It all starts with staring. That intense, focused gaze where you can’t tear your eyes off that fascinating creature!
You want to say Hi, initiate contact, get her number…. but wow! You can barely get your brain to function. You need time to gather yourself.
But you don’t want to lose sight of her, so you stare, unblinking as you attempt to bring your brain back online, regain the moisture in the arid desert that was your mouth, and get your feet to respond and take you to introduce yourself.
And so it begins.
Eventually you gather your wits about you, walk over, and attempt a casual ‘hi!’ However, in the time warp when your brain was offline, 10 minutes have passed. And in those 10 minutes, you never once looked away.
So, when you do finally say hi, you get ‘The Cut Direct.’ She looks straight at you and doesn’t acknowledge you at all and goes back to what she was doing. Or if she’s in a group, watch out! The group needs to establish power dominance, and the best way to do that is to make you feel small and insignificant – enter the insults and verbal knives.
And they can be MEAN!
But ‘WHY?!’ Even if she wasn’t interested, she didn’t need to be rude or mean!
You are missing a key dynamic in this interaction – that of instinct – predator vs prey.
Our subconscious hardwiring is always about survival and is run by our amygdala (aka lizard brain, monkey brain, instinct brain). The amygdala’s job is to keep us safe from threats and danger, and it got its programming when we lived in a world where there was the danger of being eaten by lions, and tigers, and bears – oh my!
And what it learned way back then is, when something (or someone) is starting with unbroken, intense focus it means they are hunting us – we are prey.
