The Chodefest Journals

Oui oui!

2010-11-07T05:42:00.001-08:00

An old article of mine has just been translated into French....

10 choses a savoir surles femmes

Here's the English version...

10 things it took me 39 years to learn about women

I've been busy as ever, helping guys all around the country. Work's been hectic, so I haven't had much time to update the blog. Coming soon: an upcoming article for the emagazine Interesting Times, holiday edition. Stay tuned...

I've Moved

2010-09-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

All future posts will be found here at my Man School dating site:

http://www.manschool.cc/blog.htm

Be a Champ: Living with Intention

2010-08-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

You see a cutie at a bookstore and devise a plan to get wit her. Sounds good brother! Problem is, shit crops up, and it tries to derail you every fucking step of the way…

Step One: Approach her

You step to her, but at that very moment, her cell goes off. You abort and reach for a book to save face.

Step Two: Game her

She hangs up and you do finally open her and spit some game. She’s digging you, but the bookstore is closing. You’re forced to leave before the moment feels right to get her number.

Step Three: Get her digits

The two of you keep talking outside. Things are going swell, so you give her your phone and tell her to punch in her number. “Awww…I have a boyfriend,” she apologizes. But you keep chatting her up and finally she admits they’ve broken up a few times and the relationship has been mostly strained. Nice! You invite her to hang out in a few days.

Step Four: Take her out

The time comes to meet up, but she gives you a last-minute excuse about needing to hang out with her dad. You reschedule, she flakes, you reschedule, she flakes. Finally, with enough persistence and game, the two of you meet up.

Step Five: Close the deal

It’s going smoothly. You get her back to your pad and make out, but she resists getting totally undressed. After two hours of foreplay she surrenders and you seduce her. Lay report to follow.

We can all relate to having goals, even these very goals. You see a lovely girl and then a flood of ideas similar to the above pops into your head, planted there by well-meaning fellas like myself…

THE GAME PLAN: approach, gain attraction, take her number, run text game, work logistics, get her out, escalate, pull, close.

By themselves however, these goals may or may not be enough. When they aren’t – as is so often the case – you need something else you can fall back on, something broader and more powerful.

That something is your intention.

Goal vs Intention

So what’s the diff?

The intention was that thought which clicked on in your head when you saw the hottie: “I am going to seduce her.” It’s your internal call to action.

That plan may not be possible. It may in fact have absolutely no basis in reality. It may be so outside your comfort zone and beyond your skill set that the chances of it coming to fruition are as unlikely as a good Jennifer Aniston film.

But intentions don’t care about all that. “I am going to seduce her. Let’s make it happen. Go.”

You set your intention, and then you go about finding ways to bring it into reality. Often you will need to create a series of goals, such as the above. Many times, though, the universe will sort itself out automagically, seemingly with little effort on your part, where everything falls into place.

Goals are at the service of your intention. When certain goals fail (her phone goes off as you approach, she’s got a boyfriend, she keeps flaking), you can always abandon that particular goal and fall back onto your intention for further guidance. Your unwavering intention will then compel you to seek out, stumble upon or invent new goals to see you through.

Outcome Dependence

If you were to live simply by a series of goals without a well-defined intention, then you are operating with dependence on the outcome. And if that outcome fails to result, you’re fucked.

An intention is that inner voice moving you forward, regardless of whether the outcome is even possible. “I intend to seduce that girl, although I’m not positive it can be done.” Hence, outcome independent.

Plenty of people don’t set their intention before mapping out their plan. Are you one of them? They instead analyze the risks, rewards, probabilities and resources, and then once discouraged, abandon their outcome as highly unlikely. In effect, they have allowed the outcome to derail their efforts well before making up their minds to take action.

Many times, one’s happiness relies on the attainment of these goals, rather than on the intention-driven process itself. As such, any day not spent living one’s goals is an unpleasant day, whereas one can easily find fulfillment when living through intentions, even if one’s goals have not been met.

People focused on intentions are living in the present moment, whereas guys constantly aiming at goals are always living in the elusive future.

Mindfulness

You may hear this term tossed around by Buddhists. To be mindful means to be living in the now, present with your own inner states.

While it can be impossible to be aware of all stimuli bombarding you at every moment, you can realize how these factors are affecting you. Do they make you feel anxious, confused, scared, happy? Connecting with your reactions, observing them without judgment, is being mindful.

We speak of being mindful because without it (and clarity) we cannot be in tune with our core values or intentions.

Clarity

Prior to setting your intention, you must be internally clear about what it is you desire. Any intention you create may be undermined by other thoughts:

“I will seduce her…but…she’s out of my league, she’s reading a book, my breath smells, my last girlfriend cheated on me…”

That intention then becomes obscured. Being clear means uncluttering both your conscious and subconscious minds of all this jibber jabber. For more tips, check out my article on Clarity.

When you are clear within, it becomes easier to telegraph your intentions more effectively to others. Even when you speak succinctly, women can typically tell when you’re suffering from inner conflict and chaos. All channels of communication – physical, verbal and other non-verbal – must be congruent, or else any mismatch will be interpreted as lack of clarity.

Values

What drives your intentions is your set of core values, not to be confused with the superficial values that society and upbringing have convinced you are important. I had this chat with a student recently:

Me: So why are you attracted to that broad?
Him: Look at her! She’s smoking!
Me: And why is that important? Besides that it turns you on, what else?
Him: I don’t wanna bang ugs. Or if I did, I wouldn’t tell my boys about her.
Me: Hmm, so then it’s important your friends see you with hot girls?
Him: Totally.
Me: Ok, then sounds like what you value is being accepted by your friends.

Banging a hottie is fantastic and heroic, but often we are driven by deeper values, like in this case peer acceptance.

According to authors Patrick Williams and Diane Menendez, you can start by categorizing your values into three main headings: experiencing, creating and being. From each of these, determine which values most resonate within you, and then align your intentions with these values each and every day.

Experiencing: exploring, athletics, dancing, seeking pleasure, leading, nurturing.
Creating: clarifying, originality, innovating, playing, designing.
Being: integrity, peace, spirituality, loyalty, empathy.

When your intentions and values are in alignment, you find yourself at peace, energized and happy. When they aren’t, life seems turbulent, unfulfilling and lacking direction.

Accountability

A man of integrity who makes a promise will do everything within his power to keep that promise. He has resolve and discipline…whether that promise is to himself or others. He holds himself personally accountable.

You must begin with a reasonable plan. Say I set as my intention, get into better shape. If one goal included working out five times a week then I would fail. This is not gonna happen. I’m way too busy. Three times a week is reasonable, and so that would be a realistic goal.

However, once I’ve created a workable series of goals, I must then hold myself accountable to drag my ass to the gym as I promised myself. No excuses, no procrastination, no negotiations.

So to sum it up: be mindful and clear about what your deep values are, create intentions which are in alignment with these values, devise goals that will bring your intentions into being, and then hold yourself accountable to take action.

Now get out there, fuckers! xoxo

Stuff I like about dames

2010-07-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

I see a lot of talk about what attributes dudes are looking for in girls, and it usually boils down to two: looks and personality. This is an incredibly myopic view, and if you stopped to think about it, you’d probably come up with many more desirable traits. Here now is a short list of mine…

1. Physical attractiveness

I’ve never had “a type,” but I found that as I went out more, my tastes broadened. I discovered I prefer Latinas, for example. Every guy has his own 10, and there is no right or wrong. Tall, short. Big tits, flat. Skinny, hefty. Red head, blonde.
I would recommend if you’re new to pickup, you keep an open mind. If you’re trying to learn how to be social, then imposing standards will ultimately be counter-productive; this is usually another excuse not to approach or move things forward. As your game improves, you can afford the luxury to be more selective, but at that point the other attributes listed below will probably begin to eclipse a girl’s beauty.

2. Emotional availability

Whether a girl is in a relationship or is guarded from a series of abusive boyfriends, many times a chick is simply not willing to open up. Often, girls will look for the slightest incongruence or weakness in a man, and at that point shut down. I find the two big red flags that cause this reaction are, a) being lied to, and b) being thought of as slutty.
I always weed out chicks who aren’t emotionally available, because I don’t have the desire to work that hard. If a girl is on the fence, then by me being honest (sometimes shockingly so) and transparent I can move them towards investing in our interaction.

3. Emotional stability and maturity

Some girls love drama. Some are using you to get back at a man or men in general. Plenty of chicks have major emotional issues. I’ve dated ladies with drug and alcohol abuse, anger management problems, you name it. I no longer allow those kinds of girls anywhere near me.
If you wanna be a girl’s daddy, and you enjoy babysitting on your dates, by all means go get em. I personally wouldn’t bother with any girl who brings me down because of her own insecurities or immaturity. Life’s too short.
Instead, I feel you should look for women who are nurturing, open with their feelings and willing to grow. Emotionally healthy women will elevate your game and your life. Learn from them.

4. Logistics

Some broads aren’t able to get away from their kids, or they live too far away, or they live with their parents, or they’re too busy with work to spend much time with you. This is one reason to have multiple girls, because you can’t always depend on one to be there for you anytime you want.
Try to find women who are logistically desirable, and do what you can to work with those who aren’t. This may mean getting a hotel room or banging in your car, or her driving to your place or getting a sitter for her kids. If she’s worth it, put the effort in to make it happen.

5. Financial stability

Plenty of women are looking for a dude to take care of them financially. They have no career plans, or are in debt, or have an expensive coke habit. You aren’t an ATM. Guys are typically expected to invest something financially in the relationship, but it is possible to find women who don’t need or want your money, and will in fact pay their way.

6. Energy

Girls can give off different energies. Some are bright and sunny. Others are dark and moody. I won’t tell you what kind of energy you should bring into your life, but personally I believe it’s a good idea to surround yourself with women who are positive. Energy is contagious. If you constantly spend your time around negative energy, you may find yourself succumbing to it.

7. Physical and mental health

If health is important to you, then make it a priority in your women. If you hate smokers, don’t date one. If you are fit, then date girls who are too. I tend to avoid girls who abuse or neglect their bodies, since this is telling me they lack respect for themselves.
Similar to the above on emotional stability, you can meet a girl who is truly mentally unwell. Before long you may find yourself dealing with her ups and downs, her trips to the ER for suicide attempts, her violent outbursts. Many mental disorders are inheritable, so realize if you have kids with a woman who is bipolar, you may be dooming your children. Plus, is this girl fit to be a mother?

8. Personality

Many guys are willing to overlook a chick’s personality if she’s hot. And a lot of hot girls have relied on their looks primarily, such that their personality is nothing memorable.
As with looks, I’d say be open to various kinds of personalities. Diversity is a good thing, and dealing with the many styles will help your future interactions.
Attributes I look for are humor, charm, wit, confidence, assertiveness and femininity. You should have a pretty clear idea eventually about what sorts of personalities you’re attracted to.

9. Sexuality

Some girls hate the cock. Some love it but act like they don’t. Some can’t live without it. I’ve been with girls who gave mind-blowing BJs, and others who didn’t even know how to kiss well. Certain chicks lay on their back like ragdolls, others are like trying to stay on a mechanical bull. You got your squirters, your ass fetishists, your BDSMers.
I won’t twist any girl’s arm for sex. I like a girl who is comfortable with her body, secure with her sexuality, adventurous, submissive and able to show me new things.
Demand sexual chemistry from your partners. Don’t settle for chicks who are frigid or who use sex as a bargaining tool.

10. Baggage

Everyone has something they aren’t proud of. The question is, how much slack will you give a girl? Everybody defines baggage differently. She’s had over 200 partners. She has 3 kids. She’s in the middle of a divorce. Some things may be acceptable to you, others may not. Remember, you probably have baggage as well that others may find unacceptable.

11. Similar interests and views

People think that this is of key importance. In my opinion, it’s nice when it happens, but isn’t necessary. My views and interests have changed a lot over my life, and so it may be for the women you meet. She may be a huge sports fan this year, but may be over it next year.
Screen women according to the things you find important in this regard, but don’t necessarily disqualify women if they don’t totally hold your opinions. I often seek women with interests unlike mine, so that I can learn new things.

Stop Fucking Around and Work on Your Lifestyle

2010-07-07T19:08:00.000-07:00

Many PUAs get so submersed in the culture of the game that they never take a step back to see the bigger picture. Essentially, you are out there marketing a person.

Aside from needing great marketing skills, you must have a product worth pitching. How attractive is that person to women? Is he worth dating, pursuing, and taking home to meet the parents? Or is he a dude she’s embarrassed to introduce to her friends, a boy she can have some fun with and that’s all, a Mr. Right Now and nothing more?

If being a girl’s flavor of the week is your goal, then no need to read on. But if you’re out there trying to bring quality women into your life – and keep them there – then let’s take a look at how you can build a substantial lifestyle to meet this goal.

Passion
It is very clear to all women when they go on a date with me that I LOVE cinema. They also find out I’m a huge music fan, I’m crazy about good food, I help guys interact with women, and I consider my dog almost like a son. These are things I’m passionate about. There are many smaller interests and hobbies floating around, but when I speak about any of my true passions, it’s from a deeper emotional level.

A man who loves women and only women is a sad, sad little person. Girls may feel flattered and validated at first. However, as they scratch the surface to see what else is inside, and come up with nothing, they quickly lose attraction.

I’ve seen guys get up and dance so insanely bad that the room comes to a stand-still to watch. But that guy is completely submersed in the joy of dancing, and he becomes a star. So don’t worry about whether the object of your passion is cool or not; as long as you have things that turn you on, aside from chicks, you will appear cool.

If you don’t have anything, then go out and try new activities. Fencing, sky diving, feeding the homeless. Get your hands dirty and figure out what things move you spiritually. There are tons of meetup.com groups full of people willing to show you the ropes. Any moment in your life you meet a new woman, you should have multiple projects, activities and events going on.

Variety
Sports, video games and cars are guy things. If you like that stuff, fine. But you’re gonna need something more. Be able to speak in depth about a range of topics. Books, films, food, wine, politics, travel. You don’t necessarily need to hold opinions on these things, simply a basic awareness and appreciation. And then as you meet new people, gain insights that will embellish upon this awareness.

Assertiveness
Being assertive is a win in life, but especially when it comes to dating. You the man are expected to do everything, from approaching to proposing. It all falls on your shoulders. You are ultimately accountable for every aspect of the relationship. Sorry, bro, but that’s life.

To make shit happen, you must be assertive. If you see something needs to be said or done, you take the reigns and get it handled.

But lots of guys are not assertive enough. Typically, they are passive, and less often, aggressive. I will cover assertiveness in another article, but for now I direct you to the excellent book, Your Perfect Right, which has been the Bible on assertiveness for many decades.

Develop a lifestyle that cultivates assertiveness. In fact, if you tend to be passive, then injecting some aggressiveness can help. Examples are any contact sport or boxing. At very least, go work out at the gym (though this probably won’t be sufficient).

It may help to find work that requires assertiveness. One summer I walked around a mall and performed market research; cold approaching people and trying to get their opinion on shit for half an hour requires persistence.

Being Solid
Women typically expect the men in their lives to be solid: centered, balanced, grounded, present. This doesn’t mean boring and predictable. But it does mean that when she is being a girl, she can trust you will be there for her as a man.

Yoga is an excellent way to get out of your head and into your body, teaching people to find their center. You spend much of the time on your back (being grounded), must stand on one leg (being balanced), clear your head of thoughts (being present) and breathe through any discomfort you feel (being in your body). If you’re doing it right, you can’t help but shift your energy into your body, and specifically your center of being. Bikram yoga is an offshoot, putting you into a very hot and humid room for an hour and a half. If that’s not your style, then stick to old fashioned yoga, getting lessons at first and then performing it at home several times a week for an hour.

Martial arts can also help you to generate power from your core, to let energy move through you without blocking it, and to be present with your opponent.

Being in the Moment
Many people are not living in the now. They dwell on the past and future, and when things pop up they don’t react in time or from a place of authenticity. Having a lifestyle that keeps you on your feet will carry over into your interactions.

Improv is a classic example of an activity where you have to be in the moment. The funniest lines are usually ones that come out without premeditation. Your partner then feeds off of that, and a routine is born from thin air. Stopping to process and think kills this creative process.

As I mentioned above, boxing and martial arts can also help you be in the moment.

Girl Friends
Having chicks in your life is critical. You can bang em or not, but you should be surrounded by a lot of women. Friends who are girls will teach you about how they think, act and feel, and you will develop a better and healthier appreciation for women (as opposed to “targets” and “HBs”). A lot of the smoke girls blow as a diversion around men goes away, and you can peek into their minds, unfiltered; this can include why they bang or date certain guys (what works and what doesn’t), why they behave how they do in clubs, and what makes them laugh.

You don’t need to have hot girls around you, just a lot of em. This will naturally seem attractive to other (hotter) women. Besides the concept of preselection, having chicks in your life is a normal thing, and not having them can appear odd. So always be looking out for girls you can add to your social circle, and spend a lot of time with them.

Personal Ecosystem and Energy Drainers
People have clutter in their lives, and this crap can use up a bunch of their energy. We call these things energy drainers. This may include a messy home or car, friends who bring you down, money you owe, a bad relationship with your parents, or excess weight.

When I spar, I sometimes use muscles I don’t need. I overwork, and therefore get tired faster. A key to lasting longer is to relax the parts of your body that you don’t have to call upon. The same holds for any activity in your life; if you expend too much energy unwisely, you have less left over for constructive stuff.

Run an inventory of all the items that might be draining your energy and polluting your personal ecosystem. Clean shit up. If you can’t tackle a chore all at once, small chunk it down and do a bit at a time. Get help from others.

If you can resolve dysfunctional or draining relationships through assertiveness and open communication, then do so. If you can’t minimize the impact of these people, then try to eliminate them from your life.

Forms of Expression
You can learn to express yourself in many different ways. Learning to be open with your opinions and beliefs will carry over into your interactions. If you want to express yourself verbally, you can take up Toastmasters, improv or acting. If you want to move people emotionally, you can work through painting, sculpting, even food. If you express yourself physically, there’s dance and music.

At the other extreme is being closed off and stifled, incapable of expressing yourself in any aspect of your life. Or you may only express yourself through one channel like singing, but can’t open up verbally. Seek a healthy balance, where girls realize that among the many forms of expression, you take advantage of several methods, including verbal and sexual.

Stress Management
A lot of times our interactions fail because we’re thinking about other negative parts of our lives. Sometimes, we aren’t consciously paying attention to these things, but they are weighing our psyche down.

Learn to compartmentalize your life. Be present. That is, when you’re talking to a girl, you should only be focused on that interaction. Money and work have zero relevance at that very moment, so force those thoughts away until it’s relevant to address them.

When these stressors seep into your interactions subconsciously, you need to find a way to get them handled. Do research, ask others for advice, devise a course of action, whatever needs to be done to move in the right direction. Even without resolving the stress, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel can help a great deal.

You can relieve some of your stress through art or physical activity. Freud talked about sublimating your sexual energy in the form of creativity, basically transferring that energy into something more socially acceptable. As I described above, yoga is another way to get stress under control.

Why I’m Not a PUA

2010-07-07T18:27:00.000-07:00

Lo those many years ago, having had my world exploded watching that VH1 reality show, I set out on my path to become a pick-up artist. Somewhere along the way, I had made that transformation, but have since gone far beyond.

People (especially girls on dates with me) often laugh about that “pickup artist” they met in the bar, the guy who ran some routines and had an obvious agenda to push buttons.

And I know from experience that stuff works. You push buttons, get a quick rise out of girls, feed your ego. Maybe even get a speedy lay out of it.

What the women in my life miss from those encounters is the slow build of seduction, the man who doesn’t push buttons but is genuinely sexy inside and out. Hell, he barely has to lift a finger to get chicks wet. While that dude is curled up with his lover-to-be in a dark corner, the PUA is still jumping from set to set, gaming HBs and yes, still feeding his ego.

So here it is. I am not a pick-up artist.

And here’s why.

“Pick-up” is only one small part of me. Because I’m a dweeb, I drew this fantastic life-like self-portrait. My arms (C) represent my ability to pick up women (literally and figuratively). I don’t deny I still use many of the tactics and routines I found efficient and effective over the years. They are too habitual now to set them aside. Going out and being “myself” doesn’t work all that well. The game must be played, no doubt about it, and so I do still consider these tools useful.

But look at everything else left over.

(A) is my inner game. My confidence, abundance mentality, humor, perseverance and so on. I am not at all the man I was before the community. I am mentally healthy, I have a much more profound understanding and appreciation of women, myself and social dynamics. All this has contributed greatly to the way I live my life, not simply how I interact with women.

(B) is my heart, my emotions, my love for women. Whether I’m “running game” or just lying in bed with a broad, my heart is over-flowing with awe at the feminine energy. The curves of her hips, her laugh, her willingness to be dominated. My interactions, when they’re at their best, have a huge amount to do with my ease at expressing my emotions in a way that is attractive.

(D) is my core, my gut. This is where I usually feel my energy, and the part of me that communicates with girls at that deeper level. This is the place that lets me calibrate, my instincts regarding how I’m doing with a chick, when to move things forward.

(E) is my Mr. Dandy. Not only my sex drive and desire to seduce, but my balls. A lot of dudes gaming girls leave their balls out of it; they never state their intent, don’t go after the chicks they really want to screw, try to be a friendly, sociable guy instead. Often they don’t even find the girl sexually attractive. I dunno, maybe they just game certain girls to impress their wings or write reports about em. Perhaps they’re simply drawn to the intellectual challenges the game has to offer. Either way, keeping your weiner out of the set is decidedly safe, but not particularly rewarding.

And finally (F) is my lifestyle. It’s everything going on in the background when I’m not with girls. The things I do to improve myself intellectually, physically, sexually. All the stuff that makes me cool. My lifestyle is my legs. Take it away, and I don’t have a leg to stand on. I’m just laying still on the ground, maybe looking up skirts.

Fear Management, Part Two

2010-06-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

In the first article, I reviewed ways our body sends out fear signals to the world, and how we try to pacify ourselves involuntarily to alleviate this fear. Now we’ll review the many ways to get our fears handled, including the single most powerful method.

A Dozen Ways to Deal with Fear

1. The Blinders Effect: Med school and Bikram yoga
Don’t look for potential risks; put on blinders and push forward. If you had asked me while I was in college, or in med school for that matter, how many years I had left before I could practice, or what classes I’d need to take, or what grades I’d require to advance to the next level, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I set my intention – become a physician – and I did whatever I needed to do to advance me towards that intention. Fear never took over, because I never ran an analysis of what would be required. It simply didn’t matter; I was willing to do whatever it took.
Recently I signed up for Bikram yoga. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the yoga where you spend 1 ½ hours in an extremely hot and humid room posing in often painful contortions. Sounds fun, eh? When I signed up for it, I bought a full month of classes. That is, I committed to it with blinders on, knowing that I might get scared away after my first attempt. When I bought the month I was telling my fear to fuck off, I was giving this activity a fair chance.

2. The Cold Pool: Committing to the intention
If I asked you to get into a cold swimming pool, you can do one of a couple things. You can put your toes in, then step in up to your knees, then wade in so your waist is underwater, then finally submerse your entire body. Or you could simply jump right in.
Whether it’s a cold pool or anything else uncomfortable and scary, diving in fully without hesitation will bypass all fear. Set your intention and then go for it 110%.
Approaching is like swinging a bat. You don’t swing half-way and then tap the ball. You commit to the swing fully, so even after contact the bat keeps moving to the end of the swing. Likewise, when you see a hotty, make it your intention to walk up to her and get her attention. She may ignore you or blow you off, but that’s not relevant. All that matters is that you do everything in your power to make your intention a reality immediately, and not take the time to mull over the potential discomfort.

3. Snorkeling and Horror Flicks: What is the actual risk?
I flew all the way out to Oahu one summer, and found myself gazing at the sea with a sense of intimidation. What if a shark was out there? What if a jellyfish floated by? What about eels? What if, what if?
I almost didn’t go snorkeling, but thank god I did because it was one of the best experiences of my life. I took control of my fear by assessing the actual risk. There rarely is a shark out in popular snorkeling areas. And all my other concerns were statistically highly unlikely to ever materialize as well.
Yes, there may be risks involved in certain activities, but be realistic about them. The risk of air travel is minimal, the risk of public speaking is nil, the risk of approaching is practically non-existent.
Recognize when the danger is to your body, or just to your ego. Public speaking is the number one phobia of people, but why? No real harm can come to you while speaking in front of crowds. Perhaps what you fear is rejection, humiliation, loss of respect and acceptance, or accidentally offending people. These are all worries of the ego, and have nothing to do with your physical well-being. They are all manufactured and can be just as easily dissolved with will.
I love horror films. I could watch them every night. They never get old. Horror films pose no true risk that I’ll be killed by the undead or the demented psycho or the plague. I may startle at times or feel dread for the characters, but I’m never actually personally afraid.
You see a dude in set, and you tell yourself, “he’s just a coworker” and you go in despite the fear (the "fuck it" moment). The coworker is not a real threat to you, not unlike the slasher in the horror film. You can certainly generate all sorts of potential repercussions in your head if the guy doesn’t welcome you in, but you also can set aside those voices and remind yourself that this risk is pure fantasy. Nevermind all that community AMOG bullshit, and instead, view him as another potential friend to help you get the girl.

4. Boxing: Gathering cues
I took up mixed martial arts about a year ago. As I threw punches, I often found myself turning my head away and shutting my eyes, because I knew my trainer was most likely avoiding my jab and about to clobber my head.
Though I wanted to shut my eyes and lean away while I swung, to punch effectively required me to keep my eyes focused on the opponent so I could see how he’s gonna react. I am, in effect, reading my adversary for cues. Will he move left? Will he duck? Will he throw a cross? Will he deflect my punch and rotate away from it? If my eyes are averted, I can’t gather information and then respond in turn. I must not only have a good offensive, I must always be on a fact-finding mission at every moment.
The only way to manage any interaction strategically – whether it’s boxing or evaluating cues a girl is sending out – is to look at it head-on with total presence. Move into the fear with open eyes, in spite of the risks.

5. The Proud Piano Student: Positive reframe
A friend of mine teaches piano to kids. I asked her once how she deals with their fear of performance, and she described a kind of reframe. Rather than think about a performance as possible rejection or failure, she has the kids think of it as proving to the audience how much they’ve learned. They then go on stage with a sense of pride, not fear.
Every perceived failure is an opportunity to learn. Any night you totally bomb is still a good night, as it provides insights for you to help progress. Without failure you can’t grow. To quote the granddaddy of the community, Ross Jeffries: “The difference between winners and losers is that losers don’t fail enough.”
Another powerful reframe is accepting that your role is simply to give value to others. Believe that you are a man who loves to make others happy, and who expects nothing in return. Make that girl’s night. With this belief, it’s impossible to consider your approach as anything but positive. You aren’t bothering people, you’re only adding to their experience. If they don’t accept your value (and some people won’t), then it doesn’t hinder you. You simply move on to find those who will.

6. Be Prepared: The stack
Going into a set without knowing what to say is scary as hell. But when you have a pretty good idea how the first few minutes are gonna play out, you feel secure and ultimately less fearful.
I’m a fan of routine stacks for guys who have problems vibing or approaching. Having the first coupla minutes in set prepared helps reduce that fear of the unknown. Likewise if you go for a kiss and get her cheek, having something ready to say to reduce the awkwardness of this moment will make you feel more confident pulling the trigger. Have a detailed game plan, accounting for all contingencies.

7. Visualization and NLP
I don’t have the space here to talk about neurolinguistic programming (NLP), but it can help get your inner game on track. One tool NLP employs is to run movies in your head that minimize your negative emotions. For example if a boss yells at you, you can then reimagine the scene with him having a cartoon voice and wearing a clown outfit.
In sports, trainers use visualization techniques to enhance performance. Athletes imagine themselves winning the race, hearing the crowd roar, et cetera. You can apply this to your interactions with broads, seeing yourself as the man you want to be and envisioning the women you wanna attract into your life. Before your encounters, visualize how they’ll go. As your mind begins to believe these images, fear dissolves.

8. Passive Value: Dress for success
Looking your best will boost your sense of confidence. Dress well, have some accessories that add color to your personality, make your avatar stand out, go lift weights. In addition to fashion, address bad breath and a lousy hair style. Do anything you can to make your passive value as appealing as possible.

9. Reward Yourself
Create an incentive for facing your fear. “Even though I’m claustrophobic, I’ll get this MRI and then buy myself ice cream afterwards for being brave.” Don’t beat yourself up for being afraid, but do negotiate a system of rewards with yourself for acting in spite of your fear.

10. Hypnosis
Often the conscious mind isn’t the problem, it’s the subconscious which is too resistant to change. You may need to talk to it directly. That’s where hypnosis comes in.
There was a time I was doing really well with night game, but I couldn’t for the life of me approach during the day. I sought out a hypnotherapist and within a month I had no fear of going direct on super-hotties during the day. What she did under hypnosis was have me think of something I was highly confident about (practicing medicine), and then link this via anchoring (squeezing my hand) to the situation which gave me fear (daytime approaches).

11. Desensitization
A commonly used tool in alleviating anxiety is called systematic desensitization. In pick-up, this means you keep approaching more and harder sets until the anxiety fades. This is how I primarily dealt with my own AA, and over a couple years, I went from being paralyzed with anxiety to being able to easily work a room.

All of the above can be effective coping strategies to get you into the right head space, but I haven’t yet mentioned the biggest, baddest, most effective way to reduce fear in your life. Here it is.

12. Find Your Center and Live There
When I ask you to identify where in your body you feel your “being” resides, where do you point? For many guys it’s their head. For some, their chest. If I ask you where your physical power is mostly generated from, you might show me your guns.

I want you instead to focus on your belly as your center. Make it a few inches below your belly button. Let your energy transmit out from this point. Send your breath into it. When you think of power, shift your focus away from your upper body and down to your core and lower body, where masculine energy is concentrated. Feel the ground while you stand and walk, how it contacts your feet, and how your legs move. Slap your thighs if you have to. Own the ground you’re stepping on. This is your ground. Be gracious enough to share it with others, and welcome them onto your ground.

In martial arts, a man’s core is down in his belly, not up in his head. You don’t have time to think about each moment of the spar; you must always feel the energy and movement of your opponent and react immediately from your core. It’s no different when talking to women. Just as soon as you get out of your head and start living in your body, everything begins to flow with far less effort.

Likewise, when you generate force to throw a punch, that power is coming from your core primarily, and then transmitted upwards through the chest and out the arms. Your greatest power in moving women emotionally isn’t generated from your head or your chest, it’s from your core.

For those of you living in your head and placing your center of power in your upper body, you are in essence, walking through life off balance. And guys who aren’t balanced are easily thrown, whether that is by physical confrontation or a shit test. Dudes who are centered are far less easy to topple. Out of being centered and grounded comes the feeling that you can take on the world, that you are unflappable and in touch with yourself, the earth, and ultimately the universe. In short, you are living without fear.

And so fear management starts outside the venue. It’s a way of being. You can’t suddenly switch this confidence on when you approach a girl. Instead, it carries over into your interactions, because that’s the way you move through life.

Any physical activity can get you into your body and out of your head, but specifically activities like yoga and the martial arts will place the focus where you want it. So now you know what to do. Get off your computer and go hit the mat.

Back to that night I did my first Bikram yoga class. It was 45 minutes in, and the instructor had cranked up the heat while the poses got more difficult. My heart was pounding, I could barely catch my breath and my water bottle was nearly empty. Would I pass out or collapse from heat stroke? Panic set in. But then, I pushed those thoughts from my head, explained to myself that I wasn’t overheating internally but that I was just experiencing a sudden spike in room temperature. I talked myself down and focused intensely on my breathing and my heart beat, clearing my head of all noise. And in that moment I conquered the fear, settling peacefully back into my routine.

Fear Management, Part One

2010-06-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

It’s the Ultimate F Word.

Fear.

That dirty, four-letter word. It’ll try to hold you back from the things you desire and stop you from fully appreciating all that life can teach you.

Guys new to the community are often controlled by fear: their beliefs, their behaviors, their thoughts. Fear is why they don’t open the mixed set, don’t go for the make-out, don’t head to the club alone, don’t call the chick on the phone. So what exactly is fear, and more importantly, how can we take charge of it?

The 3 Fs

In the beginning – and I mean the very beginning – animals on earth were controlled by their limbic brains. If they saw something that could kill them, they responded without thought. Primitive animals didn’t yet have the higher level of problem-solving that man possesses. They weren’t capable of analyzing the entire scenario so as to elucidate the best course of action. The little fuckers simply reacted instinctively, and as a result, they escaped harm.

The limbic brain is there to keep us humans alive as well. If there is a danger in your proximity, over-analysis could lead to death and injury. So you react to perceived dangers very swiftly. If you hear a gun go off near your head, you’re gonna startle and move away from the sound without thought.

Fear is handled by the limbic brain using three responses:

1. Freeze. The first strategy you’ll usually use if faced with danger is to freeze. Since movement attracts the attention of predators, freezing makes us invisible to them. It also gives our higher brain time to come up with a strategy.
If I tell a guy with approach anxiety to go talk to the three-set of 9s, the guy will initially freeze up. His breath will get shallow, he’ll avoid eye contact when he does approach, and if he sits down he’ll lock his feet together under his seat. In effect, he is making himself smaller, less noticeable and ideally invisible, all indicators of the freeze response. Even evasive eye contact is his way of “hiding” in full view.
If one person in the tribe suddenly freezes when he sees a lion, the others will mimic his behavior. This mimicry is in place to help survival of the group; hence, fear is contagious. Going out and trying to be sociable with anxious wings will make you more anxious. A better strategy is to hang out with guys who aren’t as nervous as you.

2. Flight. When freezing won’t assure survival, we flee. In the wild, we would run from a lion that was pursuing us. In the modern world, we can’t literally run from everything that scares us, but we can evade in other ways, called distancing and blocking. The goal: to create space between us and the danger.
Distancing is seen when we turn away from people who are annoying us, lean away from someone confrontational, point our foot away while legs crossed from someone offensive.
Examples of blocking include briefly covering your face with your hand when somebody says something you don’t like, closing your eyes almost as if to make the world momentarily go away, and holding a drink or cell phone up in front of you when a sexy mama walks by.

3. Fight. When freezing and fleeing don’t cut it, we fight. In the wild, we turned fear into rage and fought our predators. In the modern world, we can’t fight physically so we tone it down, and instead we argue. Insults, sarcasm and other verbally aggressive tactics are manifestations of our desire to physically fight. When we feel the urge to fight, our subcommunications tell the story: an aggressive stance, clenched fists, gnashed teeth, hard eye contact, getting up in the other dude’s grill.

Pacifying Behaviors

Your subcoms will vary depending on whether you’re comfortable or uncomfortable. Comfortable people give off a sense of high confidence, well-being and contentment. Those who are uncomfortable appear to have low confidence and seem stressed and possibly afraid.

To assuage ourselves of this discomfort, we employ pacifying behaviors. In kids, these maneuvers are easily apparent, such as thumb-sucking. But as we grow out of these babyisms, the pacifying becomes less recognizable: chewing gum, biting fingernails, munching a pencil. While the child tries to hide from a stranger behind mom’s leg, we as adults use our beer bottle to hide behind. When we don’t have a beer bottle, we touch briefly at our nose or throat. Different behaviors, same drive: to alleviate our discomfort.

Types of Anxiety

Anxiety is a constellation of symptoms including elevated heart rate and breathing, excessive sweating, sometimes chills, a racing mind and oh yeah…all those voices. Our discomfort may not always escalate to the point of anxiety, if, for example, we defuse that fear with self-pacification.

In many cases, the anxiety is so deeply ingrained subconsciously, that it is completely unreasonable. You are incapable of resolving the anxiety by talking yourself out of it. In other cases, the fear is not as deep, driven instead by too much mental noise, which can be voluntarily quieted. See my post, “Clarity,” for further discussion of this.

Social anxiety. This encompasses any fear of interacting with people, and at its extreme can include agoraphobia, the fear of leaving your home. One aspect of agoraphobia is the shame involved in having a debilitating panic attack out in public. Normal kids can have a degree of developmental social anxiety, but when it persists into adulthood and impairs social functioning, there’s a problem. Often, it appears as shyness, stage fright and avoidance of public gatherings.

Approach anxiety. One form of social anxiety is AA, the fear of approaching people. You may do well when introduced to a girl in your group of friends, but the thought of approaching that same girl as a stranger in a bar would trigger anxiety. That fear can affect you simply asking a waitress for a napkin or a checking out at a supermarket. AA is to be distinguished from a mild version which has been called approach reluctance. AA is truly paralyzing, whereas AR is a nagging internal dialogue around which you can still function.

Trigger anxiety. Not much is said about this fear, that of “pulling the trigger.” But fear of escalating is every bit as real as AA. It happens when you’re having a great interaction with a chick, and when that impulse comes to escalate, you don’t do it. You get in your head and in spite of the cues, the set fizzles out. You get angry with yourself, she simply assumes you’re not attracted to her. Getting past TA involves a series of verbal and physical steps, a thorough game plan designed to handle both the escalation and the potential rejection.

Sexual anxiety. You may be able to get a girl into bed, but then blow it because of all the crazy talk in your head. You get flaccid, which makes matters worse, making you feel like less of a man. Huge frustration for all parties involved. Often, the mere anticipation of sex can trip you up, long before the opportunity actually arises. SA is a kind of performance anxiety, but largely is a result of you not being present with the woman (or women) in bed with you. That is, rather than clearing your mind and only acting from your core as a sexual being, your mind is distracted by crap like your cock size.

In my second article on fear management, I’ll discuss methods of getting a handle on your fears.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

2010-06-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

What are the chances you're gonna find your soulmate or potential wife in a bar or club? I've been told these aren't the places to go if you want a lasting relationship, but until this recent match.com study, I didn't know the odds.

The website partnered with a research firm and surveyed 7000 married people to see where they met their match.

38% at work/school
27% through a friend/family member
17% online dating site

Wait, where's bar/clubs? Oh yeah, here it is...

8%.

A very tiny part of marriages began in the bar. Now, keep in mind that the survey is sponsored by a dating site and this may affect the results. Also realize the number might be low because responders may not be totally truthful ("I met my husband in a club" may still be a taboo).

But still, that number does reenforce my suspicion that you probably aren't gonna find the girl of your dreams out in the bar or club. It suggests that women who want to get married either don't hang out much in these places, or these women will fuck dudes from the bar but don't as a rule take them seriously as a potential spouse. The study doesn't appear to shed light on the reasons.

The big winners for LTRs, it would then seem, are social circles and work/school. For sure, those are the places I always met my girlfriends.

I don't recommend giving up cold approach in bars, which I still feel is an essential skill for many reasons not least of which is inner game development. But you may want to invest more energy into growing your social circle. I personally am not in school, but if I were I'd certainly be making the most of this as should you. As for work gaming, I am opposed to it (though back when I didn't know any better, I dated plenty of work chicks). If you don't care, then go for it. That's probably where you're gonna find your next ex-wife.

http://cp.match.com/cppp/media/CMB_Study.pdf

It's here! My new ebook

2010-05-31T18:01:00.001-07:00

I sat down this Memorial Day weekend and jotted my new ebook.

INNER GAME PRIMER: Stop being such a fucking pussy

Here it is. Enjoy.

http://itsomusiccompany.com/inner%20game%20primer%20by%20decibel.pdf

The Four Horsemen of Breakups

2010-05-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Tipping Point by Gladwell which was brilliant, and am on to his follow-up, Blink.

He mentions a researcher who can observe a couple talking for a few minutes and then predict with greater than 90% accuracy if in 15 years they will still be together.

The signs he looks for are called the four horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt.

Defensiveness: a girl accuses you of being stingy, and you argue that you’re not.
Stonewalling: a girl accuses you of being stingy, and you get annoyed and turn away.
Criticism: you accuse a girl of being greedy.
Contempt: a girl accuses you of being stingy, and you roll your eyes and make a disgusted face, or tell her she’s a bitch.

Women tend to be more critical, and men do more stonewalling. The one factor that is most predictive of relationship durability, and which is independent of gender, is contempt. While the other three factors may not promote happy times, contempt actually puts one person on another plane, creating a hierarchy in the relationship. It’s that hierarchy which spells doom.

So be on the look-out for these four signs in your relationships, both coming from you and her. But especially pay attention to evidence of contempt.

5 things the pickup community doesn’t want you to know

2010-05-20T17:02:00.001-07:00

Recently there's been a huge wave of anti-PUA posts. Most of this is written by guys trying to sell their own bootcamps and material. As a joke, I responded with the following post, which echoes a lot of the comments made by these other guys. PUAHate.com I guess thought I was serious, and they've been praising my post lolzzzz.

1. Just be yourself. Come on man. It’s not that hard. Go out and be yourself and girls will sleep with you. You don’t need to go to the gym, or learn about calibration or theory. It’s all bullshit. More lies the community feeds you to sell bootcamps. All you need to do is be yourself. That is, as long as you’re an asshole, since those are the only guys who get laid. Everyone else is just plain weird and will never get laid.

2. Be confident. Girls love confident guys. All you need to do is walk up to a girl and be really confident about yourself, and she’s bound to sleep with you. Getting confidence is easy. You tell yourself you’re awesome, and that’s it…you’re good to go. When you touch girls, do it with confidence. I realize you’ve never been told how to actually do it, but touching girls is like the easiest thing a man can do, so stop being a dick and do it.

3. It’ll happen when you least expect it. Sarging is a waste of time. Have you ever tried sitting around not talking to girls, and have you noticed they ALWAYS talk to you? Ever wonder why this is? You gotta stop trying, because that’s when girls will appear in your life.

4. Don’t take pickup seriously. Come on, man. This shit’s hilarious. Sitting in your mommy’s basement every night well into your 30s, playing video games and not getting laid. Yeah, that’s some funny shit. It’s not like you’re gonna get suicidal doing that. You can go out and have fun, and not really put in much effort, and still get laid. As long as you don’t take this shit seriously, you’re bound to get good at picking up chicks. The moment you start thinking about this as a “journey” or create goals that are uncomfortable and involve work, you’re taking it waaaay too seriously. Lighten the fuck up, man.

5. The community stops you from getting laid and is full of frauds. Posting on the forum is the surest sign you’re not getting laid, or if you are it’s with a war pig. Hanging out with other pickup artists is also a good way to know you’re a virgin. There’s no valid exchange of information on forums. It’s all designed to stop you from getting pussy and turn you into a loser. I’m the only exception. Everyone else sucks except me, so always listen to what I have to say. I’m not out to make a ton of money, but everyone else is. Pretty much everyone in the community who teaches is a fraud. (Except me. I’m ok).

Clarity

2010-05-15T09:23:00.001-07:00

Women are allowed to be tangential and illogical. Men are not. We are expected to be clear in our actions and intentions. But a lot of fuckers lack clarity. I was a victim of this for most of my life. Once I became clear inside and out, I felt much lighter and could make very direct connections with people very quickly.

There’s a lot involved in what it means to be clear. Let’s pick some of this shit apart.

First, there’s the subconscious. They tell me this is 88% of your mind, so we can safely state the subconscious has a big say in the things we do. Sometimes it’s obvious when our subconscious is creating noise in our heads, but often it’s subtle.

For example, many times when I ask a dude to go approach, he’ll first take a sip of his drink, then hesitate, then give me some reasons why he won’t approach.

Dissecting this, there are two ways this guy is demonstrating lack of clarity. First, he’s taking a sip. This is his subconscious saying, “I miss my mommy and wish her teets were here because I’m scared. But instead of having my mommy, I’ll take a sip from this straw.” It’s a pacifying maneuver intended to alleviate the internal conflict, in this case the desire to approach coupled with the fear of the approach.

His second sign is his creating logical excuses to not approach. The dude’s attracted to her, he’s horny, he knows consciously the approach is the right thing to do and he has never ever regretted any approach he’s ever made. And yet there’s the conscious mind trying to talk himself out of taking action.

Okay, so in both examples, he isn’t acting and speaking clearly. He has conflict, incongruence and fear, and is feeling the need to defend himself and assuage himself. As opposed to a man who is clear with his desires, owns them unabashedly, and does what he feels is the right thing.

Now, if I were inside this dude’s head, there may be a bunch of “noise” or “static.” Things that he may be processing, consciously or subconsciously:

“I’m too old.”
“I don’t have money for dates.”
“Mommy was controlling, and I fear this girl might turn out to be like mommy.”
“My last girlfriend cheated on me, and I’m afraid this girl might do the same.”
“This girl is just gonna reject me like the last five girls, so what’s the point?”
“I’m not wearing any peacocking.”
“My breath smells.”

Again, none of this may rise up to your conscious level. It may all be processing deeper below your level of consciousness, but would certainly be telegraphing out through your subcoms. And most definitely these beliefs will be delaying you from taking action or moving your interactions forward. So while we talk about “being in your head” with negative self-talk, it’s possible to be in your body yet still affected by these limiting beliefs.

This is all clutter that leads to lack of clarity within. It’s all harmful. The end result is you not taking full ownership of your intentions. The hotty doesn’t know exactly why and doesn’t care. Often, she’ll blame herself as undesirable to you. What matters is that your lack of clarity will create in women a similar lack of clarity. She will get confused and lose focus. Girls are mirrors of our own inner state, so if chicks seem confused around you it’s probably because you are confusing them. Your job is to figure out why.

The pickup community is often accused of being misogynistic, treating women like children. But guess what...there are similarities. So when I want to research how to talk to women, I can find advice in sources dealing with child rearing.

Here’s a quote I found today:

Children learn best by being given clear, firm and consistent direction from parents who are clear, firm and consistent in their approach.

Women…kids…same thing. Be clear. Speak with power. Be congruent.

The author of this statement goes on to say, “Firstly, find and maintain clarity within yourself.” Brilliant. “It is about being plain, obvious and understandable in a clear, short sentence that explains exactly what you mean. It isn’t about maybe this or maybe that.” Exactly.

Gather up your potential sources of confusion and get to work:

1. Clearing out the subconscious. You may have repressed negative experiences involving girls or your mom, and you may be tainting all your interactions before they even begin. Sometimes you have a clue what’s going on below the surface, but sometimes those beliefs are so deep that you need to consult a professional to get at them.
2. Uncluttering the conscious. This is where Tolle comes in. The Power of Now teaches people how to recognize that egoic voice and then how to distance themselves from it as the observer. This takes a bit of effort for some, but with practice it becomes easier to recognize what is unproductive bullshit that can be dismissed. Pretty much there are thoughts that get you laid, and then there’s everything else. All that other crap is irrelevant and needs to be quarantined and set aside.
3. Making your words clear. Stop using fillers like “uummmm,” stop punctuating your remarks with nervous laughs. Before you speak, think about what you want to say and then create a sentence. There are organizations like Toast Masters that can help you recognize and break bad habits. Go take those classes.
4. Quit with all the jazz hands and shit. A little gesturing is ok. Excessive sign language is distracting. Simplify your movements. Use your hands expressively but not defensively.
5. Recognize pacifying maneuvers and quiet them. Hands in pockets, touching your face, putting your drink up between your face and hers. These are ways to create an invisible wall of protection around yourself. Why are you protecting yourself from something you desire? Does this make sense? Buzzz…unclear.
6. Project. Give yourself permission to speak loudly. You can turn the dial up on your radio, but you simply aren’t doing it because you’re afraid of being heard. If you wanna say something, fucking say it. If you’re stifling your voice, you must be unsure about the message you’re trying to relate. When you have clarity and you need to say something, you say it so people hear it. If you need to take voice lessons, go off and take them. However many times it’s not so much a problem with vocal technique, but more a psychological issue. Believing your voice matters and that you deserve to be heard, this is the first step needed to speak loudly.
7. Believe in yourself. Be your own salesman. Ain’t nobody else gonna do it for you. If you believe in a product, you’re gonna sell it with conviction and clarity. If you’re unsure about the product’s worth, you’re gonna be wishy-washy in your delivery. Self-affirmations work for some people. There are a bunch of self-help books and videos around that may move you in the right direction. But ultimately you need to love and respect yourself fully for this to click.

2 reasons to game

2010-05-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at the crew meeting last night with Erika Awakening and I heard guys express reservation about speaking honestly with a girl because it could ruin their chances. And so if the guy was feeling anxious, or was projecting past relationships into the current one, rather than express his concerns he pushed his negative feelings deeper. Though this approach wasn’t working long term, it made for a pretty good band-aid.

Yes, there is sound logic strategically to not being fully honest with people about your emotions. You won’t get the girl if you look like a pussy. On the other hand, being able to speak your mind freely is therapeutic, and while it may sink the current interaction, it’ll help with future girls.

It boils down to having two goals when you game:

The first: it’s about you.
The second: it’s about her.

Things that aren’t challenging to you and which advance the interaction forward, are about her. Getting the girl. Things that challenge you emotionally and are not intended to move things along are about you. You can have one without the other, or they can be compatible.

Examples of saying/doing things that are about you:
“Wow, I’m trying to think of something to say right now but you’re making me super nervous.”
“I was gonna approach you 10 minutes ago but you’re really hot so I’m actually intimidated.”
Blowing yourself out on purpose with absurd comments to toughen your skin.
Escalating too hard to get past the anxiety you feel, even though it creeps her out.

Ok, so here’s another one of my famous metaphors…

You are the general commanding an army. Your army is malnourished, tired and getting sick from dysentery. Should you be focusing your attention on: a) strategies to win the war, or b) improving the health of your troops?

Seems like a no-brainer. If you let your troops die, you ain’t winning the battle. If you spend all your energy on tactics, at the expense of providing basic assistance to the soldiers, then all that energy is mental masturbation.

This is exactly the same with game, though instead of going into combat, you’re trying to seduce a broad. Here, your inner game is the battalion, sick and on the verge of collapse.

Say you are feeling a negative emotion in set. Your soldiers are sick. Do you decide to stifle those emotions because it’s a better tactical decision, or instead do you bring those emotions to the surface and express them, because doing so will help heal your inner game?

If your troops are sick, fucking take care of the troops.

Worrying about her – that is, wondering if a certain strategy is the best outer game - in this case, is a luxury. When your inner game sucks, it should all be about you. As your inner health improves, you can then shift focus onto her. Once you’ve conquered whatever is internally stopping you from success, then you can reconsider the best strategies to win the war.

Always be cognizant of this in field. If a set doesn’t go well, remind yourself, “well it’s about me anyways.” If you’re afraid to say or do something, still do it because “it’s about me.”

In a final example, yesterday I called a chick I met last week. I had a bunch of reasons to delete the number and move on (one reason being I didn’t even remember her fucking name lolzzz). I envisioned the awkwardness of calling up a girl who might not remember me, whose name I didn’t even know. And that’s when I made the decision to call. Even though the call could’ve ended up weird and humiliating, or a waste of time, or her getting pissed (it didn’t by the way), I did it anyway…for me.

Being Real

2010-05-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

We hear people say “just be yourself.” Obviously, when you’re socially miscalibrated and weird, being yourself doesn’t attract women. So this is crappy advice, mostly given by women who simply have to show and up look pretty to get rewarded.

Because of this, we must learn how to DHV and not DLV. We get our subcoms handled and project confidence. Then with practice we can relax and “just be ourselves.” That is, be our better selves.

Being yourself, once you’ve learned how to do it right, is a great goal. But the next step is being real.

Here’s an example from last night, where I was chatting up a feisty cutie:

Me: Girls tell me guys will lie about anything to sleep with them. That’s why girls don’t trust dudes in LA.
Her: So, you’re saying I shouldn’t trust you?
Me: No, of course you shouldn’t.
Her: (dumbfounded look) Uhhh…why not?
Me: Because that’s something I should earn. You oughta keep your guards up til you get to know me better. I respect that.

Clearly not what she expected to hear, which was probably more along the lines of “yeah, sure you can trust me!” In that moment, I wasn’t interested in bullshit, and neither was she. Saying “just trust me” is a ploy; saying “don’t trust me…you don’t even know me” is being real. One smells like a hard sell, the other is genuine and disarming.

Girls get hit on A LOT. Even the ones who aren’t that attractive, yeah they get gamed as much as the hot chicks. So with all this exposure to game, they can recognize BS a mile away, and can easily tell when you’re out there trying to peddle snake oil.

Where being a PUA turns into a liability is when you’re not being genuine, when you’re running routines that seem contrived, when you’re giving answers that are too textbook. Guys think they should have “solid game” to win over chicks. Many times though, that’s exactly what sinks the interaction. Admitting you fucked up your game is one of the best ways to get attraction. Case in point:

Me: Wow, you have really sexy elbows!
Her: What? I’m wearing sleeves. You can’t even see my elbows!
Me: Yeeeahh…you got me. You’re cute and I just wanted an excuse to say hi.

The more skittish a girl is, the less you should “game” her. Chilling back, vibing, but still showing intent, will get you in without setting off her “PUA” alarms. These are the girls who have their arms crossed, or are stabbing their straws into their drinks, or are calling you out on your pick-up line. Disarming these girls involves push-pull, but here again let me emphasize you still need to appear genuine with it.

Going back to last night:

Me: Hmm you smell good.
Her: It’s Yves Saint Laurent.
Me: What’s that? Shampoo?
Her: You’ve never heard of Yves Saint Laurent??!!
Me: Oh, I see, you’re one of those high maintenance chicks.
Her: No, I’m not high maintenance.
Me: Hmmm…let me see again…(pull her hair, bite her neck and earlobe, etc).

This feels in-the-moment and real now, because I’ve internalized the concept of push-pull. That’s how I’m wired to talk to chicks, but it took tons of trial and error. When I started out, I needed scripts and lines to get the job done. It worked, but felt a bit fake.

As a caveat I should say that many people don't want a guy who is keeping it real. Especially in bars/clubs, and especially around LA, what many girls are doing is comparing facades and then aligning with the most impressive facade. You may find that when you stay real, guys and girls want nothing to do with you. As a result, you may get fewer dates and fewer friends. But the people you have in your life should be of better quality than what you had before.

Some steps you can take to become real…

1. Fake it til you make it. Banter lines and routines are fine for starters. They’ll put you in the right state of mind. Eventually though, relying on them excessively will put you in a rut. Get a few lines memorized and make it a mission to try them out for several nights. Once you rewire your brain, be in the moment and move forward from your core.

2. Find your core. The number one killer of your inner game, in my opinion, is outer game. That is, running all sortsa pyrotechnics intended to wow dames, when in reality what you’re doing is playing hide-and-go-seek with your identity. This is largely because your ego is running the show. So if this is you, drop all the clutter. But some guys still can’t speak from their core because there’s too much damn static in the attic, so recognizing the true inner voice becomes impossible. In addition to decluttering your outer game, you need to do the same inside your head. There’s no way to be genuine if you have a buncha crap mucking things up.

3. Obtain an abundance mentality. I push girls away because I honestly don’t give a fuck. If she’s being too sassy, I’ll call her out on it. But when you’re coming from a place of scarcity, this isn’t so easy. You walk on eggshells and end up seeming needy because all you do is pull. How do you get abundance mentality? It’s not necessarily from having abundance, but from spending enough time in the field to finally recognize just how many hot girls there are in the world. As you raise your bar of what behaviors you’re willing to accept, you go from a place of supplicating to a place of screening. You simply don’t have the time, energy or resources to deal with weirdos...and believe me there’s a shitload of weird girls out there. Hence, out of necessity, you acquire abundance mentality.

4. Don’t care too much about the outcome. If you wanna run textbook game, you may have great success with this. If you instead wanna be real, you’re gonna screw up some of your interactions. When you care that much about the outcome, you’ll find it hard to put your nuts on the line and be genuine. This is high-risk, high-reward stuff. It can either totally bomb your set, or else win her over. Have one eye on the outcome, just enough to move in that direction, but stop caring so much about getting there.

5. Own it. I’m short. I recognize that being tall is more attractive, so I wear lifts that add four inches. And when I do, it’s a lot easier for me to gain attraction. This doesn’t mean I won’t go out in flat shoes, or that I care at all if a girl is taller. I accept my height and this isn’t a self-esteem issue. The same would hold for my race or any other aspect of my being that isn’t changeable. What you got, own it. If you can overcome flaws, then do it. If not, then accept things as they are. It’s ok to hide and exaggerate various aspects (god knows girls do this all the time…push-up bras, anyone?). What’s not ok is to let these perceived flaws affect your sense of worth, because once a chick shatters the illusion and sees you crumble, it’s game over. So if a girl calls me out on my shoe lifts, I say, “if I didn’t wear them my eyes would be at your chest level, and then I’d be staring at your tits all night, which is just rude.”

6. Be uncomfortable. Put yourself into awkward situations. Say provocative things that will likely blow you out. Manhandle girls. It’s all ok. You’ll survive. And with these blow-outs you’ll move farther outside your comfort zone. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself comfortable in any situation, which will permit you to be free to say and do what you feel.

Assertiveness, Intent, Drive

2010-05-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here’s some more pop psychology for ya. I never read self-help books or go to seminars. I just watch people and then meditate for hours on what I think’s happening. But I feel it’s pretty accurate. Strap yourself in, this one’s long.

To get shit done, you need these three ingredients: you must possess drive (aka libido), you gotta focus your drive in the form of intent, and then you have to manifest your intent through assertiveness. Let’s start at the end and work backwards.

Assertiveness
You see something you want and you go after it, whether that’s a job position, a girl or a bartender’s attention. Have intent with no assertiveness, and you wind up with zip. So assertiveness takes your intent and puts it into action. Of course, if you lack intent, you won’t be assertive, so intent is a prerequisite.

Too much and you’re aggressive, too little and you’re passive. The aggressor is the bully, the passivist is the doormat, and the assertive guy is in between.

Aggressive people tend to step over the boundaries of passive people, resulting in abuse and manipulation. Assertive people say what they mean and go after what they want, but not in a way that is harmful to others or disrespectful of others’ boundaries. If an assertive person meets an aggressive person, he will defend his boundaries from aggression.

So in the case of the bartender, a passive guy will stand meekly by waiting for the bartender to notice him while everyone else steps around him and gets waited on. The aggressive guy will push and shove everyone out of the way and yell at the bartender for help. The assertive guy will step up to the bar without pushing anyone aside, will focus on the bartender until they lock eyes, and then will make his voice heard in a way that is commanding.

There is no issue of clarity with the aggressive or the assertive guy. The passive guy, however, seems unclear about his intent (this is the perception of others, even if he is clear in his head). And so he is often ignored and passed by. Men don’t respect him and women aren’t captivated by him. Even if he is full of intent, he doesn’t show it, so he is seen as a pussy, someone who doesn’t feel good about himself, wishy washy, lets people take advantage of him, doesn’t feel free to express himself.

Aggressive people don’t have an issue with expressing their desires, but often the trouble is in controlling their emotions. So they explode unexpectedly, seem impulsive and brash. A little bit of this is exciting, but eventually the assertive guy appears more solid since he is in command of his emotions. Other people feel good interacting with assertive men, but they often wind up feeling used and disrespected by aggressive men.

Let’s take this to your interaction with girlies. Shall we?

Let’s say you have full-on intent. Meaning you see a hot girl and you want to fuck her. Now, rather than be assertive, you sit there and don’t approach. Or in another situation, you want to make out with a girl you’re hitting on, but that voice in your head stops you. Or perhaps she’s being a bitch and you don’t put your foot down, instead buckling and letting her be dominant.

Digging deeper, the cause of not approaching is anxiety. So it is with not pulling the trigger. Perhaps fear of loss stops you from letting girls know when they’ve overstepped your boundaries. Maybe you’re scared that your communication skills are subpar and will inadvertently get you into trouble.

Notice in all these cases the underlying theme is anxiety and fear. If you are truly confident and without fear, you will put your intent into action. Yes there may be repercussions. You may be made a fool of, your ego may get bruised, you may get rejected. But you get back on your feet and reassert yourself, or else realize the goal isn’t worth the effort and then redirect your energies.

Sometimes that fear is masquerading as something else. That’s where excuses come from. Guys who don’t approach often have a list of a dozen reasons to support their behavior. Recognizing this internal dialogue and then disidentifying yourself from it is the first step, and then setting this dialogue aside and doing what you want anyway are the next steps.

So what is neediness? If you like a girl, and you assert your intent, but then she tells you she's busy or sick, and then you STILL push to meet up with her, then you've passed assertiveness and have become aggressive. You are now trying to do what YOU want to do in spite of her feelings.

Intent when pushed aggressively is no longer intent, but agenda. You can come across as callous or needy depending on your frame. But either way, it's clear you have an agenda to do what YOU want to do in spite of her.

To help become more assertive, put your intent into clear and decisive action. Take charge. Lead. Take responsibility and risk. Own your intent.

Intent
Intent is your aim or purpose. In legal terms, it’s the state of your mind when you carry out an action.

If you lack intent, even with strong drive, then you probably aren’t trusting of your decision-making process. Or perhaps you feel yourself unworthy of the goal. You have drive, but you aren’t channeling it for a variety of reasons.

Intent is like light. In terms of meeting broads, the newb starts off with a wide beam of intent similar to a floodlight, and then as he progresses that beam turns into a narrowly focused laser.

If you shine a big floodlight on a girl, she'll get annoyed and give you her number to make you go away. It didn't really penetrate. Examples: never going direct, no flirting, nothing dominant, no qualifying. It’s a wide-open aperture, without focus to the beam, really diffuse. This is the newbie. His intent is usually simply to open 10 sets regardless of his attraction to her, not push to the close, whatever happens happens. Not surprisingly, lotsa flakes result.

At the other extreme is the tightest beam of intent, the laser. This guy demands he not only interact with a girl’s better self, but that he FUCKS her better self. He avoids the frames that don't suit his purposes, he never supplicates, he always self-amuses. He is always internally validated. He is clear about his intent to bang her, even if it's just through his subcoms, though remember that it is his assertiveness which is giving his intent clarity.

In the end, what stops most guys from converting drive into intent is lack of trust in one’s faculties. You may not trust yourself, or you may not be giving yourself permission to act with intent. This could be from social conditioning, your religious up-bringing, over-bearing parents, low self-esteem, et cetera. Something is stopping you from fully embracing your drive, and so you flounder in the intent department, conflicted and unsure.

Naturally there is no quick fix here. You need to do all the soul-searching necessary to own your drive fully and believe you’re the shit, before you can ever hope to assert it with chicks.

Drive/Libido
Too much and you’re a horndog. Too little and your interactions lack sexual charge. Horndogs do get laid, but most high-value women will eventually realize they’re being used for their pussies. Some girls don’t mind this, but most need to feel somewhere along the line that you aren’t PURE libido, that you do care about what’s inside, that you respect her as a human being.

Libido has an organic component. If you’re old like me, you may find your drive diminishing. I have to do little tricks like feeling up a girl while I talk to her, or stare at her tits, to get that surge which once controlled all my thoughts.

Libido also has a psychological basis. If you’re depressed, stressed about finances, over-worked, then your drive suffers. Sometimes you can shut those worries out while you interact with girls, but sometimes they’re too over-whelming.

Let’s face it. Libido is all about procreation. Of course, when we fuck girls, we are hoping NOT to procreate, but on a deep evolutionary level sex is sex because the designer of the system wanted us to do it a whole bunch of times in order to continue our species. You can tell yourself you don’t want kids, and take meticulous and irreversible measures to prevent it from happening, but that is the biological reason behind all this.

So to a degree, we are at the mercy of hormones. Even without intent and assertiveness, you can be raging with drive. The result is a guy who sits at his computer whacking off to porn every night, because he is too confused about his intent or too afraid to go out and bring women into his life.

In the end it’s better to have more than less drive, but drive left unchecked will scare away most girls.

The end goal is to channel your libido with clear intent, and then pursue what you desire assertively, but to also balance this drive with things like charisma, romance and giving value.

Have respect for the process, fucker

2010-05-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

I saw this quote online today by jazz legend Charlie Parker:

Master the instrument, master the music, then forget all that shit and play.

Any journey to a level of mastery requires the understanding that there will be often lengthy plateaus where growth is not apparent, followed by unexpected rises in progress. It’s this appreciation of the process – both during times of growth and times of apparent stagnation – that keeps guys moving towards their goal. If you haven’t read it by now, go get Mastery by George Leonard. It’s a quick read and he’ll help explain this crap.

But most of us probably don’t have that kind of stamina and patience. By nature, we want shit to materialize quickly and with the smallest amount of energy expenditure and risk.

Hence the very high turn-over in the community. Few of my wings from a year ago still go out, and almost all my wings now are newbs. And let me clarify that by “go out” I mean push themselves to get better interacting with people, and girls in particular. It’s just too much fucking work for most. The blow-outs, the rejections, the flakes, your inner dialogue constantly talking trash. What looked like a promise for easy pussy turns into an epic search for the elusive Holy Grail.

Where many of the dudes who give up falter is in lacking respect for the process. They see a goal and they pursue it. When that goal doesn’t materialize after a month, half a year, two years, they surrender in frustration. But as Leonard points out, striving towards a goal at the expense of enjoyment of the process is bound to fail.

It isn’t easy to always enjoy a process that is so often harsh and brutal. Look I’ve been there. Long dry spells. Times when NO set hooks (if you even have the balls to approach). Feeling like you aren’t learning anything. It’s tempting to stay home, and many times I have done just that.

A lot of guys go astray when they get invested in their interactions. This seems healthy, since nobody wants to be an unemotional robot. But really in terms of mastery, it’s detrimental. Cold detachment from your sets and keeping a critical analytical mindset, these are the best ways to learn this skill. Literally being a social scientist in his lab running experiments.

What if you were training to box, and every time a fighter hit you, you went crying to mommy because some dude was mean to you. Come on, the dude you’re boxing is trained to hit you hard in the face, just like that bitch in the club has been trained to disrespect you. It’s the nature of the beast. Don’t take it personal.

Emotional investment is ultimately healthy, but where guys fuck up is in rewarding a girl with this investment before she deserves it. Certainly not day 1 or day 2. Maybe a few weeks into a relationship. But even then, it is reasonable to step back as objectively as possible and take notes on what’s working and what isn’t. You still need to be a scientist while in a relationship, so that you can strengthen your relationship skills. In the end, the process NEVER ends, even when you have apparently met your goal.

I know guys who meticulously analyze every site at the end of the night. And I know guys who refuse to do this analysis. The latter group tends to flounder around never progressing, ultimately pussyless and angry at the game. You wanna be the first guy, not the second. Here are some ways to get there:

1. Pick apart your sets. All of em. Word by word, if you can remember them. Think back to how a girl or set responded to something you said or did. Her body language, her words, the way the friends reacted.
2. When something worked, keep that in your toolbox and try it again to see if it was just luck or was something meaningful. Fuck community dogma. I found a while back that failing to escalate on day 1 works better for me when it comes to closing; for me, the surest way to fuck a girl on a date is to not put my hands on her on day 1. So be observant of what is working for you, and nevermind what everyone else says works for them.
3. Where things didn’t work, come up with a reason why. Maybe you weren’t standing right (hands in pockets or gesturing too much), maybe you were standing too far away to escalate, maybe your wing came in too soon with the wrong energy level. Realize that for every girl you meet, there’s probably a player out there who could seduce her. So don’t assume it’s the girl, assume it’s you.
4. Come up with solutions to your sticking points. If it’s an issue of having a SP, work around this by creating a plan for the next time you sense that SP is popping up. And blast away at that SP til it resolves. To do this, you need to be totally egoless and honest with yourself. “My sticking point is I didn’t pull the trigger and so the set fizzled out.” Good, now how are you gonna resolve to fix this the next time it happens?
5. If you said something that blew yourself out, come up with a few alternatives that would probably have worked better. Ask your wings or come here to the forum if you have no idea what could’ve worked. Because someone out there may have experienced your issue and has resolved it. I got great advice last week from Action on handling bitchiness, and sure enough that very night I put it to good use.
6. If you didn’t say something you should’ve, get that handled too. Last night a couple stunners kept their backs to me after the open. I ejected, but a better tactic would’ve been calling them out. “Wow, I’m not used to talking to the backs of girls heads! Am I getting you two in trouble with your boyfriends? Is that it?” Then apply this solution in future sets and see if it floats or sinks.

Always be respectful that there is a process and that you need to put in the work to get the results. Disrespecting the process – that is, having the audacity to think you can go out night after night and make the same errors without introspection or correcting your course – is like stamping a big red FAIL on your forehead. Don’t be a boner.

Focusing Intent

2010-04-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

Intent with a woman means essentially, where do you want to go with the interaction? Do you want her as a friend? A sexual option? When your intent is cloudy, confusion sets in. So key always is to have clear intent.

Intent is like light.

1. If you shine a big floodlight on a girl, she'll get annoyed and give you the number to make you go away. It didn't really penetrate. Examples: never going direct, no flirting, nothing dominant, no qualifying.

2. If you instead focus and concentrate your light it might be a pinpoint laser beam, but that sucker will burn a deep hole. Example: state your intent, brush off suggestions of her screening you, be dominant, qualify.

You don't want to have a floodlight. Yes, that will get the #, but it won't leave her with much of a positive impression. You want the laser beam. Strong, undeniable, persistent intent. A drive to close the deal.

Ok, here's a diagram:

A. Wide open aperture, no focus to the beam, really diffuse. This is the newbie. His intent is usually just to open 10 sets regardless of his attraction to her, not push to the close, whatever happens happens. Lotsa flakes.

B. A little tight. Here the guy is saying "I'm only gaming the girls I'm attracted to." His subcoms show he's attracted, as does his verbal game. Problem is, he's still willing to supplicate, be beta, be the dancing monkey, etc, in order to get approval.

C. Tighter beam still. This is the guy who not only talks to girls he's interested in, but demands he interacts with her better self. This guy disqualifies to show he's willing to walk away. He qualifies to show he has standards. He's pretty persistent.

D. Tightest. This guy demands he not only interact with her better self, but that he FUCKS her better self. He avoids the frames that don't suit his purposes, he never supplicates, he always self-amuses. He is always internally validated. He is clear about his intent to bang her, even if it's just through his subcoms or implicit verbals.

Being Normal

2010-04-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I’m out with fellas who are acting all fucking weird, I find myself telling them, “dude, be normal!” It got me thinking, how does one transform from weird to normal?

Why be normal?
When any artist starts learning their skill, they must first internalize the fundamentals. Before he or she can venture out into his or her own unique style, that artist should become competent at or master the style of well-established others. For a guy who isn’t good with people, learning the fundamentals – AKA learning how to be normal and fit into society – should precede him developing his own style of behavior.

Girls want to know you CAN be normal. Not to say you should be ordinary or boring, but if the situation calls for it, you can act like a normal man. When you demonstrate this, she feels comfortable and secure.

Nervousness
A big reason why guys act weird is their anxiety. Put em in a familiar situation like a library, and they’re just fine. But pile expectations on their shoulders like having to talk to people, and they crack.

Nervousness is manifested through all kinds of behaviors: talking too fast, stuttering, looking around too much, moving too fast, playing with his cell phone or jewelry, smiling too much, etc etc etc. Not uncommonly, a guy will demonstrate a whole bunch of these behaviors all at once.

Normal people – unless they’re on coke or something – don’t act this over-stimulated when they’re in the usual social situations. Walk into any bar and look at the guys playing pool, or a pack of college kids drinking, and almost always they’re just chilling and having fun. But put these same guys into stressful situations – maybe a final exam at college or a job interview – and now their nervous behaviors emerge.

So it’s ok to become nervous when you need that adrenaline to boost your ability to handle the stress, but it’s not ok to become nervous when all that’s expected of you is to relax and have fun. Do you see why looking nervous in a social gathering may seem weird to others? Ok, well, you need to work on extinguishing these behaviors. And in large part this will mean finding ways to get out of your head, and into your body. Out of the past and future, and into the present. This is some Eckhart Tolle shit. Read it.

Getting out there into the field – even if it just means sitting by yourself in a bar – will be a main way to get these habits under control. You don’t necessarily have to open sets, but you should at very least feel comfortable in your own skin sitting in a bar by yourself, not worrying how others may judge you. So a night out of your house is NEVER a wasted night, even if you’re just sitting there by yourself feeling uncomfortable. With time, that feeling will get better.

Next, focus on body language signals that indicate your anxiety. There are a few good books on the subject. Read them and then always be cognizant of your own nervous behaviors. If you can’t recognize them, have a wing call you out until these habits are broken. It takes a lot of practice for some, and it means being in your head, but in the end it’s worth it.

Dealing with dudes
We get really good at talking to girls, but still many of us suck at interacting with guys. I for one always had more female than male friends, so learning how to interact with other men took work. Plus, I CAN’T STAND talking about sports, cars, or most of the usual “guy” things.

First off, you gotta learn that normal dudes respect other dudes. They don’t touch them in weird ways, they give them plenty of space, they talk in a linear fashion, they make solid eye contact, they shake hands firmly, they project their voice with confidence, and they don’t say shit to belittle the other dude. If you stand with your crotch in some guy’s face, or you grab his thigh while sitting next to him, or make fun of something he’s wearing…even if he doesn’t kick your ass, he’s probably gonna think you’re weird.

And needless to say, normal dudes aren’t afraid of other dudes. That’s one big problem newbs face, the Fear of the Dude. They avoid mixed sets because of some imaginary fight that might erupt. Or maybe that fear isn’t even well-crystallized, he just refuses to open because some guy is standing there. So a lot of PUAs start off in a mindset of intimidation and fear, or feel threatened before a threat is even posed. Again, can you see how this might be considered weird by others?

Guys are there to help you. Make nice with them. Fear not. If you aren’t sure if he’s involved with the girl you’re after, clarify it with her. Problem solved.

Calibration
This encompasses a coupla ideas. First, there is calibrating your energy level. So if you’re in a chill venue and some PUA is doing his magic monkey routine stack bit, spinning and hooting and high-fiving at level 11, that fucker’s acting weird. Always calibrate your energy to the venue and to the set. Like a normal dude.

Second, it’s about calibrating your level of interest. If you come in direct, and you fail to hook, the girls may keep facing each other without showing you much interest. Continuing to show way more interest than they show back is miscalibrated and ultimately creepy. Using push-pull, particularly with your body language, is a good way to offset this.

Both kinds of calibration take mental focus at first to internalize, but with time this becomes your sixth sense. You automatically adjust your energy level and interest level according to environmental cues. In so doing, you become more normal.

Push-Pull
While on the subject, let’s talk more about this tactic. If you stand there and fluff with chicks, you’ll probably wind up going nowhere. Maybe the friend zone, but that’s about it.

And so we employ the concept of pushing girls away, and pulling them in, both physically and verbally. Because it creates attraction.

Here’s the rub. New guys are afraid to push. Why? Because there’s this smokin hot girl talking to him, and if he pushes her too hard, she’s gonna walk away. And being under the influence of scarcity mindset, that would be equivalent to the walls crashing down. The ego would not be happy, and so the newb handles each girl with kid gloves.

But what about pulling? Showing intent? Naw, the new guy is afraid of that too. The thought of walking up to a girl and being direct, stating intent, escalating sexually…this stuff scares a lot of these guys shitless. And so he tempers his intent, again trying to protect his ego.

As a result, he does pull, but it’s an anxious pull. He does push, but it’s an anxious push. Needless to say, his head explodes. Full-on creeper.

Now. I will say that being creepy is perfectly okay as you’re learning the ropes. You need to get comfy with all these new emotions. Incongruence will happen, miscalibration will be the norm. You will seem weird. And that’s ok. Accept that some of the tactics you employ – like push-pull – will not come off smoothly at first. You will look creepy for now, but with practice, all this gets smoothed out and a normal dude emerges. A guy not afraid to push because he has a new-found abundance mindset, and not afraid to pull because he owns his sexuality and isn’t ashamed of telegraphing it.

Assimilation and Entitlement
Whoa! Hold up fucker! What the hell does that shit mean??

Look, if I am among “my peeps,” whatever that means, I will feel normal. I’m an artsy guy, so by hanging around other artists, I feel more normal. If I hang out with jocks, I feel less normal. Assimilation is a big part of feeling normal.

The problem is this: you should feel comfortable in your own skin, regardless of the company around you. And thus arises the sense of entitlement. Meaning, even though I am in a bar full of frat boys, I still FEEL normal, because I’m fucking entitled to be in that bar as much as the frat boys. I may seem out of place, but I will most definitely not appear weird because I am totally at ease with myself.

When you can’t obtain assimilation, entitlement will keep you looking normal.

Agenda and Intent
Intent is good. Agenda is bad.

When I go out every night, my intent is to meet a lovely lady and get her digits. That’s cool if it happens, but when I’m talking to chicks I’m not trying to force this result. I’m not in my head thinking, “ok, should I get the number NOW?? How about…NOW???”

I’m just vibing and enjoying the moment (or not), and then if I like her I go for the number.

Guys who have agendas look weird. If I see a girl sitting at a bar and I walk up to her confidently, I am a man full of intent. But if I linger, stare at her for a couple minutes, walk past her a few times, bump into her as I go for a napkin, but never actually open, then I’ve revealed: a) I have an agenda to get her to notice me, and b) I’m too chicken shit to talk to her. This is a massive fail.

It’s the same for escalation. If I grab a girl and pull her in for a kiss because she’s said something to turn me on, that’s intent. If I do the classic awkward arm-around-the-shoulder in the movie theater, that’s agenda. One’s manly, the other’s weird.

Have intent, not agenda.

Ok, I could go on, but that’s enough for now.

Crazy Mommy, Invisible Daddy

2010-04-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

This phenomenon is rampant in the pick-up community, and probably among the general population of men. I know it applied heavily to my life, and talking to one of my local wings last night, I was reminded that so many dudes suffer from this.

The American family unit has disintegrated. Marriages fail half the time, and in the other half you probably have a large percentage that is dysfunctional. Tons of single moms raising boys on their own. Tons of boys who have no clue how to be men, so take their cues from TV and movies.

This is a set-up for badness when it comes to passing down manhood to one’s son. As a result, we have decades of boys being raised by crazy moms, and by dads who aren’t there.

Invisible Daddy
This is the guy who was supposed to be there telling you to go approach that two-set. The guy correcting your tonality and body language. The guy telling you to hit the gym 5 days a week and start dressing in more stylish clothes because hot girls care about this stuff. Instead, he wasn’t there, and so now here you are in the community trying to get this knowledge. Better late than never.

Where was daddy?

Maybe he bailed out of his relationship with mom. Maybe she booted him out. Maybe he was physically there, but not present emotionally or in spirit. Maybe he meant well but never really stepped up as a Man to show you how it was done, because maybe he himself had no clue. Maybe he was drunk all the time or out chasing skirts.

And so, you had a father who essentially was not there. Cobain summed it up well (as usual) in “Serve the Servants”:

“I tried hard to have a father but instead I had a dad.”

So when you don’t have a real male role model to guide you, you turn to the next option, your mom.

Crazy Mommy
Invisible dad may be around, but he doesn’t wear the pants. That role goes to mom. Mommy is stepping up and trying to raise her son the best she can. When dad fucks up, there’s mom assuming the masculine role putting dad in his submissive place. How’s that for fucked up?

In community jargon, dad tries to assert himself, then mom shit tests him as is her nature, and then dad buckles, and then mom is disappointed and forced to be the dad.

So you learn how to be a man from mom. And women, as we all know by now, are not generally very good at being men. They like to test their men, but at the end of the day, they would prefer relaxing into their femininity and letting the man step up and do his job.

Over time, mommy does what she can to raise us. She gives us information about life and love. The problem is, it’s largely wrong. We don’t realize it at the time, and hence we deeply internalize this advice. We take it to the extreme and cling to it for decades, permitting it to shape our world view.

Like when I was a kid, I always heard “never talk to strangers.” As an adult, I held onto that warning, and never talked to strangers. Nevermind that the advice was meant to prevent kidnapping, and didn’t mean I shouldn’t talk to a girl sitting next to me. I had to force that mindset out of my head, and give myself permission to talk to strangers. Sounds ridiculous, but this is the kind of bullshit advice that has stuck with tons of dudes all their lives, much of it implanted by mom.

Another one I got was “you’re gonna be 8 this year! When are you gonna start acting like it?!” As if a seven-year-old needs that kind of pressure to grow up. What did I know? So I thought, “ok, I guess my childhood is over…better start acting serious.” When I tell her about this, she denies ever having made these comments. Moms often will.

The epiphany for me was that mommy didn’t mean to be crazy. She was doing what she could and had to do, and since daddy wasn’t present to counter her nutty advice, we had no choice but to believe it.

This came from a place of love, not indignation or ill-will.

And so, recognizing what mommy was up against, and trying to do the right thing, as adults we need to forgive her. Like truly deep down appreciate all her stupid advice, and stop blaming her for the way we turned out. Starting right now.

Your Facebook Make-Over

2010-04-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

As part of my text game coaching service (puafieldguide.com), I help guys do a make-over of their FB profile. Some of em just need a little tweaking, some need a major over-haul. Here are a few tips for you fuckers…

These are the tools you have to work with:

1. Your friends.
Do you have 10 or do you have 300? Are they all dudes, an equal mix, or mostly hotties? If you don’t have 100-200 friends, you need to go out and start making them. Adding peeps is super-easy, especially chicks in bars. I went and made friends with Zach Galifianakis and post on his updates on occasion. It’s fine to name-drop. I’d stay clear of most PUA gurus or if they have “PUA” in their name.

2. Your wall.
Here is where you can post status updates, and where friends post shit to you. If you comment on friends’ statuses, it’ll show here. If you add a pic or video, or a link to a youtube vid, or a new friend, those things get posted here.
So there should always be a ton of activity. Not peak socializing hours like Friday night, but you know, during Monday afternoon. Browse around your friends’ profiles and start commenting on their pics, updates, etc. Make insightful and fun comments about your day…something you saw on the street, some stuff a chick said to you, whatevs.
Note: BE NICE TO YOUR WINGS! Don’t post anything that would make them look lame. If a wing does that to you, just delete his post and let him know. We’re here to prop each other up.
Don’t be super-serious unless it makes sense (like don’t give a big irritated spiel on what a womanizing scumbag Tiger Woods is, but do say something sympathetic about a recent natural disaster). Mix it up: a few funny posts, a few more serious insights, a quote, a video you found, a political commentary.
Ideally, you want chicks (even if they ain’t hot) posting a lot on your updates. You can help get this by posting your own updates that grab attention about 5-6 times a week, and by posting something nifty on your girls’ profiles. The best example of this I’ve seen is Jordan Harbinger of Art of Charm; greatest damn posts I’ve read. Go make friends with him right now. I’ll wait.
Just a word of caution: I’ve annoyed girls by posting on their wall before getting to know them. If you just met a chick, you can add value to her wall, but be aware that you can easily get unfriended if you cross the line (too weird, too much, too personal, etc).

3. Left column.
Here’s your profile pic, a quote, relationship status, birthday, list of friends, photos, videos, links and notes.
Key is to have a great primary profile pic. You should be CLEARLY visible, having a fun time. I don’t recommend dark sunglasses or anything that obscures your face. Be cautious with group pics. I’ve seen profiles where EVERY pic is a group pic, and I have no idea which of the dudes owns the profile. Your profile pic should be warm and inviting, charismatic, or anything that makes girls feel like getting to know you better. They should not feel afraid when they see a pic of you.
Pick a quote…find a book of quotes, use a movie quote, etc. Keep it fun. Relationship status…single. Birthday…personally I don’t put the year, just the day and month. Intrigue.

4. Info.
Meh, I don’t put that much here. I’m single, interested in women. I got my home town listed. My religion is listed as “food.” A few more things under interests, activities, music. Nothing too detailed. I don’t want to give everything away on my FB page, just get a little intrigue. I’ll fill in the rest in person. Guys who are super busy don’t have the time to post every single song they like or book they’ve read.
You can add groups and pages, but again be careful not to add a bunch of weird or PUA-related things. Like if everything has to do with Neil Strauss and Mystery, you need to drop that crap and go find some more amusing pages and meaningful organizations.

5. Photos.
Peeps will tag you on their own profiles. If the pic is unflattering, untag yourself without hesitation. You passed out drunk on the sidewalk…untag. You peacocked at a PUA summit…untag. Obviously, you know where I stand on having a bunch of PUA shit on your fb page. If they’re cool dudes who don’t look or sound like PUAs, go for it. If everything about them screams of PUA…untag.
Under the main photos section you have albums. These include your profile and wall pics albums. Divide them up into groups that’re easy to understand. I have one folder for my dog and my house. I have one for my homies and girls. I have one for my birfday. And so on.
If you don’t have pics of you with hot girls, what are you waiting for? Loading your fb page with these pics is about the easiest thing you’ll ever do. Get a camera, go to a club, and start taking pics. You by yourself, you with girls, you with wings. Have fun. Pick the best ones. Post em.
Have pics that reflect other things you love to do. Rock-climbing, playing music, whatevs. Let your personality shine here. Don’t keep showing your mean mug. Fucking smile!

6. Other stuff.
Videos of my dog playing piano. My song lyrics and downloads. Top ten albums of all times. Favorite movie quotes. Anything you wanna post, put it up. This is icing.
Just beware of a few things. You DON’T want to scare girls. So if you want to make a political or religious statement, go easy and keep it witty and fun, not mean and angry. No pics of you flipping off Bush. No pics of you looking like a gangsta or terrorist. Girls are very skittish. Don’t give them another reason to ignore you.

Shit I do to get make outs

2010-04-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

We were doing the Chodefest thing last night. Me, Troublesome and that Jayku mother fucker. I had just moved a cute girl to the smoking area of 7 Grand to make out.

I left her set for a bit and saw Jayku talking to this blond chick. She was totally into him, so I thought the pull was in the bag, but a few minutes later he came walking back up to us with a sad puss. A half hour later she was hanging onto some other dude in a dark corner. Jayku had not gone for the make out, and so most likely she lost interest.

We bounced to the Standard, and I sat down with him to go over the stuff I do to get make outs. And no, I don’t mean grabbing girls by the face and forcing the kiss, or dealing with sloppy drunk club chicks. I mean, when you’re talking to a sober or slightly buzzed girl, and you get her into the state of wanting to reciprocate the kiss. Be that same night or on a date.

When I started, I had a huge problem with this. Not just from an inner game aspect, but because I also always got her cheek. Dames never wanted to make out. Here are some barriers I’ve dealt with and 10 tips that I’ve used to get around them while in the venue.

1. Inner game. Trigger anxiety is something they don’t talk a lot about, but for me it was as real as approach anxiety. Even if all the signs were Go, I couldn’t nut up and pull the trigger. I knew everything got much less awkward on a date once this waypoint had been reached, and yet I kept stopping myself. On top of this, I was always a germophobe.
Just like the approach, I needed some kind of stack to help. First, I had a verbal reason to pull her in, like “come here, you’re adorable.” Or sniffing her neck while saying her hair smelled good. Any lame excuse to get my face close to her neck or face. Next, I didn’t go right for the kiss, but would kiss her forehead, cheek or neck. Then if she was still standing there, I’d pull the trigger. Rinse and repeat until that fear goes away, and you can just pull her in for the kiss without the other shenanigans.

2. Downshifting your energy. It’s helpful if she’s attracted to you before going for the kiss, but attraction was never a problem of mine. If my personality wasn’t winning a girl over, then my routines would always do it. But that wasn’t serving me well when I tried to get a kiss.
Instead, it’s important once you have attraction to lower your pitch, speed and volume. We call this bedroom voice. It should be rather seductive, often talking into each other’s ears, even if the venue isn’t that loud. You likewise would remain very still and centered with your body language. You can do some high energy shit with your hands to hook a set, but before the kiss, you need to look more like a tree.

3. Sensual touching. Ok, so there are many ways to touch a person. If she’s sickly, you can provide a comforting touch. If you’re trying to spike her buying temp, you can high five. If you’re trying to fuck her, your touch would be sexual (fingering, heavy kissing, etc).
But right before the first kiss, your touch should be sensual. That includes stroking her forearm, holding her hand, gliding your fingers through her hair, gently massaging her neck while you talk into her ear. I often use a palmistry routine, which is pretty lame, but it introduces some sensual touch while cold reading, spiking BT and getting sexual. Besides that, when I was talking to the chick last night, I had my hand on her knee and thigh (she was sitting on a barstool and I was standing next to her). Sensual touching warms girls up, and you should start doing it as soon as you’ve truly hooked (she’s facing you, making flirty eye contact, smiling, moving in to talk to you).

4. Make intent clear. Verbally throw out comments that let her know you like her. Even if they’re playful, like my elbow bit. Last night I said stuff like, “You can’t fly back home tomorrow…we haven’t fallen in love yet!” (credit Rob Judge) and “Oh good, you’re single? Let’s get outta here!” These things caused her to laugh because they were absurdly direct, and it’s ok to laugh when needed to break the tension, but don’t laugh nervously or saying “just kidding” as a way to relieve your own anxiety. Let the tension sit, see how she reacts, then break it with her so she isn’t uncomfortable.
If you find yourself doing a lot of chodespeak (interview questions, lame stuff about politics or sports), then take a step back. You can say “wtf? How’d we get onto religion?? This is a bar!” Last night she started giving me some long spiel about what she does, and I cut her off with a “whatever” and stacked into some other more exciting topic (it sounds rude, but it works). Likewise, if you find you haven’t made your intent clear, it’s ok to randomly stop the convo and drop it in. Like if she’s going on about her work, tell her how sexy it is (this is especially effective if it’s a non-sexy job like math teacher). Role play and cold read about the naughty aspects of her job.
There’s no real need to go overtly sexual. Meaning, you CAN ask her about giving head and stuff, but that won’t necessarily make her more willing to kiss you, and can backfire. So just get your intent on the table, playfully and/or seductively, and move on.

5. Kiss another place. I usually tell girls I like their elbows, and often I’ll kiss em there. Girls pretty much have never had a dude in a bar kiss their elbow, so this catches them off guard and spikes BT. If not that, you can kiss her neck, hand, cheek, forehead or shoulder. Or if she shows you her tattoo, you can give it a kiss. If she’s ok with that, it is a stepping stone to the real deal.

6. Isolation. I always mini-isolate, but anytime I want to go for a makeout, I want the girl and I to be in true isolation away from her friends. Preferably in some dark corner. This isn’t always necessary of course (lots of girls like making out in front of their friends, just like us dudes), but if you sense she’s willing to kiss but worried what her friends might say, then go for isolation.
I have a secret clubhouse at 7 Grand. It’s the far end of the smoking area where nobody hangs out. I oversell it, grab her hand, and lead her there into isolation. But you can improvise in any venue. Say it’s too dark to read her palm, or too loud to talk, or you want to sit because your feet hurt, or you want to go to the bar. Whatever, just have some excuse, spike her BT, and then lead her there with authority.

7. Routines. I think routines are uberlame. Anytime you logically engage a girl’s mind to tell her you’re about escalate, it’s a lose. You want to disengage her logical mind and spike her emotions, then escalate. So Mystery’s gambit isn’t something I would use, for that reason and because it feels beta to ask chicks if they want me to kiss them. Style’s phase shift thingy is overly complicated, but does incorporate some of the above like kissing other areas and sensual touch. If you need a routine to get you past your trigger anxiety, try it out, but in the long run I don’t find it’s anything more than another crutch.

8. Watch for the window. There are times when a girl wants you to kiss her and times when she’s not feeling it. Pull the trigger when that window is open. Sometimes once it closes and you haven’t made your move, it’ll never open again.

9. Rough play. I have a wall in my little 7 Grand clubhouse that I tell girls is my “favorite wall.” I say “I love this wall!” Then I slam her against it and kiss her. Any kind of dominant behavior if done right will spike her emotions and make her more willing to kiss. It’s always fun to manhandle broads, and once attracted they usually like it (even as they’re voicing objection to it).

10. Good oral hygiene. Naturally, if girls are gonna wanna kiss you, it helps if you don’t smell like a sewer. I had bad breath for ages, but I investigated treatments and overcame it (as far as I can tell). Here’s my formula:
a) Brush before you go out, with a powered toothbrush. This includes your tongue and roof of mouth. Wash all the residue out thoroughly, maybe five times.
b) Use Listerine twice a day. Use enough to get it back to all the regions of your mouth, and even swallow a little to hit the back of you tongue.
c) Scrape your tongue in the mornings.
d) Don’t eat smelly food before going out.
e) Floss at night before bed.
f) Keep minty gum on you and chew a lot of it in the venue.
g) I had acid reflux. So does my dog. We’re both on Prilosec, and now our breaths are much better. If this is something that might be a problem, go see your doctor or try over-the-counter Prilosec for a week or two.

And that should do it. Happy snargings, fuckers.

Romance, Part Three

2010-02-25T07:42:00.000-08:00

I’m gonna wrap up this series of posts now, but I’m sure as my research continues, more will be uncovered. This should get you on track for the time being.

Pampering
Obviously, most people like it when you do shit for them. I like my feet rubbed after a long day. But me asking to be pampered isn’t a romantic gesture on my part. Me offering to pamper a woman is.

It needs to be clear that you enjoy taking care of her, that attending to her desires means a lot to you. Going along with it grudgingly is unromantic.

Dedicate yourself to things that make her feel good, and personalize this. Offer foot rubs, make dinner, all that stuff. Whatever it is she appreciates. Don’t do it with any expected reciprocation in mind. Do it simply because you like making her feel good. And as usual, keep in mind the element of surprise, which will amplify the romance of these moments.

Compromise and sacrifice
Girls appreciate when you sacrifice your time and energy for them. Don’t do it all the time, but when the mood strikes you and when it doesn’t impinge on your mission or beliefs. Seeing some awful chick flick that she’s dying to watch - that is a romantic gesture.

Be there for her, do nice things for her, but don’t overdo it. Don’t be a guy who will drop everything at a moment’s notice, or inconvenience himself tremendously, for her every whim. Once in a while this can be romantic, but if done too often you’ll look weak.

Have a life and a mission. If what she desires compromises your mission, sometimes you must say no. Do this from a place of love. That’s where displaying your power as a man will come in. Being powerful means holding your ground, sticking to what you believe in, while still projecting love for her. Be cautious not to turn down her request from a place of anger.

On the flip side, when you do make sacrifice, say yes to her without resentment. Surrender yourself to the sacrifice once you decide to make it, and don’t hold any dissatisfaction towards her. That will kill the romance of your sacrifice.

Chivalry
A subset of sacrifice is chivalry, being of service to women. Chivalry may sound old-fashioned or antiquated, but girls find it super attractive.

What does it mean to be chivalrous? Strictly speaking, the word comes from chevalier, French for one who rides a horse. This implies a knight, who is thought of as chivalrous.

Chivalry is a component of courtly love, which includes being appreciative of women, providing rescue and defense. In fact, knights were attentive even when there was nobody around to recognize it, since an end goal of these behaviors was spiritual salvation.

The qualities idealized by knighthood include bravery, courtesy, honor and gallantry toward women. According to a modern chivalry movement, Chivalry-Now, chivalry encompasses many higher ideals: honesty, loyalty, courtesy, justice and commitment. As stated on their website:

The virtues of chivalry offer more than pleasantries and politeness. They give purpose and meaning to male strength, and therefore support the overall workings of society.

Some examples of being at a woman’s service:
Getting up on the bus and offering your seat to her
Holding a door open for her
Pulling her seat out at the dinner table
Rescuing her, such as when you show up at her work and kidnap her for the day

The Awwww factor
Things that make a girl go, “awwww.” Leaving rose petals on her pillow, teddy bears, fluffy puppy dogs. Many of the things that make men vomit.

Items that provoke awwww are not practical. Microwaves and blenders are unromantic. Men gravitate towards things that fit a function, and so may have a hard time understanding the value of anything impractical.

Many times simple gestures provoke an awwww response, particularly when it involves sacrifice; don’t forget, with romance less is often more.

One night chicky came over and I gave to her a dozen roses. Now normally, this clichéd gift is predictable and not all that romantic, and so I don’t recommend it. The thing is, prior to this moment, we had discussed me being unromantic. I told her I didn’t know how to be romantic, and that I was gonna get her a dozen roses as an attempt. So when I stood there with the roses, genuinely trying my best to be romantic without having much of a clue how to be, that sweet gesture provoked an awwww.

Affection without expectation
Of course, affection at the right moments is romantic. What makes this even more meaningful is to be affectionate with no expectation of the reward of sex. You may find it can be more romantic in some cases to say no to sex even though it’s available. This would demonstrate that you are setting aside your own sexual gratification so as to create a romantic moment for her.

When a woman feels you’re being affectionate for the sake of how that makes her feel, she appreciates it. When it becomes clear you’re being affectionate just to get her in the mood for sex, that is unromantic.

Kissing is a key ingredient to affection. There are few things women despise more than a lousy, unromantic kisser. She should feel like you are kissing not just for yourself, but for her as well. This means being present with her and reading her feelings, building from slow and light kissing to deep, passionate kissing. In addition to kissing, caress her face and hair, make eye contact at times, take breaks such as to comment on how hot she looks. Reserve the tongue until she’s ready.

But again, realize that often women are perfectly ok making out without having sex, and from a romantic stand-point, you get more points reading her mood correctly and going for sex only when and if she’s ready. Going through the moves of foreplay just to get your dick wet might work, but it rates low on the romance scale.

Under this heading I would put push-pull, withholding and anticipation. The thing women expect of a man is he will usually make a linear attack to get into her panties. When he gives her a little affection and then withholds it, making her wait in anticipation for more, the tension he creates can be romantic.

No pride
As Billy Joel once wrote in “Shameless”:

Well I'm shameless when it comes to loving you
I'd do anything you want me to
I'd do anything at all

And I'm standing here for all the world to see
There ain't that much left of me
That has very far to fall

You know I'm not a man who has ever been
Insecure about the world I've been living in
I don't break easy, I have my pride
But if you need to be satisfied

I'm shameless, baby I don't have a prayer
Anytime I see you standing there
I go down upon my knees

When love moves you to set aside your pride, women find this romantic. I’m thinking again about Cusack holding his stereo over his head in Say Anything… As retarded as he appeared, he didn’t care; he was a man on a mission. There are countless other film examples. Here again, like obsession, being shameless can easily backfire.

Just because
Do things for her “just because.” You appreciate her; that’s the reason why you’re doing it. Let her know you’re glad she’s present in your life, and that is enough of a motivator for you.

Romance, Part Two

2010-02-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

In Part One, I uncovered some of the things that go into being romantic. These include utilizing romantic settings, being attentive to details and using emotionally charged words.

Continuing on my quest for enlightenment, I have found yet more ingredients.

Pragmatic Idealism
It’s easy as a man to read a girl’s description of what romance means, and then brush it off as sickening. But take a moment and look at the concepts behind the words and try to determine why these images and traits trigger a sense of romance.

I found this description of romance written by Christine Coppa online. Try not to puke:

What is romance?

Romance is a fancy steak dinner for two in a room lit purely by candles. It's flowers on a random day and falling asleep in your lover's T-shirt that smells like his cologne. It's a date to a famous children's bookstore and a shared slice of cherry pie—a stroll through a crowded museum that doesn't feel crowded at all. It's making toast for someone in the morning and drawing a heart in the butter, then watching it soak into the bread like it was never there at all, but you know it was. It's handing him a towel for the shower and sopping up the water on the floor, not nagging him about it. It's kissing in the rain, in the snow, in the sunshine, on a street corner after you just met. It's wine and mouths that taste like wine. It's being mistaken as a couple when you're not. A plane ticket to nowhere special, just somewhere together. Romance On A Budget.

It's waking up next to someone and smelling their skin and liking that smell—now familiar—even if it's only been a few days. It's a warm body pressed against yours that fits like a puzzle piece. It's talking about nothing for an hour and feeling like you've solved a murder mystery together. It's a toothbrush in a cup next to yours. It's his tie flung over your desk chair. It's holding on to him on the subway when the car jerks. It's knowing he is always there for these simple moments. He will not let you fall. You really believe this.

As a man, I’m sure more than a couple lines in this made you cringe. The flip side of this idealism is perseverance through the hard times. In short, being realistic. Coppa redeems herself when she concludes:

But romance is also dealing with situations as they come along. It's not walking away. It's not breaking up over the phone: Just throw my stuff out; I'm not coming to get it. Romance is a second chance: Meet me for dinner. C'mon, let's talk this out.
It's a hand in yours; it's a shoulder for your heavy head. It's showing up when you say you will, not shutting your phone off, changing your number, your address. It's tender understanding, fragile but strong. It's honest. It's patient and sweet and it's picking the other person up when they can't stay above water because they're scared, so scared they're breathless. Romance is giving of yourself, working through whatever comes up.

Men tend to be practical, so this aspect of romance is something they can wrap their heads around. You as the man are expected to bring stability, solutions and reassurance. Being able to project to a woman that you can balance both this pragmatic realism as well as the sappy mushy idealism…that’s where the art lies.

Bonnie and Clyde: Us against the world
You and she form a union, and no matter what the world may throw at you, that bond is unbreakable. Along these lines is the concept of conspiracy: scheming up a plan where you two are doing some playful misbehavior as a pair. This may come in the form of future projection (telling her how you two will rob a bank and then flee the country and live in the Bahamas drinking umbrella drinks).

People-watching and then laughing at the expense of those around you works through this technique. I was sitting in a restaurant with chicky and there was a little girl eating dinner with her family. I told my girl, “That’s the ugliest boy I’ve seen. I can’t even eat my dinner anymore. DAMN he’s ugly.” We snickered about this for an hour. Our little inside joke, solidifying our bond.

The Bubble
Similar to Bonnie and Clyde is the bubble. It is the sense that when you are with her, everything else in the world melts away. There is nothing more important than you and her in that moment. One way to build this feeling is to whisper into her ear randomly, such as a compliment. Eye contact is also powerful in creating this connection.

The Element of Surprise
This one is huge. I hear it anytime I ask women about romance, and I see it in every description.

Give her gifts unexpectedly. But do it infrequently. If done too often or predictably, you will lose the element of surprise or she'll become bored. Gifts don’t need to be expensive, just thoughtful. Likewise, random texts showing you’re thinking about her will work.

Drop by her work to take her to lunch unexpectedly, or for any other purpose, but not just to say hi. She wants you to have a life. If you’re stopping by just because you’re bored, that’s unromantic.

One of the most effective ways to be romantic is to leave a hidden note for her somewhere to find when you’re not around. The note doesn’t need to be more than a sentence, such as telling her your feelings for her or your appreciation that she’s in your life. Women have been known to burst into tears when discovering this note.
Pulling a girl in for a kiss when she doesn’t expect it, or sneaking up behind her to grab her butt, are ways to make affection surprising. We’ll get to affection later.

Connect emotionally
A prevailing wisdom is that men should appear unemotional. But emotions can lead to romance when they are appropriate. She doesn’t want you to fly off the handle like a little girl, but she doesn’t want you to be a cold robot.

Connect deeply. It shows you trust your own emotions, and more importantly trust her to feel them with you. This includes the emotions involved in strong sexual chemistry. You can be sexual and still romantic.

Security
She knows you will be there to take care of her, to hold her and protect her. Even if you can’t be there, she needs to have the feeling that this is your desire and intent.
She expects you to be emotionally strong, to balance her sometimes erratic mood swings, and to be a grounding force. When you’re a man, she can fully express herself as a woman.

Romance, Part One

2010-02-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a Cuban restaurant with chicky one night, when she informed me I wasn’t romantic enough.

This didn’t surprise me. For one thing, I have a long history of being overly romantic at the expense of not being sexual enough. As a result, I was always viewed as a boyfriend first, lover distant second. When I entered the community I made an effort to cast myself as a lover with boyfriend potential.

So I’ve been deliberately withholding romance in many of my interactions. I don’t want girls to get too attached, and I don’t want to be thought of as a boyfriend. I’ve become so effective at this, that when I do develop love for a woman, she is extremely skeptical.

“Sooo…” she suggests, “telling me you want to fuck me…that’s not romantic.”
“Really? Ok, what should I say? Bang?”
“No…I don’t know…have sex?”
“That’s REALLY unromantic! Might as well say ‘have intercourse.’”
“Uhhh…make love…”
“Some girls don’t like when I say that. But yeah, I see your point. So no more ‘fucking.’”
“Not unless we’re in the bedroom.”

I later tell her I wanted to see her one night so much, I would’ve driven an hour to her home.

“See, that’s romantic! And you didn’t need to say ‘fuck.’”

I thought about this the next day. So driving an hour is romantic. But what about that specifically is romantic? It’s the sacrifice, I assume. Ok, then sacrifice is romantic, particularly the sacrifice of one’s time.

Hmmm, what other aspects of romance are there? How little do I know about romance? How would I even define it?

For all that the community has to offer about being alpha, good at perceiving subcommunications, on and on, there is scant written about romance. If I ask any woman what that word means to her, she will go off for 15 minutes easily, listing in minute detail all the various ways a man can be romantic. Whenever I ask most guys this same question, there is half a minute of silence, until they finally dig up some awkward definition, many times caked in disgust.

All those romance novels, all those chick flicks…what exactly makes them appealing to women and not to men? It’s something hard-wired or biochemical for sure, but what exactly?

I needed to find out.

And on a practical note, I needed to know how to implement romance in such a way that women viewed me as Prince Charming, not some sniveling, supplicating chode who stalks her at work and sends her 50 texts a day about his undying love. It’s not enough to feel desire and express that to a woman, you gotta do it in a way that’s alluring to her.

Power and love. Sex-worthy and romantic. You can certainly have one trait without the other, but why not try to possess both in balance? I think it’s the fear of looking like a pussy, of seeming less than powerful, that inhibits a lot of guys from fully embracing romance.

Let’s see what the dictionary has to say about this word:
a. A love affair.
b. Ardent emotional attachment or involvement between people; love.
c. A strong, sometimes short-lived attachment, fascination, or enthusiasm for something.
d. A mysterious or fascinating quality or appeal, as of something adventurous, heroic, or strangely beautiful.

One of my girl friends was insane about romance novels, read em all, and so I asked her for recommendations. I picked up a couple and started to explore. Authors like Julie Garwood and Lisa Kleypas. This wasn’t easy. In addition to being perplexing to men, romance is oftentimes nauseating. But if I were to find the answer, I needed to do the research.

I interviewed all the women I came into contact with. People at my work. My hairdresser. Friends. When I told women I was doing research to learn how to become more romantic, their eyes always lit up. Seems like as much as women want romance in their lives, it is sorely lacking.

Here now is my attempt to categorize the basic principles of romance as I see them. Hopefully this will help guys understand what it means and know how to apply it in their relationships.

Obsession
Obsessive behavior is considered decidedly unromantic by most people I’ve talked to. And yet, this behavior is pervasive in romantic films and books, indicating there must be something to it. Bottom line, take this for what it’s worth, realizing if miscalibrated it can be seen as extremely weird.

One thing you’ll see over and over in films is a guy stalking a woman, and her finding this romantic. Or he’s totally infatuated with everything about her. It’s John Cusack standing outside her window with the boom box in Say Anything... It’s Nick Cage sneaking back into the house party and waiting in the shower in Valley Girl. It’s Spartacus telling his woman…

“I want to know all about you. Every line. Every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.”

In tiny measured amounts at the right time, this can come across as alluring to women. Mystery calls this the “hijacked my brain” campaign, which he uses to avoid LMR. It means that something has come over you – against your better judgment – that is inexplicably compelling you towards this girl.

But beware: Hollywood movies are stylized and rely on the character developing over a couple hours to get to the point where obsessive behavior is appealing. If Cusack were holding that stereo at the beginning of the movie, that would just be plain creeperville. So use with great caution or you may find yourself with a restraining order on your ass.

Needless to say, the girl needs to be into the guy for this to work. If she doesn’t have those same feelings, the result is icky.

Emotionally Charged Words
Telling a girl you’re gonna fuck her isn’t romantic, though at the right moment it can be powerful. You have to describe the details of the event, your emotions, her emotions. You can still be steamy and hot in your language without being utterly explicit. Here’s an excerpt of a love scene from the novel Slow Burn by Garwood:

Her nails gently scored his shoulder blades as she arched up against him.
The pleasure she gave him intensified. He slowly withdrew and then thrust inside her again. She increased the pace, demanding more and more of him until they were both mindless to the world around them. Only the two of them existed, and for that short time, there were no problems, no fears, no insecurities.
She reached a shuddering heart-stopping orgasm before he did. She cried out and squeezed him, forcing his own climax.

As an exercise, try to avoid use of any explicit words, and instead use some of the above when speaking to a woman. Other examples:
I want to ravish you. I will show you that you’re mine. I will take you.

Be attentive to details
Remember and notice things that are important to her. Listen closely to her. Even when it seems she doesn’t care about something, she could care very much. Make mental notes of anything she comments on, and use this to show you’ve been attentive.
Compliment her on things she’s proud of, not necessarily something that others would recognize. By personalizing the compliment, it becomes far more meaningful.

Settings
Sunsets on the beach, a view from a mountaintop, a candle-lit dinner table. Some settings lend themselves to romance. However be aware that for many women the setting is secondary to the gesture. A romantic offering works, even if on a busy city street. Don’t rely too heavily on the setting to do your work for you.

Gestures
Often if you simply state to a woman what your intention or desire is, that gesture suffices as romantic. For example if she is in need of something but you can’t be there to help, telling her you wish you could help is many times enough.
Opening a door, likewise, is an effortless task which may not take much work, but that gesture implies your desire to serve her. Always be mindful of these gestures since they can speak volumes to women.

Midgame

2010-02-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

Yo check it. Done some cognizating recently about pickup, seduction and beyond. The thing I’ve found funny is that most pickup companies, in-field videos and material focus on the approach. We call this the initial game: the approach through getting the number. As you will see, initial game comprises a very small part of the overall interaction, but that’s the place most students end up dwelling.

The problem is that while this early phase is tough for the majority of guys, the real heavy work is usually gonna be done in midgame, all that shit required to get a girl out and eventually sans panties. Endgame - getting it on - is the easiest of the three phases, although even this stage can be fraught with hardships and heartaches.

So what the PU companies and books should be primarily dissecting is midgame. Stuff like texting and calling, how to set up the date in your favor logistically, how to escalate so she’s horny. Yet how many in-field videos follow the PUA on his day 2? I haven’t seen one. How many PU coaches spend their bootcamps analyzing your text exchanges? Absurd. Despite this, midgame is the meat and potatoes of most sets (SNLs excluded).

This is how I would categorize the stages of a relationship arc, in order:

1. Initial game. This is a toughy, but not as difficult as midgame. In initial game, you must overcome your AA, learn how to hook, vibe, build attraction. Comfort is optional. The end point is obtaining some form of contact information, whether that be a phone number or Facebook info.
2. Midgame. This is the hardest aspect on your journey to sex, in which you first convince a girl to meet up and then upon rendezvous, begin the in-person process of seduction. Mystery said “the game is played in comfort.” In truth, the game is played in midgame, whether you choose to make that attraction, comfort or seduction. More realistically it will be a calibrated combination of all three.
3. Endgame. You’ve got her hot and wet, and now you must overcome the final shit tests, LMR and logistical hurdles to achieve intercourse.
4. Repeat offender. Hooking up once is fun, but maybe you want to see the girl again. In this stage, you’ve managed to see the girl repeatedly for sex.
5. Conversion to LTR. After about 5 or so sexual encounters, you have achieved an LTR. You may call her a girlfriend or fuck buddy depending on your preferences. Romance is optional.

It is helpful to break down the relationship arc into these stages because then you can understand where your deficiencies lie. Here are some reasons why you fail to progress to the next stage:

1. Initial game. You have too much AA. You are unable to vibe without being in your head. You fail to get attraction. You choose girls or venues which are unlikely to result in dates (you know, like stupidly drunk crack whores at a rave).
2. Midgame. Your text game is sub par. You don’t consider logistical issues in advance to prevent obstacles. You fail to escalate.
3. Endgame. You haven’t turned her on sexually. You haven’t gained her trust. You fail to plow past token objections. You have no place to fuck. You aren’t carrying a rubber.
4. Repeat offender. The initial sex was poor. You came across like an uncaring player. Your follow-up text game was weak. You look like a troll naked.
5. Conversion to LTR. Sex continues to be poor. It is too logistically difficult to sustain. She has other better sexual options. You are telegraphing an agenda or seem needy/desperate. You post a LR and she finds it.

Let us now examine midgame in greater detail, and specifically what things I think make up a “solid” number. I’m only gonna talk about text game, since that’s all I run leading up to the meet. Let’s say you get a number and send out an initial text. These are the levels of investment a girl may demonstrate through text game, in increasing order:

Level 1. No response. Not only was your day 1 interaction piss poor, but your text game sucks. Or possibly she failed to mention a boyfriend or husband. The number is wood.
Level 2. She responds to your texts, but the responses are brief, without much thought, and after lengthy delay. She ignores many of your texts. You get a lot of one-word answers like “Cool”, “Awesome” and “No.”
Level 3. She begins responding consistently, and after little delay. Her responses reflect she is putting some thought into them and enjoys your texts. When you suggest a meet-up however you may find she goes dead air, or at best gives a token ok that she will eventually reverse.
Level 4. She has become emotionally invested, albeit superficially. She is sharing various personal aspects of her life. She qualifies herself. She appears to be emotionally affected by certain comments you make. At this point, she may be willing to see you, but there is still a high chance of flaking. In fact, she could seem genuinely excited to agree to a meet, but don’t be surprised when she goes dead air or cancels at the last minute when that time arrives.
Level 5. She is more deeply invested. She suggests the meet up, often giving suggestions. In this stage, flaking is much less likely.

I will invite girls out when they are in level 3 or 4, but this many times results in a flake. Still, after a flake I like to call her out to demonstrate that this behavior is inappropriate and bizarre in my world. I also take this to mean I need to move to level 5 before asking her out again. This can take about a week, sometimes two, of solid text game, a few days a week. A flake almost always happens at some point in each set, so I’ve come to believe these often represent shit tests. How you handle it can help build or destroy attraction. So I welcome the flake, like I welcome most shit tests, as a sign of attraction.

If you can’t convert numbers to dates, then you have no way of improving your day 2 skills. YOU MUST GET A LOT OF DAY 2s TO GET GOOD AT MIDGAME. I mean, one day 2 a week is ideal. Rack up 20 day 2s a year and that’s a pretty decent sample size to be strengthening your midgame. If you’re like me, the bottleneck here is your text game. Once I got a handle on text game, I had little problem converting numbers to dates.

Here are a few ways I move into the higher levels of investment, via text:

She willingly qualifies herself. Whatever ways you do this in person, you can try during text exchange. Common statements of mine are, “So you’re hot and smart…what’s the catch? There must be a catch...”
She permits sexual innuendo. Often, this leads to dead air because of ASD. But even after sex talk backfires, you may find the interaction is even more solid. It’s as if she takes the time to mull over your suggestions of sex, and she makes peace with them, resulting in curiosity.
You demonstrate power and dominance. You dismiss her like a bothersome little sister. Disqualification is potent stuff.
You make your intent clear, by calling her cute or sexy. A statement I may drop even if unprovoked is, “Stop being so cute! There’s only so much I can take woman”

Ok, so you ran tight-ass text game. You got her out. Now what do you do?

I recently posted “Relationships and nasty shit” in which I explain that women are sizing you up sexually from the get-go. Women really really really like sex. In my opinion, sex is pretty much what’s gonna get you conversion to LTR status. Naturally, then, if your day 2 isn’t exhibiting your ability to bring it sexually, you are moving backwards into the friend zone and eventual oblivion.

You don’t necessarily need to pull your willy out on the date and start slapping her ass with it. But you do need to hit a few items on your checklist:

1. Show dominance. Manhandle her, grab her cell, have rapport-breaking tonality, lift her up and carry her. There are a ton of ways to do this, and collectively they’ll get her juices flowing.
2. Try to make out with her. She may not be receptive at first, but if you don’t at least try, chances are good she’ll write you off. To get a make-out, I make sure I’m in a venue that will facilitate this (dark, kinda loud, and full of people and booze). Anything else is an uphill battle. Specifically what I’ve been doing lately is buy a round of drinks and then when it comes time for the second round, I tell her, “I’ll get you another drink but I have a rule. You have to kiss me first. Sorry, it’s the rule.” If she says no, the date is essentially over. Why are you wasting time with a girl who won’t at least kiss you? This is assuming you’ve gotten a bit cozy with her first, preferably with some manual escalation and certainly with proximity. The make-out is pretty much your turning point; once you get it, that weird first-date awkwardness usually will disappear.
3. Sexualize. Not just bring up all things sexual (which you should’ve already been doing through your text game), but set the sexual frame. Meaning, reward her for being impulsive, affectionate, open-minded and so on. I believe this is called sexual framing, but I’ve always called it sexualization.
4. Keep her BT up. It’s possible to make out with a girl running cold, dry comfort, but I’d save that shit for after the make-out. Leading up to it, keep the vibe fun and exciting. Plenty of humor, teasing, banter.

Sex may happen on the first date, or it may not. It’s up to you if you want to pursue that girl if she isn’t putting out on the second or third date. My belief is that if all lights are green and she just needs more time, I give her the benefit of the doubt and keep things smoldering. It’s a balancing act between pushing and leading: if you push her too hard it may backfire as you’ll appear needy; if you lead she may not follow. So find that balance each girl requires, and guide things towards the endgame.

Relationships and nasty shit

2010-02-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

I've been reading an excellent book on sex currently called Sex God Method by Dan Rose. There's just not enough material on sex in the PU literature for some reason, and this one covers everything from when to change sexual positions to how to create mLTRs.

I posted something on paradigms a week ago. Before I got into the community, my paradigm was that most girls want exclusivity, and that what draws them into this revolves around what a great guy you are. You know the shit: he treats her like a gentleman, his family likes her, he takes her on fun vacations, he spends a ton of cash on her.

Since being in the community, I've shifted into a new paradigm. Girls mostly DON'T want exclusivity right off the bat. Maybe a few months in, but for the most part, nearly all girls have been very clear that they aren't looking for anything heavy or too involved. Many are in fact receptive to and encouraging of polygamy. The less you rely on a girl emotionally, the less obligation to you she feels, at least early on. That was the first thing to surprise me.

Second, it isn't your credit card or your magic tricks or your job which are usually gonna get a girl interested in a LTR with you, nor sustain it once you get it. It boils down to one main ingredient:

Being really good at fucking.

You can be the best boyfriend on every other level, but if you suck in bed, she’ll be miserable. Sometimes you can skate by in a dysfunctional relationship if she’s getting enough emotional nourishment from drama and whatnot. But in a healthy LTR, you want the sex to be really good for her. Sex will be the most reliable and potent currency you’ll possess to obtain and maintain LTRs.

Rose talks about 4 pillars: dominance, emotion, variety and immersion. To this I’d add that when I’m talking sexual to a girl or having sex, she gets that most of what I’m doing is trying to give her the best sex she’s had. So having a value-giving mindset is the foundation to all of this. Being in it solely for your ego or for self-gratification will typically result in shitty sex in the long run.

Let me break it down.

Dominance may not come naturally to some (it didn’t for me at first), but it’s essential. David Deida doesn’t say 100% of women want to be dominated, but the number is high enough that you should assume every girl you interact with wants to be with a dominant man. Evolution has selected this desire. How to be dominant is something you can try to fake until it’s internalized, and may include grabbing her and her possessions, giving her commands, and using sexually charged language.

Women are emotional beings. Understanding how a woman’s mind works is key to seducing her. If you want girls to have great sex, being a good technician in bed is far less important than arousing her emotions. But beyond that, if you want women to fall in love with you, you need to embrace and express your own emotions. If you stifle them, the sex will suffer.

Variety means switching things up. Be dominant one moment, tender another, change sexual positions, go down on her in the middle of sex, pull out unexpectedly, etc. Doing the same routine every night leads to a bad sex life.

Immersion involves being totally present with a woman. Shut out negative self-talk, stop planning out what to do next, don’t fantasize about other things, don’t think about things you need to do tomorrow. Women can sense when you are not completely there in bed with them, and they lose arousal. Conversely, when you’re totally immersed in the experience, she will be too, and the sex will be at its best.

So here’s the problem. If you suck in bed, you’ll try to make up for it in other ways. You’ll be the guy who buys her shit, or always supplicates to her, or goes out of his way for even a drop of affection. This behavior makes her question your abilities. If you make a girl work for sex, she will realize you’re worth the effort because you’ve got skills; the Latina MILF I see now drives sometimes 2 hours to see me - once or twice a week - because I take care of her needs.

Getting to that point is partly inner game and partly your abilities. Inner game issues include you think yourself unworthy of fucking hot girls. Or maybe you’re worried about dick size, or your physique, or whatever. Even without saying anything, your feelings of inferiority and intimidation will turn her off. And before you know it, you’re chasing her for sex and not vice versa.

If it’s your abilities that are deficient, then work on this aspect. I personally had crappy knowledge of female anatomy and orgasm. Most guys muddle their way through relationships without getting honest feedback from their women, and then fill in the gaps by watching porn.

Even being in my late 30s and having what I thought was a solid education on the subject, I realized I knew very little. Therefore, I sought out reliable sources on how to please women, and I made myself into a sex machine. By acquiring an understanding, I improved my competence at sex, and hence my confidence went through the roof. So go out and read up on anything and everything you can. Basic techniques, how to talk dirty, different kinds of female orgasms, fetishes, all that. Demonstrate to women (without bragging, of course), that you not only know your shit and can prove it, but that you’re open-minded and non-judgmental.

It’s important to set the seductive frame early when you meet a girl: you’re there to fuck her, not to make nice or to entertain her. Along these lines, tailor your day 2 to give her this information as quickly and powerfully as you can. Whenever I have a dinner date or take a chick to a movie as a day 2, she almost always loses interest and there’s never a day 3. Instead, if I take her to a bar and try to fuck her that night, even if unsuccessful, there will always be interest in another date. Don’t push her if she’s not ready, but let her feel that you are there for sex, and you’re ready and willing to deliver when the time is right.

Paradigms

2010-02-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

A paradigm is defined as a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality. I was talking to an Indian chick last week, and she thought it was absolutely unacceptable that some strange guy in a bar was talking to her. In her paradigm, talking to strangers in bars is out of the question. Pure explained to me that like other Asians, there is a cultural reason behind this paradigm.

In the community, we talk about limiting beliefs. Let’s say I believe that tall guys get more and better-looking tail than short guys. This, some would say, is a limiting belief, because it is an internal dialogue that might stop me from going after hot girls. On the contrary, when I put on shoe lifts and my success goes up, that belief becomes an enabling one. So because this same belief can be interpreted as limiting or enabling, let’s side-step this judgment call. In either case, we can agree I have a paradigm that includes a belief about height.

Some girls you game will have deeply entrenched paradigms. A woman who is happily married may find it unacceptable to date other men. This is her firmly held paradigm. Then it’s up to you the player to decide if you want to try to work within and against her paradigm, or move on.

Of course, that’s an extreme case. Other paradigms include the belief that the man should pay for everything, or that the man should always lead in the interaction, or that you shouldn’t have sex on the first date, or that you shouldn’t date outside your race.

You may choose to accept a woman’s paradigm, or you may try to challenge it. I believe that a man should always lead, and I’m ok with women who maintain a similar paradigm. I am not, however, okay with the paradigm that sex on the first date is wrong; whenever a girl demonstrates this paradigm, I will always try to challenge it.

This brings us to paradigm shifts. Before Einstein introduced his concepts, there was a belief in physics that we had learned all we would ever learn. With Einstein came a huge shift in thinking. The opposite is paradigm paralysis, where you are unable to make a shift in your beliefs and so you get stuck in the same thought process. Which leads us back to limiting beliefs; a lot of new guys in the community suffer from paradigm paralysis. “I’m not good-looking enough,” “I’m too old,” “I don’t have enough money.”

And yes, we sometimes forget that girls also have limiting beliefs and suffer from paradigm paralysis. Probably the most notable case is ASD, her set of beliefs that if she acts too aggressively, society will deem her a slut. And so she doesn’t pursue what she wants sexually out of fear of being stigmatized. If you’ve gamed cougars you may find that these women often have undergone a shift, and no longer suffer from paralysis. We’ll get back to cougars in a sec.

Some girls may subscribe to a given paradigm, but underneath that is a latent paradigm. When you cause a shift in her beliefs, you cause that latent paradigm to rise to the surface. Many times that initial set of beliefs is what’s called the dominant paradigm, which is a set of beliefs commonly held by a particular group. An example may be when a group of girls rolls into a club, they have an unspoken contract that they’ll all leave together. The dominant paradigm in that group is that going home with a strange guy is unacceptable.

Alright, so what does all this mean? When you meet a girl who holds a paradigm that is not in alignment with your own, you will make the determination as to whether you want to induce a shift or bring to the surface a latent paradigm.

In many cases, trying to induce a shift is simply not worth it. The girl has such paralysis that a shift will be nearly impossible, or you may have to compromise your integrity in order to get there.

In other cases, that paradigm is very superficial, and the latent views are simmering just below the surface. In these cases, with the right game (and your own positive assumptions), you can induce a shift. An example includes shit tests, such as the classic, “You can come in, but we’re not having sex tonight.” To the trained ear, the latent paradigms can be recognized and elicited.

So let’s go back to the cougar. What has caused her shift? She now goes out, meets a guy she wants to bang, and aggressively pursues him. She may open him, do much of the escalation, drop plenty of explicit suggestions, and contact him the next day.

In my opinion, the cause of the shift has to do with relative value. Most women begin to lose value after around age 30. Her appearances start to diminish and she notices she gets hit on less. On top of this, her sex drive starts to peak during her mid-30s. So the only way she can satiate her desires is to step up her game. She must undergo a paradigm shift to get what she wants out of the sexual market.

Value can be measured in many ways: money, status, looks, preselection, humor. As you make yourself more valuable to women, you will become better able to induce paradigm shifts. What constitutes a valuable man is something we can hotly debate, but in my opinion, it mostly involves a combination of his physical attractiveness and his ability to work with her emotional states. There are other esoteric factors like pheromones and game.

In the end, all you can do is make yourself as valuable as possible. We can run through the list: social intelligence, calibration, your subcoms, height, build, escalation, charisma, so on. There is some potential for creating a value gradient by trying to lower the girl’s (e.g. negs), but this is less reliable. Hot women who get hit on a ton typically aren’t too phased by your negs; this may be good gravy, but the real meat is your own intrinsic value as a man. Plus, if you become too concerned about relative value, you find yourself in a reactive mindset. You are constantly analyzing her value and then trying to calculate your own value relative to hers.

Aside from becoming a valuable man, this has much to do with your ability to telegraph your value effectively to women. Handing a girl your resume will not suffice. She needs to feel that you are of high value. Which is why we keep getting back to the importance of making an emotional connection with women. That connection will serve as the conduit through which you will use your value to leverage her paradigm shift.

Jackson Pollock and Pick-up

2010-02-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

We were having this passionate discussion at 7 Grand last week, my date and I, about our favorite artists. When I told her who I thought was the greatest contemporary artist, she totally understood: Jackson Pollock.

To look at the art of Pollock, you may not understand or appreciate what the fuck he was all about. But the fact is, he not only created a new style of art, but applied something nobody had previously done. Physicality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

The guy stood over his canvas which he laid out on the floor, and splattered, dripped and poured liquid paint over it. Til then, artists used easels and applied the paint with a brush.

Do you get it now?

No? Ok, let me explain. Or better yet, let’s allow Pollock to explain:

“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”

“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

Wow, sound familiar? When I’m in field, I immerse myself in the experience, get out of my head, become totally present with the girl. I am not standing back, looking at things with a distant or objective eye, trying to micromanage my interaction. Pollock’s approach to painting is about the closest correlation you can get between art and being “in state.”

He worked through his entire body to create his art, not just his fingers and wrists. The dribblings you see are a direct manifestation of what he was doing with his entire body when the paint went air-borne. He – his body – went into his art. In a word, he was fully present with his canvas.

I am not a skier or surfer, but I’m told it’s very much the same. You must go with the flow, making small adjustments as needed, but essentially reacting from your core moment by moment.

So, as amazing as this state sounds, lots of guys have trouble getting there in field. I was one of them. My head was wall-to-wall noise, and it took a great deal of work to get to a place of being fully present without all that distracting static. Of course, my mind still wanders, but things are a billion times better now and this is perceptible by women.

The key, besides reading stuff by Tolle and watching the Blueprint, was getting in touch with my body. Which brings me to my main point: get your ass off the sofa and get the fuck in shape.

Women like physically attractive men. We can debate this point til the cows come home, but it’s my experience that all things being equal, most girls would rather fuck a hot dude. Some things you can alter or improve, some you can’t. Build is one thing you can get under control, through diet and going to the gym.

But piling on muscles will only get you so far. I have a really messed up spine, so I’ve always been very conservative with my work-out routine. Though I had nice pecs and gluts, I had the flexibility of a scarecrow. This was evident in the way I walked, the way I moved, and yes the way I fucked.

When a dude moves smoothly at the hips, has great posture, is centered, my theory is women will translate that into how he’ll perform in bed. If he’s rigid and locked up when he walks, he’ll probably be the same way when he’s banging her.

Bottom line, you can’t ignore flexibility. To address this, I got myself into yoga. A couple times a week I took a class, and then did the same routine at home. My chest stretched back, my spine was erect, my hips were less tight.

Still, I felt deficient. There was resistance somewhere. A block. So I kept searching, until I discovered mixed martial arts (MMA).

You can build your body up, you can acquire amazing flexibility, but you still are missing several important ingredients. Guys who practice MMA are centered and grounded. Still, they are loose, letting forces move through their legs and core and out their arms. MMA aims to eliminate any physical resistance to energy, letting everything flow.

And so, we get back to Jackson Pollock. It all comes down to getting rid of all that resistance and simply being present, moving around obstacles like water around rocks, allowing for “pure harmony, an easy give and take.” Both in your head and in your body.