fed this narrative, and they believe it. I did it too, over 15 years back.

Let me break this to you, cold approaching girls DOES NOT MAKE A MAN GOOD WITH GIRLS.

And that’s because cold approaching girls as practiced and preached by others, focuses on a numbers game, luck, and adopting a performative mindset – which takes a man away from developing a strong presence of mind among many other things.

Cold approaching has various forms, and not all cold approaching is the same, but the one which is widely practiced and preached is running through a lot of girls across different spaces.

Just because you can approach a certain number of girls randomly, maybe get a number, an instant date, or even a lay on rare occasions if you are lucky, that does not mean you went from nobody with women to somebody with women.

Cold approaching makes you feel good in the early stages, it makes you bold enough to do what 99 percent of men won’t, it makes you enter the space of women when you had no context to meet women, and it certainly gives you a mission in life that can be measured.

Maybe I am missing some other minor benefits.

But cold approaching tons of girls will not give you skillsets, maturity, groundedness, female knowledge, emotional and social intelligence, smartness, communication skills (especially non verbal), depth, presence of mind, self awareness, ability to read women, and so on, which are more important to generate attraction and keep a woman interested in you.

I see a lot of men jumping into the well of cold approaching as if it is the cure for all their problems.

The men who are actually good with women have done a lot of inner work and self reflection, paid attention to women, paid attention to themselves in real time, exposed themselves to different environments, approached women, fixed the parts of themselves they would not stand in others, hung out with the right people, examined their thought process, unlearned the bad stuff, shaped their personality through external work, developed a delight for women, became undefensive and unapologetic, did a bit of grooming, and developed a personal style.

(If you want a starting point for that work, I have put the practices together in These Guides ).

They say it is about how a man makes a woman feel. But he is not making her feel anything. She is responding to how he carries himself, how he expresses, how he behaves, how he reacts, how he thinks.

Generating attraction and keeping a woman interested is a lot more complex than just showing up.

That’s why you will come across two categories of men; one who can comfortably approach random women one after another, and still fight to get a woman attracted to him; while another man who can’t approach women without any context to save his life, but always has a girlfriend or a woman interested in him, because the second guy wins when he meet girls through common friends, house parties, work, while travelling, dates through apps/social media, etc.

Men forget how finely tuned most women are. Yes, sometimes they slip for whatever reasons, but for the most part they can see through a man.

Cold approaching can be a place to begin, but it is a very small piece of a much larger puzzle.

About Pratik J

Pratik Jain, is an international Dating and Transformation Coach for South Asian Men. He primarily works with men to reinvent themselves so they become compelling and desirable, socially and to women. Pratik travels across major global cities to work with his clients.