Month: August 2013

Yesterday, I went to get a haircut after months of letting it grow out from a style that was completely short. I had never been to this particular place before and there was a line forming at the front desk due to problems with the credit card processing. I sat in line for a few minutes feeling a bit irritated about the wait, not really wanting to talk, and simply wishing that I could get my hair cut and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. While I waited, one of the women who worked there tried to make the usual customer service banter with me and my mood in that moment completely showed. In my head, I said to myself, that she now thinks that I’m a sullen asshole and just knew that she was going to be the one assigned to cut my hair.  Sure enough that is what happened.

Now, this type of situation can be a common occurrence for me when I’m in a more introverted mood. People around me perceive me to be angry or shy or whatever, due to the look that I have on my face, which to me feels completely neutral but other people don’t take it that way. When I have gone out to socialize in the past, I have experimented with trying to induce a certain perception of myself for other people. A few times, I even went out with the intent of making myself out to be more awkward or aloof, and was laughing like crazy on the inside at the reactions that I got. Yesterday, I decided to try and turn around the initial perception that she had of me being sullen and angry and experienced some good success. From the time I sat down in the chair, I tried to embrace the awkwardness and made it to be a running joke between us. I recognized that my voice was weak and un-emotive, so I pushed through anyways and delivered every comment or joke that I could, even if it was completely deadpan. You know what? It worked, we were both laughing the entire time, and she even started opening up about stupid customers and things she hated about the job. She told me that I was ‘really good at sarcasm’ and believe me it’s always preferable to be perceived as a sarcastic asshole as opposed to a sullen one.

This little interaction got me thinking a lot about perception and how it shapes our lives and the kinds of opportunities it can lead to or shut us out of. I know that personally and for many other guys, the perception of who they are hinders the reality of who they actually are. For instance, a guy who is perceived as nerdy will get stereotyped and put into a certain category of social value if he does nothing to fight against that perception. It is interesting that what often ends up happening with these guys is that they feel that ‘being themselves’ is a strategy that has failed them in being popular socially and landing dates with women and so they feel the need to attempt to make themselves over in someone else’s image. They want to be the cool guy.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with you. Seriously, you need to understand that this is a fact…there is nothing wrong with you. Beyond the internal battle you may be waging against yourself in your own my there is also the level of how other people perceive who you are. It’s akin to basic marketing, if you were to take identical soda and place one in a Coca-Cola bottle and another in some generic bottle, the soda in the Coca-Cola bottle will be perceived to have higher value. Why? Years and years of marketing and product placement have created ideals and warm feelings toward the Coca-Cola brand while no feelings have been created for the generic brand, it’s just perceived as inferior. The truth is that they are both just carbonated sugar water.

Now you’re not a product but there definitely is a bit of selling that goes on socially. Whether it is something that is shallow or not, it is still a fact of life that you will be judged by other people based on what you present to them. So, why does the ‘nerdy’ guy who likes video games and reading books not get laid? Is it specifically because he enjoys those activities? Nope. Millions of people play video games either on systems or on their phones and still enjoy an active social and sex life. Reading never hindered me, I actually started reading more as I got better at talking to women and if anything it only helped me express myself more clearly and be more engaging in conversation. Besides, plenty of gorgeous women love to read. The problem the nerdy guy actually faces and one that I had to work my way through until I understood was one of perception.

Make an honest assessment of yourself. What do people perceive you as? Are you out of shape? Do your clothes fit? Are they even a good style on you? When you talk to people do they perceive you as awkward? As a timid guy? Do you get the perception that you are a sullen asshole like I do sometimes? Haha. You don’t have to tear yourself down and declare that you’re a hopeless case, just be honest about areas that you could improve upon. I won’t lie and say that looks don’t matter at all, they do matter, but the extent is pretty flexible. The good thing is that people are fickle, so people can alter their perceptions about you fairly quickly. The problem with not having good looks is a short-term one in the interaction, as you can get rejected quickly based on that alone. However, your confidence and personality can often keep you in the game long enough which is why you will see guys who aren’t all that attractive physically with hot women. Working on your looks by getting into shape, dressing better, and have good grooming is like building your resume, it will get your foot in the door and sometimes it will get you the job on the spot.

A good way to fight back against negative or suboptimal perceptions about who you are is to push your boundaries and develop new interests. It is hard to pigeonhole or stereotype someone as one thing when he is involved in many different interests. Suddenly, you are no longer just the perception of a nerd or loser, you’re the guy who trains for triathlons, does volunteer work, and goes to parties on the weekends. It’s just like when a comedian tries acting in movies, at first people won’t take him seriously, but once they see that he can act, he becomes an actor and comedian. It shows that you are a well-rounded person and you have much more depth than what people originally assumed about you.

Okay, so what if you make changes to your exterior self and have gone out and tried to be more outgoing, etc. The problem then, in this situation, is that your negative attributes are outweighing the positive ones you possess. Meaning that while you are being yourself, your self kinda sucks to be around at this point. You may be smart, kind, and funny but if you’re also whiney, needy, angry, or whatever other trait that is unattractive then you are still going to get lots of bad reactions. Again, you cannot take it personally, these are just areas in which you need to grow. If you’re really needy, then get to the root cause of that neediness and address it. Same thing with any other bad habit or trait, address the problem, don’t be a little bitch and chalk it up to people just not liking you, that is the type of self-fulfilling attitude that will keep people away from you.

While perceptions can be changed quickly, it isn’t always the case that they will be. Sometimes a certain identity is so ingrained within you and in the minds of other people that it can take a longer period of time. So for instance, a guy in high school who is at the bottom of the ladder may not be able to alter all of the perceptions about him before graduation. However, he can certainly make inroads, at least within his own mind and physical body even if the social aspect of his life is still lagging behind. Ultimately, high school doesn’t mean anything, unless a person identifies with that perception of who they were within that teenage hierarchy. If you’re one of those guys in high school now and you’re reading this, just hang in there. You have to hold yourself up and make positive changes in your life in the face of adversity, bullying, and just general garbage that you put up with daily. I’ve been there too, what I did was to start working on myself. I started with the physical by lifting weights and getting into better shape which led to strengthening myself mentally with books. The external world can be terrible sometimes but that internal strength needs to be harnessed to carry you through towards better times.

Perceptions are kind of ridiculous sometimes but you really can’t take them to heart. I’ve gone to clubs by myself at times and had to work through the initial perception that I was some creep, sometimes it worked and others my mindset did me no favors. I’ve also gone out and had a few girls close to me and having a good time with me, which helped to attract other women. In either case, I’m the exact same person, it’s just that the external society will place a label on you, regardless of its validity. You have the power to rip that label off and be exactly who you are and show off all the great traits that you possess, it just is something that you must accept as a challenge and make a conscious effort to change. Be patient and try to address your weaknesses while not taking the labels personally or too seriously. I’ve been accepted and rejected and everything in between as will you if you push yourself. The question is will you accept the perceptions about you as something set in stone or just mere misunderstandings that need to be corrected.

I have been really trying to evolve and change as a person for the past few years and in many ways I have successfully done so. For instance, I fell into a deep depression about three years ago that crippled me physically, psychologically, and emotionally. This was one of the defining times of my life thus far because I had a choice to make, either forge a new path towards growth or continue to follow the same path spiral downwardly until there was nothing left. I decided that I was going to take the more difficult path and pull myself towards trying to grow as a person and even more then that I decided that I was going to try and help others to do the same, even if I failed personally.

The idea of making positive changes in your life and pushing yourself to grow as a person is all well and good but it is also a very difficult thing to do in terms of application. For years you have been programmed by society, your family, friends, and even by yourself to adopt certain habits, attitudes, and ways of thinking regardless of whether or not they are useful or beneficial. So, if you’re a person that needs to lose weight in order to regain your health, it will often go far beyond just eating less and exercising more. There is an emotional attachment to certain foods, there are social activities that you enjoy with others that lead to unhealthy behavior, there are daily routines that clobber your advancement at every opportunity.

For my own life, I have been recently tracking different behaviors through journaling and also by just keeping tabs in my own mind and trying to effectively measure their impacts on my mental health and towards my own growth. With this cataloging of my life I have been able to pinpoint several behaviors or activities that tend to skew the type of results I am trying to achieve towards the negative. It wasn’t really a surprise to me that most of these things seem fairly minor in their own essence but on a large scale they can have a profound impact.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that my productivity and mood is less directly tied to how much I sleep versus the hours I keep. Meaning that on a night where I get only 5 hours of sleep, while I may not be as sharp, I can still get everything that I want done that day if I wake before 8 AM. However, if I wake up at 10 AM or later not only does my productivity tumble but also my mood and the bad habits start to creep in.

Why would the few extra hours make that much of a difference? It has to do with the remnants of my old schedule of going to class in the mornings and work through the afternoon. I still work the job that was necessary while in school in order to enroll in all of the classes that I needed to take. However, now that the classes no longer exist in my life the job still does and it is not optimal for me. I haven’t kept the consistency of getting up early, which would allow me to exercise while at peak motivation or to read while I have the most energy in the morning or to get done whatever else I need to. It becomes easy to stay up late and watch a movie or interesting documentary because there is no direct imperative to get up and start my day. Getting back into the habit of early rising would allow me to start my day off with a positive build and establish the mindset necessary to truly make change.

Another thing that I noticed about time is my lack of a set schedule for certain things like writing. I’ve always tended towards being the writer who has to be in the flow to write instead of sitting down and getting it done. The problem with that method is obviously the fact that the inspiration to write 5,000 words isn’t always there but the ability to do so is. I had no intentions of writing this post today or even at all but my tracking of my life and habits made me realize that this is what it is going to take for me to get things done. This can be a really bad habit to get into because you are only doing things when you ‘feel’ like doing them instead of doing the daily grind and forcing them into habit, which is the only way you are going to improve. On the days, where my lack of planning met with a late start to my day, it was essentially pointless for me to get out of bed. Not only did I not get anything done but my eating habits were garbage and my mental clarity sucked.

There are other things that I definitely noticed that have been holding me back from reaching that next level of growth and this is something that I expected when I started down this path. I can’t really beat myself up about it because a few years ago I was at rock bottom in every single aspect of my life, so it is only natural that I run into obstacles on my ascent and eventually find myself getting stuck on plateaus. If you are currently trying to achieve a specific goal or make big changes in your life, I encourage you to start cataloguing all of your daily habits for a few weeks and see what are the little habits and patterns in your life that are really holding you back. It’s okay if you cannot change them at first, what is most important is that you recognize that they exist and then you can decide on a plan of attack. For example, my sleeping habits have always been extreme my whole life and so I usually have to force myself to get up early for a few days in a row regardless of how late I stayed up the night before. The change itself isn’t usually fun to make but breaking out of these cycles helps to create a tremendous amount of opportunity for growth.

Could you go hard for a month? I mean, choose a new habit you wish to adopt, and make it happen for 30 days straight? Sure, you can. You might already watch TV or play video games every day, so why couldn’t you try something else? If you want to get better with women, you’re going to need to accumulate experience in order to dissolve your old limiting beliefs and help install new ones. The problem with this is that if your currently social life only has you interacting with women once a month or not at all then any gains you see will be very minimal indeed.

I remember when I first started going out with the intention of getting better with women, I would go out on Saturday nights, and I made that a habit that I stuck with. Was it worth it? Yes, I gained valuable insight on what I needed to improve and how to overcome my fears. However, once a week wasn’t giving me enough feedback so I upped it to every Thursday and Saturday nights to coincide with the most popular club nights for college students and allow me to take the lessons I learned on Thursday, and try to implement them on Saturday night. I did this for a long time and gradually got better but the biggest change I noticed was when I would go out 3 or 4 nights in a row, I started to develop a rhythm.

These extra days allowed me to feel more comfortable in the nightclub type environments, which led me to relax and have better interactions with girls. I never did a full month of going out, probably because I established the fundamentals over a longer stretch of time, but I do see a value in trying it out due to the rapid gains you can experience from it.  This is not to say that in thirty days you will have mastered social interactions or to even say that you’ll have one phone number at the end of the experience. However, if you can stick it out for thirty days and approach women then you will definitely have broken down some previous mental barriers that you once held, which is a great starting point. From there, you can obviously expand your improvements physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, etc. but this is a great way to break down the wall that currently blocks you and build the life you want in its place.

Right now, I feel myself needing better mental clarity and discipline in my life because I am sort of overloaded with things I need to get done. A busy schedule can introduce all kinds of negative habits that can nest if you don’t uproot them. For instance, my goals for the next thirty days are to exercise and mediate each day. Simple goals, right? Yes, but they lead to many benefits that I value highly. So far my sleep has improved which leads me to wake up earlier, which leads to better food choices, and getting more work done. My mind is much clearer than it has been of late and I feel like I have more energy also.

The transition into these daily habits was fairly easy for me to accomplish because I already did mediate and workout at least a few times each week but I wanted to try a boot camp like approach with both of them in order to accelerate the mental and physical benefits. Increasing my weight training for example from two or three days a week to five wasn’t that bad because I didn’t have to deal with the overwhelming soreness of going from zero to five, which would have left me exhausted. These same ideas also apply towards your social development, and whether you do a full month or stretch it out for six straight weeks of going out, the gains you will see in that amount of time should be pretty impressive.

30 days of sustained effort isn’t a cure-all and at the end you won’t be miles ahead of where you were but you definitely will be better. People tend to fail in their long term goals for various reasons like lack of planning, but also it is often because they try to take on too many new things at once. For instance, when trying to lose weight people may begin to exercise more and eat less, which is good for trying to induce the weight loss. However, while they do this they also ignore the triggers in their environment that causes them to overeat and fail to plan in detail when they are going to work out and how to make the transition from their current life to the one they want. In essence, they are trying to forge a new lifestyle without fully giving up the other one and a house divided obviously cannot stand.

The way around such a problem is to either use overwhelming force and snuff out the problem for good or to slowly introduce new habits to sort of establish a beachhead and transition relatively easily. This is where the 30 days comes in. If you are trying to get in shape, then the slower method would involve goals of establish a 3 day per week workout routine and the gradual elimination of unhealthy foods from your diet. So, you would find a workout routine and stick with that program 3 days per week for a month, which allows your muscles to adjust to the workload and cause a minimal amount of disruption to your life. Meanwhile, your dietary changes might include introducing a healthy breakfast each morning for the first week, while the rest of your diet remains the same. In the second week, you could make it a bit better by elimination soda, beer, and other sugary drinks. You could continue this for a full four weeks and you would have gone from no exercise during the previous month to 12 exercise sessions during your initial 30 days of change. You would have gone from a poor diet, to one that at least had a healthy breakfast, decrease or elimination of soft drinks/alcohol, and the possible introduction of other healthy habits. You haven’t completely transformed your life but you have made inroads and taught yourself what it takes to introduce change.

The idea for a focused month of change is to essentially build a bridge from one version of you to an improved version of you.  The second method for accomplishing this is that of overwhelming force. This is the idea of immersing yourself into the goal that you have and maximizing the benefits of doing so. This method is sort of liking buying a new video game and playing the hell out of it for some period of time. That game will consume your free time but by the end of a month you’ve already developed some sufficient skills.

Let’s take that idea and say that your goal now is to go from a video game nerd to being a very social person who can pick up women. The 30 days would be intense but also could have a profound impact on your life if tackled correctly. This change could include establishing an exercise routine, stopping the video games and excessive TV watching, listening to motivational podcasts or books on tape during exercise or while driving, reading articles about socializing and pick up every day to reinforce your goals, dressing better, going out every single night, and basically going out of your way each day to be social.

That’s a lot of stuff, right? The great thing about it though, is you will establish a great rhythm each day and will be super focused and motivated. This method of overwhelming your life with positive change can allow you to make super leaps in your level of skill and your ability to break bad habits. The weakness in this method is that because it is so tough and overwhelming in your life, it can be harder to stick to and you run the risk of slipping right back into old habits if you happen to have a bad day. It is said that the easiest way to learn a language is to move to a country and immerse yourself in study of the language and the culture because in order to get by in that foreign land you had better learn how to communicate, at least on a basic level. You have to succeed at learning and so you do. Improving yourself socially is different in that you have to make yourself go out and improve, you can always say screw it, and stay home that night. You have the option to stay the same socially, one that is much more difficult to choose in the case of moving to another country and not learning the language.

Total immersion would be that complete dedication towards growth in every aspect of your life. However, immersion can be done on a smaller scale and in many cases it would probably work out for the best. Trying to do so much at once is overwhelming for your bad habits but it is also overwhelming for yourself. Improving yourself socially so that you can go out and attract women is a great goal to have and one that will work well for 30 day challenges. Set the goal of going out for 30 days in a row and approaching 5 women. That’s 150 women you will have talked to in a month (read: How to Start a Conversation with Girls), which is not bad at all, but it is unfocused.

A better goal would be more finely tuned. I would suggest that each day you try and set aside an hour or two in which you just read articles about approaching and picking up women as well as books on ego and self-esteem. That way you will prime yourself mentally each day and ingrain what you want to achieve in your head. Secondly, you still go out each night and approach 5 women, but you focus on one thing during each approach and conversation. So, for instance during the first week you would have conversations but focus on have a strong voice and good tonality, to help rid yourself of an underwhelming voice. You would be reading about all of these pick up theories and methods for approaching women but in practice you would focus on one or a few basic things. That first month might be spent breaking down your fear of approaching, learning to start a conversation, and having a strong voice and eye contact. It doesn’t matter if you get with any girls because you are learning the fundamentals of socializing with women and getting comfortable in these environments.

If you want to improve socially or improve any other aspect of your life plan out an initial 30 days of changing your current habits and establishing new ones. They don’t always have to be completely life-altering in a single fell swoop but taking positive steps to change can help to establish a new path in life and help you to get out of a boring rut or whatever sorry state you may find yourself in. Consistency is the key to getting better physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially, so don’t discount something small like saying “Hello” to a girl if you are socially anxious or clueless because that is what will get your foot in the door towards your new life. You are responsible for continuing your growth and advancing to higher levels and greater challenges but focusing yourself for just 30 days can pay untold dividends in the long run. The question is will you make it happen?

Everyone has different sets of standards for various areas in their lives but often times it seems that many guys only have two sets of standards when interacting with women:

1. She is hot.
2. She’s the best that I can do.

This kind of mindset can be killer when you are approaching women for many reasons. First, if your only criteria for approaching a girl is that she is hot, as soon as you’ve approached her the screening is done, and she automatically qualifies. This leads to you not really paying attention to who she is, which leads to not forging a connection, which just makes it harder on your chances of getting the girl to go out with you or whatever. Also, the interaction will shift from one of expression and exploration (which I wrote about here) to one in which you are basically selling yourself and trying to prove yourself worthy to her. Why shouldn’t she be demonstrating the ideal attributes you would like a woman to have?

On the flipside of the girl qualifying to be in your life by the virtue of her physical appearance alone, there is the train of thought that you should take what you can get instead of trying for what you want. In this mindset, there are defined and unbreakable leagues of people ranked based on their physical appearance alone. This is a horseshit way to look at human interaction. Yes, looks can help determine how you are treated but the negative attitude and self-defeating belief cycles only serve to reinforce these outcomes. I remember back in school, when I was a pretty chubby kid, learning after the fact that certain girls had liked me when we had classes together. At the time, this sort of blew my mind because I thought that I wasn’t good looking enough to land these cute girls but it turns out they liked me for my personality and those traits made me appear more attractive.

The fact of the matter is that improving your style, getting in better shape, and having a kick ass life are all going to improve your chances with landing your ideal girl. However, these improvements are all linked to traits that women find attractive: confidence, passion, and drive. Wearing a nice shirt isn’t going to help much if you’re a sad guy walking around the club. It will however, help to show off your physical features nicely, which can enhance your attractiveness.

Your interactions with women are almost completely random and the more women you talk to the more you will notice this to be the case. Some love you, some hate you, others will be indifferent, and it won’t necessarily fall into perfect categories based on their looks. I’ve been dissed by ugly chicks and have gotten hotter girls, it really is completely random with a large sample size. This is why it is important to not put so much stock in your interactions with women. Yes, you should learn from glaring mistakes, especially and how you are coming across but you need to learn to steady yourself with the highs and lows.

The reason that I am writing about having standards with women is that when you improve how you are presenting yourself and getting better at socializing it is easy to get burnt out from chasing the wrong things. At first, it is exciting to get some attention from a hot girl and hook up with them but it soon gets old and you can get bitter against all women because you didn’t screen for the right women. That’s what happened to me, I had physical standards but I let girls get away with too much and kept things going with girls who had noticeable bad habits and qualities about them. The fun I was originally having turned sour, and I really started avoiding having any real relationships with women.

Screening is important because it allows you to avoid becoming needy and focus on the interaction instead of how can I sleep with the girl, which in turn leads to better conversations and an abundance of the types of girls that you actually want to meet. I want to add that the screening I’m talking about is not about blowing girls off at the first sign of a trivial physical flaw or something along those lines. Rather, it is about finding the type of traits both physically and in their personalities that you feel you really want in a woman. It’s not about finding perfection but it is about inviting abundance into your life and not getting so hung up on what every single woman thinks of you.