(1) Beginner

What should your first impression be like in order to get a girl to be excited enough to text you back?

We tend to think we need to be the most attractive guy to a girl the first time we meet and create an undeniable connection in order to get her to be excited enough to respond back, but in reality, these things can actually scare girls off and rarely cause things to pan out like you would expect them to.

Over the years I’ve come to learn that you shouldn’t focus too much on first impressions or try to achieve too much too early, because it isn’t the most powerful way to stand out.

At the end of the day, women are over saturated with different messages from different guys, and all of their feelings of attraction tend to blur together into one big conglomeration, until they can no longer tell you apart from that other guys. Girls just have way too many options, and your being attractive almost always gets lost amidst all of that.

So if you want to stand out, don’t try to be the most attractive guy of the bunch; just find a way to intrigue her and be memorable.

If you can do those two things well, you can then focus on what you will do the next time you see her rather than stress out about being Superman. This is how you best handle a first impression: by not overdoing it!

Let’s face it: girls have major ADD when it comes to stimulating interactions with guys, and while this seems at first to work against our interests, you’ll find that the best path forwards is acceptance and then to politely sidestep the mosh-pit and set up your interactions so they are as crisp as they can get. Play along with this aspect of their psyche and try not to get too upset by it, just play along for now, and work to develop a simple strategy.

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.