Opening

I don’t know how useful this is as a technique we can discuss here, inasmuch as I don’t know that it’s something you can be taught so much as something you just pick up or develop. But I figured it was worth writing a little about regardless.

I do a little something I call quick reading. Pretty much every guy I know who’s done his fair share of meeting and dating and getting intimate with women does this, and it’s quite different from what you’ll see less experienced guys doing.

What a quick read is is when you very rapidly assess whether a girl is the kind of girl you’d go for.

It’s an extremely useful technique – or maybe habit – that helps a man in two ways:

• Helps him to save time by quickly moving on from women he doesn’t like
• Helps him to end up with women he does like

After a long break from facial hair, I decided last fall to begin sporting some again. I hadn’t had any since I’d shaved off my moustache and goatee back in 2004. This time though, at the end of 2009, I grew a chinstrap and a soul patch. And I noticed an immediate changed in the level of attraction I got from women.

Asian girls from Asia, I noticed, apparently had preferred me clean-shaven, and their attraction for me went down a bit once I began sporting facial hair. But white girls, on the other hand – whoa. Dramatic increase in attraction there. My approach toward them hadn’t changed. My style hadn’t changed. My voice hadn’t changed. But the level of attraction I got from them after growing a little facial hair – that changed over night.

Back when I first got into learning to get better with girls, one of the things I recall really struggling with was communicating to women I was interested in them.

As I watch most newer guys, they seem to consistently have as much difficulty with this concept as I used to. There’s one of two ways it usually goes with guys who struggle with this:

Had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day where he asked me if I ever got the scenario of walking up to a girl, engaging her, and having her blankly stare at me and not respond. He asked because he wondered what it meant – in other words, what he might be doing wrong.

And it touched on something I’d been thinking about recently: on how perceptions of “rejection” change as your understanding of women evolves.

Five years ago, I took any form of non-engagement by a girl I’d started speaking to as a deep, personal rejection. It was as though she had assessed my person and found me unworthy. I felt hurt and insulted.

Nowadays, I recognize that reaction I used to have for what it was: a combination of a lack of understanding of women, and a lack of any kind of abundance mentality. Because the world is not so simple as I assumed it was back then.

If you’ve ever looked at a pretty girl and suddenly felt a surge of nervousness at the idea of going to say hi to her, you’ll get something out of this article. Because what you were doing when you felt that nervousness was you weren’t thinking in numbers.

Most men who are successful with women have a number of similar traits you can distill and learn from. One of those traits is thinking in numbers. That is to say, thinking to themselves not, “I’m going to go meet that girl… I hope she likes me!” but rather, “I’m going to go meet every cute girl I see, until I find one who likes me.”

Every guy new to the social arts works on his eye contact. He practices holding eye contact, maintaining it even in the face of social pressure from others who continue to hold eye contact back. He learns the importance of maintaining eye contact while speaking with and listening to others. He learns not to shift his eyes around from eye to eye while looking at someone else.

Really quick quiz: what’s the most powerful tool of seduction in your arsenal? What’s the one thing you have that, when used properly, can turn an ice queen into a kitten and make even the strongest women become bubbly little girls?

Is it your sense of style?

Your suave demeanor?

Perhaps your silver tongue?

Those things all are great, but there’s one thing you can use to greater effect than quite possibly all of them combined. Want to guess what it is?

It’s your smile.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying:

One of the things that stuns me most, when going out with others, is noticing how some of the other men I meet and hang out with approach women. Many of them, I’ve noticed, approach in a way that is either silly, entertaining, tentative, or half-assed – and women predictably don’t bite on their approach.

It's tough going direct -- which is to say, expressing genuine interest in a girl. It's tricky, it's risky, and it can sometimes elicit all the wrong kinds of reactions. But it's also the most potent, powerful way that you can begin a conversation with a girl and gives you the best chance of getting strong attraction, fast, from the very outset of the interaction.

Opening (or engaging a woman verbally for the first time) in-and-of itself is a necessity, something that must be done 96% of the time when you want to meet a girl (if we imagine that about 4% of opening is done by women themselves). It’s unavoidable and inescapable. Different types of openers can net you different results – with direct openers being of course the flavor of opening that typically offers the most bang for your buck.

But outside the words used in the opener itself, there are in fact a few other things you can do with your openers to have them serve you far better.

Enter pre-opening. A term I coined to give name to a handful of small nonverbal gestures that net big returns in opening percentages and efficacy.

This is stuff that will get more girls opening for you, more eagerly. If you want women falling all over themselves when you first say hello, outside of making changes to your clothing, hairstyle, posture, eye contact, voice, and other fundamentals, this – pre-opening – is the way to do it.

There are several categories of pre-opening I’d like to cover here, so rather than spend a lot of time talking about the how and why, let’s just dive into them and hash that part of it out as we go.