The Breath Before You Walk Over
There is a moment I have watched thousands of times.
A man sees a woman he wants to speak to. Nothing has happened yet. She has not rejected him. He has not said anything embarrassing. In many cases, she has not even noticed him.
Yet his body has already changed.
His shoulders rise. His breathing becomes more noticeable. He starts moving less naturally. His attention, which a few seconds earlier was on the room around him, turns inwards.
Then the thinking begins.
What should I say?
Is now the right moment?
What if she isn’t interested?
What if everyone sees me get rejected?
I have been coaching men in dating and social confidence since 2008, and for years I thought mostly about what happened after this point. I taught men how to approach, how to start conversations, how to listen, how to flirt and how to handle rejection.
More recently, while completing my Oxygen Advantage training, I have become fascinated by what happens before the first word is spoken.
In particular, I have started paying much more attention to the breath.
I used to focus almost entirely on behaviour
Dating coaching is unusual because the feedback is immediate.
You can spend an hour talking about confidence in a classroom, but sooner or later the person has to walk across a room and speak to somebody.
That is where you see the difference between understanding something and being able to do it.
A client might tell me, quite accurately, that approaching a stranger is not dangerous. He knows intellectually that the worst likely outcome is a short conversation that goes nowhere.
Then he sees someone he finds attractive and his body responds as though the stakes have changed.
I have watched articulate men suddenly struggle to form a sentence. Men who are relaxed with their friends become formal. Some speed up their speech. Others start filling every silence. Some become so focused on what they are experiencing internally that they barely hear what the woman is saying.
For a long time, my answer was action.
Go over.
Have the conversation.
Get experience.
See what happens.
I still believe that.
What has changed is that I now pay much more attention to the physical state a person brings into that action.
The breath gives me another piece of information
One of the things I have been learning through Oxygen Advantage is to notice breathing volume and the difference between breathing more and breathing well.
A concept I have spent time practising is Breathe Light. The basic experience is of allowing the breath to become softer, quieter and less noticeable rather than automatically taking large breaths whenever you want to feel calmer.
I found this interesting because it challenged an assumption I had carried for years.
When people become nervous, they often think they need a huge breath.
You see it before public speaking, before an important meeting and before somebody walks over to start a conversation with a person they find attractive.
Big inhale. Chest rises. Try to calm down.
Yet my training has made me much more curious about whether adding more breathing is always what the person needs.
I am still in training, and I am not trying to turn this into a breathing protocol. What interests me as a coach is the awareness it has introduced.
I now notice the breath as part of the moment.
Sometimes the anxiety about anxiety becomes the bigger problem
There is another pattern I see around dating.
A man notices that he feels nervous.
Then he decides that he should not feel nervous.
Now he has two problems.
There is the original uncertainty of approaching somebody, and there is his judgement of his own reaction to it.
His internal dialogue changes from I feel nervous to I need to get rid of this feeling before I can go over.
That can lead to endless preparation.
One more minute.
One more lap around the room.
One more attempt to think of the perfect opening sentence.
By then, the opportunity has often disappeared.
Breath awareness has given me another way of working with that moment.
Rather than treating every physical sign of activation as a problem, I have become more interested in noticing it.
What has happened to the breathing?
Where has tension appeared?
Has attention moved away from the room and into self-monitoring?
Can the person remain aware of those sensations and still take the next step?
That final question matters to me because confidence, in my work, has never meant eliminating nervousness.
I am much more interested in whether somebody can act while nervous.
I have started looking at the hours before the moment
This has also changed how I think about dating anxiety outside the obvious dating situations.
A client might tell me he becomes tense around women he finds attractive.
But what was happening during the six hours before he walked into the bar?
Was he rushing between meetings?
Was he staring at screens all afternoon?
Was he working without stopping?
Had he spent most of the day mentally rehearsing the date?
Was his jaw tight while answering emails?
Was his breathing calm while sitting at his desk, or had he already spent hours in a heightened state?
The interaction with the woman might be the point where he notices his state, but it may not be where that state began.
That has been one of the most useful changes in my thinking.
I used to look at the approach almost as an isolated event.
Now I am more curious about the state someone has been carrying into it.
Regulation has not replaced exposure in my work
There is a temptation in personal development to find a new practice and make it responsible for everything.
I do not want to do that with breathwork.
I still believe a man who is afraid of approaching women eventually has to approach women.
Somebody who becomes anxious on dates needs experience being on dates.
A person who fears rejection needs the experience of discovering that rejection is uncomfortable, temporary and survivable.
Breathing cannot give you those experiences.
What it may give you is another way to notice what is happening while you collect them.
That distinction has become important in the way I coach.
I do not want somebody to believe they must achieve a perfectly calm state before they can act.
Dating contains uncertainty. Attraction matters to us. Of course the body may respond.
The question is whether that response takes complete control of our attention.
What I do differently now
These days, I pay attention to things I would have missed earlier in my career.
I notice when somebody begins breathing harder while telling me they are fine.
I notice the shoulders lifting.
I notice someone suddenly speaking at twice their normal pace.
I notice when they stop observing the person in front of them because all of their attention has moved towards monitoring themselves.
And I am paying more attention to these patterns in my own life as well.
My Oxygen Advantage training has made breathing less invisible to me.
It is happening all day, including during the supposedly unimportant moments between the events we think matter.
That may be the biggest lesson I have taken from it so far.
The moment before a difficult conversation is connected to the rest of the day.
The breath before you walk across the room did not begin when you saw the woman.
And sometimes, before changing what somebody says or does, there is value in becoming curious about the state they are saying and doing it from.
