Author Archives: Sean Deacon

Leave Me Alone

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Faithful readers, I have a treat, a rare new post.

I got an email question from Sexy Fez (who gets props for having such a snazzy name):

I wanted to ask you a question about dealing with women (and by extension, people in general). I’m an introverted, quiet person who needs some solitude to recharge and can really get lost in his work. Because of it, I’m occasionally unable to give time to a girl. I feel bad about it because I let her down. And yet, my sole purpose in life isn’t just to make a woman happy, there are other goals too that I wish to accomplish and I need to give them dedicated time.

What do you think about this scenario, and what advice would you give? It’s not that I don’t give women time, I just can’t give them time every time that they’re needing it, because I’m busy with my own stuff. You can only say sorry afterwards and makeup so far. I end of up wishing that they too have some private goals to keep them busy.

I’m an introvert too. Big time.

Most days, when I get home from work, I just want to sit around and play Skyrim (yes, I’m a year late to the party, but I just got Skyrim).

I want time to myself. I can’t spend all my time with my lady, I’ll go nuts if I do.

So what to do?

There’s four things that come to mind, numbered here from least helpful to most helpful:

  1. Suck it up and deal with it
  2. Establish expectations early
  3. Quality instead of Quantity
  4. Bring her in

Suck it up and deal with it!

There are certain realities to the world. Death. Taxes. Etc.

Also, relationships take work. All relationships. To maintain a romantic relationship, or a friendship, or relations with your family, you have to put time in to them.

The more time you put in, the stronger the relationships will be. It’s just a fact of the world.

Yes, there are those great friendships where you can see someone after a couple years, and it’s as if no time has gone by. Those are few and far between though, you can’t count on every friendship following that pattern.

So, if you want relationships, you’ve got to put in at least some work to maintain them.

We can do better than that though, let’s keep reading…

Establish expectations early

Now that I’ve got the “deal with it, bro” advice out of the way, we’ll get in to some of the good stuff.

One of the big lessons I learned from Lance that has stuck with me is that if something is wrong in the current state of the relationship, it means you did something wrong in the previous stage of the relationship. If she doesn’t answer the phone when you call, you did something wrong when you got her number. If she doesn’t go out with you on a second date, you did something wrong on the first date.

If a woman wants to spend more time with you in a relationship than you have to give, then you may have set the wrong expectation when the relationship was starting.

If you only have one day a week to see a girl, it is important to establish that early, and make it clear that with your busy schedule, that’s all the time that you have available.

Sometimes, when we’re first dating a woman, we’ll see her a couple times a week, because it’s exciting and fun! This then sets the expectation that you will see each other a couple times a week every week, and it is then hard to back away from that.

When I start a new relationship, I establish that I’m busy, and don’t have a couple times a week to spend together. The bonus to this is that it is true, I am very busy, just like it sounds like Sexy Fez is. I don’t see a woman more than once a week, even if I want to. You can always increase the amount of time you spend together, after all.

Quality Over Quantity

This is a quick one.

The basic situation we’re addressing is that the woman you’re dating wants to spend more time with you than you have to give.

If this is your situation, make sure that the time you do spend together is really good.

Focus on the time you spend together, and make it good time.

Bring her in

It’s not a cure-all, it won’t magically make all your problems go away, but it might help. So here you go:

Bring her in on it.

Let her know why it is so important to you. Let her know why you need your time, how having your time makes you happy, and working on your goals and aspirations makes you happier, and better.

Let her know that you appreciate that she lets you have your time to work on your projects.

Really, this is about opening up and sharing. Sharing the right stuff, in the right way. You want her to feel how you feel about your work, and what you do with your time, so that she can understand it, and understand that it is important to you.

Really, this is about building a connection between her and yourself. The “you” that you really are, not the “you” that she wants you to be.

Find The Right Women

We’re all different. Different men, different women, we all want and need different things.

Fez and I, we need a lot of time alone, to ourselves, and that’s just fine.

There’s a lot of other men out there that are the same, and there’s a lot of other women out there that are the same.

There’s also a lot of men and women out there that like to spend a lot more time with the person they are dating. For some people, three or four times a week is about right.

The easiest way to have a woman accept that you need your time to yourself, is to find a woman that understands and appreciates that. Do that, and you’ll be happy.

It’s a little tougher, but find that woman, and you’ll be happy.

Reason you need game, number 413

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I came across this in my RSS feed this morning:

British police say they’ve charged a 33-year-old woman with stabbing a man through the eye with her stiletto heel.

… the man was in a critical but stable condition after the woman, with whom he was sharing a cab, assaulted him with the heel of her shoe.

Read the whole article

Funny? maybe.

Sad? maybe.

Avoidable? Definitely.

This kind of thing should not be happening. If you can’t keep your cool enough so that your woman doesn’t stab her stiletto heel through your eye, you need to work on that.

A man keeps his cool.

Touch Is Communication

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Random lesson from a random memory today.

You may have heard how touch is important, how you should break the touch barrier early, and ramp up the touching as the relationship gets more intimate.

The real key to understanding your touch is to understand that it is just another form of communication.

The way you touch a woman, in the end, communicates with her.

One night, a long time ago, I met a woman out at the bars. After we had dated a few times, I asked her why she liked me. What was it that made her want to see me again that night we met?

She mentioned that she liked that I could approach her and start talking to her (confidence), and that I could keep up with her verbally (banter).

Then she said something that kinda surprised me. “You know how I knew you liked me?” she asked. “When you talked to me, you put your hand on the small of my back a little bit, and that’s how I knew that you liked me.”

A light bulb turned on above my head, and I realized that I had communicated with her with by the way that I touched her.

You can communicate that you are interested in her, that you like her, that you are feeling attracted to her, that you care for her, or that you are feeling intimate with her by the way you touch her.

Touch is pretty powerful stuff, because it is a very basic communication. You can say something you don’t mean, but you can’t touch in a way you don’t mean. One touch can’t be confused for meaning something else usually.

Also, the way you guys touch each other shows what is really going on with the two of you. If you and her have talked for hours, and really gotten to know each other, but haven’t touched much, the relationship still hasn’t progressed very far in terms of intimacy.

On the other hand, you and her may not have exchanged many words, but if you are comfortable touching each other, then things have progressed pretty far.

How To Be Nice Without Feeling Like a Chump

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A while back I wrote about how nice guys are manipulative bastards. It is a lovely piece of prose, I suggest you consume it. Those “nice guys” who are really nice to women are being manipulative in their own way, just in a way that every one expects and thinks is fairly normal.

And it begged the question, how do I be nice without it being manipulative?

Here’s the trick. You can be nice, but you have to be nice to yourself first. You have to expect other people to be nice to you to.

If a girl asks you to pick her up from the airport at 3am, and it is really inconvenient for you to do that, then don’t.

If you wouldn’t regularly go out to a really fancy dinner on a Saturday night, don’t bring the woman you just met there on a first date.

The trick to being nice is that if you are going to go out of your way to do something nice, then do it because you want to, and because it makes you feel good to do it.

Be nice to women, but don’t do it at the expense of being nice to yourself.

Some examples:

If I am on a date with a girl, and I get a little hungry, I’ll grab a bite to eat, and I’ll pay for whatever she gets. It’s nice to do, but I’m not going out of my way to do this nice thing to her. I don’t make it a point that I am buying something for her, but if it comes up in the situation, it’s not a problem.

I like to cook dinner, so I would be happy to cook for a woman on a date. I like to do it, I would like doing it for myself, so I would be happy to cook for her.

If a girl I knew needed a ride from somewhere, and I was in the neighborhood already, sure, I’ll give her a ride. I’m not going out of my way to make myself available to her or to help her out.

Heh, this post was a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Be nice. Be nice to yourself. Do nice things for women, but only if it was you want to do, not because you expect something in return.

Read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover With Me!

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I’m starting on a new book, thought I’d share.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover book cover

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. This book is written by some Jungian psychologists who have researched and explored the 4 archetypal types of grown men (which you can figure out from the title). I’m doing a book club reading of this with some folks in San Francisco, and I will probably be writing a bit about this book here.

You’re invited to read the book as well, and follow my discussion of the book here on my blog.

I plan to think beyond just a critical analysis of this book, and to explore how the contents of this book can apply to my life, and possibly to your life as well. I’ll be reading and posting about this from time to time over the next three weeks or so.

If you’d like to get King, Warrior, Magician, Lover at Amazon, click here

Here’s a little baout the book from the author’s home page:

Here the authors explore today’s crisis in masculine identity and describe its two major causes – the disappearance of masculine rites of passage and patriarchy itself. They define the four mature male archetypes – the King (the energy of just and creative ordering), the Warrior (the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action), the Magician (the energy of initiation and transformation), and the Lover (the energy that connects men to others and the world) – as well as the four immature patterns (Divine Child, Oedipal Child, Precocious Child, and Hero). Moore and Gillette believe the developmental history of every man is, in large part, the story of his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity.

The most interesting aspect of this book is that it does not just talk abotu the archetypes of manhood, but also talks abotu the types of boyhood, and how immature men behave, and the distractions they may find on their path to manhood.

This should prove to be an interesting read! Again, if you want to get King, Warrior, Magician, Lover at Amazon, click here.

Women: How To Make A Man Love You

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This has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about this.

Women, if you want to make a man love you, like crazy love you, then understand him.

Put in the work to really “get” him.

This is not easy to do, and off the top of my head, I don’t have any practical advice about how to do this. My experience makes me pretty sure it works though.

I can count the number of women I felt like really “got” me on one hand, without using three of my fingers.

I still love both of them very much.

How Proper Action Can Propel Your “Inner” Game Forward

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I recently watched a video with Tony Robbins, John Reese and Frank Kern, that really gelled together something I have thought about for a while. I highly recommend this video, since Frank and John talk to Tony about the question of why so many of the people that get involved with Internet Marketing never get anywhere with it. They maybe buy a few products, but never end up really acting on it and making major changes to their life.

The similarities between this and men’s efforts to improve with women should be self-evident. Plenty of men read blogs, and invest in books, programs, or workshops to improve, but don’t quite make all of the steps necessary to put it in to practice. The video is about 40 minutes long, and well worth the time to view it:

Tony Robbins, Frank Kern, and John Reese Video.

The most important part of this video, in my mind, is this diagram that Tony draws:

The cycle of Potential-Action-Result-Belief

We all believe we have some Potential, and that Potential leads us to take the Actions that we perform. Those Actions then return a Result, and that Result either changes or reinforces our Beliefs. Our Beliefs directly effect what we believe our Potential is. The cycle continues.

This cycle can be a flat line, where nothing ever changes, it can be a downward cycle, where negative beliefs work around to negative actions, which furthers our negative beliefs, or it can be a positive cycle, that leads onwards and upwards.

Tony focuses on changing these beliefs in this video, and that is good and useful to some degree, but isn’t always the best, or most effective way to go about this.

The thing with this cycle is that there is no beginning point. Any one of these boxes can be targeted to turn this cycle into a positive, upwards cycle. You can start anywhere here, and things will improve.

For instance, take a guy with bad beliefs about his abilities and chances with women, beliefs that hold him back from taking the proper actions to get amazing results. Now put him in a hot tub with 4 Swedish bikini models that all want to take him to their room and molest him, and his inner game is gonna get fixed right away.

Those Results instantly change his Beliefs, which effects what he sees as his Potential, which will impact his Actions.

So much self help and “inner game” stuff targets the Belief portion of this cycle, and this is why I think a lot of inner game stuff is BS. Your and my Beliefs are the hardest to change out of those 4 things. After all, we have years and years of results that reinforce our beliefs.

Do you think that saying “I am sexy” 10 times to yourself in the morning can overcome being treated as unsexy since junior high? You can’t think your way out of years of experience.

I think we all have a belief about how hot of women we can get. It’s this little belief that is lurking down inside of all of us. Take the guy that thinks that he can only get girls that look so-so, let him date Megan Fox for a couple months, and his beliefs about how hot of women he can get are gonna change pretty quickly.

A strong result will do far more to change beliefs than anything else.

Here’s a real world example. I was working with a guy at a workshop a couple weekends ago, and he thought he had a problem with women. His belief was that he just didn’t quite have what it took to be successful with women, and that there was something wrong with him. I pushed him into action to talk to a woman in Union Square, and he ended up instadating her and spent an hour with her in a cafe.

That Result from his Actions did far more to change his Beliefs than inner game work could have.

Actions and Results are the fastest and easiest way to change beliefs, and with it, inner game.

This is why I have always been rubbed the wrong way when people say that they need to work on their inner game. The best way to get better Inner Game is to get better Outer Game. The inner game will improve from the outside in.

Here’s another example from my life.

I’ve noticed that I feel much more confident lately. It’s a “new level of confidence and power” (Pantera rules). I figured out what this comes from, and it comes from all the “find your purpose” crap that gets thrown around all the time.

I say it’s crap when it’s really not. It’s actually incredibly important stuff. I’ve only recently started to see the power behind this. A couple months ago I invested in some art supplies and got to work with a big art project, the first since I finished art school, other than the random drawings and doodles. I don’t need to get really deep into it, but suffice to say, creating art is VERY important to me. The world makes more sense when I create stuff.

Because I am doing this, my life feels more complete, and I have a sense of being a fuller person. I feel like I bring much more to the table when I meet a woman, and I have a rich life to bring her into, one that is very satisfying for me. If she isn’t interested, that is fine, I know that it isn’t because I have a douschy, pathetic life.

The beginning of this advance was Action. I performed an Action (started making a series of 101 prints), which led to a Result (a feeling of satisfaction about my life), which led to a Belief (I have a rich, full life to share with women), which led to Potential (more women).

Most of my inner game advances came as a result of Actions and their Results, not the other way around.

There are still specific things I remember that changed my inner game. The time I was waiting for one girl outside her apartment to pick her up for a date, when another woman called while I was waiting. There are others that I won’t share publicly here :)

I think that most inner game issues can be addressed by taking Proper Action. Proper Action will do far more for your inner game than anything else, and Results from that Action will improve your inner game far more than thinking about it will.

Magic Dolphin Women Present A Dilemma

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I have a new favorite Television show, Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t. If you haven’t seen it, Penn and Teller go around debunking everything from little known facts, like the fiasco that has been rebuilding at ground zero, to well established beliefs, like recycling is good, to out their crazy stuff, like alternative medicine.

I discovered this on Netflix streaming last night, and watched a few episodes.

First, Penn and Teller leverage the fact that they are (kinda) famous and have a TV show to have a bunch of hot topless chicks dance around them all the time. The episode about alternative medicine starts out with topless cheerleaders cheering them on, two of which have a set that has been augmented by the marvel of western medicine.

When have crystal chakra baths ever given us something like that?

I have to admire these dudes for what they have created. Their job is to swear and make fun of people while hot chicks hang out all around them in varying levels of dress. They seem to be doing very well for themselves indeed.

The second thing I really got to thinking about came about when I was watching the episode about people who think that dolphins have super powers.

Yes, you read that right.

There are people who think that dolphins are higher beings with powers to heal, provide spiritual fulfillment, and help mothers to painlessly give birth. Even though dolphins are pretty much just big fish. Sure, they can swim real cool and look neat when they jump out of the water, but they are pretty much just big fish.

Anyway, there was one chick on the show that explained how the dolphins increased her natural flow of energy, and then she started squealing like a dolphin. She kept squealing and clicking like a dolphin for a while. But she was hot. She was nuts, but hot.

It made me think, could I look past the fact that a woman was nuts like this, at least if she was really hot? My tolerance for stuff considerably less than rational (i.e. dumb stuff) is fairly low. My propensity for pretty girls is fairly high though. Would these cancel each other out, or would one of these trump the other?

I’m not sure. I may have to head over to Berkeley one of these days and find out.

More on this Lifestyle Nonsense

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I’m a little behind on posting, I got side tracked on other projects. I worked on a painting on Thursday night that I got thoroughly frustrated with after working on it for a few hours. I ended up scraping all the paint off of the canvas, and ended up not wanting to work on anything else.

Last night I stayed up way too late and drank way too much wine with a friend of mine. I invited her over for dinner to eat some of my healthy new groceries I said I was gonna get. Had a delightful time with her.

Now I am coming back to life, and back on track to revisit this lifestyle stuff I was talking about earlier this week. I started out the week talking about creating a healthy lifestyle for myself, and I have been doing just that.

I have been thinking about this in terms of lifestyle and habits. Lifestyle is the overall vision of how you and I want our life to be. The habits are the things we do that either makes that vision more of a reality, or less of a reality.

Some habits are good habits, and some habits are bad habits. In order to make any vision more of a reality, we have to both increase the good habits, and remove the bad habits. The reason why my vision is not reality, after all, is that I have plenty of bad habits that counteract all of my good habits.

Excising the bad habits is one of the most important, and most neglected, parts of changing any lifestyle. Bad habits can be invisible, and you and I may not even realize the effect that they have.

After thinking about this for a while, I realize another way of looking at this stuff is just strategy and tactics.

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics

Strategy is what you want to accomplish, and tactics are the specific actions necessary to accomplish that. Things that you want to do, or results that you want to get, are strategy. Specific things to do to accomplish that are tactics.

This healthy lifestyle that I am putting together can be thought of as a couple of strategies: I will eat healthy food and exercise. I will fill my kitchen with delicious, healthy foods. I will keep my kitchen clean and clutter free.

The tactics flow from this. I change in to my jogging gear every morning when I get out of bed. I go grocery shopping every Wednesday. I clean my dishes every evening after I eat dinner.

The tactics flow out of the overall strategies, and they create the results that the strategy seeks.

Not Such A Big Deal

When I started this week of thinking about lifestyle and habits, it seemed like a much bigger topic than I thought. Once I got started though, I found out that it really isn’t that big a deal. Once I got going with a few changes, it started the ball rolling and everything went from there.

A little bit of momentum led to more momentum, and made the next step to implement these lifestyle changes easier than the previous change.

My suggestion for lifestyle change is this:

Start with the first thing, and do it today. Don’t think too much, and don’t worry. Figure out what the first thing is and decide to do it.

What do I mean by this? Every change has a first step. Determine what that should be, and get to it! The best first steps are symbolic in nature. The first step should be something that is a big change from anything you did previously, something that makes you feel like “my life is different now”.

For me, cleaning my kitchen and filling it with healthy food was a good first step. With that one action, I changed my lifestyle from eating whatever food I happened to pick up, healthy or not, to a lifestyle of eating fresh, healthy foods all the time. I’m actually writing this while eating an oat bran muffin and a nectarine with my morning coffee. Tasty.

So what change do you want to make? Do you want to flirt with more women out at bars? Smile and say “hi” to every woman you see out at the bar from now on. Do you want to meet a woman while grocery shopping? When you see a pretty girl at the store, go tell her that you didn’t mean to hit on anyone today, but that she is really cute, and made you change your mind.

There all sorts of things you can do to signify to yourself that your life is different, find one simple thing, and do it today.

Small Change, Big Result (Because Habits Cascade)

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Still thinking about lifestyle change, and making an overall change in my life to having a healthy lifestyle, rather than just a few healthy habits. I will be lean, green, and mean.

It seems like a lot of habits cascade from other habits. One of my really bad habits is to pick up some food on the way home from work. I’ll stop at the taqueria and get a burrito, go to Uncle Vito’s for some heavy pasta, or get Thai takeout from King of Thai Noodle.

Not good for the health. It’s always too much food (that I eat all of anyway), and the way restaurants make their food so good is by extra helping of oil, cream, and cheese. Tasty, but not healthy.

It’s a bad habit, and is one I want to change.

Not so fast though, I realized that there are a lot of other habits I have to change to do this. Part of the reason I get take out a lot is that it is tasty, but another reason is that I don’t have much tasty food at home to make a good, healthy meal.

Another habit I need to change is to go to the grocery store often to get groceries. Makes a lot of sense. I also need to get to the farmers market on Saturday morning to get a nice bag of fruits and veggies for the week. Two new habits. Great!

Now I’m thinking about how these will fit in. One of the reasons I don’t go to the grocery store often is parking. It sucks in my neighborhood. If I move my truck, it can take a while to find a new parking spot. I never want to move my truck for just a few groceries.

Turns out that I head over to a friend’s house most Wednesday’s for our band practice. It is always more of a hang out and drink beer session than a serious band practice, but it is good fun, and it is a good time to spend time with one of my best friends. I can tack the grocery shopping on to that trip, when I’ll have to re-park my car anyway.

That was easy!

As for Saturday morning, it’s easy enough to head down to the Farmer’s Market, I just don’t think to do it. Just added a reminder in my phone for Saturday morning. That aughta do it.

Anyway, so I’m working backwards to figure out the habits that effect other habits, and addressing those. I may decide to make a habit of eating only healthy food, but if I don’t have the habit of going to buy healthy groceries often, then this isn’t really gonna stick.

The habits seem to cascade into the next, so I am working on addressing these high level habits. There are a few others that I know I can implement that will cascade down to the “end result” habits, bur I won’t bore you with the details.

This week’s posts are a week in progress, we’ll see where this takes me. Should be interesting.

Any high level habits that you can think to change?