Men Style

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 than you might care to think.

As a boy, I decided I wanted to learn how to be a man who inspired others to gather around him. I wanted to become a magnet for people. I don't know why I wanted this; it's just something I've always had, something deep in my DNA. I have family members who are actors, singers, and entrepreneurs; at least one of my ancestors was a privateer (or, more commonly, a pirate), a few hundred years back.

Even as recently as my great-grandfather, I'm told that my grandmother was first introduced to her future father-in-law when my grandfather brought her to his father's estate in Europe, led her up a large grand staircase, and cast open the doors to his bedroom, revealing an old man reposed in his bed with two young women, one on either arm. I come from a long line of different, eccentric individuals who have had little taste for playing by the rules.

Yet, I still faced an uphill climb as I developed. It might seem that being a man is passé in today's world of tender, sensitive males and assertive, upwardly mobile females. TV and the movies lionize the shy, unconfident man; powerful men routinely get painted the villains, or used as unintelligent plot devices eventually triumphed over by strong women and underdog men. Society tells you it's men's feelings that are most important, and achievement is of secondary importance; so long as you're happy, that's all that really matters.

Because of all this, we now celebrate the ordinary, and frown upon the exceptional. It's as though the exceptional threaten ordinary individuals' contentedness in their own ordinariness, and so must be discouraged from pursuing the exceptionalism that would seem so disruptive to those around them.

Well, if you want to know how to be a man women chase and pursue, you're going to have to accept that you're going to get a lot of push back from people, and you're going to have to confront the beliefs you've been instilled with since a child. You'll have to pull the wool from your eyes, so to speak.

But as you do, you'll find the world comes to look a more and more beautiful place, the more you see it for what it really is. Today, I want to help you pull that wool down and see the world a bit more for what it is, and arm you with a few steps to start taking right now to set yourself on the road to becoming the kind of man you've always dreamed you could be.

And in order to accomplish all this, I'm going to give you a set of maxims to grow by.

I'm launching a new blog series today that'll roll every Friday of each week, featuring selected excerpts from my acclaimed manual on meeting, dating, and succeeding with women. If you've already got a copy of the book, these should serve as nice weekly refereshers! And if you haven't gotten yours yet, here's a small sample of what you're missing...

Today's excerpt is on how to get a sexy male voice, from my eBook How to Make Girls Chase: Every Tactic and Technique You Need to Get the Girl(s) of Your Dreams. Voice is one of those topics that's tragically under discussed; it's a huge fundamental, and (if Mehrabian's numbers are right) it comprises a whopping 38% of what you communicate to other people -- and women. Not your words, mind you -- your voice itself.

This is an area you should definitely pay a little attention to...

“Your voice is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. It can be used to attract, to seduce, to build intrigue and capture a woman’s interest.

If you listen to women talk, you’ll notice first off that some women have appealing voices; you’ll also notice that other women have unappealing voices. Some women have voices that make you think, “Wow, she’s cute, but she must be a nerd.” And other women have very sexy voices.

It’s the same with men. There’s a great deal of variation in voices; in fact, every man’s voice is in fact surprisingly flexible in how it can change and evolve. Your voice is most likely the result of the way people around you spoke as you were growing up. If you were raised in Northern England, vs. Southern California, vs. Australia, vs. South Africa, you will have a different accent, for instance. And within each of those accents, there are even different voices.

Before we get into the deeper stuff though, first let’s cover some of the vocal basics:

If there's one pet peeve I have right now, it's the current way being an "alpha male" is talked about in most pick up and dating circles. I've gotten to the point personally where I cringe every time I hear some guy talking about "being alpha."

But I don't want to go on an anti-alpha tirade here, because at it's core, the alpha male ideology is very correct; it's just that the term itself has become so laden with cultural baggage that "the alpha male" has just about become a stereotype -- a clownish, cartoon caricature of what an alpha male used to be.

Every time I hear the term "alpha" these days, I imagine some bald, shirtless, gargantuan, vein-popping 'roid-head screaming, "Alpha... ALPHA!!!" at the top of his lungs, and a crowd of skinny nerdy guys standing around him, pointing at him in awe, and whispering to each other, "That's alpha. That's how you get the ladies."

This post is my effort to wrestle back the term "alpha male" from the shadow of itself it's become, and redefine once and for all what the term really means -- and exactly how to be an alpha male... without turning yourself into a cartoon character.

You know, I've been called a lot of things. I've been called an extremely warm person; I've been called a cold man. And at times, I've been called a romantic.

To me, romanticism is an ideal, of sorts. It's a refusal to accept the baseness and ugliness of the "real" world, as most consider it. And, it's the creation, in your own self and in the life you lead, as well as in the life you help those around you to lead, of another world -- a world where things are filled with meaning, where people truly matter, and where we all are the authors of our own spectacular, riveting stories.

As a romantic man, you become able to touch others' lives and bring hope to those who lack it. You inspire; you motivate; and you energize. You take those for whom the world had been empty and cold, and make it feel as though it's buzzing with electricity and potential. And best of all, you take the fantasies that women read about so avidly in their romance novels, and you can bring them to life.

Striving to become romantic is, to me, something very much worth striving for -- romanticism gives you an ability to affect others' lives that is in some ways without equal.

Who would've thought scientists'd ever get around to proving something like this?

A decade and a half ago, I found that if I wore outrageously cool and different clothes, I attracted a lot of attention to myself. When I later took on a tougher persona in university, I took to wearing a lot of (what I'd now describe as really tacky) gold jewelry all over: big chunky gold rings with huge fake diamonds, gold necklaces, a really flashy gold cubic zirconium-studded bracelet that people would stop me to comment on and more than a few bouncers and DJs tried to buy off me or barter for.

I wouldn't be caught dead in that getup these days, mainly because I have a very different image now, but it got me attention, and what I did with that attention was up to me.

And what else I found was that it caught a lot of women's attention. And I couldn't prove it, but they seemed a lot more interested in me than most of the other averagely-attired guys in my classes.

I've been getting called "gentle" and "a gentleman" quite a bit recently. Me, of all people! The man who prides himself on taking women as lovers within a few hours of meeting them, and who hardly ever goes on second dates because he either sleeps with a girl on the first date, or burns the house down trying.

Yet I am, according to more and more women I meet these days, a gentleman.

I've had an interesting and at times soap opera-y progression of events over the past week in which my girlfriend has contacted an ex-girlfriend of mine, whom she'd never met or spoken to, in order to, at first, vent about me and seek her guidance, and now to be friends with her. My ex-girlfriend and I have since reconciled, and my current girlfriend and my ex-girlfriend have been comparing notes on me: the good and the bad.

I have a big belly (I'm skinny by American standards, but... I'm not in America anymore).

My face gets red very easily.

I'm troublesome and not simple. Just when they think they have me figured out... they realize they were wrong.

And, I'm a gentleman. I have gentle eyes. I'm a gentle person.

That last one is no accident, mind you. Being a gentleman is something I've long aspired to be. I'm a big believer that a man can be fast, powerful, and incredibly seductive – and yet, still manage to be dashing, enchanting, and considerate.

James Bond is a rogue and a knave, and he shoots bad guys and beds women – a LOT of women – with speed and expertise.

But he's still a gentleman. And if you aren't – well, I think you should aim to be, too.