"Inner game" is the way you play the game on the inside. Good inner game is crucial – but the way to improve yours is not alone in a room in front of the mirror.
I had a call earlier with our director / casting director Casandra, who is always an absolute joy to talk to. Casandra was pivotal to the filming of my 'get the girl in one date' program One Date & The Dating Artisan, as well as a few other programs we're set to release in the next couple months (including my long-delayed course on personal charisma and a bachelor lifestyle, and another on touch).
On our call we discussed a new project we want to do for this lockdown situation. While we were on it, Casandra told me a rather incredible story of her own about guys she'd encountered who still had a lot of 'inner game' work to do.
The coaching I want to do is one where, rather than have a student on with a coach, then send him out between sessions to practice in the real world with women (which many guys can't do now due to the lockdown), we instead have him alternate between coaching sessions and video 'date' sessions with beautiful girls we've trained to go on these practice dates with guys so they can do what they've covered with the coach despite the lockdown.
Casandra liked the idea and we are at present setting that up (it's still going to be a week or two before I'll be able to tell you more... but if you're interested, you can fill out this form; we'll be in touch as soon as we can say more about it).
Anyway... as we talked about this, Casandra told me a story of her own, that related to the kind of thing we discussed.
A while back, she'd worked with another date coach, named Leo. Leo was helping a group of U.K. students who were 'below beginner' in romantic experience. They had very little experience with women, although Casandra said they were all "nice people, not weird or bad, they all looked normal, some were even handsome."
Leo decided to put these guys into one-on-one interactions with beautiful women to acclimate them to women like that. Casandra recruited the girls, and also joined herself.
Then came go-time. When the students started talking to the women normally, just in a normal person-to-person interaction, everything was fine.
But then, Leo told each student to imagine that he had approached his girl, that she liked him, and now he was talking to her. After Leo told the guys this, Casandra cocked her head a bit and smiled at the guy she was paired up with. Just a very cute, warm little smile (she showed me this smile. Totally harmless smile).
And her guy started crying.
A number of the guys started crying.
The moment they were asked to imagine these were girls they'd approached, they just lost it, and started bawling.
Casandra said she was shocked at the response. And honestly, while I have been in this business for 12 years, I was also a little surprised to hear this. Probably because many of the guys we get on GC are not total hard case beginners... many of them are guys who have a little dating success under their belts already and just want to up their results.
And I will say -- even when I was totally socially isolated myself (in my teens), I still had beautiful girls flirting with me or pursuing me (because I did other stuff to seem cool and attract women in). So I always felt 'entitled' to hot women.
Hearing about guys crying when faced with beautiful women they were told to imagine they'd approached got me thinking about this whole 'broken inner game' thing.
Because certainly, if a guy is starting out in a place like that, his inner game needs work.