Dating and Attracting Women

I headed out to acting practise in the city last night, before teaming up with my wing man John to hit some clubs. We wanted to see what the Thursday night crowd were like, thinking they might be a little older and more mature than the Saturday night-ers. Our objective at this early stage of the approach process is simply to get over our approach anxiety by approaching women and starting conversations. Minimal pressure on ourselves; just chat for a minute or two, and we’ve met our goal.

We started off approaching a pair of girls who were sitting in a lounge bar. They were a little hesitant at first, but soon warmed up and were quite receptive to a chat. Turned out they had boyfriend/husbands, but when we didn’t flinch or run away when they said that, they relaxed a bit and became more chatty. It was good conversation practise, which helped put us at ease.

After that John and I approached a few more pairs of girls individually. I’ve been going with the conversation starter “Hey you guys look like fun, are you friendly?”. It often gets a bit of a laugh as it’s clearly a pick-up line, but it works… and most people do turn out to be friendly.

I have a girl I met from Canberra coming to visit Sydney this weekend, bringing 4 of her girl friends, and they want to hit the town on Saturday night. So I started using this scenario as conversation material, saying “Hey, I need your advice on something. I’ve got 5 girl friends coming from Canberra this weekend, and they want me to show them around town on Saturday night. What clubs do you recommend I take them to?”. This seemed to work really well; the story is true, it’s got some social proof built in because it shows that I have other female friends, and I got to ask the girl’s opinion on something.

It was pretty cold in town last night, so there weren’t a whole heap of women to approach and we called it a night about 11pm. We were pretty happy to say that we approached every available group of women that we saw in the clubs that night. We were nervous right before every approach, but we did it anyway. There’s something about being a man who faces his fears that builds self-confidence. And as John said “Imagine where we’re going to be in a years time if we keep practising 2 nights a week…”

I’ve decided to put more energy into celebrating my successes, especially when it comes to approaching women. That way I have less energy wasted on the approaches that don’t go so well. Even on those I learn something, but it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of beating myself up when a woman blows me off or doesn’t want to engage with me. So rather than talking about them, I’m gonna start telling you about the more successful interactions.

I hit the town last night with John, another guy from the upcoming bootcamp. Our pre-bootcamp assignment is to approach as many women as we can. We only just met up last night for the first time, and it was awesome having a wingman who is on the same wavelength as I am.

Together we hit a club in the city, starting nice and early so we had no trouble getting into one of the classier venues. Then we started approaching! We got a bit competitive about it, and all up I did about 8 approaches in the evening, while John did about 6. He’ll have to make it up to me next week.

The friendliest girls I met happened to have boyfriends/fiancée’s, but some were super-encouraging. One of them thought it was awesome what I was doing to learn to engage strangers in conversation. She knew what I was up to; reality is that when we first start doing something, we’re not going to be brilliant at it, and that’ll show. But we ended up in a really enjoyable conversation that was fun for both of us. Almost everyone I approached that night was up for at least a brief chat, and as the evening wore on it gradually got easier. There are some good people out there, and it’s worth taking the time to learn how to approach them.

I have about another month till the actual bootcamp evening, so in the mean time there will be lots more opportunities to do more approach practice, and gradually lessen the old approach anxiety.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to finally overcome my fear of approaching and interacting with women that I’m really attracted to. I’d already created myself an attractive and interesting life, but how are women supposed to get to know about all  that if I’m too afraid to approach them, because I’ve never learned how to do it?

I recently went along to an attraction seminar run by street pick-up expert Alex Coulson, and decided it was time to get a dating coach by signing up to one of Alex’s dating workshop bootcamps. On these bootcamps an experienced pick-up coach takes a small group out into nightclubs and teaches you how to approach and interact with women.

I’ve never been a nightclub kinda guy. That whole scene was frowned upon in my conservative upbringing, and since I never really got into going “clubbing”, I never became comfortable in that environment. Add loud noise which makes conversation difficult, and my awkwardness about approaching and meeting people, and the whole nightclub experience was just unpleasant for me. But clearly for other people comfortable in that environment, it looks like a lot of fun. So I’m keen to learn the approach skills I need so that I can enjoy it too.

Although the bootcamp isn’t for a few weeks yet, my coach has already given me plenty of “homework” to do in order to prepare for it. Every couple of weeks we have  a coaching call where he gives me my next assignment. My first assignment was to go out into some clubs, have a look at the sort of people who went there and decide which clubs had the women who I thought seemed most interesting and attractive. Even just going to the clubs to get myself familiar with an unfamiliar environment was part of the idea. I felt pretty awkward at first, but slowly got comfortable wandering around different clubs, sussing them out.

The next assignment was to start making approaches to women, using a simple conversation opener to start a conversation with the aim of talking for at least 90 seconds. First time I went out to do this I was so nervous, I nearly chickened out at the door of the nightclub thinking “I just want to go home!”. But I also really wanted to get this fear handled. So in I went. I was pretty rough at first, and about 50% of the women I went to speak to were prepared to talk to me. Going alone was also really hard work; I quickly learned the value of having a wing-man. There’s something psychological about having some support nearby, so I don’t feel like a loner when an approach goes badly. Another important thing is to have low expectations of myself: simply to make and approach and start a conversation as my measure of “success”.

The next night I went out, I hooked up with one of the other guys from the workshop so I had a wing-man. Funnily enough, he was more nervous about making approaches than I was, so I ended up making all the ones that he declined.

I went out again last night with one of the guys from my men’s group. We checked out a few nightclubs, but he’s a bit older than me and we don’t seem to be aiming for the same demographic. Rather than making approaches, we wandered from club to club, which made me a bit restless. About 1am we decided to head home, and ended up having a conversation with a really lovely (and very attractive!) woman at the ticket machine in the parking station. After driving back home we had a conversation about the importance of remembering our successes, and spending less time beating ourselves up about our failures. We could choose to focus on the positive interaction with the women at the car park, or on the missed opportunities in the nightclubs. Focusing on the positives will always make you feel better, and good vibes lead to more good vibes. We just have to undo the societal and childhood conditioning that leads us to focus on fear, doubt, uncertainty and failure too much of the time.

Tonight I’m going out again with another guy who has also joined up for the bootcamp. I’m looking forward to it; he seems like a decent guy, and I know he’s as committed as I am to getting this approach thing handled, because he’s forked out his cash. A lot of other guys I’ve been “winging” with haven’t had that level of commitment, and it shows. If you want to be successful at anything, you need to have commitment. I’ll let you know how things go. I’m also going to start celebrating more of my successes on this blog; I think it’s key to developing the positive mindset you need to become successful.

Self-consciousness is a problem for men who want to be more attractive to women, because it broadcasts neediness and insecurity; neither of which are attractive. So overcoming self-consciousness is an essential step in becoming naturally attractive to women.

This is one of the biggest issues I’ve struggled with in my life, arising as a chronic fear of what other people thought. As a result, in the past I always dressed conservatively and had a conservative hairstyle. This was dreadful as far as attracting and relating to women went.

A big breakthrough for me came a couple of years ago when a stage production I was in gave me an excuse to dye my hair blonde. Getting over the fear of what other people would think and say when I showed up with blonde hair was a big step for me at the time. And the more I’ve gone down the path of overcoming self-consciousness, the more I’ve found women both comfortable around me, and attracted to me.

Last month I decided to quit shaving and grow a beard. Never done that before. Hey, why not? Some people like it, some people don’t like it. One girl friend said it made me look more manly because I have a boyish face. Another didn’t want to kiss me and said I should get rid of it.

It turns out that whatever you do, some people will approve and some will not. Freedom comes when we get over needing the approval of the nay-sayers and just do what comes naturally. The way to get over this is to try something new as an experiment, and then find we can deal with the people who tell us they don’t like it. Something like going blonde, growing a beard, or shaving your head is the easiest way I know to make a sudden shift in our perspective, without going through hours of therapy, meditation or reading heaps of self-help books; good though all that stuff is.

The Leukaemia Foundation are currently holding a fundraising event called The World’s Greatest Shave which is the perfect excuse for shaving your head for the first time. I’ve signed up, and I recommend that you join my team by clicking here. Women are always saying that they like a guy with “confidence”, but often we struggle to work out how to get it. This is the easiest confidence-booster I know, and I’ve tried a lot of things! It’s fun, and you’re bound to have a breakthrough or two when you do something you wouldn’t normally, and the women of the world start seeing you in a new light.

I learned a valuable lesson the other day:

I can’t help guys that aren’t serious about wanting help!

You see, I was chatting on MSN to a girl I’d dated recently, and she asked me:

“Graham, how is it that you have so many women interested in you?”

“Why do you ask?”, I replied

“Well, I have this friend who’s really struggling to meet women. Can you help him?”

My natural reaction was to think “Sure, I love helping guys with this.” But somehow my gut instinct kicked in. Maybe it was the fact that this guy wasn’t asking me directly, or perhaps it was just the phase of the moon. But something twigged in me and made me ask:

“Is he serious about this?”

“Yeah. Of course. Why do you think he wouldn’t be???”

She seemed offended that I’d even considered the possibility that he might not be serious.

“OK. Then. Yes, as a matter of fact, I can help him…”

The girl knew that I was a writer, but while we were dating I’d never got around to telling her what I actually wrote about. I went on to explain that I had the perfect answer to her friend’s question in the form of a book titled How to Become a Chick Magnet.

The book describes in detail the exact process I used to transform my life from nerdy computer engineer who was hopeless with women, to a man who now regularly has women asking me to meet up for coffee with them. It is precisely targeted to answer to my friend’s question. I couldn’t image a better match if stone tablets dropped from the sky at that precise moment in history with a message to help him.

So I pointed them to the website where her friend could pick up a copy. And guess what… they made every excuse under the sun as to why he didn’t want the answer to his own question! “It looks like it’s got a virus” he said. Nope… no viruses on my site buddy. “It looks dodgy” he said. Dodgy? Hardly. It’s the real deal. “What, I have to pay for it?” he said. Oh, so we want a freebie. Well that’s not what I call a good indication of commitment.

Crikey! I go to all the trouble of finely handcrafting an answer to this guy’s problem in advance to save him all the time I had to invest in sorting it out, and then lead him to it; and he still doesn’t get it.

There is no magic quick-fix formula for attracting women. Sites that try to sell you one are running scams. If you want more success with women, you need to make some changes in your life. You need to take action. Not your mates, not your mother, not your sister or your brother. But you. You can’t change your life by getting someone else to do it for you, which is what this guy wanted. My intuition about that turned out to be spot-on; he wouldn’t even take the first step, let alone the others I recommend in the book that would actually get him the success he wanted.

If you’re reading this, chances are you probably want more success with women. I’ve lead you to water, but I can’t make you drink. And frankly, I’m a bit over trying to help guys who make excuses and won’t take action. I’d much rather work with guys who are committed, because I know they get awesome results when they read my book, and getting results is what I get excited about.

So if you’re prepared to take the first step, and the ones after that which ensure your success, click here to grab a copy. Start drinking at the well of knowledge and charting a course towards a life of vastly greater success with women. Even if it does have mixed metaphors!

My mate James is a recently-ex-Army Officer, and a natural Alpha-Male.

One of the free bonuses that comes with How to Become a Chick Magnet is an interview where he talks about how guys can become the Alpha-Male who attracts women naturally.

You’ve gotta check it out; in the interview, James actually compares the physiological response we get when approaching a woman to his experience of a roadside bomb attack on the squadron he was leading while serving in Iraq. It’s amazing!

Check out this free preview:

For the full interview, grab your copy of How to Become a Chick Magnet right away.

The reason that we don’t have the success with women that we would like all comes down to the way we behave, and this behavior is ultimately driven by our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Emotions play a big role too, and these are linked to our unconscious beliefs.

Beliefs that inhibit us from having what we want are termed limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs get learned through our experiences of life, and become built deep into our subconscious. They shape our default response to the world. Once any belief is acquired, our subconscious makes an automatic connection between what we observe in the world and the beliefs that we have, which makes these beliefs self-reinforcing.

We selectively gather evidence that supports our existing beliefs, strengthening them in the process; even if they aren’t in our best interests. In some cases a limiting belief was in our best interests in the past, but is no longer working for us; in others, someone else has taught us a limiting belief in the past because it suited their agenda, and we took it on because we didn’t know any better. Once internalized, we started collecting evidence to prove it true for ourselves.

Before we can address our limiting behavior, we need to change or at least reduce the emotional impact of our limiting beliefs. Otherwise we keep doing what we’ve always done, and keep getting the same results we’ve always got.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has a collection of tools and techniques for changing the way we think by shifting our underlying beliefs and thought habits to be more constructive and less constraining. Changing limiting beliefs so that they no longer have such a strong hold over us is referred to as reframing. But before we change or challenge our limiting beliefs via reframing, we need to identify what those beliefs are.

For example, here are some lists of my own present and past limiting beliefs, which have stopped me experiencing the success with women and dating that I would like:

Limiting beliefs about Myself

• I can’t be happy unless other people understand and accept me.
• I need other people’s approval to feel OK about myself.
• I just don’t get over emotional hurts.
• It’s wrong for me to want an attractive partner; I should just take what I can get.
• If I got a woman pregnant by accident, I wouldn’t cope.
• Other guys are more attractive and interesting to women than me.
• Beautiful women aren’t interested in me.

Limiting beliefs about Other People and Our Interactions

• If I’m honest with people, I will offend them.
• If I offend someone, they won’t like me.
• It’s always terribly bad to hurt another person’s feelings.

Limiting beliefs about Women

• All women are as judgmental and critical as my mother.
• You can have either brains or beauty, but not both.
• Women are offended easily.
• Teasing hurts adult women’s feelings.

Limiting beliefs about Dating, Flirting and Seduction

• Flirting is bad. It’s leading someone on unfairly.
• Seduction is evil and wrong.
• Sex outside marriage is wrong, even when it’s consensual.
• Women don’t want to be seduced.

Limiting beliefs about Approaching Women

• If I approach a woman without her initiating it, I’m bothering her.
• Women don’t want me to bother them.
• If I annoy a woman by approaching her, she won’t like me and I’ll feel terrible.
• When a woman rejects my approach, it means there’s something wrong with me.
• If one woman rejects me, all will reject me.

Imagine walking around with that lot in your subconscious! Little wonder it took me a long time to start being successful with women. Many of these beliefs turn out to be the exact opposite of reality. But we learn them early on, and then just keep acting as though they’re true. Because we never act otherwise, we never get to experience their invalidation.

Here’s a great example:

• People won’t like me unless I try hard to act polite and nice all the time

In fact, if I act polite and nice all the time, most people will become bored with me very quickly, and many will end up resentful that I’m not straight with them and don’t speak my mind when required. Women are actually more likely to end up liking me if I’m straight with them than if I’m polite and nice all the time; even though there’s a risk that I may offend them sometimes.

The way to deal with limiting beliefs is to reframe them by looking at them from a different perspective, and then to act based on the new belief. After a while, we start getting validation to reinforce the new, more constructive belief instead of the old limiting one… and our default behavior changes as we start getting more positive results.

I remember when I first started learning to flirt with women by playful teasing, I was amazed at the way they responded. I had no idea that women love being teased, because I had limiting beliefs from my childhood that teasing always hurt people’s feelings, and that flirting was bad and wrong. So I never had experiences with women that would show me any differently. Once I started flirting with women, I had new experiences which reinforced my new belief that flirting is fun, and that women are playful and fun to get to know; instead of terrifying.

Breaking Chains Of Belief

Sometimes there is a chain of beliefs that run together, any of which could be reframed to break the negative cycle:

• If I approach an attractive woman, I’ll get really nervous.
• When I get really nervous I won’t know what to say
• If I don’t know what to say I’ll feel awkward and bad
• Feeling bad is intolerable

Or

• If I don’t know what to say, she’ll think I’m stupid

• If someone else thinks I’m stupid, then I must be stupid
• The worst thing in the world a man can be is stupid

Or

• I need to be right all the time, or people will think I’m stupid
• If people think I’m stupid, they won’t love me
• If people don’t love me, I’ll either die, or live miserably

We only need to reframe or break one of these connections for the chain to lose it’s grip on us. We are all driven by a deep desire to be loved. Deep down we don’t really care if people think we’re stupid or not; we just care about whether they love us. So if I reframed “If people think I’m stupid, they won’t love me”, then it no longer matters whether someone else thinks I’m stupid, or indeed whether I am in fact stupid. People will love me anyway. It becomes irrelevant because the thought of being stupid no longer makes me feel unlovable and bad.

Or another example:

• If I get something wrong, I’ll feel really embarrassed
• If I feel really embarrassed about something, I will get a terribly bad feeling
• Terribly bad feelings last indefinitely

Here, you could challenge the belief that getting something wrong is embarrassing, or that being embarrassed gives you terribly bad feelings, or that bad feelings last indefinitely. What if getting something wrong wasn’t embarrassing? Or what if being embarrassed just felt mildly unpleasant? Or what if terrible feelings passed so quickly that they were of no concern? Any of these alternatives diminishes the power of the chain of limiting beliefs.

Reframing Techniques

Here are some more suggestions on how to reframe other limiting beliefs:

• Look for counter-examples and evidence that contradicts the belief
• Consider other possible explanations
• Make it about them, not you
• Put yourself in the other person’s shoes; get their perspective
• Break it down into a chain of beliefs, and find the flawed link(s)

It takes some effort to reframe limiting beliefs so that we can begin acting differently, getting different results, and coming to more positive conclusions about ourselves and the world around us. But it’s worth it. Then we begin to gather real-world evidence to continue undermining the limiting belief. Once past a certain tipping point, the new belief becomes self-reinforcing instead of the old, and the success we’ve always hoped for starts flowing our way.

Hey folks,

Check out this SlideShare presentation with some great tips on attracting women. It’s even got an audio track so you can sit back and listen to some awesome secrets that will help make you more successful with the ladies:

Got this question in the email today:

I am 54 years old and have always had a hard time approaching women. I am divorced and wasn’t popular in my town because I was a poor athlete and this has always haunted me. Can you give me some advice? I will be going to Cancun, Mexico this summer and want to be attracting women while on vacation.

Here’s my reply:

Thanks for your question. I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying. Sounds like you’re hanging onto some emotional baggage from your home town, which is probably compounded by your divorce. So I’d start by looking at the ways in which your existing mindset could be contributing to the problem. Start dealing with your emotional baggage. Consider some therapy. Go into emotional areas you’ve been afraid of.

At the same time, start developing some of the skills women find attractive. Can you dance? Or play music? Dancing will help you enormously to build self-confidence, and will be really handy down in Cancun. Also learn some new social skills, like how to flirt and how to approach women. See my blog articles on flirting and learning how to approach women.

Grab a copy of my ebook, and follow the advice in it. It work. You’ll get there too.

I also highly recommend Joseph Matthew’s book The Art of Approaching.

Let me know how it goes down in Cancun!

Cheers, Graham

My friend Stan rang last night to give me an update on how he’s going with this whole life and dating thing. He recently turned 40, and has been single and frustrated for quite some time. But when I heard his speech at his 40th birthday party last year, I sensed that he was ready to make some changes in his life. He’d had enough of being miserable. He wasn’t just going to sit back and keep feeling bitter, resentful or hurt about life any more. He was ready for some action.

So I sent Stan a copy of How to Become a Chick Magnet as his birthday present, and to be honest, even I have been amazed at what this guy has been up to since then. In short, he’s taking massive action, and already getting incredible results.

Flicking quickly through the program in the book, Stan is already well into implementing Steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and Skills 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13. It’s incredible. The program is deliberately ordered so you take the Steps and learn the Skills that make the biggest difference first. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s even doing some stuff I’d never thought of, that I’ll have to put in the next edition. The man’s a machine!

And what do you know… this stuff really works. He’s already finding that women are drawn to him now. He’s not desperate any more. He’s more approachable. He’s doing what he wants and becoming a better man, on his terms. He’s no longer expecting women to make him happy; he’s making himself happy. And the result? Women at work, at dancing, at gigs he plays; they’re all taking an interest in him now, where they weren’t before.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that to get anywhere with anything, you need to take action. That’s the only way to achieve results. Nobody is going to do this for you. Women are attracted to men who act, even in the face of doubt and uncertainty. We need to learn what action to take to get the result we want, and then get off our proverbial behinds, get out there and take it.

I can’t wait to hear from Stan again to see what he’s up to next, and how he’s doing. It’s inspiring. This stuff is just awesome. If you want to start having the success that Stan’s having, start taking action by grabbing the book and getting out there. I can’t wait to hear how you go!