(1) Beginner

I’m sitting back at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia where I grew up, and I’m thinking about how over the years I’ve changed my life to allow myself to meet women more regularly, more easily, and more consistently.

Back when I used to make music, one of the ways that I advanced my skill level over the years was by closely examining the guys who were great successes, then closely examining the guys who were utter failures, then having a look at the guys caught in the middle, and asking myself why each person was where he was. After four years, starting out being atrocious at music, I was putting together incredibly lyrically sharp pieces and constructing music that people would get really excited about when I showed it to them, chiefly because I spent a lot of time deconstructing what made a song a hit, then using the lessons from that to make my own music. When I started focusing on seduction, I turned that same discerning eye (or ear, in the case of music) onto men’s success with women.

I noticed that a number of the most prolific seducers all did things that put them constantly in a position to meet women. They had jobs as lifeguards, or nightclub bouncers, or model talent scouts; other guys did unconventional things like moving abroad and becoming a tour guide or a bartender or an English teacher. Not all guys; some guys just stayed close to where they grew up and simply went out over and over again and did massive amount of approaching, until they got the skill down that they could read women quickly and well and identify the women who would be most open to them.

Have had an exhausting past few days, just constantly tired and running all over the place, but wanted to get some thoughts up here, so this’ll be just a short quick post.

There’s a saying that goes, “If you want to learn, teach,” and one of the cool things about teaching something as dynamic as seduction is that it compels you to continually be refining things, questioning things, and identifying new strategies and techniques and then asking yourself why they work.

This is to be the first of a new series of articles on building equity. This edition is going to focus on how to build equity in your nightlife.

Women are subtle in how they show interest. Well, by male standards, anyway. Even when women think they are blatantly obvious, they’re quite often being very subtle by male standards.

Learning to tell how girls show interest is a very valuable skill for a man, because it will allow him to operate with greater assurance he’s making the right move at the right time, and will also allow him to pick up the pace when a woman signals she is ready.

The last couple of girls I slept with surprised me a little at how quickly they were ready to get together. They gave me some hints that probably would’ve seemed fairly subtle; a friend of mine remarked that one of the girls I took home and bedded rather quickly quite recently hadn’t even seemed to be terribly interested in me, and that it just looked like we were having a good conversation. Being able to read the signals they gave me was the main reason I moved as quickly with them as I did.

Probably by now you have your New Year’s resolutions all done up and set to go for 2011, and you’re charged up and (hopefully) already setting to work turning those resolutions into reality.

I’ve always been a little anti-New Year’s resolutions myself, but that mostly because I’m just kind of a humbug, contrarian kind of cat. When I stop and think about it, I often do set a number of goals at the very beginning of the year, which for all intents in purposes are, in fact, resolutions for the new year. So, I grudgingly accept that now I, despite my protestations otherwise, do in fact make New Year’s resolutions. And they do, in fact, help.

So if you’re a little on the lazy side, or a bit of a humbug like me, and you don’t usually do resolutions for the next year, I invite you to do things a little different this year and join me in setting a few goals for yourself in 2011.

Today I found myself reading an article on the Washington Post’s website titled “Date Lab: A Matchmaking Year in Review”. It was all about these blind dates that the newspaper had sent people on throughout the year. I clicked through and read about each of the dates discussed, and paid attention to why the dates that didn’t pan out didn’t. For every single one of them, it came down to the same exact story as what I used to read when things didn’t work out in the monthly Pacific Beach magazine in Pacific Beach, San Diego, where they’d also have a blind date they sent a pair of readers out on each month.

I’ve come to the conclusion, based on my own experiences, that of friends, and of all these blind dates I’ve read about, that dating doesn’t work out the majority of the time because the guy doesn’t measure up. If you read about the blind dates that don’t work out in that Washington Post article, you’ll notice a similar thread through all of them: the guy says When I saw her, I definitely was physically attracted to her, and the girl says When I saw him, I instantly knew he was not my type.

Why is this so consistently the case?

There’s this thing called approach anxiety, and I haven’t talked about it all that much, because it was never a huge concern for me personally, and it was always something I was able to push through okay on my own. Sure, sometimes I’d stiffen up and miss out on a girl I should’ve had, but all in all it was never too bad for me. I had a lot of fears as a kid, and got into the habit early of overcoming them by confronting them head on; this might be why I was never overly concerned with this one. I just tackled it the same as the rest of them.

But for some guys, approach anxiety is crippling. I’ve coached men who would at times simply refuse to approach women; I eventually got pretty good at getting guys to approach, even when they were terrified to (the first few approaches are always the toughest), but how does a guy who’s shaken about going up to meet women do that on his own, without a coach there to work him through it?