Mindsets

Howdy! I’m happy to bring you a special podcast I did directly myself with Glenn Pearce. Glenn’s one of the coaches I have the most respect for in the men’s dating advice industry – he’s even a guy I got coaching from myself a good 9 years back.

Our society trains men to be helpless, for several of its own reasons. But it’s important you know helplessness is learned... not inborn.

Learned helplessness is the behavior shift that occurs when an animal or individual decides its situation is impossible to change. At this point, the individual decides he is helpless to affect the outcome, and simply gives up trying.

Some of the most tragic stories of crushed spirits come when you discuss learned helplessness. Animals who’ve been caged so long they won’t try to leave even if you leave their cage doors open. Prisoners who aren’t able to operate outside the penal system, so commit crimes to go back to the familiar comfort of the prison yard. And men who’ve been unsuccessful with women so long they don’t even try to meet them.

In a recent popular thread on our Beginners’ Forum, a forum member starts off by asking why women like dominant men and men who take the lead. But it quickly becomes clear his real issue is not a philosophical question of why women prefer dominant men, but an exploration of his desire for women, yet lack of motivation to take steps to meet, date, and sleep with them.

This article will not be about why girls desire dominance and leadership, per se. If you’d like more on those topics, see these articles:

• How to Be a Dominant Man: What You Didn’t Know About the ‘Winner Effect’

• A Failed Relationship is a Failure of Leadership

• Why Leadership is so Key to Seducing Women

• The Real Reason Many Men Can’t Get a Girl

Rather, this article will be about the phenomenon of learned helplessness in the modern male – where it comes from, who’s responsible for it, and what you can do to shake it off.

Girls teach you a lot when you try to talk to them, date them, or pick them up. They’re among the greatest teachers you’ll have, in fact.

In Drexel’s post yesterday on the top 3 reasons to pick up sober, he discussed pickup as a crucible through which you may purge demons and unlock total masculinity.

There are a few areas of life that shape and mold boys into men in their own unique ways:

• Group leadership (sports, clubs, politics, priesthood, military)
• Business operation (or in particular, business ownership)
• Teaching
  
• Fatherhood
• Cold approach pickup
  

None of these are guarantees. Plenty of men make it through any of these crucibles with gaping holes in their masculinity.

• The talented seducer who sobs over yet another girlfriend who’s ditched him, or flies into a rage when some girl dares reject him.

• The father who fails to discipline his children out of fear and instead raises dysfunctional adults.

• The leader who’s a leader in name only, and never learns to look out for anyone more than himself.

• The teacher who’s only in it for the paycheck, the power, or to indoctrinate and inculcate, versus the instructor who exists to challenge, spark curiosity, and open minds.
  

• The business operator or owner who cuts corners and does anything for a buck, leaving a trail of burned contractors, employees, and customers in his wake.

However the man who takes his cultivation serious can grow enormously in any of these roles... Far more so than he can in any other way.

That’s because central to each of these roles are two elements as crucial to succeeding with women as they are to succeeding as a man: the social crucible, and responsibility for more than one’s self.

Congruence is a term in psychology that refers to a state where your self and your behavior align. This leads to crazy success in dating.

How many “techniques” have guys ever used to get women?

Some guys take a very smooth, suave approach – a little James Bond mixed with Danny Ocean.

Others take a “Van Wilder” approach and try to amp up a girl’s emotions, making her have so much fun that her logical, self-judging mind turns off, and sex just happens.

Others, me included, like to take a “gorilla game” approach, and just approach every girl as decisively and directly as possible, initiating physical contact as early as is appropriate.

There are a ton of different strategies when it comes to getting girls, and those are just a few. But which one is the best? Some would argue the merits of push-pull game, others claim that providing a witty and charming conversation takes the cake, while others insist that confidence is key. What I would say is this: these are all very good approaches to getting women, and they all have their merits. Some strategies will work better than others – depending on the situation.

If you’re at that posh new nightclub in LA, or at Surrender in Las Vegas for your yearly bachelor’s trip, using “James Bond” game might not be the best idea. If you’re at a high-end business networking meeting, emulating “Van Wilder” might network your ass right to the curb. But regardless of the location and style of game you prefer, there is one underlying principle that is more important than ANY strategy or technique.

That principle, of course, is congruence.

A man’s ability to penetrate defines him, just as a woman’s capacity to receive defines her. But it isn’t just physical penetration: it’s mental and emotional too.

What is different between woman and man?

In 1908, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of ‘penis envy’ in his article “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” The (rather circuitous) thought process Freud believed little girls went through included wanting to have sex with their mothers, realizing they lacked the equipment for this, then blaming their mothers for their ‘castration’ and turning their affections toward their fathers.

Freud himself admitted not really ‘getting’ women, and his attempts to psychoanalyze them seem to make clear he never really did ‘get’ them.

Yet ‘penis envy’ is a real phenomenon (even if it may not come about quite as Freud imagined). More or less every woman experiences, at some point, the desire to be the penetrator herself. To know what it feels like to thrust the reproductive part of her body into the body of another. Even women, who cannot penetrate, recognize the power of the role.

Men who struggle with masculinity invariably are men who have lost sight of this uniquely masculine role – the role of the penetrator. And they have forgotten women’s uniquely feminine one – the role of recipient. Unlocking masculinity in yourself, and unlocking femininity in the women around you, comes down, to large extent, to this question: can you penetrate, and will she receive?

It’s easy for guys to get hung up on a girlfriend’s sexual history. Yet you can get over this if you choose to. To do it, you’ll use 3 steps.

Whenever we start dating someone new, we’re bound to soon discover a few facts about who they once dated and the amount and kind of sex they enjoyed, whether we like it or not. A new girlfriend will often tell us about her past, or we’ll end up asking about it. Either way, sometimes the truth can hurt. A lot.

Learning that a partner once enjoyed threesomes, had five sex buddies on the go at once, or has slept with fifty guys... this can be a hard pill to swallow. Some men are able to just forget about it. Some don’t care. Others slip into a whirlpool of self-torment characterized by OCD-like repetitive thoughts and emotions which they find extremely hard to shift.

You may have heard of this form of anxiety-ridden obsession referred to as “retroactive jealousy” or “retrospective jealousy”. In men this tends to be an anxiety about a girlfriend’s sexual past. In women it tends to be an anxiety over who their man was once in love with. There are genetic and biological reasons for this, but in this post I’ll be focusing on the former.

Now, not all men are willing to date (let alone marry) a girl who’s “been around the block”, and this is a perfectly reasonable position to take. But what if you’ve bagged yourself a great girl who’s wonderful in every respect, except you are bothered by her promiscuous past? Should you ditch her because she once used to enjoy hooking up with guys just for sex? Or, in later years, would you regret passing up on the possible love of your life all because of her past?

These are all points worth considering, because there’s nothing stopping you from moving on if you feel you can’t handle a girlfriend’s past or that you shouldn’t have to learn about it in the first place. Many guys hold this view, and some studies have shown that the more promiscuous a woman is or has been in the past, the more likely it is she’ll cheat when she settles down.

However, if you happen to think she’s a great girl in every respect but are obsessing about her “number”, then it might be worth trying to regain control of your thoughts and emotions regarding this.

If you want to start overcoming retroactive jealousy rather than be tormented by it, keep reading; in this post I’ll show you the tools necessary to learn how to get over your girlfriend’s past. The first step is to research and discover what causes a retroactive jealousy disorder in the first place.

You load a barbell one side at a time. The most effective way to improve with girls is to use the same approach: one side at a time, then the other.

There is one thing that bugged me more than anything else when going out with someone new to hit on girls, and I never realized it till a few months back, and only then did I begin to put it into words.

Odds are, if you go out to talk to women, you do this at least some of the time too. Most guys do. And it’s bad for you. I’ll tell you what the thing is in a moment, but first, let me tell you about Seneca’s Barbell.

A month ago I read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. In it, Taleb highlights the problem I noticed guys running into when I’d go out with them to chat up girls. The solution for this problem is what Taleb terms “Seneca’s Barbell”.

The idea behind Seneca’s Barbell is that when you work on part A of a two-part project, focus just on A; when you work on part B of that project, focus just on B. Do not work half and half on A and B at the same time, because you divvy up your attention between foci and prevent yourself doing either effectively.

As Taleb puts it, think of a barbell used by a bodybuilder. When he prepares the barbell, the bodybuilder places the weights on either side of the bar, not in the middle. Engage and become fully consumed with one side, then be fully consumed with the other. Never try to do both at once. Use your focus to its fullest.

Let me explain how this idea applies to picking up women.