Take the Edge Off: Using Humbleness Like an Elite Man

As you work on yourself and improve and become a higher and higher value person – a man who’s really got his life together, with a solid group of high achieving friends and connections, with multiple options with beautiful women, with goals and dreams and ambitions and numerous pathways to success laid out ahead of you and accomplishments behind you – you become an increasingly imposing individual.

And that’s both good and bad.

I originally was going to write this up as an article on being impressive. But I think impressiveness in its own right doesn’t need a write-up; if you work on your fundamentals and you take care of business in things like body language and posture and voice tone and manner of speaking, you will naturally build yourself into an impressive, imposing individual. Throw in some intrigue into how you choose to define yourself and respond to questions and challenges, and you will rapidly develop into a very naturally impressive, imposing individual. It comes with the territory.

What’s a more difficult prospect, though, is how you make yourself approachable and accessible to people once you’ve gotten there.

The Issue with Impressiveness

Ah, it must be a fantastic thing being impressive and imposing, right? Everyone scrambling to be in your good graces, compelled to try and impress you simply by the way you are in their presence, deferring to you as though you are some person of the highest authority.

And indeed, it does do some wonderful things for your seductions. Once you reach the point that your presence is so impressive that women feel nervousness and pressure to perform around you, you’ll start seeing the following things:

• Visible anticipation in your presence: signs like women’s lips trembling a little or pauses or hesitation in answering you, accompanied by slight stutters in their answers or a tremor in their voices.

• Concerted efforts to impress you: going into long, detailed stories about themselves and their accomplishments or things about their background they think you will like or be impressed by.

• Lots of spontaneous compliments and comments: when people are impressed by you, they quite often will talk about you a lot and compliment you a lot. Complimenting you on your singing just after you’ve sung a song is one thing, but when the compliments start appearing out of the blue is when you ought to pay attention. One or two compliments out of nowhere are a bit of a sign, but more than one or two is a loud, clear sign they may be feeling a little dazzled by you. And without humility, being overwhelmed is just a short step from being dazzled.

You may be getting these already if your presence is very strong. If it isn’t, buckle down and work on your fundamentals, and you’ll start seeing more and more of this eventually. And it really is a good thing when people begin finding you so impressive that they get on-edge and nervous around you. It means you come off as a very, very high value, top caliber person.

Problem is, if you don’t quickly set their minds at ease, they’ll also very quickly throw a wall up to protect themselves. Have you ever met a very impressive person and then, after meeting them, you very, very quickly ended the interaction? Maybe you met an extraordinarily beautiful woman, or a senior official in your company, or a celebrity or politician, or someone else who seemed unbelievably imposing. Maybe you talked to him or her for twenty or thirty seconds and then – you left.

Why is that? Why’d you leave? It’s an attainability problem, but not from anything the other person did. He or she probably wasn’t mean to you. Nor did he or she act rude or imply that you were wasting time. No – rather, what happened was, you self-rejected. You said to yourself, “This person is way too imposing for me, I need to bow out rather than make a fool of myself.” So bow out you did.

The issue with being an impressive man with a strong presence is that women begin to do this around you, too. And the more impressive and imposing you become, the more women this affects, and the more severely it affects them. Women begin bowing out of interactions with you earlier and earlier, because they simply can’t handle the social pressure of talking to a man with a presence like yours. It’s easier for them to make their exit than it is to stick around trying to win over someone they don’t realistically think they can win over.

As you become an increasingly powerful, successful, high status men, more and more women (and men) feel like you’re out of their social league, too high caliber for them, and simply start bowing out of talking to you quickly and early. It can get to the point where success starts feeling like a double-sided sword – all these women who should be feeling awed by you instead get cold and shut down and put a wall up because they feel like they can’t really have you.

The “Full of Yourself Threshold”

There’s a “full of yourself threshold” that you can cross that just turns a lot of people off. I’ve noticed it for a long time with all kinds of famous, semi-famous, and even just mildly successful people; many of them get high on their fame or success and begin acting supremely self-important. What then happens is that some people, blinded by the “VIPs’” risen star, continue to kiss up to them in the hopes of winning their favor, further reinforcing their sense of self-importance, while many other people grow disgusted by and disillusioned with them and cut ties and want nothing to do with them.

The tragic part is that you will see this happen to people who formerly were very good and noble people who simply got caught up in the whirlwind of fame and success and seeming-importance. They cut off their friends who try to ground them and alienate anyone who doesn’t support their view of themselves as Very Important People.

What then ends up happening is they become surrounded only with insincere people who are trying to use them to further their own agendas, because all the sincere people who had their best interests at heart have been pushed away by the VIP’s growing selfishness and entitlement mentality. And when they meet people, they will elicit one of only two reactions:

• Awe, or
• Dismissal.

Awe occurs if the VIP seems so far above the person meeting him that she sees him as vastly superior to her and worthy of her reverence. Dismissal occurs if the VIP seems to be not that far above the person meeting him, or on her level or beneath her, or if she doesn’t buy into whatever superior hierarchical value he’s attempting to position himself as having (if he seems fake or tryhard to her, for instance). Either way, he doesn’t get anything approximating a real connection from people genuinely appreciating him; the real people leave, and only the people who want to use him, feed off him, and ride his coattails remain.

Too much pride without humility hurts the person guilty of it the most. Crossing the “full of yourself threshold” quickly undertows your social life, pushing away the best people and calling to a man’s self the users, who respond to the loud cries of the self-important man like moths to a flame and come to get what they can from him.

Humility to the Rescue

In today’s world, humility gets a bad rap. It’s almost a kind of dirty word in modern parlance – humbleness, the dreaded self-descriptive word of the meek. Except, it really isn’t.

Meek, weak people aren’t actually humble – they just don’t have anything to brag about and aren’t terribly impressive individuals. Strong, accomplished people who combine humility with their impressiveness though – now those are some mighty folks.

Humility most significantly affects a man’s likeableness and approachability. Take if you will the example of two kings. One king has conquered two new countries to add to his empire; he stands before his people and says, “Today, I have triumphed! Your all-powerful king has led us to yet another victory!” The other king has conquered two new countries to add to his empire; he stands before his people and says, “Today we have triumphed. The noble people of this empire have led us to yet another victory.” Which king do you think the average subject will feel more comfortable sitting down and chatting with one-on-one? Which king do you think is most likely to be treated well by enemy kings if he is captured, or more likely to avoid a revolution by the people in rougher times?

Too much pride divides; humility builds bridges. Particularly as you build a stronger and stronger presence, you can use and will need humbleness to take the edge off yourself in social situations.

I’ll give you an example. When I first started traveling overseas back in 2006, I started talking about it to everyone I could. I figured, traveling to foreign countries is such an impressive thing, people will like me even more! What I found surprised me though: women responded to me worse when I told them about my travels than they did if I refrained from doing so.

One of the reasons I realized half a year after I started talking about travel was that many of the women I discussed my travels with couldn’t relate to them; I might as well have been talking about astrophysics or my childhood Marvel comic book collection. For a while, this frustrated me to no end, that this really awesome, impressive thing I had to talk about simply seemed to fall flat on its face every time I tried to discuss it.

Eventually I came with a solution, which at the time I didn’t 100% understand, but it worked so I used it. I started talking about when I didn’t want to travel at all and didn’t like travel. And I’d tell people about how the only reason I got into travel at all in the first place was because I found myself living in Washington, DC, a very international city, and I had a few friends who were gung-ho about me going abroad with them, and I decided to push my limits, swallow the pill, and say, “Sure, why not?” And I ended up surprised to find that, in fact, I loved it.

All the people who would’ve been formerly turned off by me talking about travel before now followed me with interest as I told this story, nodded their heads in agreement as I described not wanting to travel and being afraid of going overseas into an unknown land and culture where I didn’t speak the language, and worked overtime to connect with me on my tales of adventures abroad, telling me the places they’d like to go someday and what they’d heard about travel from others who’d been off-continent. Suddenly they were all warm to me now.

At the time, I chalked this up entirely to me being more relatable by describing being in a state of mind (scared to travel / disinterested in travel) that matched the way they currently felt. And I still think that’s part of the reason this worked. But now I think the other part is that it makes me sound far more humble, approachable, and relatable.

No longer was I saying, “Look how impressive I am; I travel the world!” I started instead saying, “I travel the world, but it wasn’t always that way and I used to be downright intimidated at the prospect of it.” And the response I got for it was excellent.

Being Humble

There are specific, actionable steps you can take to up your humility and play down your impressiveness – which, in fact, only makes you seem more impressive. Do you know any non-impressive people who say things like, “No, no, no, it was just pure luck that I became so successful, everyone else in my field is a lot smarter than me?” Didn’t think so! It’s only people who are truly, genuinely impressive who talk that way, so they don’t come off like they’re bludgeoning you over the head with their accomplishments like the showboaters do.

Here are the things to think about and the things to do to position yourself as a successful-but-humble individual and take the edge off your accomplishments and impressiveness to let women connect to you better:

• State your achievements, endeavors, and interests, then downplay them. These days when people ask me what I do, my response is nearly always the same: “I’m finishing my first book and working on launching a couple of startup companies with a good friend of mine.” They always say wow, that’s so impressive, and I always reply like so: “Well, we’ll see when the results come in. My book may sell four copies, and the companies… hey, maybe they’ll make a lot of money, or maybe they’ll make none at all! Only time will tell.” Do this with anything impressive about you and it removes any fears the other person has of not being able to relate to you.
  
  Do not sell yourself short and act defeatist and pessimistic – this is what weak people do to try and elicit sympathy, and it’s grating and annoying (“Oh, I don’t know if my businesses will even succeed, it’s so hard to be successful in business and 9 out of 10 businesses fail. I might be just another failure”). Instead, just be a little self-deprecating then move on.

• Turn it back to her. Just as noted in last week’s post “The Conversationalist,” you want to turn the conversation back to the person you’re talking to as quickly as possible. This is especially true after you’ve just said something impressive. If someone asks you where you went to school, and the answer is that you went to Harvard University, downplay it quickly (“I’m still not sure how I got in”), then turn it back to her (“So where’d you go to school?”). You want to move on quickly from impressive topics because it gives you flexibility; if the woman you’re talking to enjoys what you’ve mentioned and wants to focus on it more, trust that she’ll bring it back up. If it’s too much for her and makes her feel intimidated, you downplaying it and moving on lets her steer the conversation in a different direction she’s more comfortable with, rather than being stuck on something that will lead to her self-rejecting.

• Be gracious toward others' accomplishments. So you’re a freelance photographer who’s had his work published in the New York Times and National Geographic? Great. Just because she’s taking her first photography class though is no reason to brush her enthusiasm for her newfound pastime under the carpet. Give her some kudos – and don’t overdo the advice unless she asks. Tell her how excited you are that she’s taken up photography, and how you think it’s one of the most wonderful arts there is and so liberating a form of artistic expression. Ask her how she likes it. Then move on – most people don’t like being stuck on a topic where they’re total novices talking to a professional who far outclasses them, it feels quite uncomfortable. If she instead she feels very comfortable with you and wants to come back to the topic and pick your brain a bit and bond over it excitedly, she will.

• Don’t get hung up on topics. The last thing you want to be is the guy who mentions something impressive, then mentions it again later, and then once again later. Even when you think you’re being subtle, people know what’s going on if you mention it again later, “casually” in reference to something else or not. Wait for other people to bring it back up, and meantime find other things to discuss. The truly impressive man needs only mention something once – and a fleeting once, at that – to know its impact.

• Don’t get specific unless asked. I’ll break my own rule here and tell you I used to drive a Mercedes-Benz E320. It was an absolutely gorgeous car, and had a smoother, firmer ride than any other car I’d owned or perhaps even drove (and I used to work in a tire store back in the day and drive everything into the shop from Kias to Alfa Romeos). How this relates to conversation is that sometimes I will be talking to people who tell me what kind of car they drive, or what kind of car they used to drive. I never, ever discuss what kind of car I had. Very occasionally, it will come up in passing that we are discussing cars, or something like the ride in a car, and I will say, “I used to have a luxury car,” and then I’ll immediately downplay it, “kind of a reward for myself after the first two cars I had, oh man, those cars were a mess,” and then I’ll go on discussing whatever it was I intended to discuss about how luxury cars handle better. Only if people ask me what kind of car I had will I get specific. I’ll give the make, and if they press further, I’ll give the model. By this time, most of the people who are asking drive luxury cars themselves, and have far better and more expensive cars than an E320, so it’s no problem from an impressiveness-standpoint, and I don’t come off showboaty like the guy who comes out and lists his make and model uninvited.

One final note is that there’s another danger to being the guy who showboats as well: running into people that are able to show you up. There are people out there (myself included, admittedly) who enjoy nothing more than showing up a showboat. Some guy walks up and starts bragging about how accomplished he is in some way or another, and then one of his listeners very casually make a reference to something he or she has done that completely outclasses the showboat’s accomplishment. He’s now tanked his value and is in full retreat. This is when you see these guys get nervous and defensive and start searching for a way to regain their sense of self-importance. This is also the downfall of the hierarchy mentality I touched on a bit some time ago in “Ultimate Social Calibration.” I ought to write a proper, updated post on hierarchical mindsets and what a bane they are to genuine, enduring social success… I’ll get around to it eventually.

Ultimately, humility and humbleness get a bad rap, but they’re actually quite good and useful when you’re an impressive guy. You don’t even have to be a super-successful, over-accomplished chap; I’m a cat with no job and hardly any possessions to my name with perhaps delusions of grandeur of someday being a successful author and businessman. It’s all in how you position yourself, really. When you say something impressive, then throw in some humility to take the edge off, it makes you especially warm and alluring. And somehow, that makes women find you all the more interesting, attractive, and relatable.

Chase