Tactics Tuesdays

It has been said that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death… Seinfeld’s little twist on this idea is that at a funeral, people would rather be lying in the coffin than giving the eulogy.

I believe there is something that we fear even more than public speaking: approaching beautiful women. And this fear gets multiplied when we’re going out alone, without our buddies and “wingmen” around.

I remember the first time I went out ALONE to meet girls. Just the thought of it made me nervous, but I had been told that it’s a great exercise to build confidence and social skills.

Right after I left the house I realized I was hungry… and got something to eat. But while I was still waiting for my food, I became aware that this was nothing but creative avoidance – I was giving myself reasons to put off the dreaded exercise until the last possible moment!

And once I had left the restaurant, I started REALLY getting nervous… and psyching myself out. After half an hour of this, I couldn’t even have asked a girl what time it was… leave alone flirt with one!

Thank God I’ve long since overcome this hurdle, but the question is…

Tell me if you've ever been here before: you're talking to your girlfriend, or a girl you've started dating, or even (if she's really got gall) a girl you just met... and she starts nagging you, persistently, repeatedly, and annoyingly about something. She just won't let up.

I wrote this today to answer the question of how to deal with a nagging woman.

We've talked on here about angry women, and we've gone in-depth on women and drama, but this is something different. Nagging doesn't come from anger, and it isn't an attempt to stir up drama. Nagging is its own animal altogether.

Women nag all the time -- whether you're the spouse they've been together with for twenty years, or they've just met you that night. Usually men simply get frustrated at this, sigh deeply, and throw their hands up. I'm a strong believer that throwing your hands up is never the path to success though -- and this post is designed to help make sure you never have to (at least not when it comes to nagging!).

So if you're ready to stop nagging and get yourself on a smooth, even keel with the women you meet and the women in your life, read ahead.

I've been putting in 17 hour days, 7 days a week the past 2 weeks for a new business of mine I just launched, and I've been training a lot of new salesman recently for it, and it's forced me to talk on a number of great sales and psychology points. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm even finding myself training my staff with a number of terms from the pick up world that I've developed (if only they knew!). Anyway, now that I've got some breathing room again to get back to things like the blog here, one of the more interesting points I've touched on recently with the staff has been why you should never say no.

My sales guys are a little rough around the edges. One of them used to be a Texas car salesman. One used to sell suits in Wales. Another is a German guy with an unflappable ego who believes he can do anything, but he's never had anything to do with sales before.

Anyway, one of them I listened to while taking him through some drills several times told the mock client he was speaking to "no."

She asked him if he could do something, and he said "no." I corrected him, and he said, "We will not." Argh.

Because, you see, both in sales and in seduction, "no" is a big no-no -- and what I want to talk about with you today is why you should never say no.

There used to be a time when from time to time I'd get a girl's phone number, and then I'd never talk to her again. No first text. No first phone call. Nothing.

Making that first phone call to a girl felt like the hardest thing in the world to do. I was a mess of nerves every time I had to do it. And sometimes I couldn't.

But you never know which one of those first phone calls might be one that'll set your life on a different path. There was a beautiful girl I'd met at a nightclub one night in the summer of 2006 with whom I swapped numbers, and, thinking about it the next day, I was almost too nervous to call. I took out my phone, and went to put it away; I knew if I didn't call her then, I'd never call her. But, unlike so many other occasions back then, I soldiered on and forced myself to make the call.

That beautiful girl from the nightclub I almost didn't call answered my call, and ultimately ended up becoming one of the most important people I ever had in my life and gave me the deepest relationship I've ever had.

And, because I'd been so afraid to call, I'd been a hare's breath away from missing it.

So how do you kick your fear to the curb and get yourself calling the amazing women you meet? How do you get yourself bringing these women into your life, instead of wordlessly letting them slip away?

Well, I devised a few simple, but handy, strategies in the intervening years to make sure that first phone call goes as smoothly, painlessly, and successfully as possible. And I'd like to share those with you here.

One piece of guidance I often give to guys looking to improve with women is to start doing active listening in order to better listen to women and build great connections with them fast. It's simple, straightforward advice that's easy to start implementing right away -- or at least, that was what I'd been thinking.

A reader writes in reminding me of a realization I had years ago but since forgot about the right way to do active listening:

“Wow man just had a great convo with my mom of all people about how to handle women. We talked a lot about things I already knew but it gave me a fresh perspective. But the one thing she told me about was "paraphrasing what she said"

She told me that a lot of guys like "reiterate" what a woman says. For example if I was talking to a woman and she told me a story about jogging and how it makes her feel great. Reiterating would be me saying "Hmmm so what you're really saying is you feel great because of this...." Then the woman tells me "NO I'm feeling great because of what I just said! Your not listening to me!"

Now that same situation as a paraphrase would go "so let me see if I understand you, your saying you feel great because of this..." then she says "Yes exactly I was feeling great because growing up my mom..."

Now at that point I've got her opening up because she's feeling understoood. And sorry for the vocab lesson I"m sure you already knew this but it helps me illustrate my idea in my mind lol! But I'm just emailing you about this because I've noticed that A LOT of your game is based off of paraphrasing.

When a woman is challenging you paraphrase. When you want to deep dive you paraphrase. When you try to connect with her emotionally you paraphrase.

Once you can paraphrase her words she feels understood and now you guys can truly connect. And it was something that had been bothering me for YEARS man because I was trying SO HARD to listen to women lol! But I found out that I was just doing it the wrong way which was from a frame of reiteration (male comm) and not paraphrase (female comm).

It's crazy because now I can look back at some of your old post and say OHHHHH that's how he did that! IT's amazing how much power paraphrasing gives you when it comes to communicating with others.

Just wanted to share that with you because it really struck me as gold.”

After reading this email, in a flash, I remembered the years I spent straining and striving to understand women and feed back to them what they'd said, only to have my efforts be tossed right back in my face when girls replied with, "Uh, no, that's not what I meant," or tersely corrected me.

Man, that was frustrating. But it doesn't happen anymore. Why? Well... let me tell you.

You see, our good reader highlights the difference between what a guy who's learning tries to do, and a guy who's got it down does. And I'm going to delve deeper into doing it the right way here, in this post on active listening.

I hear men whining and complaining to their girlfriends, wives, and women they're pursuing from time to time. Since I don't spend all my time following random couples around, I know it must happen a lot more often than I hear it, too. And every time I hear it, it's like nails on chalkboard.

Thing is, I don't think most guys realize they're doing it, and I don't think most guys realize that it's Rule #14 or so in maintaining attraction and relationships that you don't whine and you don't complain to women.

A little over 5 years ago, I made the rookie mistake of telling a girl I'd just started sleeping with that I wanted her to be my "main girl." This has all kinds of "wrong" and "incorrect" and "bad game" painted all over it, and I'd never do it now, but that was then and I said it.

Her response to this was, as you might suspect, a defiant "I will never be your 'main girl.'"

And I felt a welling up of despair inside my chest. I was about to say it... I almost said it... and then I stopped myself. The urge to belt out a plaintive, "Why???" was overwhelmingly powerful and almost undeniable, but in the end I squelched it, and instead shrugged off the remark, gave her a confident-sounding, "We'll see," and forced myself to keep on as if nothing had been said. I slept with her again that night, and gave her the most potent, memorable, fantastic night of bliss in her life, and she, in a throe of passion, proclaimed that she didn't think she could leave me.

And for the next 2 1/2 years after that, she didn't.

I guarantee though, beyond any shadow of a doubt, beyond all second guesses, beyond anything, that had I whined or complained in that moment instead, we never would've ended up together.

How come? Because whining and complaining positively, absolutely, unequivocally kill attraction.

Kill it. Bury it in the ground, cover it up with dirt.

And most guys do it unknowingly anyway.

A man finds himself in conversation with a beautiful woman. Excited, and a little bit nervous, he starts to talk. And he talks more. And more. She can hardly get a word in edgewise.

He feels -- no, he knows -- that if he lets the conversation die down, just for a second, she's apt to get up and leave. So, instead, he decides he must run this conversation like a man possessed... he's got to keep it going himself. He's just got to.

And for a while he does.

Sooner or later though, eventually, he hits a moment where he finishes what he was saying and doesn't know what to say next. There's a pause; it's an awkward pause.

"Well," says the girl, "it was great talking to you. But I have to go find my friends now."

"Uh - okay," says the man. "Nice meeting you."

He never sees her again.

"Drat," he thinks to himself, immediately after she leaves, "if only I'd been able to keep the conversation running a little longer, until we were able to find something that was interesting to her. Then it all would've been okay."

I know this feeling -- I used to experience it myself all the time -- and I'd guess most guys reading this have probably felt it too. What it comes from, though, is a fundamental misconception about how a conversation with a new woman ought to run, and what that conversation is really all about -- and it also shows an inattention to using a very powerful conversational tool for getting things working in your favor: the pregnant pause.