Investment

In Part 3 of my 3-part series on compliance, I’ll be discussing how to say no to people who want compliance out of you – and when specifically to say it (as opposed to saying yes).

You can read Parts 1 and 2 of the series here:

1. How to Get Her to Say “Yes”
2. What If She Says No?
   

Turning down compliance is actually an especially dicey area for most. Even for experienced guys... even for men who are naturals socially... you will run into the odd situation here and there where you aren’t sure whether to say yes or no, and aren’t sure how to say no even if you probably should.

Tell me you’ve been here before: there’s a really cute girl, and you really dig her, yet the dynamic you have with her is just that you’re chasing her a little bit too much... yet, you sense that if you let up even a bit, she’s going to vanish off into the ether.

And then, out of the blue, she says: “Can you wait here a minute? I have to go make a phone call,” then turns to go leave.

Can you say no to this? Should you? What’s your play?

You can sense that letting her do this only worsens your position with her and moves you farther away from getting anywhere with her... but you just don’t know what else to do.

You did it; you took the plunge and asked her to do something... to come with you, go out with you, tell you something, show you something... to invest.

And now, she’s said no.

Well what exactly do you do? What do you do when she says no?

This is a pressing question for men. If guys didn’t worry about answering the “what if she says no?” question, men everywhere would walk up to the women they wanted and address them with reckless abandon.

There’d be no “missed connections”; no “I saw this beautiful girl today, and she saw me, and I wish I’d gone and said something to her.”

No more “waiting for the right moment”... not really.

Because there’d be no fear of looking awkward and feeling uncomfortable if it didn’t work out. Yet, this is not the case, because men generally do not know how to handle a no.

In Part 2 of our 3-part series on compliance (you can read Part 1 here: How to Get Her to Say “Yes”), we’re going to tackle your options for how to proceed when you get a “no.”

You meet a girl, and it’s going okay. She’s chatting with you, seems nice enough, and isn’t trying to pry herself away like those girls who really obviously aren’t into you do. Yet, she isn’t exactly throwing herself at you, either.

So, you decide to get some more investment from her; partly as a compliance test to see where you’re at, and partly also to ratchet up attraction by making her get a foot in the game too (instead of sitting on the bench watching you play).

To do this, you ask her to move a little ways with you: “Hey, let’s move over there, the lighting’s much better.”

But, she says no: “I’m comfortable here, I don’t want to move.”

Gulp. What do you do now?

If you stay and keep talking as if nothing happened, you’ve yielded control of the interaction to her, and if experience has told you anything it’s that whatever chances you had before are sunk now.

Yet if you leave, the chance you’ll get another shot with her is not so hot; you can always reopen her later on, but there’s a good chance she’ll be gone or locked up in conversation with someone else by then, and you won’t exactly be riding back in on a majestic white horse at that point either. You’ll just be that guy she didn’t connect with earlier who circles back around for another shot.

As a third alternative, you could launch into a hard push... but she’s not that sold on you yet so you realize your chances of pulling this off are dim, and besides, you don’t really want to pull the nuke out of your arsenal this early on and launch into a battle of wills before the game is even afoot.

At this point, it may well seem like your interaction with her is all out of gas, and you’ve no choice left but to pull off the highway and hitchhike home.

But what if she says no and you respond another way?

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.

If you’ve ever been tricked or convinced to do something against your original intentions, you’ve been on the receiving end of a failure to get buy in before an action.

When I was a teenager, my parents would always try and convince me and my brothers to get jobs. It’s quite funny that having them tell us to do this actually made us less likely to get jobs, because they were constantly on our backs about it.

They made it seem like it was something that we needed to do against our will. Thus, it was us against them; we had to give excuses as to why we couldn’t get the job, and skillfully dodge being told what to do.

Convincing people to do things isn’t as simple as telling them what to do.

If I could walk up to a woman and make the first thing out of my mouth be, “Come home with me,” and she immediately acquiesced and did, I wouldn’t be spending time with her creating an emotional connection, comfort, and sexual attraction. In fact, if I made this the first thing out of my mouth she would likely very heavily resist any intention of coming home with me, even if I was the sexiest man on the planet.

She would resist because I failed to get her to buy in to the idea of coming home with me. She had no say in the matter, and thus felt like she was being coerced into doing what I wanted, rather than doing something that was mutually beneficial.

Sleeping with each other requires the collective conscious of both parties involved. She’s not your slave, which makes it absolutely necessary that she is thought of as an equal in the mating game.

I was doing some reading the other day when I came across the term “trivializing.”

It gets thrown about in popular media, and often is something you learn to somewhat ignore, just because of how often people lament others “trivializing” some XYZ “really big deal” to them, that seems trite or overblown to others.

And yet...

Examine the classic debate between two opposites. Say someone who is pro-renewable energy because he wants to save the planet, and someone else who is pro-fossil fuels because he doesn’t want to be forced to pay top dollar for new, less effective technologies when cheaper alternatives are available.

The first guy accuses the second guy of killing the planet. The second guy feels like the first guy is trivializing his need to not burn a hole in his wallet, and becomes offended, and tells him off. The first guy then feels like the second guy is trivializing his desire to save the planet as an ignoble cause, and fiercely retorts.

This is a case of crossed wires communication-wise of the sort we discussed in “Dale Carnegie’s Most Life-Changing Piece of Advice”, but it goes broader than this, because trivializing comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s hard to detect and harder to combat in nearly all of them.

Who’s fault is it when a relationship fails?

Two words for you: the man’s.

Usually.

Note: a relationship failure is something different than letting a relationship decline and die, or just breaking up with a girl, because you’ve lost interest or other things in your life have taken precedence or she’s let herself go and is no longer meeting your requirements for someone you’ll keep around in a relationship capacity.

In that case, while a female observer would still consider it a “failed relationship”, from the standpoint of the male it probably isn’t (unless it’s a case of her letting herself go... then, maybe it is, if she was what you wanted before that but stopped being it after it). In that case, it’s just a relationship that didn’t work out.

When I say “failed relationship” here, what I’m talking about is a relationship that you really wanted to work out... but it went belly up anyway.

Is it ever the woman’s fault?

Yes, sometimes. Rarely. In the case where the relationship is a female dominated one because the man has yielded to her the role of captain aboard the good ship Relation... in that case, he is following her lead, and the direction the relationship goes is up to her.

Even then though, I’m torn... because most women who lead don’t want to do it, and resent men who make them do it as weak. If I’m the officer of a military unit and I hand over my command to one of my subordinates, who then goes on to lead us right smack into a disaster, am I absolved of all blame, or do I still take some too?

The large majority of the time, across most kinds of relationships, it’s the fault of you, the man – and nearly always, it’s a failure of leadership that causes the relationship to fold.