Socializing

Self-monitoring allows you to adapt yourself to the people around you. It’s a good thing… but too much of it can really cramp your style (and the naturalness of your interactions).

If you've gone through my charisma course, Charisma In A Bottle (which, incidentally, I'll be re-releasing soon), you're familiar with the concept of 'self-monitoring'.

A self-monitor is someone who keeps a mental eye on himself, observing his own actions, making sure he is acting in 'correct' ways and not screwing things up.

Charismatic people are high self-monitors. While they might seem to be the most casual, relaxed folks out there, they are in fact carefully monitoring and adjusting their social presentation.

Dating is another area that turns men into high self-monitors. You go out to approach girls and you focus relentlessly on:

• How nervous vs. confident you seem
• Whether you approach from the right angle
• If you're delivering an opener she'll respond to
• If you're getting enough compliance from her fast enough
• Whether you've moved her soon enough
• Whether you're dominant enough
• Whether you're bantering enough
• What your value is relative to hers
• What your attainability is relative to hers

... plus a whole bunch of other things you are doing or that are about you.

And while this is useful for spotting your weak points and improving on what you want to improve at, it hobbles your ability to truly be in-the-moment with a girl and interact with her in a truly smooth, natural way.

Thus, some of the time, you are going to want to do things the opposite way, and turn your self-monitoring way down.

Calibration allows you to fluidly conduct social interactions with others. How do you develop it, though? There are several ways, but they all involve talking with other people.

Other people are similar to you in many ways. Yet they also have their differences.

People tend to veer too far in one way or the other, either assuming excess similarity or assuming excess differences between people. Depending on which way you veer, your baseline approach to calibration will differ.

For example, if you tend to assume everyone is just like you, your main calibration task becomes to identify ways people are different, and adjust your behavior to compensate for the differences between you and them.

On the other hand, if you are someone who assumes most people are nothing like you, you need to train yourself to be much more aware of the similarities between yourself and others, to bridge the gaps between you.

Achieving a balanced sense of how alike someone is to you, as well as in what particular ways he is different, and what he is most responsive to, and using that sense to adapt your interaction with him, leads you to calibration.

All calibration is is the treatment of someone in a way effective for that individual; a way that gels with his likes, preferences, and motivators.

The better you calibrate, the more easily people will like and respond to you, plus do what you ask them to do.

People will view a calibrated individual as more alike them, more understanding of them, and less mysterious and unfathomable to them, too.

A man is only as stuck as he allows himself to be. It can take some time to climb out, but you can cultivate options and knowhow, and build a life of freedom for yourself – if you choose.

On our forum, one of our long-time members writes:

My personal fears of the future, has me losing hope, I see no way to live the life I desire (that may be untrue and that what I want is possible) and that has me running to my addictions, instead of having enough hope and groundedness to overcome my problems. I don’t want to let this feeling of hopelessness drive me down my own rabbit hole anymore.

When I was a teen and early twenty-something, I was depressed to the point of despair.

Sometimes I got to dwelling on hitting 'eject', but the only kind of eject I could think of was ejecting from life.

I got over that eventually, and began to branch out into trying all these different things, meeting all these different people, traveling to and living in all these different places.

And I discovered a way of living that was the opposite of how I'd lived when depressed:

Rather than get stuck somewhere, trapped in a situation, with no way out, I could simply step out of any situation and enter a completely new one, any time I liked.

From any situation, at any time, I could hit 'eject', and be free.

Small talk serves important social functions in the early conversation. Being good at it enables you to have better, more fluid conversations with those you talk to.

In our next installment in the Social Skills 101 series (see Part 1 on why basic social skills are so key here, and Part 2 on approaching unfamiliar people here), we'll talk about everyone's least favorite part of conversation, small talk.

Small talk is the bane of many an objective-oriented conversationalist, and not always for the same reasons:

• Some loathe small talk and try to move past it or skip it entirely wherever possible

• Others view small talk as necessary, yet become trapped in it, unable to free themselves from it

Let's discuss what small talk is, the function it serves in conversation, and how to use it without bogging down in inane conversation you can't break free of.

Approaching strangers demands a variety of social skills many people never fully develop. You need a reason to approach, to make sure you’re seen, and to be friendly, to start.

This is Part 2 of my reboot of our old 'Social Skills 101' series.

You can see Part 1, with a video breakdown of various socially unsavvy approaches, here.

In Part 2, we're going to talk about approaching strangers.

If all you want is solid social skills, stranger approach isn't completely necessary (though it is helpful). There are plenty of highly socially skilled people who aren't able to approach strangers.

However, I think it's good to begin with, since a.) a big part of this site is devoted to cold approach, and b.) in the event you're starting off at zero socially, as I did, to even talk to people at all you'll need to start approaching strangers.

So let's dive into approaching and opening people you don't know -- a painfully awkward, uncalibrated social situation for most (even many otherwise veteran socializers who yet never learned to approach strangers).

It doesn’t matter how slick you look or how many great tips you’ve absorbed. Good basic social skills must come first if you wish for social success.

This is the first installment in a reboot of our old series on social skills.

Social skills are the single most crucial skill set for anyone to learn to work with other people.

We'll use dating as our vehicle to discuss these skills. Nevertheless, as you learn social skills in dating, you'll apply them to every area of your life too.

Social skills aren't deliberately taught. You don't learn them in school, except incidentally. Most people only intuitively understand social rules, and only once they've learned them.

People shun and shame those with insufficient social skills and grace.

However, you can develop these skills at any age; it just takes focus and practice.

In this series kick-off article, I'm going to show you just why social skills are so absolutely crucial.

In this video, two guys go head-to-head for a cute, horny club girl. One of them wins, and presumably gets the lay, while the other of them (painfully) loses:

This video's titled as "guy gets his girl friend stolen in under 3 minutes" but the girl's clearly not his girlfriend. I'll tell you what the apparent dynamic actually is below. Also, while the video only takes three minutes, the process itself clearly took longer than that. Again, I'll tell you roughly how long it likely took below.

However, to introduce this piece, let me say I've been in very similar situations myself a number of times over the years. Both several times on the losing end as a beginner, and then more times on the winning end once I earned my chops.

In this article, we'll examine the tactics used by both seducers in the above video.

We'll also talk about when they can work and when they won't (plus why the blond white guy beat the Asian guy).