Beauty and depth

Had another great night yesterday! In general, it’s been going really well the last two weeks. In listening to the Blueprint, I realised again that all I need to do to get rid of my feeling of displeasure, if it has no real grounds is to… drop it. Like a hot coal. Be happy! It’s a habit, not something that happens to me. That’s one to remember. It’s also the struggle with ego; I’ll let it go, it’ll sneak back in, I’ll resist its presence but in doing so only strengthen it… It’s a process I need to go through, get to know the ins and outs of it so I recognise its phases as they happen and learn what reactions work for me. Another liberating thought: we’re all constantly in cycles. From realising we’re not happy with the situation as it is and why, to defining what should be better, to creating a strategy to make it better, to implementing it, to evaluating the results, to defiing what should be changed and kept. I have this thing where I feel ashamed of going into introspection, or not feeling like going out. Like I’m sick, and there’s something wrong with me that I need to fix or something. But it’s just the cycles, and every cycle has its characteristics and reflection on our behaviour. Sometimes you’re best staying in, in others you’d better get out there. But I think this is quite advanced stuff; newbies should just get out there ;-D

So what worked? I entered the place alone yesterday, so I was a bit tense about that. But I admonished myself to relax, and above all, take care of my own needs first. I remember that most of the great nights I’ve had, started with some time spent by myself relaxing or in a good conversation with someone, something that connected me to myself. So I figured if anything real and good was going to happen, the first thing I needed to do is connect to myself. I sat down a bit, looked around. I went outside and took a piss. I ordered a drink (no alcohol! Like Jeffy, I only started drinking once I was on fire :p). Walked around.

I felt the urge to ‘do’ something but resisted, and of course in doing so did a lot of things very naturally. When I felt the thought come, I just dropped it. No self-reflection needed, only trust and connectedness to myself. And also the soothing realisation that any social situation won’t just open up to you the moment you walk in (or not many). It takes some adaptation: time for people to watch you, get used to you and appreciating your value through the actions they perceive of you. So while everything you do has a meaning or repercussion, it’s just no use trying to control it; you never know who’s going to like or dislike you for any given action anyway. As long as it fulfills you and you’re considerate to others, anything goes.

Then, I felt it was time to talk to someone. The difference with half an hour before that is that now it was just because I wanted to, not because I expected it from myself. I wanted to share myself around, now that I had briefly rediscovered what riches lie inside

I approached, and the reactions weren’t great, but I didn’t let it get to me. I think it’s understandable that people don’t always react well to strangers walking up to them. That’s just the way it is. In fact, I use a variation of BlueWave’s approach here: I walk up, say a few lines, not too much, then leave. Half an hour later, I’ll come back and say some more. Yesterday as well, I was having great fun with some friends that had come and some girls we met, and I could see the people I’d approached glancing now and again. That’s social proof for you. I noticed that if I keep on respecting myself, I make people respect me. If I get a funny look, I give a funny look back. If they react weird, I understand, don’t get angry and extricate myself from the conversation with a smile. The more I learn about my own processes and childish reflexes (because they were learned in childhood, often come up inappropriately even though as adults we backwards rationalise them into social patterns ), the more I see how we are all children. I understand who people feel afraid of strangers, I FEEL when they uncomfortable and more and more, I’m able to tune into their feelings and flow with them to comfort. Hard to explain, but I’m sure you understand. If not, talk to more people!

In fact, here’s my theory on the social matrix and ‘building an evening’. In the beginning, take it easy. Be humble and nice. If people don’t react well, bow out with a smile, don’t expect anything from them or yourself. At some point, you’ll make friends. Talk to them for a while, get comfortable, get to know each other. Create a base. Then, when the time is right (you decide), start talking to other people again. Go back to your base. Replenish your energy! Your battery isn’t eternal, at least I can’t meet new people all the time – I need some comfort as well. Return long enough to charge yourself and to add something to the evening with your friends (important!), but not too long to start procrastinating (fifteen minutes-ish is my natural rhythm). As you start talking to more people, start spending time with those that are more worthwhile to you. A mistake I still make often: don’t spread your energy around too much! Scout, introduce yourself, and select. Another great thing: introduce people to each other. They automatically assume that you’ve known them for ages, even when they find out that you haven’t the impression of familiarity stays (trick of the mind).

In introducing people to each other, you’ve effectively opened up the room. This is another kind of energy, another kind of state. You can go talk to people just because you think they’d like this other person, or you can talk about a person you met and if your conversation partner is interested, go introduce them to that person (even if you didn’t really talk to them, most of the time they’ll feel honoured). In this way, you slip in and out of groups without anyone really noticing. Once people see that you’re going around and being well-liked, there is no stopping you anymore. Basically, yesterday, I talked to ALL the hot girls, and high-fiving the guys. I admit there is still more than enough work on my confidence and consequent comfort building, escalation etc. but at least I was talking to people, and getting a good vibe! And you can’t please everyone anyway. Some girls even started giving me the eye, like publicly, and all I had to was smile and walk over. Beautiful.

So then we changed venues. It was a bit harder at first, a really crowded place with younger girls (more bullshit, less realness), but then I spotted the hottest woman I’ve seen in ages. I was talking to some people at the bar in a group, and asked if she was a friend of theirs (getting introduced eh…) but she wasn’t. So I walked up to her, and said ‘So who are you?’. She looked at me, taken aback, amused. I just stared at her with my eyebrow raised (my trademark, I even have a special wrinkle above my right eye from doing it ), she started laughing and said she was L. I introduced myself, I introduced myself to her friend, I asked her if he was her boyfriend, we talked about stuff (don’t remember). Such a great energy! Charged, but relaxed. I could see she liked me. At the end, I said we’d go for a coffee. She said ‘I don’t have coffee with just anyone’. I said something like ‘Just anyone?!’ and told her to give me her number. She laughed, and said that she had a boyfriend. This is where it could become contentious for you guys. I bowed out. We had talked about how you shouldn’t interfere in relationships as they were hard enough as it is, so it would be a bit weird of me to push it. I also said that I’d have coffee with her even if she had a boyfriend, like as friends, but at that point it was up to her. I chose the elegant option, and said I was happy to have talked to her. We kissed goodbye (cheeks) with a big smile. Even though I didn’t get her number, this is pretty much my first conversation with an absolute 10 that I felt completely comfortable in (not a doubt in my mind) and that went like fireworks! Someone more evolved might have gotten more out of it. Let me know! In any case, I’m hoping I run into her again…

No kidding - she looked a lot like this.

One more thing that I want to note on all this: becoming good socially and with women, or at anything, is not just about getting used to success, feeling that you deserve it. That comes quickly. The hardest part, for me, is getting used to the inevitable lows that follow nights like these. As great as the night was, I still ended up in bed alone. That I don’t mind. I don’t need to dive in bed with a chick I picked up, I’d rather get to know someone better and build a special moment with them that still feels worthwhile after I come all over her face and I met enough women yesterday that I can and will go for that with. Back to the point: getting used to lows. This morning, I was not a superstar. I skipped the morning at work and lay in till noon. I scuffled to the kitchen for some tea and a sandwich. The interactions that seemed so heroic yesterday looked different in daylight. I started wondering if I didn’t make a fool of myself, being so hyper. See what’s happening? Self-consciousness at not being in the same state. Because you can’t be in that state all the time! I started my night out really chill, taking time for myself, grounding. That wasn’t too superstar either. After being up there though, I start thinking that I should be up there all the time. So what I need to do: get back to the ground. I guess it’s a kind of performance: my moment of glory becomes a point of feedback afterwards for future growth (at its best). It’s another form of letting go of an ego that springs up in those beautiful moments. I want to say ‘that was me. Look at how cool I am’. But in fact, it’s happening through me. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, things just flowed. Just like this morning, I’m more subdued and I want to chill, so my flow is to accept whatever state I’m in. This is the basic secret of all this stuff: accepting the state you’re in NOW. It could change, but it only will when I first accept what is now.

That’s what went wrong last weekend. I had a great time like yesterday, only I started feeling like this was ‘the new me’ and I became greedy, going out five nights in a row and ending up depleted, and not liking what I ended up with. You see, every day you live the way you want to live is like a point added, a rock to the mountain you’re building. Every day you live against those principles however, like letting your ego take over and trying to consciouly force a replication of something you had yesterday, are points that you lose. So the main point is: stay with yourself and your integrity, don’t sidestep your conscience. Stay humble. Accept your state as it is NOW. Even if it means not going out for two months and digging into your soul, seeing yourself become anxious in approaches and feeling like you haven’t made any progress at all. Everything you feel has a use. Maybe it’s a lesson that you need to learn. Maybe it’s something you thought you had learned but that still lives within you, on a deeper level. Maybe something is calling for your attention that you haven’t been wanting to see ever since you started out going out with girls. The periods that I’ve retracted in myself were always the foreboding of a new level that I achieved afterwards, and the more profoundly I went into it (as in, the less I resisted whatever I was feeling), the more profound the change in me was afterwards. It’s the cycle I talked about in the beginning of the post. Sometimes you need to dig deep to find what’s troubling you, and your mind doesn’t give its treasures up easily.

Something to all of us here, who think about how we can improve with the ladies, and the few between those that are thinking about how they can make themselves more valuable and how they can love themselves more completely. First thing is that thinking about it makes your situation clearer. So being conscious isn’t all fun and games – it hurts more. Other guys live in a daze and think they’re rocking, because in their minds, they get all they want. I have it myself all the time, so I know. I tend to get intimidated when I see guys in night life, looking so confident, so pimp. It’s like they have it all together. But now that I’ve started talking to them, and really try to look for that force that they seem to exude, I see that it’s all a farce. Every guy out there is afraid of approaching beautiful women. Every guy ends up in the friend zone. Every guy fucks the wrong kind of girl because it’s all he can get. Every guy wakes up wondering what the fuck he was doing getting drunk yesterday and making a fool of himself. Every guy in a relationship has to struggle through doubt, power struggles, boredom, temptation… Every single guy has to deal with the lonely nights, with giving a place to meaningless sex, with how to explain that yes, he is here alone. And every guy feels like a hero, a little boy, when he plucks up the courage to go up to that girl and make it happen. He feels like a fucking PIMP when he gets a number, and a ROCK STAR when he meets her again and beds her. That’s it

No, ONE more thing about seduction. Angel taught me this These days, I don’t really try to ’seduce’. I look for realness. In me, in the people I meet. I talk about the things that keep me busy, even my work or my exes or something, and then when they talk I listen to them, genuinely. That in itself may not get you laid like a motherfucker every night, but it sure as hell will set you up with a lot of phone numbers and grateful girls with lots of curious girlfriends One woman literally told me that I seduced her by simply listening to her actively – “that is so rare!”. So, be attentive. Don’t be afraid to be a friend! The whole friend zone thing is true, but think about your social life. If you have ten cool chick friends, how good are your chances of having some female company next Friday? And how long do you think those girls will be able to resist when they spend time with such a cool, attentive, funny guy?