Monthly Archives: January 2007

Right Now! What Do You Want?

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Sexy goalsMy last post was about the importance of knowing what you want when starting a dating relationship. ‘Honour’ made an interesting comment on this post, “the hard part is how do you figure out what you want”. Well, I want to give you some guidance on how to figure this out.

Long life goals are good. They can give you vision and purpose. They don’t always help you figure out short term goals though. So, rather than ask yourself, “what do I want?”, ask yourself, “what do I want right now?” For example, a lot of men I talk to say that they eventually want to meet a really great woman and settle down with her. This is a great long term goal. This, however, does not necessarily lend itself to short term action. You may eventually want to find a great woman, but may feel that you want a lot more general dating experience. A short term, right-now goal that addresses this might be to casually date 3 women. Now, you know what you want right now.

By thinking in terms of what you want right now, this frees you from the worry about if this is really the right thing, or if you are making the right decision. You can change what you want right now all the time. You can decide tomorrow what you want, and do the same again the next day. If your long term goal is to settle down with a great woman, that doesn’t mean that has to be your short term goal as well. If you eventually want to date a lot of women, you may decide that right now you just want one girlfriend, to get the experience of being in a relationship.

There is no right or wrong answer.

You can take this further, and apply this idea to every woman you meet. If you meet a woman out at a bar, or out grocery shopping, or at a party, take a moment to ask yourself, “what do I want right now with this woman?” It doesn’t have to be the same thing for every woman. You may want something fun, casual, and physical with one woman, and a close, caring, intimate relationship with another.

Here is a way that I figure out what I want right now. I imagine it. I picture it. I imagine the type of relationship I want to have a with a woman. Then I picture another one. Then another one. Chances are, one of these will stick out to you. You will know which one. Now, here is a very important step to this. Forget about what other people think. It is really easy to get caught up in this pattern of “proving yourself” by dating a lot of chicks, or getting a lot of “notches on the belt”, or proving that you are a good “pickup artist”. This should be informed by one thing and one thing only. What you really want for yourself.

I hope this helps. I have to give credit to Lance of PickUp 101 for this idea. I first heard it verbalized by him, and it became a very useful tool for me.

Do You Know What You Want?

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Know what you want!Do you know what you want?

Do you know how you want a relationship to be? Do you know how often you would want to see the girl? What kind of dates you go on? How long before you have sex? Do you know how you want the girls you date to behave? What you want them to do for you?

Take a look inside yourself. It is very important to know these things.

More importantly than knowing these things, when you are dating a woman, put the importance of these criteria ahead of whether or not she likes you. This might seem a little counter intuitive. A man usually get into a rut with a girl he is dating by thinking “what can I do to make sure she likes me?” This kind of thinking is actually counter productive. I have talked to a lot of women who say they want a man that knows what he wants. You know why? It is confident.

When you proceed based on what you want, you have direction, and a plan. The next step is to follow that plan as closely as possible. If you are the kind of man that likes to get alone with a girl on a first date in a romantic place and make out with her, meet her at a bar in the Mission for a quick drink then go for a walk to Dolores Park (or the equivalent in your city). If you like to have sex on a first or second date, know in your head how and where this is going to happen.

Now, it doesn’t matter if everything goes according to plan. That is completely besides the point. The important thing is to actually know what you want, and you have a direction that you want to take things. A lot of men don’t really actually know what they want from a dating relationship, and they fumble around things, and make excuses like, “well, I want to spend some time getting to know her.” Meanwhile, deep down they want to be, well, doing something else. If you actually do want to just get to know her, that is fine. Just understand that that is what you want, and proceed confidently in that direction.

The only thing you can lose from this is a relationship that isn’t what you want anyway.

Warning! Women May Impede Business

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Smokin'I went into the bank today to sit down with a banker and get a couple questions answered about business bank accounts. Shouldn’t take long, about five minutes. Besides, I had some other errands to run. I have to get ink for my printer, check out laptop computers…

But then I sat down with my banker, and she was cute. Like, really cute. My five minutes of questions turned into a one hour conversation. We talked about the usual; dating, different cultures, and hot lesbian action.

I usually just don’t date the women that serve me professionally, like bartenders, bus drivers, bankers, and the like. I’d rather have a cute banker that loves me than an eventual ex-girlfriend that doesn’t. Hmm… this rule doesn’t make much sense to me right now.

The bad thing, I got none of my other goals accomplished!

You Can Improve With Women

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Guys either think they “got it” or they don’t.

If you are a man that is not successful with women, at some point in your life you have probably seen a guy that IS good with women and just thought, “he’s just got something that I don’t.” It may have been looks and money, or it may not have been. You may have just noticed his charisma and confidence, and felt it was so far beyond what you were.

This is a load of crap. It IS within anyone’s reach. It just may take some work.

Being confident and charismatic is not something you either have or don’t have. It is something you learn or don’t learn. The guys you see that naturally have it just learned it at a young age. You can learn it too, and that is what I am dedicated too. That is why I work at PickUp 101, so for those of us that didn’t have a chance to learn this in our adolescence, we will have a chance now.

I got inspired to write this post because my friend and fellow PickUp 101 instructor Ben emailed me this morning telling me he had a new blog. Ben was my very first student as a PickUp 101 instructor. It was Friday, I was nervous because I had gotten a call asking me to help out as a guest instructor for the weekend and I had no idea what to expect. Lance, the head honcho himself was leading the workshop, and USA Today was there to write an article about our workshops.

I knew what to do, I had been through the program myself, and I had practiced it, made the changes, and achieved success with it. I still had a bit of performance anxiety though. I was assigned to be Ben’s coach for the evening. Now, I was responsible for not only my evening, but Ben’s as well. I still remember walking into Barnone in the Marina that Friday night. Ben rocked the place. To his credit, he had done a lot of work on his own before taking the workshop, so he was already fairly confident and competent with approaching and talking to women. A few little tweaks, and he was unstoppable.

Now I work with him, and can call him a friend.

You see, all of the instructors at PickUp 101 went through the same process that our students do. We have all taken the workshops that we teach, stuck with the material, practiced, and improved who we are.

I have seen it improve my life, as well as the life of many other men. That is why I believe in it.

He's Pushing Her Away From a Relationship

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Last night I talked to a close friend of mine. She wanted some advice about a guy she was dating. They met about three weeks ago on match.com. He’s pushing for a committed, serious relationship. After three weeks.

She is about to run away.

The frustrating thing is that she likes this guy, but he is being very pushy. I know he is probably well intentioned too, he’s not just a prick. At least, not intentionally.

My friend deserves the best. She is cute, sexy, fun, loving, giving, empathetic, and, did I mention, cute and sexy? She would probably really like a relationship with this guy, if he would just RELAX.

What is happening is that he is trying to get her to commit to a relationship, but this is totally the wrong thing to do. I think I know what is going on in his head. He met a really cute girl on match, and now he feels like he has to get her committed as soon as possible so he doesn’t lose her. He probably feels like this is about as good as a girl as he could get, or possibly maybe even a little better than he thinks he can get (he’s probably right).

He is making two mistakes.

First, he is being way too pushy, and expecting way more commitment than is appropriate given the ACTUAL level of involvement they have together. This is pushing her away, and if he keeps it up, he is never gonna get her.

Second, he is wrongfully thinking that once he gets her “commitment” to a relationship, then everything is nice and settled. Way too many people get complacent when they are in relationships.

When a man is in a relationship with a woman, he should constantly be building attraction and building intimacy. Let the amount of attraction and intimacy define the relationship, not some sort of agreement.

Ultimately what this guy needs to do is relax, and give my friend some space to let them get closer over time, not to force it do to his poor ability to create a relationship.

In the end, I gave my friend two course of action that she could follow:

1. Break it off now with this guy, because this kind of behavior is really a red flag. If he is pushy and can’t understand her and the relationship now, how will he understand her in a month? A year?

2. Stay in the relationship, but stick to her guns about the level of commitment she wanted, and tell him he can take it or leave it. Even if it ends badly, she will benefit from the experience and knowledge about men that she will gain from dating this guy.

I wish her the best.

And to you reading this, don’t be like this guy.

Overdoing It

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Talk to the HAND!

So you see some girls in the bar. You walk up to flirt with them.  They ask some question… “Oh my god! You guys are like inquisitive little investigators! You are like ninja investigators that strike out to find the answers you want! I am totally gonna hire you as my ninja assassin strike team and you will be sent into old ladies houses for me to steal their fresh-baked cookies! You are gonna be blue ninja, and you are gonna be pink ninja… but YOU… YOU get to be the argyle ninja because you are the deadliest. Yeah, your outfit is going to be one giant argyle sock with a little slit cut in it for your eyes.”

Wait, where are they going?

“Guys?..”

“guys?..”

“I didn’t… overgame you… did I?”

Overgaming is when you do (or overdo) something and it is kind of weird.

Take the above example. That was a WHOLE lot of playful banter. Say, for the sake of argument, that I unloaded that clip of banter, machine gun style, into a group of women. I would hope they would start laughing and giggling and pawing at me, but if I kept it up they might start to think “well, this is fun and silly, and it makes me laugh, but this guy is kind of weird because all he does is stand there and say all these goofy things to us without stopping”.

What is really going on here is that I am bantering AT them, rather than bantering WITH them, and that is why they give me the “overgamed” response in this hypothetical little situation. You can banter AT a girl for a second, but you better get into a conversation WITH her right after that. A conversation with a girl goes by many names, but we usually refer to it as “vibing” or “rapport”. It can also be banter, but it better be banter with a girl, rather than at her.

I have had banter conversations that go on for a good half hour. The reason that these conversations didn’t end up as overgaming was that we were bantering together. We ended up playing a game that everyone was joining in on. Remember, when banter is really working, it is a two way street. If you are out at a party or something like that it is OK to banter with people a lot. You DON’T want to just hose them down with banter though, because then they will be all soggy. You want to kind of bat the birdie back and forth with banter.

NOTE: This post is a modified version to a response to a question on the PickUp Lounge, the PickUp 101 VIP discussion board.

Your Resolution for the New Year: Start Walking

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Start Walking!It is the time of year for resolutions. A lot of guys who want to improve their lives (especially their LOVE lives) make resolutions around this time. A lot of men look back on their year and see that they want something to change. They are finally going to do the work to make the changes happen.

Now, New Year’s resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. I know it, you know it, and the 1,600 page copy of “War and Peace” that I read the first two pages of (after resolving to read that novel a few years ago) knows it.

I spent this New Year’s with my girl. We talked a bit about resolutions, and I told her I don’t really make any, because I can NEVER keep them. She said that the reason that people often don’t follow through on their resolutions is that they set the bar too high. She told me about a friend who always resolved to “run more”, but never did. Finally, this friend made the resolution that every day, she would put on her running shoes and step outside. This goal is easily achievable, I mean, all you have to do is step outside, right? What happened is that this friend ended up running more that year because the goal was easy to achieve, but more often than not it led to a nice jog.

Here it is, January 2nd, and I started thinking about this idea. I also have thought about one thing that I have noticed. The hardest part of any approach is taking that first step of walking towards a girl you want to hit on. Once you start walking, you don’t think about the nervousness as much, and your mind starts to think about what you are actually going to say.

Everyday, start walking towards a woman that you want to flirt with

Here’s the resolution I suggest for anybody who wants to talk to more women: Everyday, start walking towards a woman that you want to flirt with. That’s it. Resolve that EVERY DAY of this year, you will start walking towards a woman to hit on her. What you do after you start walking isn’t part of this resolution. All you have to do is start walking towards a woman every day. You just might surprise yourself.

The beauty of this resolution is that of and by itself, it is incredibly simple to succeed at. This very simple step, on the other hand, is also the very hardest step to make when looking at it as part of an “attempted pickup”. By looking at it as part of a simple goal to be achieved, you remove it from the context that makes it so nerve-racking.

I know I have to start walking towards some woman I want to flirt with on my way home from work today so I can meet this goal. Now, I know once I start walking I am gonna jump on the chance to flirt with her, and have some fun with it. I hope some of you will join in on this.

Oh, I have one other resolution, to watch all 21 James Bond movies and write up my reviews of them for my web site. I used the gift cards that my sister gave me for Christmas to buy the first two volumes of the complete James Bond collections. I don’t think this resolution will be a problem though :)