Confidence

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?

The chief tenet of the Law of Least Effort in seduction is that the less effort you put in while still achieving the desired result, the more powerful, attractive, and sexy you appear. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is by learning to communicate without the use of words.

If you’ve ever studied very charismatic people – I have, and I recommend it – something you’ll notice is that they frequently say things with fun, charming, wordless expressions. A smile and a wink, say, or a mischievous look. For instance, maybe someone asks a charismatic man if he can handle a certain situation – he gives them the skeptical look with just a hint of a knowing smile and then gets to it. Or maybe he gives a small smile, makes a thumbs up sign, and goes about his business.

Don’t forward this post to any feminists.

There’s a lot of animosity among men in the West toward women these days, and a lot of it, I’m quite sure, ties back to the efforts women have made to change their image. Fifty years ago in America, if you watch old television shows, women are quite often depicted as silly and cute; they did and said the darnedest things, and men would look upon them with expressions that said, without words, “Aw.. ain’t she just so silly and cute?”

Nowadays, a woman being depicted that way on television, and a man looking at a woman that way, would be demonized as outdated and humiliating. “Women need to be taken seriously,” we’re told; “that’s the only way they’ll be treated as equals.”

So most men in the West no longer view women as silly and cute. Instead, they view them as scary, intimidating creatures who will bite their heads off should they dare to view women as anything less than ferocious beasts and equals; “men in skirts”, if you will.

This is one of those things that’s as effective in opening as it is in closing, and it’s useful throughout the course of an interaction. Pulling on a woman’s arm or shoulders or waist (or, if you’re in bed or on the sofa, her legs or feet) and dragging her into you is one of those very fun, very dominant, very sexual things a man can do to a woman (or a woman can do to a man!) that take things and spike the level of excitement and intrigue very quickly.

The reasons it works so well are basically that:

• Only really confident men do this
• Only really dominant, sexual men do this
• It shakes a woman out of autopilot and brings her back into there here-and-now

Autopilot I just realized I haven’t written about on here yet; so let’s slate that as something to target in the near future. But for now, suffice it to say you don’t want women floating through their interactions with you without putting any mental footwork in. You want them making effort – albeit easy, natural effort – to be with you.

To be a man truly successful with women, one must first come to master his own feelings – to override deep emotions and instincts when he knows those emotions and instincts are going to take him the wrong direction.

Emotions are our snap, subconscious decision-making process, designed to be powerful to preserve necessary functions even in the face of logical decisions to the contrary. In today’s world, for instance, it’s easy to get caught up in life and feel like you have no time for children and can’t be bothered with offspring. But the entire reason you exist is that your ancestors all, every single one of them, successfully passed on their genes, and along with everything that makes you who you are, they also passed on the things that made them successful at survival and reproduction – some of those things being deep emotions that overrode logical thoughts like, “Eh, I don’t really have time for kids.” The desire to go condom-less in sex is one – spend enough time with a girl, and you don’t want to be wearing protection. That’s just one of life’s way of preserving the natural order of things and working to get you procreating.

But some of the things that worked in the past don’t work so well nowadays. In the past, if a man really liked a woman, fixating on her and obsessing over her and devoting tons of time and energy into getting her might have worked. In the past, beating oneself up over a botched effort with a girl one likes might have led to a man going back and figuring out a way to get her, against all odds.