Tactics Tuesdays

One piece of guidance I often give to guys looking to improve with women is to start doing active listening in order to better listen to women and build great connections with them fast. It's simple, straightforward advice that's easy to start implementing right away -- or at least, that was what I'd been thinking.

A reader writes in reminding me of a realization I had years ago but since forgot about the right way to do active listening:

“Wow man just had a great convo with my mom of all people about how to handle women. We talked a lot about things I already knew but it gave me a fresh perspective. But the one thing she told me about was "paraphrasing what she said"

She told me that a lot of guys like "reiterate" what a woman says. For example if I was talking to a woman and she told me a story about jogging and how it makes her feel great. Reiterating would be me saying "Hmmm so what you're really saying is you feel great because of this...." Then the woman tells me "NO I'm feeling great because of what I just said! Your not listening to me!"

Now that same situation as a paraphrase would go "so let me see if I understand you, your saying you feel great because of this..." then she says "Yes exactly I was feeling great because growing up my mom..."

Now at that point I've got her opening up because she's feeling understoood. And sorry for the vocab lesson I"m sure you already knew this but it helps me illustrate my idea in my mind lol! But I'm just emailing you about this because I've noticed that A LOT of your game is based off of paraphrasing.

When a woman is challenging you paraphrase. When you want to deep dive you paraphrase. When you try to connect with her emotionally you paraphrase.

Once you can paraphrase her words she feels understood and now you guys can truly connect. And it was something that had been bothering me for YEARS man because I was trying SO HARD to listen to women lol! But I found out that I was just doing it the wrong way which was from a frame of reiteration (male comm) and not paraphrase (female comm).

It's crazy because now I can look back at some of your old post and say OHHHHH that's how he did that! IT's amazing how much power paraphrasing gives you when it comes to communicating with others.

Just wanted to share that with you because it really struck me as gold.”

After reading this email, in a flash, I remembered the years I spent straining and striving to understand women and feed back to them what they'd said, only to have my efforts be tossed right back in my face when girls replied with, "Uh, no, that's not what I meant," or tersely corrected me.

Man, that was frustrating. But it doesn't happen anymore. Why? Well... let me tell you.

You see, our good reader highlights the difference between what a guy who's learning tries to do, and a guy who's got it down does. And I'm going to delve deeper into doing it the right way here, in this post on active listening.

I hear men whining and complaining to their girlfriends, wives, and women they're pursuing from time to time. Since I don't spend all my time following random couples around, I know it must happen a lot more often than I hear it, too. And every time I hear it, it's like nails on chalkboard.

Thing is, I don't think most guys realize they're doing it, and I don't think most guys realize that it's Rule #14 or so in maintaining attraction and relationships that you don't whine and you don't complain to women.

A little over 5 years ago, I made the rookie mistake of telling a girl I'd just started sleeping with that I wanted her to be my "main girl." This has all kinds of "wrong" and "incorrect" and "bad game" painted all over it, and I'd never do it now, but that was then and I said it.

Her response to this was, as you might suspect, a defiant "I will never be your 'main girl.'"

And I felt a welling up of despair inside my chest. I was about to say it... I almost said it... and then I stopped myself. The urge to belt out a plaintive, "Why???" was overwhelmingly powerful and almost undeniable, but in the end I squelched it, and instead shrugged off the remark, gave her a confident-sounding, "We'll see," and forced myself to keep on as if nothing had been said. I slept with her again that night, and gave her the most potent, memorable, fantastic night of bliss in her life, and she, in a throe of passion, proclaimed that she didn't think she could leave me.

And for the next 2 1/2 years after that, she didn't.

I guarantee though, beyond any shadow of a doubt, beyond all second guesses, beyond anything, that had I whined or complained in that moment instead, we never would've ended up together.

How come? Because whining and complaining positively, absolutely, unequivocally kill attraction.

Kill it. Bury it in the ground, cover it up with dirt.

And most guys do it unknowingly anyway.

A man finds himself in conversation with a beautiful woman. Excited, and a little bit nervous, he starts to talk. And he talks more. And more. She can hardly get a word in edgewise.

He feels -- no, he knows -- that if he lets the conversation die down, just for a second, she's apt to get up and leave. So, instead, he decides he must run this conversation like a man possessed... he's got to keep it going himself. He's just got to.

And for a while he does.

Sooner or later though, eventually, he hits a moment where he finishes what he was saying and doesn't know what to say next. There's a pause; it's an awkward pause.

"Well," says the girl, "it was great talking to you. But I have to go find my friends now."

"Uh - okay," says the man. "Nice meeting you."

He never sees her again.

"Drat," he thinks to himself, immediately after she leaves, "if only I'd been able to keep the conversation running a little longer, until we were able to find something that was interesting to her. Then it all would've been okay."

I know this feeling -- I used to experience it myself all the time -- and I'd guess most guys reading this have probably felt it too. What it comes from, though, is a fundamental misconception about how a conversation with a new woman ought to run, and what that conversation is really all about -- and it also shows an inattention to using a very powerful conversational tool for getting things working in your favor: the pregnant pause.

A reader writes in asking about attainability:

“Hey Chase, Great blog man, top notch stuff. Never been part of the PUA community, but been doing self improvement (corresponding with my values) for 4 years or so, and your blog and TSM are pretty much the only two I read consistently. I've also read your book, and have a question on attainability. So here's the issue:

Not to sound pretentious or arrogant, but I'm a pretty good looking guy, fantastic shape, fashionable, carry myself well, great job blah blah blah, and I have a lot of symptoms of having much too low of attainability. Only super confident women seem to have the guts to put themselves out there (which can be a good thing, they are my type), make eye contact passing by each other, or even manage a smile after eye contact is made.

Now I am a very pleasant, outgoing person, and I always walk around with at least a pleased look on my face, so it's not like I'm walking around frowning or anything. I guess my question is, how can I raise my attainability through body language or the way I carry myself before words are spoken or even eye contact is made, so that more women are open to me? This isn't in my head, I live in a smaller town (50,000) people, half are college kids (I'm in my late 20's) and countless times friends tell me women ask about me all interested, and I'll end up knowing who they're talking about but have never had these girls so much as make eye contact or smile?! I don't want to walk around smiling like a goofball to make myself seem friendlier, help me man!”

This goes deeper, to the issue of how to make yourself more relatable to people. In this reader's case, he's running into the same problem I used to have a lot -- that only the most confident women feel comfortable around him, and everybody else can't relate. I struggled with that for quite a while myself.

These days though, I'm a pretty darn relatable guy.

And you might be surprised by that, considering my lifestyle should make me all but unrelatable -- frequent international travel (often to places like Cambodia or Monaco instead of the "usual" places like Australia or England), starting up not just one business, but a whole host of them, meeting girls in bars, clubs, airports, and train stations, and a hard-line approach toward friendships and relationships that most people would probably politely describe as "extreme."

Me, relatable? I don't even find the same things enjoyable that most other people do.

Yet, should you ever meet me, chances are we'll get along just fine. We'll laugh; we'll trade stories; and, like so many people I meet, you'll quite possibly end up telling me you feel like we've been friends forever, despite the fact that we'll have met minutes before.

That's because I sat down and put the time into figuring out how to be relatable, both in conversation and even on first appearance. And the great news is, anybody can pull it off -- all it takes is a little effort, and a bit of a push in the right direction to get you started.

Something that can be a great deal of fun to deploy when talking with some new girl is playful banter. You can quickly find yourself in a riveting, electrifying back and forth that leaves both you and her smiling and excited with this fresh new person you've each just met.

However, if you haven't spent as much developing your technique, playful banter can, instead of being a lot of fun, end up being downright headache-inducing. Pop the aspirin and break out the Alka-Seltzer -- you'll need it (or maybe she will).

And even if you have put time into building good wit, there's a good chance -- particularly if you're newer or even intermediate -- that you haven't learned the timing of using that wit and banter in a conversation with a new woman yet -- and that you may very well go over the top, or go for too long, straying into the land of the socially awkward or even calling up out-and-out auto-rejection via over-gaming, thereby costing yourself a girl who otherwise might've been yours.

For that reason, figuring out the rules of bantering properly ends up being quite important for your early game -- you're not always going to deploy your wit in full force with every young woman you meet, but you will with enough of them that having it honed more or less to a razor's edge can end up making the difference between making it to the mid-game with that new pretty girl you like, or having to bow out early.

Thus, this quick and dirty guide on getting down some of the basics of bantering playfully with women.

You're out and about, in a high end nightclub or a top shelf retail outlet, when you spot an insanely beautiful woman. She's just gorgeous: dressed to the nines, hair flowing and perfect, and standing atop 6 inch heels. You have to meet her.

So, you walk over, start talking to her, and, to bring her back down to Earth and rob her of the inflated status her beauty and style must, you reason, confer, you apply a well-worn tactic from the early days of the codifying of seduction: the PUA neg.

"Nice nails," you ask her, 30 seconds into the conversation. "Are they real?"

That's a neg, and that's how it looks in practice for 99.9% of the guys out there who're using it.

What I want to address with today's post is what the concept behind the neg is, whether negs actually work, and whether there are any alternatives to it.

I'll lead off by telling you this: the neg, at least the way most guys who use it these days use it, is totally not the right way to go.

I'm kicking off a new weekly blog post series today, that's going to center on brief, informative articles focused on one specific technique you can use to achieve greater success with meeting and dating women. I'm calling this new series Tactics Tuesdays.

In today's edition -- our inaugural one -- I want to have a look at the technique of locking in.

When I first stumbled upon the pick up community, I heard the term "lock in" or the instruction to "get locked in" tossed about fairly often. And to me, it sounded silly and overmuch -- another vestige of the old indirect days of picking up girls, like opinion openers and routines.

Then I moved to San Diego, and acquired a new friend and wingman who was doing outstandingly with girls, and who I noticed made it a point of his game to always lock in. It was the first time I'd seen it done effectively.

About two years later in mid-2009, I partnered Girls Chase with a talented San Diego-based date coach named Mateo (who just launched his new website, Live the Knight Life; congrats to him!), and I observed that, again, here was a guy for whom locking in was a pretty essential part of his approach with women. And like my other pal, I noticed he was having a discernibly easier time more often than not on his initial approaches.

"Well, okay," I said to myself, "this looks like something I need to stop being so closed-minded about, and start doing."

So, lock in I did.