Confidence

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.

Note from Chase: Halvor is our latest addition to the site – a close friend of Alek’s and a longtime devotee of the seductive arts (and fellow Norwegian). An engineer by trade, he’s spent a great deal of time studying both in-depth psychology and nightlife pickup, and plans to focus more on helping newer members with troublesome mindsets starting out. Halvor also posts under the alias “sparxx” over on Sedfast. Here he is.

Are you starting out as a practitioner of seduction in bars or clubs?

Have you already been trying out this scene without getting any results?

If you said yes to either of these questions, this article is for you; though some of the advice is also relevant for other kinds of game.

Bars and clubs are popular places to meet women and have several advantages. Many women go there in order to meet a man for a casual sexual encounter, and if you meet the right woman, you may go home with her in under 10 minutes. Yes, I’m not kidding.

But still, the realities in seduction at nighttime are rather harsh. Most guys do not succeed at all or have very inconsistent results; their interactions just result in rejection or being ignored. This is true for the average guy and it is regretfully very often also true for guys who are trying to learn seduction. But a few guys succeed more or less consistently, and today I’ll give you some pointers to becoming one of them, or at least get some results, if you’re currently not getting any at all.

You’ve probably been brought up to think that leaning on posts, putting your feet up, leaning back on chairs, and slouching a little bit is the key to looking good in the classroom, but if we are being honest here, no one cares, and these little tweaks are not really going to have any impact on girls noticing you.

What gets girls noticing you is never as simple as showing you don’t care, mostly because it doesn’t stand out to them as different from the other guys they see daily doing the same things. And none of those men lay themselves back so well that girls rush to them and instantly start talking with them, so it begs the question: why are you really acting that way, and is this method attractive?

In all likelihood you are choosing the easiest path, a path you haven’t really thought about very much, a path that relies on some mysterious undercurrent to be at play that will bring you luck and a girl. But we have to not only ask “Is this pragmatic?”, we also have to ask “Is the way I’m handling this attractive?”.

I used to think the old phrasing was a fairly straightforward affair. Moths, and flames... one remains in place, bright and beckoning, while the other flutters toward it with abandon, desperate to bask in the light of its warmth and radiance.

“Be the flame, not the moth,” advised Casanova... and it would seem to be simple enough advice.

Yet, one of the things that you learn you must be as you drive ever deeper into seduction is nuanced, not straightforward.

Complex, not simple.

A woman does not fancy a man who is too easily understood. Nor is being that man quite nearly as interesting.

And I realized, while thinking some things over one night working in a room, watching a number of large brown moths fluttering frantically and futilely at my window screen to enter the room and reach the light, and a number of smaller insects that had dropped, burned and singed onto my bed cover, after having attained the object that called to them so alluringly from the ceiling above, that this turn of the phrase was one that, like the men and women it describes, has a bit more nuance to it than it seems at first.

When I first read about the Law of Least Effort, it was as if everything suddenly made sense. I thought that learning about expending effort would put me leagues ahead of other men, as I knew that I didn’t have to act all crazy and get into these long-winded conversations to get with girls; I could just be like all those cool guys who had women chasing and crawling all over them.

Unfortunately, I took the definition of the Law of Least Effort a bit too literally.

I started expending next to no effort in an attempt to not appear try-hard. However, when you expend hardly any effort, you aren’t going to get any results.

Rather than achieving what I was setting off to do, I became a closed off and virtual unknown to women. I’d go out and see attractive woman, thinking that things would be so much better if I had them chasing me and carrying the conversation all on their own. I thought that by sitting around and doing next to nothing women would flock to me and up my cool factor exponentially.

After all – I was effortless, wasn’t I?

But women rarely approached me. When you’re risk averse and don’t put forward any effort, you won’t gain anything.

It turns out that I was missing one vital point of the Law of Least Effort. You must expend as little effort as possible while still achieving what you’ve set out to do.

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.