(3) Journeyman

A little while back, in "How to Find the Woman You Most Want: A 10-Step Process," Vaughn commented as follows:

“Hey chase I've been looking around but I couldn't really find an article on self esteem. I have low self esteem and inferiority complex. I always compare myself to others like ALL the time and I mean all the time. With friends,family, and guys I see at bars, clubs, and guys with their girls. When I'm out I feel so lame seeing guys with girls and I don't have one, it makes me feel like something's wrong with me. Especially on Facebook when I see people showing off all the good things going on in their life and I'm just living my regular one. Then I keep thinking about bad moments in my past that replay in my head over and over making me think I'm really a loser. I don't mean to vent so much about it but I know your good with people and to be honest I trust your advice more than anyone else. Could you help me out with my self esteem, confidence, and getting rid of the inferiority complex and reliving past failures? Thanks Chase, all of this stuff will help me finally get my dream girl.”

So, how to build self-esteem... it's the 10 million dollar question.

Everybody wants to know. And everybody else has got a solution.

This isn't one I normally tackle, because I'm a believer in action, and to hell with the words. Once you're taking action and improving your life, self-esteem, confidence, and all the rest naturally follows (see: "Does Confidence = Success? Actually... No.").

Cast aside the pump-up, roll up your sleeves, and go get your hands dirty; that's the secret to all the great feelings you could ever ask for.

Yet... the questions about self-esteem keep rolling in. And they are worthy questions... little else is worse in the world than being low in self-esteem.

And since those questions about self-esteem don't seem to show any sign of drying up any time soon, let's tackle them head on - and give you the plan you need to take your self-esteem into the stratosphere.

Ever find yourself out somewhere, talking to a girl you've just met, and suddenly, inexplicably, have her begin to act superior? As though she knows exactly what you want, sees you through and through, and holds it within her power to give it to you... or not?

Or, every find yourself alone with a woman who earlier acted very interested in you, touching you, flirting with you, only to have her begin to behave rudely and aloof once the two of you were alone, telling you things outright like you couldn't have her or that she only wanted you as a friend?

Why do girls do this?

That is, why do girls show interest, lead a guy on... and then suddenly turn the tables, run what seems to be a power play like this, and throw the guy's interest back in his face?

Is it to feel juiced up and powerful?

Is it that they really don't know what they want?

Actually, for most women, their intent is far less nefarious than it may at first seem. They aren't trying to trick you, toy with your emotions, or take you for a ride... usually.

But if you want to have this stop happening, and you want to avoid having women suddenly act superior, rude, and aloof where they'd formerly been warm, friendly, and flirty, you need to know a little about what brings this on, what you can do to avoid it, and how to deal with it when it shows up.

We've had a handful of commenters write in recently to ask about how to be vulnerable, as well as how to more fully embody Byronic traits, like those mentioned in the articles on answering "Do you have a girlfriend?" and on being a challenge to women. How do you, as a man, be vulnerable, in a way that is both appealing yet not overly sappy or saccharine?

One of these comments from a reader reads as such:

“I have several girls interested in me primarily because of my flaws, and they have told me to my face that I am imperfectly perfect. I am interested in this Byronic concept. Do you try to adapt byronic traits? And can you do a post on them?”

The flawed, vulnerable, Byronic romantic hero - he lines the pages of romance novels, and dots the dreams of women's hearts. But who is he, and how do you become this imperfect man that women so love to fantasize about?

The truth is, we are all of us imperfect, and that gives us an edge. The problem is, most men spend too much time either trying to cover up their flaws entirely, or indulge in them so much that they refuse to improve.

Like always, I will advise you to take the middle path, that lies at neither extreme, but the crossroads of both. Let's have a look at how you can do that.

In the post on how to pick up girls in bars and clubs, Kb asks, regarding bringing women home or going to their homes:

“Cabbing works pretty well here, but it is not sustainable in my life right now. The night rates are astronomical and as a struggling college student who tries to go out and pull almost every night, I'd soon be living in the streets if I was cabbing every other night back.

So what I really need is a way to go back to HER place. I tried your "got any food at your place?" a few times and while it works with more socially attuned girls, most of the people my age(19) really aren't at that level and just see that as you trying to get free food.

I was wondering if you had any ways to suggest to her that you're going back to her place that while still subtle, will let a not so socially savvy girl know exactly what you are saying without coming out and saying it directly.”

That's a great point from him on one of the downsides of the "got any food" question, and a good question. How do you go to her place?

And how do you do it... smoothly?

This article's here to answer that.

I've fielded a number of comments and questions from guys over the years on how to start a relationship off right with a new girl they've just started seeing. After all, you've used all the material on this site on how to turn yourself into a smooth, edgy, sexy man; and you've learned everything you need to know about how to get girls, you knew what to look for in a girlfriend, and you've found her, met her, and everything went perfectly. You took her to bed as your lover, and now she's yours.

Now what?

Most people treat dating and relationships as some big, mythical, emotionally-driven process these days, devoid of much logical forethought or planning. It's reached a point in Western thought where "giving in to your emotions" has become the ultimate ideal to be striven for and attained; you should seek to "just feel" and "go with your heart."

But while emotion is a very important piece of your actions and decision making as a human, it's only half the story, and, worse for relationships... it's the short term half of the story.

Emotions will have you shortchange your tomorrow for a better today.

What I'm going to tell you to do in THIS article, however, is to take command of yourself, and build a relationship designed to be strong, successful, and rewarding long after the fires of early emotion quit burning so brightly, or even quit burning at all.

This is, you might say, the anti-guide to falling in love: it's the guide not to getting there, but to staying there, and like all good stories it starts at the beginning.

The Daily Mail had a piece on U.S. college students' confidence levels shooting sky high while their actual competence and performance in the areas of their confidence dipped to new lows a few days back (the original article's here).

The article mentioned research finding that that more and more young people were carrying bigger and bigger life goals, and more and more of them were falling short and slipping into depression and anxiety disorders.

It quoted psychologist Jean Twenge as saying "You need to believe that you can go out and do something but that's not the same as thinking that you're great," and, "An intervention that encourages [students] to feel good about themselves, regardless of work, may remove the reason to work hard."

I thought it was a fantastic article for one reason: the clear differentiation between confidence and success.

I've always found the, "I just need to tell myself I can do it, and then I can do it!" approach to "achieving things" to be a little daft, and it's nice to see some research backing this up.

I'd like to talk with you a little about this today, because, if this research is anything, there are fewer and fewer people out there like me who think that the secret to success is just going out there and busting your chops until you get there, and more and more who think you can just think your way to success.

Well, I've got news for those people: nuh-uh.

Today I want to share with a post on eliminating resistance through prevention, and freeing up the women around you to be excited by you.

I want to start out by saying... I’m the LAST person who should be writing this article on how to prevent resistance and actually excite women about saying “yes” (to everything you want them to say “yes” to) -- but the same thing that makes me the last person who should be writing it, also makes me exactly the right man for the job.

What do I mean by this?

As you may know from my previous articles (especially the one on weight loss for men), I wasn’t always exactly the most attractive guy around. I was overweight, unattractive, and the worst of it: I sucked with women.

Strangely, as I grew out of this, and started to refine my fundamentals, becoming progressively more “attractive” meant I started to have even more issues with women... not less.

I became less seductive, and had trouble getting my way. Women were flighty with me, and often trying to burst my bubble. Challenges from girls were around every corner, as if I were being given a pop quiz.. every 5 minutes. Auto-rejection was an ever-present threat, and I had my hands full trying to figure out why girls would drop off the face of the earth when they had just a day prior gave me many compliments. They were slow to move, and had trigger fingers when it came to throwing up walls of resistance to my advances.

These girls were clearly attracted to me; I knew this as the attention I was getting was nowhere near what I had prior to losing weight. Not even close.

But what’s going on here? It sounds like auto-rejection, but it isn’t really... It wasn’t so much that they were ejecting from my presence... but rather challenging it full force as if they had to. Like:

Me: Why are we having platitudes?

Her: We aren’t exchanging platitudes. Was that your word of the day? A little awkwardly used.

Erk... great job, Eric.

In this case, it wasn’t normal testing; and it wasn’t normal auto-rejection. It wasn’t either of those things.

What was it?

It was resistance, and as it turned out, I had been the one causing it. Often you’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “follow the path of least resistance.” Well, I was no stranger to the flip side of this concept... that is to say, taking things down completely the WRONG (resistance-paved) roads.

Today, I’m going to share with you my journey from unattractive, to attractive-but-failing, and then finally: suave... and I’m going to show you how to dispel resistance, not by dealing with it, but by cutting off the root of the problems that cause it to arise in the first place, so that you can excite women instead, and get them saying “yes” to you with relish and abandon.

Of course, you’ve got to be able to identify the symptoms before you can figure out what’s resistance and what isn’t - so that’s where we’ll begin today: with identifying the signs of a woman in resistance to you.