Pickup Tech

A reader writes in asking about attainability:

“Hey Chase, Great blog man, top notch stuff. Never been part of the PUA community, but been doing self improvement (corresponding with my values) for 4 years or so, and your blog and TSM are pretty much the only two I read consistently. I've also read your book, and have a question on attainability. So here's the issue:

Not to sound pretentious or arrogant, but I'm a pretty good looking guy, fantastic shape, fashionable, carry myself well, great job blah blah blah, and I have a lot of symptoms of having much too low of attainability. Only super confident women seem to have the guts to put themselves out there (which can be a good thing, they are my type), make eye contact passing by each other, or even manage a smile after eye contact is made.

Now I am a very pleasant, outgoing person, and I always walk around with at least a pleased look on my face, so it's not like I'm walking around frowning or anything. I guess my question is, how can I raise my attainability through body language or the way I carry myself before words are spoken or even eye contact is made, so that more women are open to me? This isn't in my head, I live in a smaller town (50,000) people, half are college kids (I'm in my late 20's) and countless times friends tell me women ask about me all interested, and I'll end up knowing who they're talking about but have never had these girls so much as make eye contact or smile?! I don't want to walk around smiling like a goofball to make myself seem friendlier, help me man!”

This goes deeper, to the issue of how to make yourself more relatable to people. In this reader's case, he's running into the same problem I used to have a lot -- that only the most confident women feel comfortable around him, and everybody else can't relate. I struggled with that for quite a while myself.

These days though, I'm a pretty darn relatable guy.

And you might be surprised by that, considering my lifestyle should make me all but unrelatable -- frequent international travel (often to places like Cambodia or Monaco instead of the "usual" places like Australia or England), starting up not just one business, but a whole host of them, meeting girls in bars, clubs, airports, and train stations, and a hard-line approach toward friendships and relationships that most people would probably politely describe as "extreme."

Me, relatable? I don't even find the same things enjoyable that most other people do.

Yet, should you ever meet me, chances are we'll get along just fine. We'll laugh; we'll trade stories; and, like so many people I meet, you'll quite possibly end up telling me you feel like we've been friends forever, despite the fact that we'll have met minutes before.

That's because I sat down and put the time into figuring out how to be relatable, both in conversation and even on first appearance. And the great news is, anybody can pull it off -- all it takes is a little effort, and a bit of a push in the right direction to get you started.

Something that can be a great deal of fun to deploy when talking with some new girl is playful banter. You can quickly find yourself in a riveting, electrifying back and forth that leaves both you and her smiling and excited with this fresh new person you've each just met.

However, if you haven't spent as much developing your technique, playful banter can, instead of being a lot of fun, end up being downright headache-inducing. Pop the aspirin and break out the Alka-Seltzer -- you'll need it (or maybe she will).

And even if you have put time into building good wit, there's a good chance -- particularly if you're newer or even intermediate -- that you haven't learned the timing of using that wit and banter in a conversation with a new woman yet -- and that you may very well go over the top, or go for too long, straying into the land of the socially awkward or even calling up out-and-out auto-rejection via over-gaming, thereby costing yourself a girl who otherwise might've been yours.

For that reason, figuring out the rules of bantering properly ends up being quite important for your early game -- you're not always going to deploy your wit in full force with every young woman you meet, but you will with enough of them that having it honed more or less to a razor's edge can end up making the difference between making it to the mid-game with that new pretty girl you like, or having to bow out early.

Thus, this quick and dirty guide on getting down some of the basics of bantering playfully with women.

You're out and about, in a high end nightclub or a top shelf retail outlet, when you spot an insanely beautiful woman. She's just gorgeous: dressed to the nines, hair flowing and perfect, and standing atop 6 inch heels. You have to meet her.

So, you walk over, start talking to her, and, to bring her back down to Earth and rob her of the inflated status her beauty and style must, you reason, confer, you apply a well-worn tactic from the early days of the codifying of seduction: the PUA neg.

"Nice nails," you ask her, 30 seconds into the conversation. "Are they real?"

That's a neg, and that's how it looks in practice for 99.9% of the guys out there who're using it.

What I want to address with today's post is what the concept behind the neg is, whether negs actually work, and whether there are any alternatives to it.

I'll lead off by telling you this: the neg, at least the way most guys who use it these days use it, is totally not the right way to go.

I'm kicking off a new weekly blog post series today, that's going to center on brief, informative articles focused on one specific technique you can use to achieve greater success with meeting and dating women. I'm calling this new series Tactics Tuesdays.

In today's edition -- our inaugural one -- I want to have a look at the technique of locking in.

When I first stumbled upon the pick up community, I heard the term "lock in" or the instruction to "get locked in" tossed about fairly often. And to me, it sounded silly and overmuch -- another vestige of the old indirect days of picking up girls, like opinion openers and routines.

Then I moved to San Diego, and acquired a new friend and wingman who was doing outstandingly with girls, and who I noticed made it a point of his game to always lock in. It was the first time I'd seen it done effectively.

About two years later in mid-2009, I partnered Girls Chase with a talented San Diego-based date coach named Mateo (who just launched his new website, Live the Knight Life; congrats to him!), and I observed that, again, here was a guy for whom locking in was a pretty essential part of his approach with women. And like my other pal, I noticed he was having a discernibly easier time more often than not on his initial approaches.

"Well, okay," I said to myself, "this looks like something I need to stop being so closed-minded about, and start doing."

So, lock in I did.

I tend to keep my focus on this site primarily to things that are as broadly applicable as possible -- things you can do no matter who you are or where you are in life to do better with women.

But the other day I had a reader write in asking about dating in college, and I thought the topic might be on worth getting a post up on. He writes:

“Dear Chase,

First off, terrific website. I haven't found anything on the web like the quality of articles you write and the depth you explore.

I'm 21 and I've finally finished university and I'm back at home. I recently got out of a 3 year relationship which lasted all the way through my time at college. A lot of the growing pains of being a young single and meeting girls has passed me by in this time. I've been on 2 dates in my whole life - both when I was 17 years old.

For a 21 year old guy, what is the best way of throwing myself into single life? Much of the dating advice out there seems aimed for an older audience than myself. It's unlikely I'm going to find girls my age doing the weekly grocery shop for example!

Thanks for any help!”

I shot him back a reply highlighting some of the things I'm going to touch on in this post, but I think there some advice here I can offer guys in college that'll help them meet more girls and succeed with more girls.

And if you're not in college, well, you might just want to give this one a read anyway -- a lot of the things I'm going to recommend you don't necessarily need an alma mater to pull off.

Why is it that most men can't seem to get what they want with women? How come so many men can't get a girl?

A few months back, a friend of mine asked me to author a post on leading women. I put it off for a while, because it's not as sexy a topic as, say, opening or locking in or overcoming objections or dating. Leading's just... a little vague, as far as topics go.

Yes, it's good to be an alpha male, and it's good to have a set process you follow, and to move on fast if a girl isn't following along. But how's that all come into play in a cohesive strategy for getting success with women?

If you'd like to achieve anything resembling consistent, reliable success with women, you're quickly going to realize that leaving things purely up to chance isn't going to cut it. "God helps those who help themselves," goes the saying -- which, boiled down, quite basically means that good things come to the people who go out and actively bring good things into their lives.

In other words, success comes to those who engineer that success.

But still, most folks don't bother engineering anything approximating success. Most average folks sit around waiting for success to find them. And it never does.

For success with women to start occuring for a guy, that has to change for him. So what's it take to advance an average man who can't get a girl into a man who consistently can?

Well, among other things, it takes this: he's got to be leading women.

Every guy's beaten himself up over how to ask out a girl he likes.

She's there, she looks great, you want to ask her out... so bad... but you just can't form the words. Or maybe even approach her in the first place.

Making the ask, as hard as it seems now, is, in fact, remarkably easy to do once you have a few simple tools to do it...

However, you can spend endless amounts of time stressed out over it when you don't.

So let's give you some AWESOME tips to making asking girls out SIMPLE.

Before we get to tips, a quick story.

When I was 14 years old, I asked a girl out for the first time.

I walked up to her in front of the whole school (her name was Sarah), and flat out asked her to go to the school dance at the end of the year with me.

She was the prettiest, most popular girl in school (not to mention head cheerleader), and she'd flirted with me and chased me hard for a year.

In fact, she'd asked me out about 6 months earlier (but I was too scared to say "yes")!

Yet by the time I finally asked her out, she'd given up on me -- the window had passed, and so had my shot with Sarah.

At the time I didn't know you only had a certain window of time to ask a girl out in... though I guessed something like that might be the case.

I soon found out it definitely was.

As you could've guess, Sarah said "no" to me, albeit in a very gracious way.

She told me she wanted "to be friends first", which I knew meant we weren't going to the dance together.

I never got a date with Sarah.

However, in the many years after, I eventually asked hundreds of girls out on dates. Some said no... but many more said yes.

And along the way, I've learned a thing or two about how to ask a girl out and get that "yes."

I've planned to write on how to ask girls out for a while now. However, a reader just wrote in asking about asking girls out specifically -- so, it's time to cover it. Our reader says:

“Man chase I really have been in a funk lately. I'm back in school and I feel like a social retard now lol! I need some advice, I really need help with asking girls out on dates and what that actually looks like you know? I'm reading your articles and a lot of it is making sense but closing the deal and getting dates is weird for me. I guess I really haven't actually asked a girl out on a proper date before my last GF I got with because I was able to escalate things with her fast.”

To answer our reader's question, I've put together this guide to asking women out.

This guide will teach you -- emphatically, unequivocally, and without fluff, huff, or pomp of any kind -- how to ask a girl out... and always (or almost always, anyway!) get a "yes."