Pickup

Self-monitoring allows you to adapt yourself to the people around you. It’s a good thing… but too much of it can really cramp your style (and the naturalness of your interactions).

If you've gone through my charisma course, Charisma In A Bottle (which, incidentally, I'll be re-releasing soon), you're familiar with the concept of 'self-monitoring'.

A self-monitor is someone who keeps a mental eye on himself, observing his own actions, making sure he is acting in 'correct' ways and not screwing things up.

Charismatic people are high self-monitors. While they might seem to be the most casual, relaxed folks out there, they are in fact carefully monitoring and adjusting their social presentation.

Dating is another area that turns men into high self-monitors. You go out to approach girls and you focus relentlessly on:

• How nervous vs. confident you seem
• Whether you approach from the right angle
• If you're delivering an opener she'll respond to
• If you're getting enough compliance from her fast enough
• Whether you've moved her soon enough
• Whether you're dominant enough
• Whether you're bantering enough
• What your value is relative to hers
• What your attainability is relative to hers

... plus a whole bunch of other things you are doing or that are about you.

And while this is useful for spotting your weak points and improving on what you want to improve at, it hobbles your ability to truly be in-the-moment with a girl and interact with her in a truly smooth, natural way.

Thus, some of the time, you are going to want to do things the opposite way, and turn your self-monitoring way down.

Ask girls to tell you which girl is who in the group… and get them all involved in a gambit that makes things social & tells you which girl to look out for most.

Hey guys. Welcome back!

I recently discovered a gambit that works extremely well when dealing with girls in groups. It accomplishes so much! It is easy to pull off, and you can use it whenever you want after the opener.

This post is suited for everyone, whether you are a beginner or an advanced guy. You should all be able to pull it off and reap the benefits of using this gambit, which include:

• Hooking the entire group by stimulating them
• Building compliance without excluding anyone
• Acquiring information about each girl, which will help you calibrate

Pretty neat, right?

Hook girls in with these simple, effective tactics. A focus on what works to get girls hooking into their conversations with you, chatting and engaged.

Hey guys and welcome back. Last time I shared my opening cheat-sheet, where I gave you what I consider the most essential fundamentals in opening.

Today I will give you a similar cheat-sheet for hooking – basically the phase that takes place right after opening: the follow-up to your opener.

Because the purpose behind opening is to… open. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Yet that’s just a starting phase. A necessary one, sure, but that’s all it is.

The idea with a hook-phase is to get settled – to become one with the group you just opened. Go from being “that stranger” into becoming someone they know and enjoy. The hook phase is about getting them to want to keep talking to you – immerse them into you and your conversation.

If you lack a solid hook, the interaction will be on life-support while you struggle to get there, and will die off if you can’t. A solid hook lets you feel settled and gives you playing room to start the seduction process, setting frames and escalating the vibe.

You must be able to hook if you want to seduce.

What’re the odds you pick up a given sort of girl in a given sort of place? Well, it depends on a few different factors that affect that probability.

We had a conversation over on the forum where a forum member was asking where to find beautiful girls who aren't club goers, social media validation junkies, or nymphomaniacs. He reports that all the hottest girls he's been with came via dating apps, and all these girls were hot-but-broken. He's struggled to meet equally hot girls in-the-flesh via cold approach.

I replied with my thoughts, which included me stating that you are much more likely to find women with high partner counts and personality disorders in nightclubs and in any kind of show-off-y place (like with a prominent social media following) than you are elsewhere.

So, if he wanted to avoid those sorts of women, he'd be better off looking places other than in nightclubs and on dating apps or social media.

This triggered another member to jump on the thread and argue with me that the women you meet in nightclubs, the women you meet on dating apps, and the women you meet via daytime approaching (he even threw in "the women you meet in church") are all exactly one and the same, and any kind of differentiating between such girls is your imagination.

However, I soon realized we were talking about different things:

• He was talking about possibility, saying things like "You can meet a girl who's a virgin in a nightclub"

• I was talking about probability, saying things like "You are far less likely to meet a girl who's a virgin in a nightclub than in a campus library"

In seduction, the distinction between possibility and probability is a key one to make, as it influences so much of what you do, where you go to do it, and how exactly you go about it.

Owen, an average guy living an average life, faces continued frustrations getting girls. It seems like every girl he wants isn’t interested, or is too hard to get!

Owen, frustrated with his difficulty finding success with women, begins his day.

After his commute, he arrives at work. Owen has a typical gray cubicle on a typical office floor in a typical business tower. Each day is a drag of spreadsheets, reports, and pointless meetings.

The sole bright spot is Camila, the effusive late 30s bottle blonde bombshell office flirt who's caught the eye of every man in the building. Camila is the secretary for one of the big bosses, but it seems like half her time is spent roving the office floor in skimpy dresses, teasing the men. Camila's a flirt, Owen knows, but he will be the one to get her.

Today, like each day, he tries to suck Camila into a clever conversation, some fun repartee. However, Camila skillfully dodges, as always, flashing her bright, flirtatious smile, making some flirtatious quip, then rapidly sauntering off, escaping again, vanishing into the maze of fabric-covered cubicle walls.

Owen never notices Grace, the quiet dirty blonde 20-something in glasses who always steals glances at him from her cube. When there's a meeting, Grace is always too shy to look at Owen. Grace has better facial features and is objectively more attractive than Camila, but she dresses conservatively, isn't a flirt, and doesn't stand out. Her presence in the office gets constantly overshone by Camila's, and so she ends up being mostly invisible there, just doing her work then heading home.

After another workday of no success with Camila, Owen (like many of the men in that office) leaves in annoyance, complaining to himself about how picky women are, how impossible their standards are, and why dating has to be so imbalanced against men.

It’s easy to fall off your opening game when you’re rusty at meeting girls. Use this cheat sheet to tighten up your opening and start new conversations with ease.

Hey guys, and welcome back!

After finishing up my post on how to get out of bad momentum, I promised you a few cheat sheets to help in the early game, as that’s usually the part of your game that will take the biggest hit when you are at low momentum.

It’s because the opening game is the phase that feels the most uncomfortable since you have to go up to a stranger and face potential rejection. When you have low momentum, your confidence is lower, making the process more emotionally painful.

Also, your vibe is a bit off when you have low momentum, making the opening phase harder.

If you are interested in the symptoms of low momentum, check out my post from a few weeks ago for detailed explanations.

I also wrote a post on how to “treat” low momentum. If you are experiencing low momentum, I highly recommend you check out that post.

This post expands on that. If you’ve read my earlier post on treating low momentum, you may remember that you should break down your game and fix every small detail until things start working again. You should also limit your game plan to the strict minimum, only adding to it if the current plan is not working or if you sense something is missing.

A slight exception applies to opening and hooking. You should put more effort and brainpower into working on these aspects of pick-up and seduction when you experience low momentum because they take the biggest hit.

This is why I made a post on pre-opening game. That information will work in synergy with this. To be clear, it is not a necessity to use pre-opening game, but it increases your odds of successfully opening and makes opening mentally easier.

The advice I will give here will mostly consist of tips on bettering your opening game — nothing overly fancy.

Give a girl a way to recall her attraction to you with an “attraction anchor.” Attraction anchors are things you do or get a woman to do that she’s likely to remember later.

Have you ever approached a girl, who was clearly attracted to you, done everything right with her, left her smiling, had her contact info in-hand as you did so, and then... never heard from her again?

Sure you have. It's the pox of every even halfway active dater.

It can send you into a tailspin trying to figure out what went wrong. Everything seemed perfect. You executed the approach perfect. The girl responded to you perfectly in every way.

So why did she vanish once you left, and never respond to your texts, voice/video messages, or calls again?

The answer is because attraction has an expiration date, and if you fail to make a strong enough impression, that expiration date may often be "as soon as you leave her side."

What can you do to prevent attraction expiring while you're away from her?

Anchor her attraction to things likely to stick in her mind.