(1) Beginner

You know the feeling – the one where you see a group of people laughing about a movie you love or getting excited about an overseas location that you know like the back of your hand.

But there you are, standing on the outskirts of the group. Maybe you have a drink in your hand. Maybe you have your hands in your pockets. Maybe you have you arms crossed. Whatever the case may be, you feel intimidated, uneasy, and possibly even scared about the situation at hand.

You want to be a part of the fun. You know you have something to offer. But the prospect of approaching new people – or worse, approaching that beautiful girl across the room – is much too daunting for your brain to grasp. So you sit there. Doing nothing. Feeling awkward. And then you go home, not making a splash – not even making a ripple.

And you wonder to yourself: “Will things always be like this? Will I ever overcome my shyness and actually connect with people?”

Well, if you’ve been wondering about how to not be shy, wonder no more. I’ve put together a complete primer on how to overcome shyness.

First time at a bar picking up girls or going out on a hunch? Here are the three things you should do to optimize your chance for growth... and a few things I would have done different my first time around if I could do it all again.

All three points I am going to share with you will serve to illustrate a deep principle at the heart of improving with women.

Whether it is your first time heading out or if you are just curious about how you measure up and if your fundamentals are good or not, there will be a few thought-provoking ideas to be found here.

A while back Chase wrote a fantastic piece on confidence called “Does Confidence Equal Success? Actually… No.” What made it a fantastic piece was its flying in the face of the conventional wisdom of people trying to give you advice with women telling you to “Just be confident!”

Now is confidence near the top of the list of things women find extremely attractive in men? Absolutely. But can you feign confidence? Absolutely not. Even if you fool a girl for a minute or two, girls can always sniff out a mere veneer of confidence from a mile away.

And as Chase rightly points out in his post, that’s where most guys go wrong. You can’t just fake confidence. Confidence actually has to come from somewhere – either from past successes or a solid foundation of belief, process, and efficacy in other areas of your life.

So how does one develop confidence? How do you get to be like those guys who can just go up to girls in the middle of a town square and just start joking around with them? How do you become one of those guys who are unfazed by rejection who and maintains a deep belief in themselves? I’ve been re-reading Steven Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” along with some other materials that I have found truly valuable during my own journey.

It is entirely doable. And today I’m going to show you exactly how.

So you realized something about yourself recently: you realized that life is slipping you by while you sit back afraid to take it by the horns. Well it’s time to turn that new outlook to your advantage!

Where you were once convinced by all the lines and ideologies that told you it was better to numb yourself from the fear of life and its uncertainty, now you know better and feel differently about things. Hidden in this new struggle is strength, and if you know why it exists and where, you might be able to figure out your own struggle a little faster.

And that’s why this article is here: to give you a start on finding strength in that struggle and your newfound connection with fears you never had before.

For the first time in a long time you feel a twang of fear, and you know it matters, and that makes more difference than you know.

One of our senior discussion board members (and a contributor the main site) who’s going through a rough patch right now suggested a couple of article topics. One of these was on living an interesting life:

“How to Live an Interesting Life – I feel that my life outside of the occasional woman or pool game is quite mundane. I’m not someone who likes having nothing to do but inevitably my day-to-day living involves nothing but sitting around and twiddling my thumbs right now. So, I’d like to see an article on leading an interesting life.”

I think the most important thing about leading an “interesting life” to understand is that “interesting” is a highly subjective concept... and the way most folks talk about it is best understood from the outside, not the inside.

When I first read about the Law of Least Effort, it was as if everything suddenly made sense. I thought that learning about expending effort would put me leagues ahead of other men, as I knew that I didn’t have to act all crazy and get into these long-winded conversations to get with girls; I could just be like all those cool guys who had women chasing and crawling all over them.

Unfortunately, I took the definition of the Law of Least Effort a bit too literally.

I started expending next to no effort in an attempt to not appear try-hard. However, when you expend hardly any effort, you aren’t going to get any results.

Rather than achieving what I was setting off to do, I became a closed off and virtual unknown to women. I’d go out and see attractive woman, thinking that things would be so much better if I had them chasing me and carrying the conversation all on their own. I thought that by sitting around and doing next to nothing women would flock to me and up my cool factor exponentially.

After all – I was effortless, wasn’t I?

But women rarely approached me. When you’re risk averse and don’t put forward any effort, you won’t gain anything.

It turns out that I was missing one vital point of the Law of Least Effort. You must expend as little effort as possible while still achieving what you’ve set out to do.

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.