Tactics Tuesdays: Negative Compliance Busters

Otherwise known as 'no busters'.

What do you do when you ask a girl to do something and she gives a firm 'no'?

Well, you can just give up and move on completely. And sometimes that's the right call.

However, oh so often with women the right call is not to surrender, but to persist.

There's a fine line to walk between when to persist vs. when to give up.

This article gives you another solution for those scenarios where you land on the 'persist' side of that fine persist vs. desist line.

I call them 'no busters' -- or, more formally, negative compliance busters.

 

The Full Read on My Negative Compliance Tactics

Make sure you've read my proper treatment on dealing with girls who say no.

In it, I give you a range of tools for dealing with those 'no' scenarios. Including a slew of tools for less-firm nos, where instead of pull out the big guns you can often simply change your ask or sail right past the no.

Read more: What If She Says No?

The most important mentality you can take with you is that of the salesman: every 'no' brings me closer to that 'yes'.

We live in a weird hyper-serious age where people are continually yelling at you to take everything very, very seriously. So what I see with a lot of new guys is they get into approaching women, women tell them 'no', and they shrink back in defeat and maybe even fear or shame and accept that no as a firm no.

On the other hand what you'll see with any talented salesman -- or many a talented seducer -- is that 'no's are speed bumps, not dead ends.

You may want to read my article on when no means no to understand more about what's going on in the brain when women switch from 'no' to 'yes'.

Learn to not take yourself super seriously.

And don't take women (silly and cute as they are) super seriously either.

Treat them like you treat yourself: playful creatures who sometimes get into 'moods'.

It's your job (if you want them) to pull them out of unhelpful moods, and into helpful ones.

Ideally, moods like "Wow, I really like this guy" and "I'm going to chase this guy."

 

Negative Compliance Buster: "Just Kidding"

We talked about "I'm just kidding" before as a way to pull off risqué humor without having to suffer for it if the girl isn't ready yet.

Well, just as you can launch a racy joke, then tell a girl who doesn't react well you're kidding and throw in a little touch, and still manage to move things forward, you can do something similar with women who tell you "no."

The process is this:

1. She says "no" and you can tell it's a firm "no"
2. You smile and tell her "I'm just kidding"
3. You tell her "I'm not ready for that"
4. You then ask for another, lesser form of compliance

For instance:

You: Let's go sit down.

Her: Thanks, I'd rather stand.

You: I'm just kidding, I'm not ready for that yet. What's that ring you have on? Give me your hand.

Her: [gives hand]

What happens here?

Well, first she gives you a firm rejection. It's more or less a brush-off. It'll be hard to recover from that if you let it stand as-is.

So then you tell her "I'm just kidding" to reduce the force of your ask (which lessens the hit you take from her negative compliance), and then you imply that you're rejecting her.

What's that you say? How could you be rejecting her when actually she just rejected you?

When you tell her "I'm not ready for that yet," the feeling/implication is that you've turned down something she wanted to do that you were not on-board with.

Yes, she knows rationally that she's the one who rejected you.

No, it doesn't really matter.

Repeated studies of persuasion and influence show that even if you know someone is using a technique on you, even if you know exactly what he is doing, it still works just the same.

Even if her brain goes, "Hey, he's trying to trick me. He's trying to make me feel like he's the one who rejected me, instead of vice versa," it is still going to have an effect.

The effect it is having is to make her doubt who is really the one rejecting whom.

And, as Alek so eloquently put it in last week's article, if you can get a girl to doubt herself around you, to feel a void for your attention and approval, you can get her to chase.

The final part of our tactic of course is to ask her for some different, smaller compliance.

What's this for? To rebuild compliance momentum and get things moving.

When a woman rejects you, there's an awkward moment where she and you both wonder if you've hit a dead end, or merely a speed bump. The longer you refrain from asking her to do anything after she's said no to doing something, the more cemented in her mind it will become that you've hit a dead end, not a speed bump.

So what do you do to cement the alternative?

You immediately ask her for some other, smaller bit of investment.

That way you get things rolling the right way again... and you show her immediately this was a speed bump scenario, not an impasse.

 

Alternative Language Choices

A few other things you can say in addition to "I'm just kidding" here:

• "I take it back"
• "Never mind"
• "Scratch that"

And a few other things you can say in addition to "I'm not ready for that yet":

• "I don't want to do that"
• "I don't like that idea"
• "I'd rather we didn't, actually"

So for example:

You: We should go out sometime.

Her: Sorry, I'm not dating now.

You: Scratch that, I don't want to go out with you. Will you hand me that pen? I want to write something down.

Her: [gives pen]

or:

You: Why don't we walk this way?

Her: I can't, I have to go this way to work.

You: I take it back, I don't like going that way. So tell me about your free time. It can't all be work.

Her: [laughs; tells you about what she does in her free time]

Is it a little silly and contradictory that you rejected your own proposal, while framing it as if you'd actually rejected a proposal from her?

Yes, it's a little silly.

Does it work?

A lot of the time, yes.

You will see things like this happen:

• Girl who was formerly icy starts laughing
• Girl who was dismissive toward you starts smiling
• She starts opening up more to you and becoming more compliant
• Her reactions to future asks of yours are less harsh, and she may accept them

And yes, even if you tell her you don't want to go out with her, you can still ask her out a few minutes later again anyway (after you've built up a little more good vibes and a bit more investment from her).

What do you say if she says, "I thought you didn't want to go out with me" (which I have had women ask me before when using this tactic)?

All you tell her is, "Well I didn't! But you've started to win me over."

And if she's still resistant, just repeat the technique, and tell her she hasn't won you over enough yet.

Then ask her out again later after you've built things up still more.

 

Don't Be Afraid of Nos

Women will often say "no" reflexively.

Or sometimes it's a test.

Yes, a woman might have fully and totally evaluated you and decided that you're completely not for her. But most people aren't operating at that level of awareness and don't have that kind of discernment.

Typically when she is saying "no", it is based on a slim grasp of who you are, and a fleeting emotion and mood.

And often, if you are an attractive, likable guy, if you can give yourself a little more time with her, she will start to like you, and you will be able to shift her mood a bit.

And the more she likes you, and the more her mood shifts, the more she will switch from, "I don't want to talk to this guy," to, "I don't want this guy to get away."

Remember too that socially savvy persistence itself is attractive to women.

When you persist in a clever, confident, attractive way, you display one of the most seductive behavioral switches to a woman you can display, on par more or less with preselection.

A woman can't always evaluate your attractiveness to other women directly.

She's not able to see with her eyes whether other women flirt with you and how attractive those girls are and how hard they flirt/chase you.

But she can go a long way toward assessing this indirectly, by evaluating your behavior with her.

A man who is confident, savvy, relaxed, and persistent with her tells her he is comfortable with women like her, and expects that a woman like her will like a man like him.

He doesn't know her. And she knows he doesn't know her. Which means his behavior with her is a result not of having interacted with her before, but of having interacted with women he feels are like her.

Thus, why good persistence serves in many ways as a sort of indirect preselection signifier: it tells her you're used to succeeding with girls like her.

You don't have to persist if you don't want to.

Maybe this girl's not especially cute. Or maybe there are a lot of cuties in the area and it makes no sense to bother.

But I'll tell you:

• Persisting charismatically past the "no" and getting girls smiling and laughing and having a good time with you is great for your mood and momentum when out. It's always better to walk away smiling than wincing

• Persisting charismatically helps you push your limits and trains you to be much better at recognizing when you really can push past resistance with girls versus when it's likely insurmountable

• Persisting charismatically also makes you a more likable guy in general, which is helpful in social circle, where a given woman may not be available, but may appreciate you not running away at the first sign of pushing back, and talk you up / praise you to other women in the circle

Next time you get a firm "no" from a girl and it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, try using this no-buster technique:

1. You smile and tell her "I'm just kidding"
2. You tell her "I'm not ready for that"
3. You then ask for another, lesser form of compliance

You may just be surprised at where it gets you.

Chase