Social Life

A few weeks ago an anonymous GC reader made a very simple request:

“Can you write an article on leadership?”

Yes, certainly; I’m very happy to oblige. Leadership is a quality coveted by men the world over. It’s not only the ability to lead individual men and women, but the ability to compel larger groups to work harder and achieve more than they ever would on their own.

Similar to improving your skill with women, there is a common misconception about leadership that it’s just something people are born with and can never be learned. But today I’m going to break down leadership, and show that it can be learned by anyone... anyone willing to put in the time and effort to learn it, of course.

If you're a naturally empathetic person, you probably find yourself in-tune with the emotions of others. Perhaps more often than you'd like.

Even if you aren't, you'll have found yourself in a situation where you would have liked to improve somebody's mood, but may not have known how to.

A reader, Knight, commented in the article on emotional contagion about how a long-time mentor/motivator had seemed down on a recent occasion:

“A great female friend of mine who is usually a great motivator for me was down today - something I haven't seen since we were in year 9 - and it really threw me off.”

He wanted to know how he could shift her emotions:

“I still felt the need to try and cheer her up somewhat... could you perhaps show us all how to shift emotions?I do my best to stay away from downers these days but I realise that some important people in my life are going to feel a bit down some times. It would be great to get them up on par with our happiness again!”

This is a common sentiment when met with the advice that you should associate less with people who are negative or who suck energy from you, a la the psychic vampire; that you have important people in your life that you want to be there for.

Sex with friends.

It's something that we've all thought about and that can be relatively easy if one manages it correctly.

It does come with it's own little challenges though.

Today I'm going to introduce you to three (3) of the main flavours of girl you'll run into when you're hooking up with friends, and give you some insights into how to spot them and how to deal with them post hook-up, or beforehand if you are thinking about a hook-up.

It's important to view the demarcations between the archetypes as blurred lines rather than concrete ones. Girls aren't static in terms of their archetype and they can move from one to the other depending on circumstance.

In yesterday's article on emotional contagion - Part I of this 2-parter on emotional transference - we discussed how the process of transferring emotions from person to person works. Namely, there are two steps:

1. Empower the other person around you first, then

2. Emote to the other person who, now empowered, will mirror you

Today's article is about the dark side of emotional contagion - something commonly called "psychic vampirism." That is, it's how some people have learned to use emotional contagion in reverse - rather than transfer energizing emotion to others, building them up and making them feel great, a psychic vampire has learned to use emotional transference to drain emotions the other way - feeding off the emotions of those he comes into contact with, making himself feel better at the expense of his conversation partner's emotional well-being.

Like the vampires of legend, a psychic vampire can "turn" you, too - with enough of your energy drained, you can become an energy drainer yourself, feeding off the positive emotions of others to sustain yourself.

But, just like emotional contagion, this is not some paranormal phenomenon - rather, it's simply down to empowering and emoting, seeing and mirroring.

Note from Chase: Colt is one of our writers who contributed to the site a while back, with the 'Student of the Game' series and the 'Social Skills 101' series. Colt's roughly intermediate in his skills with women - he's still learning, but he's having success and taking new and pretty girls to bed - and he's focused on helping guys who are new to working on themselves and their dating skill sets to get in gear. Now returned from adventures in Thailand and the wilds of central Africa, we welcome him back to pick up where he left off with 'Social Skills 101'.

We live in a world designed for extroverts. It is designed for people who love parties, large social gatherings, and constant social stimulation. Today’s post is designed for the underrepresented men, the men who still want to attract beautiful women, but want to remain true to their selves: this post is for the introverts. So without further ado, here we go: dating for introverts.

What is an introvert?

It’s estimated that around 30% of the American population is introverted. But I would guess that the true number of people who are at least somewhat introverted (say, people who qualify as ambiverts - those who switch back and forth between introvert and extrovert) is actually much higher. But before we go any further, let me first clear something up: being introverted is not the same as being shy.

Shyness means that you are afraid of social interaction because you fear social judgment. If you find yourself in that category, there are plenty of articles on this site that can help you brave the social waters, such as:

• How to Take Your Self-Esteem to the Stratosphere
• Anxiety in Men: Where it Comes From and How to Stop It
• The Pig and the Mirror
• How to be a Sexy Man
• Becoming a Social Success
• The Purpose of Life from a Practical Point of View

However, being an introvert means that you still possess social skills and have the ability to attract women, but you would rather spend your time reading, working out, or otherwise improving yourself.

In "How to Talk About Yourself on Dates," a commenter named Al asked about an article on frame control - examples and advanced/detailed technique:

“One future article I would love to see is a more advanced and detailed article on frame control. I have read a forum thread by you on advanced frame control which was beneficial and your frame control article on here but I feel I need more real life examples of adroit frame control to be able to master it myself.

To put it in to context this last month I have just been focused on reading conversation articles on here as this has been my little "month of conversation" (convenient you slip this article in before the end of the month!) and I found the most valuable article of yours was the annotated example of a conversation you would have. Personally, i find learning by imitating helps initially for all game-related things before i stamp my own persona on how these are used so such an article would be fantastic.

Thanks again,
Al”

Frame control's a neat topic, and an important one - persuasion and communication is a central point of human existence, and if you want to stay in control and have things go your way, you've got to be good at it - not just at winning debates, but at getting people to see things your way.

That's what frame control really is - it's painting the picture in a way that not only speaks to you, but to everyone who's looking at it... your "opponent" included.

Here, we'll be taking a deeper look at frame control than we have before, and it's a look chock full of examples to get you thinking about things in the most intuitive way possible.

One of the most annoying, horrible, and downright irritating situations you'll ever run into socially is someone suddenly inveighing against you with emotionally-charged, finger-pointing, judgmental arguments.

These attacks are usually unexpected when you run into them, and they'll frequently catch you off guard. They can be confusing to know how to respond to if you're more accustomed to calm, cool-headed debates about the merits and drawbacks of a specific subject - then suddenly here's someone sandblasting you with hatred and unadulterated emotion. I'm sure you've experienced it at some point or another:

“People like you are the lowest kinds of people there are! You think you can just take whatever you want and not have to suffer the consequences! You think of no one but yourself!”

Suddenly, you're so deeply on the defensive trying to prove these accusations levied against you are untrue, that you end up effectively putting your hands up and saying, "Whoa, hey, stop, that's not true at all!"

Morality attacks also usually have a powerful communal effect, with any bystanders to the argument usually feeling either a) swept up in the argument and equally enraged and emboldened, or b) so afraid of being castigated themselves that they either just agree out of fear, or they remain quiet and let things unfold, not wanting to get in the way of an onrushing freight train.

That means that when someone starts hitting you with moral superiority, you need to be quick on your feet to not get quickly cast out as whatever you're being labeled as - and the way to do that, of course, is fighting fire with fire: you must use moral superiority right back.