Opening

Nice work if you can get it… and you can get it if you try.

Billie Holiday said it best… yes, there are jobs out there in which you could get PAID to meet women - beautiful ones, at that!

If you want to improve your social skills, it makes sense to work in a very social job. And if you’re serious about getting great at flirting with women, you will have to do it a LOT… so why not get paid for it?

Some of these jobs are merely an opportunity to get paid to practice dealing with different kinds of people in different kinds of social situations… in other jobs we’ll be talking about, you literally get paid to approach beautiful women!

Tell me if you've heard this one.

There's a decade-old approach toward women and dating called cocky and funny. It's frequently prescribed as a cure-all for men struggling to do better with women; throw a little cocky and funny at a girl, and she'll turn to putty in your hands. And if she doesn't melt on the first application, just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

If you're not familiar with cocky funny, it looks something like this:

Guy: Wow, are those sunglasses or are you expecting a flash bomb to go off?

Girl: [laughs] They're not that big.

Guy: I'm pretty sure I could use those to keep my car cooled off on a hot summer's day.

or

Guy: [inspecting shopping cart] From the looks of it, you're not exactly following the Jenny Craig diet.

Girl: [laughs] I like to indulge myself.

Guy: It looks more like you like indulging your entire family.

Girl: [laughs] Well, I have to be well stocked, just in case!

Guy: In case a charming knave like myself comes a-calling, right?

Girl: That's right.

Guy: Well, how timely you chose today as the day to start getting ready for me, then.

As it turns out, cocky and funny is an effective technique - when it's used appropriately. Misapplied, however, it can, in fact, end up being disastrous.

What I want to talk with you about today is finding the right balance for using cocky-funny type humor in your own interactions with women... and how you can use it to your advantage - rather than to your detriment.

Ever find yourself wondering how to get what you want?

When was the last time you did something that was clearly not in your best interest?

Don’t worry, we all do it sometimes… In fact, most people do it A LOT:

• We go on a diet, and then order a pizza the next day.

• We sign up for a gym, pay the membership for a full year and then stop going after a month.

• We set a financial goal, and then never seem to get around to starting that business.

Do any of these sound at all familiar?

Why does this happen?

I mean, it’s not like it’s hard to figure out HOW to do these things… as Tony Robbins says, “We know what to do.”

Yet for some reason, we always feel caught and smile the smile of recognition when Robbins adds: “…but we don’t do what we know!”

What would it do for you, if you could take control of your own behavior and DO what you know will ultimately improve your life? If you suddenly found yourself with the power to get what you want? How much better would your love life be… how much more money could you earn… and how much better would you look in the mirror?

When you're new to meeting women and you're just getting started, finding the right PUA openers is consistently the number one thing on your mind. How do you open a girl the right way? Learning opening can feel like this big, daunting challenge.

Today's excerpt on getting down the basics of PUA openers that you might not know comes from my eBook How to Make Girls Chase: Every Tactic and Technique You Need to Get the Girl(s) of Your Dreams. Opening's easy to do, you'll have experienced guys tell you, again and again - you can use anything to open with... so long as you say it right, that is. Problem is, when you're new, you don't really know how to say it right. So, you end up making mistakes, and women don't open well.

So what's the secret to opening well? It mostly revolves around a few key things you do to set the opener up right - so you're coming in warmly welcomed by women, instead of being greeted with suspicion or surprise as a man who plunges in awkwardly is wont to be greeted with. Here's what you need to know to get started...

There I was, 7th grade, sitting oh-so-close to one of the prettiest girls in school. She had long, wavy blonde hair, and for the life of me I couldn't stop staring at her legs. I wanted nothing other than her.

That was my math class, every single day, 5 days a week. And I knew that it was on me to figure out how to get her every bit as excited about me as I was about her. I had to figure out how to get a girl's attention.

And so I did. In "How to Attract Women," I spoke some about how I learned to attract women later in life. What I want to talk about in this post, though, was how I learned to get women's attention; how I learned to make women take note of me, start keeping track of me, and begin to become intrigued. Because it was those early lessons in middle school, as well as the ones that were to come years later, that allowed me to today find it quite easy to get girls noticing me seemingly (from their points of view) before I've noticed them, and it's an important element of getting them to chase.

If you can learn how to get a girl's attention, you can learn how to captivate her. And once you've mastered those two things... let's just say everything else is a snap.

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.

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.

A few conversations I've had lately have revolved around me discussing with guys how simple things are with women. You just talk to them, and then... boom! They chase after you. You don't even have to do any work; girls take care of all that themselves.

Because that's how it's been for me lately. But I keep getting pulled back down to reality; guys confess it doesn't work that way for them. And then I stop and think, and for a long time it didn't work that way for me, either.

What changed it for me? Well, one of the biggest factors was figuring out what to say to girls. All you've got to do is get that figured out, and you're set.

But that's tough, you say. Why? Well, because you're not a girl. And if you're like a lot of guys out there, you have, starting out, no idea what it is women want to hear, what they like to hear, or what they need to hear, whatsoever.

Here's how it goes for most guys: they start out talking to women too literally, and the women get bored out of their skulls and leave. So then a guy tries a few witty pick up lines, or he tries busting on girls to be a challenge, only to have them start snapping at him and shutting down. Eventually he comes full circle again and decides to try to be a lot nicer than he was, only to find that, once again, the challenge has disappeared and the interest women showed at least some of the time when he was being a jerk has disappeared.

That's the point a guy realizes that, despite all the time he might've spent trying to get better with women, he still has no real idea about what to say to girls.

Argh.

Fortunately, all's not lost, and you can figure it out. In fact, that's why I made this post -- it's something of a guide on the wild, woolly world of talking to girls. In other words, herein lies the machete you'll need to hack a path through the conversational jungle and emerge on the other side with that beautiful, smiling girl you've had your eye on.

Walking back from the gym this afternoon, under the hot summer sun, I was a bit of a mess. My shirt was drenched in sweat; my arms were stiff and wooden; my hair was a little messy; and I was still breathing a little heavy.

I noticed a girl walking toward me, dressed in rather fancy garb, and as she saw me, she pulled her face into a mildly contorted look that spoke somewhat of disgust. But, at the same time, she also couldn't seem to take her eyes off of me, and I noticed those eyes scanning me up and down; she brushed her hair back, and as she walked toward me, she ever so slightly veered toward me.

I've met lots of girls like this before. Girls that, on first glance, might appear to be completely put off by you. But if you read between the lines, their more subtle actions tell a different story. In fact, I've taken some of these women who gazed upon me with what looked like disgust as lovers, oftentimes rather quickly.

What I want to get across here is, how to tell if a girl likes you -- or not -- isn't always as cut and dry a case as you might think.

Sometimes it can even be the opposite of what you initially thought -- and that holds for both the girls you think like you, and the girls you think don't.

A buddy of mine recently asked me to write on how to meet girls in groups, as it's something I don't talk about a great deal on here. The most I've touched on the topic before has been in "Breaking Circle," the post on maintaining attraction despite distractions around you or even other people trying interrupt you.

But, as my friend noted, I haven't gotten a proper treatment on meeting women in groups up yet, so this is it.

Meeting girls in groups is one of those things that, assuming you're doing much nighttime approaching, you're going to run into reasonably regularly. In fact, it may very well be the meat and potatoes of your approaches -- you might just find yourself in groups most of the time.

Groups aren't ideal, of course. Things tend to move faster and more smoothly the majority of the time when it's just you and your girl, and there are no interruptions or distractions to knock the two of you off course.

However, when handled appropriately, any negatives of groups can usually be negated, and in fact you can sometimes even get groups working for you with the women you meet. So it doesn't always have to be unfortunate that that pretty girl you like is in the middle of a group -- sometimes groups make it even easier for the two of you to get together.