Pickup

As we all know, you don't get a second chance to make a good first impression. And this is more than just a cliché... this is HUGE!

I'll say it again: You just DON'T get a second chance!

Studies in the field of sales have confirmed the old adage. As it turns out, 80% of our perception of a person is formed in the first 3 minutes. But what’s more: 80% of THAT takes place in the first few SECONDS!

Do I have your attention?

Good.

So, what is the ideal first impression a girl should have of you?

If you don't know the answer to this question, you might be practicing the WRONG things… which means that all the hard sweat, blood and tears you invest might actually make your first impression LESS favorable.

What do you think? Should you be

• Friendly or Macho?
• Tough or Charming?
• Dominant or Likeable?

What kind of first impression will make her feel ATTRACTED to you?

Let’s take a closer look. Your first impression comes down to three things:

• The way you look
• What you say to a girl
• THE WAY YOU COME ACROSS!

And number three is the biggie.

Dominance is a touchy topic. It's positively loaded with cultural baggage - in the West, we're averse to both the idea of being dominant over others and of others being dominant over us. It has all kinds of ill-favored connotations that most would rather just avoid. I'm throwing all of that out today though and talking to you about how to be a dominant man, political correctness and sensitivity aside - and I'm going to teach you a lot of things you didn't know about dominance before today.

In the post on how to be an alpha male (without becoming a stereotype), we broke down the difference between what's generally thought of as "alpha" and what alpha actually is, and about the character of the nomad -- the man who's neither alpha, nor beta, nor any other role in a social hierarchy, but instead operates outside it entirely.

I've long noticed a failure to differentiate among "being alpha" and "being dominant" in those who discuss social dynamics. They're treated as one and the same -- if you're being alpha, you're dominant, and if you're being dominant, you're alpha.

But they aren't the same. Being alpha's about heading up your group.

Meanwhile, being dominant... that's about something else altogether. What that is -- that and the winner effect -- is what this article is all about.

It has been said that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death… Seinfeld’s little twist on this idea is that at a funeral, people would rather be lying in the coffin than giving the eulogy.

I believe there is something that we fear even more than public speaking: approaching beautiful women. And this fear gets multiplied when we’re going out alone, without our buddies and “wingmen” around.

I remember the first time I went out ALONE to meet girls. Just the thought of it made me nervous, but I had been told that it’s a great exercise to build confidence and social skills.

Right after I left the house I realized I was hungry… and got something to eat. But while I was still waiting for my food, I became aware that this was nothing but creative avoidance – I was giving myself reasons to put off the dreaded exercise until the last possible moment!

And once I had left the restaurant, I started REALLY getting nervous… and psyching myself out. After half an hour of this, I couldn’t even have asked a girl what time it was… leave alone flirt with one!

Thank God I’ve long since overcome this hurdle, but the question is…

Aaron Sleazy is the author of Sleazy Stories: Confessions of an Infamous Modern Seducer of Women, chronicling his memoirs as a seducer, and Debunking the Seduction Community, a critical analysis of the commercial pick up and seduction industry. His newly released how-to book, Minimal Game: The No-Nonsense Guide to Getting Girls, gives a brief, insightful look into his barebones efficient-as-possible style at getting girls fast with little time or talk.

In this guest post, he discusses an issue a lot of guys run into, especially when looking for a girl they might want as a girlfriend. Every guy wants to know get to know a girl before committing to anything, and here Aaron takes the process a step further -- he discusses why if you really want to get intimate with a girl on an emotional level, you need to take her as your lover first.

A few days ago, a very perceptive reader wrote in to share with me an insight he'd had after reading over the blog here again and reading the appendices at the end of my seduction ebook. It was, he said, a profound realization about how to talk to girls that he'd seen me using and others using, and it was something that, when he told me about it, I immediately realized was something I'd once known consciously but had long slipped into the forgotten parts of my memory that were accessed only intuitively and subconsciously in conversation, without ever realizing it.

That reader called it "taking off the mask." Here's the relevant part of his email:

“ Over the past few weeks I've been noticing something about your posts and really every other seducer/PUA. I've noticed that the ones that really know how to handle women all demonstrate one quality.

They see through the BS!

I've been reading through some of your posts and the Girls Chase appendices and when you talk to women you go straight to her "real" self. The "real" self the girl in her that's still romantic, the girl who wants all her sexual fantasies to come true. You don't ever allow women to put on that mask around you, you make sure she can let her hair down and just be herself.”

In a flash, I remembered it being 2006, and me for the first time approaching hordes and hordes of women. It was such a confusing time; women would say things -- crazy things, unexpected things -- and I didn't know how to react.

What do you say when a girl tells you she has a boyfriend?

What do you do when she's acting flighty and disinterested?

How do you keep her engaged in a loud nightclub filled with distractions, or on a busy street when there's somewhere she very much has to be?

I remembered how confusing talking to women used to be. And I realized that the way I go about talking to women and interacting with them these days isn't just better -- it's different. It's categorically, unequivocally, incontrovertibly different from how I used to talk to women.

I'm coming from a different place, and my thoughts are on much different matters. And if I can help get you there -- or at least illuminate the path -- I think I can rapidly speed up the process you learn by.

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.

I've been putting in 17 hour days, 7 days a week the past 2 weeks for a new business of mine I just launched, and I've been training a lot of new salesman recently for it, and it's forced me to talk on a number of great sales and psychology points. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm even finding myself training my staff with a number of terms from the pick up world that I've developed (if only they knew!). Anyway, now that I've got some breathing room again to get back to things like the blog here, one of the more interesting points I've touched on recently with the staff has been why you should never say no.

My sales guys are a little rough around the edges. One of them used to be a Texas car salesman. One used to sell suits in Wales. Another is a German guy with an unflappable ego who believes he can do anything, but he's never had anything to do with sales before.

Anyway, one of them I listened to while taking him through some drills several times told the mock client he was speaking to "no."

She asked him if he could do something, and he said "no." I corrected him, and he said, "We will not." Argh.

Because, you see, both in sales and in seduction, "no" is a big no-no -- and what I want to talk about with you today is why you should never say no.

Once upon a time, I sat in a college dorm room wondering how to attract women.

I mean, in high school I'd had them chasing after me, at least some of the time, but then I went to university and that all disappeared. Coupled with my lack of social skills, I soon found myself both alone, and un-pursued.

So, I tried anything I could think of. I got into music and performed on-stage. I made myself stand out however I could in my classes. I started peacocking with flashy clothes and accessories. I even tried buying pheromones from the Internet -- the jury's still out if that did me any good.

But despite those efforts, I still didn't have any women in my life. Some of it got me noticed -- a lot of pretty girls were paying a lot of attention to me. But was I attracting them? Here's how Dictionary.com defines the word:

“Attract: to draw by appealing to the emotions or senses, by stimulating interest, or by exciting admiration; allure; invite: to attract attention; to attract admirers by one's charm.”

Well, they may have been interested, but they certainly weren't around me too much. So, at best, maybe I was part of the way there.

Most men, I discovered, find themselves in the same boat. They try a bunch of things, not sure what, exactly, it is that'll work best at getting women attracted... only to keep realizing that the things they're trying aren't working as well as they'd hoped. Anywhere near as well as they'd hoped. Some guys even all but lose hope entirely.

How I learned to be a man who knew how to attract women and inspire them to chase him and pursue him and desire him is the story I want to share with you here.

Furthermore, I want you to avoid the scenario I was in, of having to figure this mostly out from scratch -- so I'm going to give you 7 tips you can start using right now, today, to get yourself becoming more attractive to women.

Without further ado: How to Attract Women: The Guide.

One piece of guidance I often give to guys looking to improve with women is to start doing active listening in order to better listen to women and build great connections with them fast. It's simple, straightforward advice that's easy to start implementing right away -- or at least, that was what I'd been thinking.

A reader writes in reminding me of a realization I had years ago but since forgot about the right way to do active listening:

“Wow man just had a great convo with my mom of all people about how to handle women. We talked a lot about things I already knew but it gave me a fresh perspective. But the one thing she told me about was "paraphrasing what she said"

She told me that a lot of guys like "reiterate" what a woman says. For example if I was talking to a woman and she told me a story about jogging and how it makes her feel great. Reiterating would be me saying "Hmmm so what you're really saying is you feel great because of this...." Then the woman tells me "NO I'm feeling great because of what I just said! Your not listening to me!"

Now that same situation as a paraphrase would go "so let me see if I understand you, your saying you feel great because of this..." then she says "Yes exactly I was feeling great because growing up my mom..."

Now at that point I've got her opening up because she's feeling understoood. And sorry for the vocab lesson I"m sure you already knew this but it helps me illustrate my idea in my mind lol! But I'm just emailing you about this because I've noticed that A LOT of your game is based off of paraphrasing.

When a woman is challenging you paraphrase. When you want to deep dive you paraphrase. When you try to connect with her emotionally you paraphrase.

Once you can paraphrase her words she feels understood and now you guys can truly connect. And it was something that had been bothering me for YEARS man because I was trying SO HARD to listen to women lol! But I found out that I was just doing it the wrong way which was from a frame of reiteration (male comm) and not paraphrase (female comm).

It's crazy because now I can look back at some of your old post and say OHHHHH that's how he did that! IT's amazing how much power paraphrasing gives you when it comes to communicating with others.

Just wanted to share that with you because it really struck me as gold.”

After reading this email, in a flash, I remembered the years I spent straining and striving to understand women and feed back to them what they'd said, only to have my efforts be tossed right back in my face when girls replied with, "Uh, no, that's not what I meant," or tersely corrected me.

Man, that was frustrating. But it doesn't happen anymore. Why? Well... let me tell you.

You see, our good reader highlights the difference between what a guy who's learning tries to do, and a guy who's got it down does. And I'm going to delve deeper into doing it the right way here, in this post on active listening.

I sat there staring for a moment at the woman who'd walked outside to tell me to clear out, thinking about how to be a powerful man in a situation like this. I was sitting at an empty table -- one of about thirty of them -- in a largely empty seating area in the middle of a square surrounded by a bunch of restaurants.

"You can't sit here, sorry," she told me. I'd gotten my food at one of the restaurants ringing the square. She apparently was from another one. "This seating is only for our customers."

I looked slowly out over the tables. Then I looked back to her. "All of this?" I said, gesturing to the entire square of empty tables.

"Yes," she said. "That's all ours."

I briefly considered. On the one hand, it was incredibly unnecessary for her to come and ask me to get up and leave. It's not like there was a mad grab for tables; they were almost all empty. And it wasn't like me sitting at the table was going to wear the chair out or anything. I supposed there was the risk that I'd leave some crumbs or garbage or something and she'd have to clean up after a non-customer.

But on the other hand, it was her restaurant's private property. They paid for it, they owned the rights to it, and they had final say on who gets to use it, when, and why. That's how it works in cities, where there's basically no public property. Fighting back means fighting the system; police or security get called, and then it's a big mess.

"Okay," I said. "Which restaurant are you?" I asked her. "That one?" I said, pointing to a classy Japanese place.

"No," she said, "that one." She pointed toward a tiny little deli. I had a hard time imagining a deli was going to fill up all these seats with paying customers and that owning the rights to use this big outdoor square (and spending the time to police it all) was worth it.

"Okay," I said, after another moment. "I'll head elsewhere." I slowly started packing up my food.

"Sorry," she said quietly, and walked off, leaving me to pack up and leave. I noticed there'd been some people who'd stopped to watch the interaction. As I slowly packed my things and left, they turned and went their ways.

After I left, I realized I should've just ordered a bottled water for $1 or whatever it was from the deli. I'll do that next time. But regardless, it got me thinking about looking powerful even when you're not getting your way, which can end up being something that makes or breaks your interactions with women, more often that you might care to think.