Opening

There I was, 7th grade, sitting oh-so-close to one of the prettiest girls in school. She had long, wavy blonde hair, and for the life of me I couldn't stop staring at her legs. I wanted nothing other than her.

That was my math class, every single day, 5 days a week. And I knew that it was on me to figure out how to get her every bit as excited about me as I was about her. I had to figure out how to get a girl's attention.

And so I did. In "How to Attract Women," I spoke some about how I learned to attract women later in life. What I want to talk about in this post, though, was how I learned to get women's attention; how I learned to make women take note of me, start keeping track of me, and begin to become intrigued. Because it was those early lessons in middle school, as well as the ones that were to come years later, that allowed me to today find it quite easy to get girls noticing me seemingly (from their points of view) before I've noticed them, and it's an important element of getting them to chase.

If you can learn how to get a girl's attention, you can learn how to captivate her. And once you've mastered those two things... let's just say everything else is a snap.

A reader writes in asking about attainability:

“Hey Chase, Great blog man, top notch stuff. Never been part of the PUA community, but been doing self improvement (corresponding with my values) for 4 years or so, and your blog and TSM are pretty much the only two I read consistently. I've also read your book, and have a question on attainability. So here's the issue:

Not to sound pretentious or arrogant, but I'm a pretty good looking guy, fantastic shape, fashionable, carry myself well, great job blah blah blah, and I have a lot of symptoms of having much too low of attainability. Only super confident women seem to have the guts to put themselves out there (which can be a good thing, they are my type), make eye contact passing by each other, or even manage a smile after eye contact is made.

Now I am a very pleasant, outgoing person, and I always walk around with at least a pleased look on my face, so it's not like I'm walking around frowning or anything. I guess my question is, how can I raise my attainability through body language or the way I carry myself before words are spoken or even eye contact is made, so that more women are open to me? This isn't in my head, I live in a smaller town (50,000) people, half are college kids (I'm in my late 20's) and countless times friends tell me women ask about me all interested, and I'll end up knowing who they're talking about but have never had these girls so much as make eye contact or smile?! I don't want to walk around smiling like a goofball to make myself seem friendlier, help me man!”

This goes deeper, to the issue of how to make yourself more relatable to people. In this reader's case, he's running into the same problem I used to have a lot -- that only the most confident women feel comfortable around him, and everybody else can't relate. I struggled with that for quite a while myself.

These days though, I'm a pretty darn relatable guy.

And you might be surprised by that, considering my lifestyle should make me all but unrelatable -- frequent international travel (often to places like Cambodia or Monaco instead of the "usual" places like Australia or England), starting up not just one business, but a whole host of them, meeting girls in bars, clubs, airports, and train stations, and a hard-line approach toward friendships and relationships that most people would probably politely describe as "extreme."

Me, relatable? I don't even find the same things enjoyable that most other people do.

Yet, should you ever meet me, chances are we'll get along just fine. We'll laugh; we'll trade stories; and, like so many people I meet, you'll quite possibly end up telling me you feel like we've been friends forever, despite the fact that we'll have met minutes before.

That's because I sat down and put the time into figuring out how to be relatable, both in conversation and even on first appearance. And the great news is, anybody can pull it off -- all it takes is a little effort, and a bit of a push in the right direction to get you started.

In Tokyo last Saturday, I had a very favorable interaction with a young bartender from the West who'd been living and working in town for some time. I was originally planning to write up a detailed breakdown of the interaction, since it was quite a good one, but on second thought I'll skip the details since this girl'd be pretty readily identifiable if I went into them, and due to the particular circumstances of her life that might put her in somewhat of a compromised situation. But, nevertheless, the interaction lent itself to an idea to write more on the topic of picking up bartenders in general.

I've written on here before about how to date a model, and you might think that because both bartenders and models are considered highly sought after types of women, the approaches you'd take to snagging a girl in either profession might be reasonably similar.

But, as it turns out, nope, not really the case at all, that one.

Models and bartenders are two very different breeds of woman. One fancies herself elegant, feminine, and demure, and likes to go shopping and prides herself on her posture; the other usually prefers to see herself as rough-and-tumble and tomboyish, and prides herself more on her ability to drink men twice her size under the table without batting an eyelash than on how "ladylike" she might be.

Models live in a girly-girly world. For bartenders, on the other hand, it's a man's world through and through, and they're just doing their best to carve out their own space in it.

What that means is, you're going to need to take a different tack with a bartender than you would a fashion model. And that's where this post comes in -- laying out for you that tack so you can get it into play with that cute bartender you've had your eye on.

I'm kicking off a new weekly blog post series today, that's going to center on brief, informative articles focused on one specific technique you can use to achieve greater success with meeting and dating women. I'm calling this new series Tactics Tuesdays.

In today's edition -- our inaugural one -- I want to have a look at the technique of locking in.

When I first stumbled upon the pick up community, I heard the term "lock in" or the instruction to "get locked in" tossed about fairly often. And to me, it sounded silly and overmuch -- another vestige of the old indirect days of picking up girls, like opinion openers and routines.

Then I moved to San Diego, and acquired a new friend and wingman who was doing outstandingly with girls, and who I noticed made it a point of his game to always lock in. It was the first time I'd seen it done effectively.

About a year later in mid-2008, I partnered Girls Chase with a talented San Diego-based date coach named Mateo (who just launched his new website, Live the Knight Life; congrats to him!), and I observed that, again, here was a guy for whom locking in was a pretty essential part of his approach with women. And like my other pal, I noticed he was having a discernibly easier time more often than not on his initial approaches.

"Well, okay," I said to myself, "this looks like something I need to stop being so closed-minded about, and start doing."

So, lock in I did.

A few conversations I've had lately have revolved around me discussing with guys how simple things are with women. You just talk to them, and then... boom! They chase after you. You don't even have to do any work; girls take care of all that themselves.

Because that's how it's been for me lately. But I keep getting pulled back down to reality; guys confess it doesn't work that way for them. And then I stop and think, and for a long time it didn't work that way for me, either.

What changed it for me? Well, one of the biggest factors was figuring out what to say to girls. All you've got to do is get that figured out, and you're set.

But that's tough, you say. Why? Well, because you're not a girl. And if you're like a lot of guys out there, you have, starting out, no idea what it is women want to hear, what they like to hear, or what they need to hear, whatsoever.

Here's how it goes for most guys: they start out talking to women too literally, and the women get bored out of their skulls and leave. So then a guy tries a few witty pick up lines, or he tries busting on girls to be a challenge, only to have them start snapping at him and shutting down. Eventually he comes full circle again and decides to try to be a lot nicer than he was, only to find that, once again, the challenge has disappeared and the interest women showed at least some of the time when he was being a jerk has disappeared.

That's the point a guy realizes that, despite all the time he might've spent trying to get better with women, he still has no real idea about what to say to girls.

Argh.

Fortunately, all's not lost, and you can figure it out. In fact, that's why I made this post -- it's something of a guide on the wild, woolly world of talking to girls. In other words, herein lies the machete you'll need to hack a path through the conversational jungle and emerge on the other side with that beautiful, smiling girl you've had your eye on.

Walking back from the gym this afternoon, under the hot summer sun, I was a bit of a mess. My shirt was drenched in sweat; my arms were stiff and wooden; my hair was a little messy; and I was still breathing a little heavy.

I noticed a girl walking toward me, dressed in rather fancy garb, and as she saw me, she pulled her face into a mildly contorted look that spoke somewhat of disgust. But, at the same time, she also couldn't seem to take her eyes off of me, and I noticed those eyes scanning me up and down; she brushed her hair back, and as she walked toward me, she ever so slightly veered toward me.

I've met lots of girls like this before. Girls that, on first glance, might appear to be completely put off by you. But if you read between the lines, their more subtle actions tell a different story. In fact, I've taken some of these women who gazed upon me with what looked like disgust as lovers, oftentimes rather quickly.

What I want to get across here is, how to tell if a girl likes you -- or not -- isn't always as cut and dry a case as you might think.

Sometimes it can even be the opposite of what you initially thought -- and that holds for both the girls you think like you, and the girls you think don't.

A buddy of mine recently asked me to write on how to meet girls in groups, as it's something I don't talk about a great deal on here. The most I've touched on the topic before has been in "Breaking Circle," the post on maintaining attraction despite distractions around you or even other people trying interrupt you.

But, as my friend noted, I haven't gotten a proper treatment on meeting women in groups up yet, so this is it.

Meeting girls in groups is one of those things that, assuming you're doing much nighttime approaching, you're going to run into reasonably regularly. In fact, it may very well be the meat and potatoes of your approaches -- you might just find yourself in groups most of the time.

Groups aren't ideal, of course. Things tend to move faster and more smoothly the majority of the time when it's just you and your girl, and there are no interruptions or distractions to knock the two of you off course.

However, when handled appropriately, any negatives of groups can usually be negated, and in fact you can sometimes even get groups working for you with the women you meet. So it doesn't always have to be unfortunate that that pretty girl you like is in the middle of a group -- sometimes groups make it even easier for the two of you to get together.

1. Keep it short,
2. Help her think, and
3. Walk a mile in her shoes.

I don't usually start off a post with the impact points right at the beginning. But I want to lay these out first -- because they're so vital to solid message writing -- and we'll get into the "whys" and the "hows" in a moment.

I was going to write about something else today -- I have a couple of big-concept posts I've been meaning to write up and get around to -- but, heck, the last post I put up was a big-concept post so I figured let's have a quick breather from that and get something a little lighter up first.

This topic came up as I got to an email from a reader. A very well-spoken and clearly an educated guy, he sent me a message detailing a situation with a girl he knew... and boy, was it detailed. I mean, it was long. Really long.

I've been all too guilty of this myself -- sending super-long messages. And what I found was that I was often disappointed -- I'd put all this time and effort into a monster of a message, and then... I'd get no response.

There are a bunch of lessons I eventually took away from those experiences that I'll share with you today. The basic gist of today's post is, basically, that this -- what we're about to talk about -- is how you write online dating messages and emails that don't get ignored... and, in fact, get you exactly what you want: responses, phone numbers, dates, and success.

Yesterday I went out with a guy I mentor, and he asked to watch me do some direct daytime approaches.

"Sure, no problem," I told him.

I scouted around for a while, and saw a really cute girl walking along, wearing a blue blouse and big sunglasses, apparently looking for a taxi, her cell phone in hand. Usually I don't go for women who are visibly occupied like that -- taxi-searching and texting / calling, as her headspace is going to be elsewhere -- but I wasn't seeing all that many cute girls around solo, so up I went.

"I saw you walking here, and I had to come tell you," I began -- and she put her hand up and waved me off. "...that you're incredibly cute. I'm Chase," I finished. She waved me off again. I walked next to her, matching her stride.

"What's your name, then?" I asked, sticking my hand in her direction. She smiled, turned her head away, and waved me off again.

"I'm sure you've got to be called something," I said. "Your friends don't just call you this [I demonstrated waving], right?" She cracked a bigger smile, laughed, and kept walking.

A reader writes in:

I found something strange. Everytime Im having long interactions with girls in pickups on the streets, I bomb. I mean, she dont text back. It reminds me of Murphies law: If everything cant go wrong, IT WILL. I recently approached 10 women of which gave me attraction signals. They touched me, called me cute, called me the most interesting person, smiled, was high energy, stayd 20 minutes with me, and asked me to text them. I had good interactions with them and was smoothe and confident. I bonded wtih them and made plans to see them. They never texted back and I dont nkwo why.

I did another experiment where I cutted my interaction short about 3 minutes and asked for the number. Most of the shorter ones agreed on dates and texted back, and note, most of them gave me negative signs first. Is it because women use guys that they give fake "attraction signals?" Why do they seem so much into me at first but never bother to actually get into contact again? It happens over and over so much that when a girl give me signals thats too good to be true,I can almost predict that I will never hear from her again and Im alwasy right. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I think the women who give you immediate signals are maybe time waster"? And what is your thoughts, do you find the same?

Brings back memories.

When I stepped up my activity levels in 2006, I noticed an odd trend: the women I spoke to for longer periods of time, and seemed more into me, ended up being less likely to ever return my phone calls or texts.

How bizarre, I thought to myself. This certainly doesn't make much sense.

But the numbers didn't lie. So, I did the only logical thing I could think to do: I worked to shorten the time I'd spend with girls whose phone number I intended to grab, and only spend a longer time with girls I intended to take home that day or night.

Almost overnight, the problem of girls not texting back and girls not calling back all but disappeared. But it still left me scratching my head a bit... why did spending more time with a girl and having her come to like you more lead to her falling off the face of the Earth and not returning text and calls later?