(2) Intermediate

In the comments section of "Are You Smart? It Doesn't Much Matter Either Way," on how viewing and talking about yourself as smart actually impedes progress in your endeavors, a reader named Al made the following request:

“Great Article, Chase this is an invaluable mindset for so many areas of life. I want to see an article on how to tell good anecdotes and speak about yourself. I know this goes against deep diving and LOLE but when conversations do start to become a question and answer session i often struggle to make an insightful or interesting comment.”

Al's right - while there's a great deal on this site about how to get other people talking to you, there really isn't a whole heck of a lot about how to talk about yourself.

So, in order to change that, I've put together a two-part article series on the subject: the first on talking about yourself, and the second on telling great stories.

Let's kick this two-parter off then, and have a look at how you ought to go about talking about yourself with women to achieve maximal results.

In the comments on "Your Mental Model is Flawed," M asked the following question about cologne:

“Speaking of expensive cologne...is it worth the investment? Right now my only scent is my deodorant, lol.”

I gave a quick response, but I've been wanting to do a piece on male scent for a while now. I spent a great deal of time diving into this to figure out what the "ideal" scent for men was... was it a cologne? A body spray? An aftershave? Was it pheromones? Something else? What scent gets you the best results with women?

They all propose to turn you into a man irresistible to women, of course... but most of it's just noise to be tuned out. There had to be, I felt certain, a specific solution out there somewhere to the question of what scent women like best.

Today's article chronicles my own intermittent investigation - spanning perhaps 15 years - into the phenomenon of male scent, and takes a look at what the research on scent has to say.

And my guess is, if you're accustomed to the standard advice thrown liberally about in Western society, you'll be in for a bit of a surprise.

In the article on operant conditioning the other day, I'd made some terminology mix-ups that a commenter with the handle Slightly Confused noticed and pointed out to me in a very polite and socially gracious way, and I checked on the errors he pointed out, realized he was right, owned the mistake, and corrected it. I commented back letting him know of the correction, and he had this to say after:

“Thanks for handling my earlier comment so well. I'll have to remember how you responded for when I run into that situation in the future. If you want another article idea, you could write one on corrections. It could talk about how to handling being corrected in different situations as well as when and how to correct others. The article could differentiate between corrections based on opinions and based on facts and could talk different situations such as pickup, a long term relationship, being out with friends, meeting someone new, and in a business situation, like one were a boss says something incorrect (or the boss corrects you), when you are with peers, or when you are talking to a customer. It also could cover the situations when you should and should not correct yourself when you realize you are wrong and the long term effects handling the situation a certain way may have. I realize that may be too big of a topic to cover but hopefully it gives you some ideas or something you can use.”

Some interesting ideas for a post there from SC - when and how to correct yourself, and when to perform a course correct, effectively.

And this is more nuanced than you might at first think.

There's a surprisingly great deal at risk in correcting oneself - you chance losing the confidence of those who were depending on you to know your stuff, you chance undermining and reversing whatever momentum you had, and you even chance transferring momentum over to an opponent who's hard at work endeavoring to snatch at the moral high ground away from you.

So should you ever do a course correct? With so much to lose, does it make sense to ever correct yourself... or might it be better just to soldier on, never admit mistakes, and keep your own personal reality distortion field tuned to maximum at all times to take others' eyes away from the inconsistencies?

In The Law of Success, a very, very good book by Napoleon Hill - perhaps one of my favorites all time, in fact - Hill discusses, as one of the 16 tenets of success, the necessity of having a pleasing personality. Part of his recommendation is for listeners to be agreeable.

If you look at most people in Western society, I don't think this aspect of a pleasing personality - being agreeable - is much of a problem for them. In fact, I think one of the overriding problems for Westerners is in being too agreeable - so much so that anyone willing to be a bit less agreeable is able to easily steamroll them into uncomfortable submission.

But, that's a topic for another time. What I want to discuss in this article is why it's a good thing to be a little hard to please... at least some of the time.

Because if you've long made a habit of being overly agreeable - and there really can be too much of a good thing - a little dose of pickiness may just be in order.

We’ve all faced judgments and judgmental people in the world, and it is something that people very rarely have a complete grasp of. When a man truly holds no prejudice, women will open up to him in a way that they could not imagine themselves opening up to any other guy. All of the sudden, women feel comfortable with you and communicate with you in a very warm and friendly way.

When you want to start a relationship right, you cannot judge women, of course; but, what happens when you are consciously aware of this, and despite that, the women are judging YOU?

Most people have judgments without even knowing it. Ask someone if they are judgmental, and you’ll get a “No, of course not!” Judgmental people are seen as bad, horrible humans who don’t have a soul and don’t deserve our time.

If a woman acts judgmental, you should righteously stop the seduction on the spot; or so you would think.

We all remember a time when we were judgmental of others, but would we say we were morally unjust humans because of it? No. Just because a woman is judgmental does not mean she isn’t worth your time.

Most people aren’t aware that they are doing it, and it is very simple to cut out of conversation. It’s just another barrier we need to overcome.

A couple of fellas have asked on here about cutting contact recently. Here's Matt's comment from the article entitled "Your Mental Model is Flawed":

“Can you explain cut off marks (ie, cutting off contact with a girl... say if she doesn't sleep with you or is not responding well) in more detail? You've talked about that before in several posts, how now if a girl does not sleep with you on the first date, you usually end things with her and are not going to up forth the effort because you have many other options. Do you just delete her number? Richardus talks about keeping "bad" numbers and then firing off texts to all of them in the future and see who bites. What's your opinion?

Maybe a more nuanced guide of cut off marks for every level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) would be helpful. Also I'm a little confused about how persistance seems to contradict this. Hopefully I've made some sense!

Matt”

Sure thing, Matt.

This is kind of a delicate issue. It's an issue that normally, you want to treat with tenderness, care, and kid gloves.

You kind of want to walk people through it... guide them, kindly and gradually, you might say... help them understand things without being too harsh, or abrasive.

You know... easy on the offensiveness.

Unfortunately, we're going to tackle this one how I want to tackle it: like gangbusters, with a sledgehammer and steel-tipped shoes.

So here we go.

On the new forum join bonus post where I asked for suggestions for the limited-time ebook offered to the first group of forum members, a reader weighed in with his preference:

“I'd like some tips and tricks, and knowledge about longer term relationships - for example, how to bring a girl out of that 'brick wall' sulk! I seem to attract fiery and moody, and I would like to know how other people deal with this. Never too old to learn?”

While this didn't make it into the ebook in question, I've been trying to get through each of these and tackle the ones that weren't addressed there on the website here.

If you've been in a relationship that lasted any substantial length of time, you've no doubt encountered what our commenter here is talking about - that sulky, pouting, dreary moody girlfriend situation.

For men in relationships, there are few things more dispiriting than a girlfriend, moody and sulky, skulking around the apartment, acting like somebody stole her bag of cookies, and you have absolutely no idea why. It can make you want to pull your hair out and exclaim, "Out with it already, woman!"

If she'd just TELL YOU what the problem was, by George, then you could address it at least!

Well, if it's any consolation, science is here to tell us we're not crazy, and women really DO do this and feel this a lot more than men.

And I'm here to tell you what to do about it so she knocks this off and starts acting a little more chipper again.