Grow Your Game

We’re on the final day of the Authentic Man Program Course. We’ve had 12 guys go through one of the most transformational experiences in their lives to date, and here’s our leadership team on lunch break at our favourite Indian restaurant.

Perhaps you’d expect us to be talking about personal transformation, or male and female dynamics, or how the course has been going… In fact:

Ray: “Don’t get that masala too close to Bryan’s face, that thing is like a magnet.”

(I’m the messy eater of the group)

Bryan: “I think it would look better on Garrison’s shirt anyway.”

(Garrison is working on letting go of always trying to “look good”)

Garrison: “If this was your shirt there would already be masala on it.”

(That may actually be true)

Decker: “Uh oh, Paul you’re making the ‘left out’ face again. Maybe you should go sit at that table over there.”

(Paul’s edges are feeling excluded and like there’s something wrong with him)

Paul: “I feel better about myself here, and since, as you know, lives are on the line, I need to be where I can help out.”

(Decker is working to ease up around injecting “life-or-death” significance into everything)

Garrison: “Here’s the check–wait, who ordered the ‘whine’? Was that you, Ray?”

(Ray is learning to ask for help instead of keeping it in and later on whining because he didn’t get support)

Decker: Ten bucks says Bryan forgot his wallet again.

(Oh yeah… I’m kinda forgetful too.)

etc etc

The truth is that these guys are amongst the most powerful, intelligent, solid and commited leaders I know. We’ve got a hughe amount of appreciation and respect for each other, and yet in the middle of an intense program … we’re teasing each other mecilessly!

What’s more, we’re teasing each other about the places where most people tend to ‘close down’ or start taking things personally. Why on earth would we do that? Are just insensitive, obnoxious jerks to each other?

Actually: we’re supporting each other. We enjoy finding ways to tease each other about the unconscious behaviours that limit our connections with others. There’s something that’s very powerful about having fun with each other in a masculine, good-natured and loving way.

When you can have humour and laugh about something that triggers us, it has less of a grip on us. Where we’d normally feel ashamed, the insecurity starts to burn away – it’s like a rock polisher – our sharp edges are being worn away by our friends ‘ragging’ us.

The more able we are to laugh at and accept ourselves, and the less seriously we take our ‘image’, the better we get at relating to women, who as we know, are very adept at finding those places where we’re not complete and whole.

Women will often poke and test for the places where you’re not yet solid, where you might posture, or might collapse in to being defensive, apologetic, self-righteous, and angry.

With the ability to laugh at yourself, you’ll be able to welcome openly whatever a woman says or does, without reacting compulsively, and you’ll be far more capable of creating the attraction and profound erotic connections that make life so rewarding.

It’s book review time again, and this time: Michael Jordan, Driven from Within. I was pretty skeptical at first … the book’s very decorous, which is a nice way of saying, it’s largely a picture book. And it has a ghost writer too, which is normally a bad sign.

Having read it, I can say it was truly life-changing. Some of the philosophies espoused in the book are totally paradigm shifting, and seem to come back to me at the most opportune moments.

The book’s written from several perspectives – interviews with the man himself, interviews with his family and people he worked with. It also charts the development of his sneaker brand.

Overcoming Tricks of the Mind

Many of the themes are repeated over and over, one of the most powerful for me being the idea of overcoming adversity using your creativity, rather than letting it get you down:

I remember being at the gym with Michael, and there was this businessman, very successful. He wanted to get back in shape, and he’s laying on the board doing some inverted situps. The guy starts talking about how he’s getrting cramps, and he stops. Michael tells him he has to find a wsay to get past the pain if he really wants to get back in to shape. The guy walks around a little while, comes back, and finally does another set – The mind will play tricks on you.

The mind was telling you that you couldn’t go any further. The mind was telling you how much it hurt. The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal. But you have to see past that, turn it all of if you are going to get where you want to be.

Earning What You Want

The entire first chapter is called “Earned”, and it’s another big theme running through the book:

“Players who practice hard when no-one is watching generally play well when everyone is watching”

He talks a lot about greatness. My favourite definition? Greatness is your opponents knowing the have to do their best, when all you’re doing is expressing yourself in the moment, never having to think abuot lifting your game or trying harder – because you’re firing on all cylinders from the core.

No Fear of Failure

Again, best explained by a quote from the book:

There was never any fear for me, no fear of failure. If I miss a shot, so what? You either make it, or you miss it. I could think that way because I knew I have earned the opportunity to take that shot. I had put in all the work, not only in that particular game, but in practice every day. If I missed, then it wasn’t meant to be. There’s no stress in losing under those circumstances – it just wasn’t meant to be.

I was as prepared as I could possible have been for that mooment. I couldn’t go back and practice a little harder.

If you know you haven’t prepared correctly, or you know you haven’t worked hard enough, that’s when the other thoughts and emotions creep in to your mind. That’s stress. That’s fear.

It’s the same process for doing anything, anywhere in life no matter how big or small the stage. Whether it’s running a corporation, taking a test in second grade, or taking a shot to win a game, at that moment you are the sum total of all the work you have put in, nothing more and nothing less. If you are confident you have done everytyhing possible to prepare yourself, then there is nothing to fear.

Women are attracted to men who are confident and unreactive to them. It’s easy to fake confidence though, so women will often try and ‘test’ men and throw them off guard to see if they’re as confident as they’re projecting.

We call these ’shit-tests’, and normally they’re manifested by the woman making a negative assumption or comment about you. The degree to which you either reinforce or reject that ‘frame’ determines if you pass or fail – if she becomes more or less attracted to you.

Let’s take an example: the classic shit test “Are you a player?” If you say “No!” it looks like you’re getting defensive. If you say “Yes!” it looks try-hard. So what can you do?

a) You can ignore the comment entirely, and keep going with your game plan:

Her: “Are you a player?”
You: “Man, you know what I saw today? [routine]”

This is my favourite way to hold the frame, but a girl can just keep repeating the question if she wants to be a pain.

b) You can make the question look absurd:

Her: “Are you a player?”
You: “What is it about players you like so much? I’m actually a card-carrying member of the ancient order of Make-Out Whores. My father was a Make-Out Whore, and his father before that. It’s a great honour! Anyway, [routine]”

c) You can throw her a shit-test back

Her: “Are you a player?”
You: “Are you just a typical San Diego party girl?”

Like her shit-test, it’s a great double bind – however she answers, she’s playing in to my frame. If she says ‘yes’, I can ‘dismiss’ her and say “I know what those are like, and they’re trouble”. If she says ‘no’, I can tell her that’s good because I’m sick of those girls, but she’s probably not adventurous enough.

d) You can misinterpret what she said, and then disqualify

Her: “Are you a player?”
You: “Oh my God, you’re attracted to me! It’s too bad, because you’re really not my type…”

Not only are you labelling her as attracted to you (and people normally play in to labels), but you’re then immediately disqualifying her too – you’re setting up the frame that she wants you, but can’t have you.

e) You can use a total non-sequitur

Her: “Are you a player?”
You: “My friend eats lemons. [Next routine]”

One part ignorance, one part humour, with some illogical chick sense thrown in – it also subtly sends her the message that you won’t jump through her hoops. If you say the same thing every time she throws you a shit-test, it becomes good call-back humour too.

This was originally posted by the now retired Future, who used to work for The Mystery Method.

“How Do You Deal with Haters? I try to ignore them but still there’s that part of me that can’t stand anyone disliking me. I guess… how can I work on that?”

Concern over what other people think is a major problem; it’s the root of approach anxiety, and it’s the murderous threat to progressing your game because it cripples your ability to take chances. Sinn’s response is of vital importance:
“Who cares?

One of the first hurdles to truly getting this at a level that very few people( Like less 10 that I count) that Future and I perceive events at, is getting over the idea that another person’s mental perception of you, matters at all..

There are going to be people who think you are weird or pathetic or loose morealed. Who gives a fuck? Live the life YOU want! As David D said on some program ” What other people think is none of my business”. Seriously you are here for a reason. NO ONE finds TMM by mistake so whatever forces drove you to us, don’t give them the power to control your behavior and your ability to live your lifetime to the fullest.

As far as we know THIS is the ONLY life we get…”

How do you deal with people not liking you? Honestly, the best way to handle it is to go to the store, buy a box of straws, and suck it the fuck up. I don’t know you. You could be big or small, ugly or handsome, fun or boring, smart or stupid. But letting other people define your self-perception by virtue of their emotional state is a weakness that will stand in your way in most endeavors, one of which is your ability to form successful, meaningful, and repeated sexual interactions with women.

The haters will always be there. You will never be everybody’s cup of tea. Someone will find a reason not to like you. Heck, there are countries full of people who might not like you simply because of your skin color or country of birth! I was in the American military! I suspect nearly everyone walking around Baghdad would talk shit about me in the abstract.

So you get over it. You focus on the prize. The sign of strength in this world is to pursue that which you want relentlessly and tenaciously. The sign of virtue is to bring as many people as you can along with you on that journey. But even when you reach the height of success, someone will trudge toward the summit to pull you down.

Fuck them.

This is one of the key parts of being a man. I just finished a book called The Female Brain. The back of the book warns, “Men, get ready to get brain envy!” but I’ll tell you I’ve never been more pleased to be a dude in my life. Women’s brains are constantly saturated with varying levels of hormones that dictate mood switches arbitrarily through the month or day. Modern media and society have pushed a feminist agenda on us in a big way, so we have all pumped up our overall level of vaginositude. There was a time when it would have been ludicrous to see a man of a certain age crying in public. Now I see it every other day on the streets of New York City. People are pussies.

You are a MAN. You are a WARRIOR. You are the one who protects his family from the saber-toothed tiger, finds shelter when the snows come, and kills a mastodon with a spear to help feed the fucking tribe. YOU. Someone in your genetic line understood this, and so you are here. If you were called to serve in battle, you could whimper at the bullets, cower at the explosions, or you could crucify the child in that moment of fear and live up to your own expectations of yourself. And baby, girls ain’t bullets.

Emotions lead us arbitrarily. They change extemporaneously, and they can rarely be trusted. Our positive emotions burn when we are comfortable and lazy. Our negative emotions burn as we shit ourselves before talking to a girl. Emotions are here to stay, but you must learn to acknowledge them without kneeling before them. In the recent New Yorker, there is a stunning interview with billionaire Mort Zuckerman. This dude has made a ton of hard choices, pissed off a lot of people. But he focused on his brass ring and grabbed it without compromise.

When I’m teaching boot camp, it’s not uncommon for a student to stall approaching because he imagines a girl to be this way or that, or he imagines her relationship with the guy she’s talking to as this or that. Most of the time, I shove him in the back, and he returns a while later, stunned by how well the interaction went, how it was absolutely NOT what he predicted. You simply can’t read ANYONE’s mind. You can’t CHANGE anyone’s mind, necessarily. All you can do is be the best you the world has ever seen. You are a man. You do not feel what anyone else tells you or wants you to feel. You feel as you are supposed to feel according to your own designs, and that is all. Every shivering moment you do NOT act this way is another blade’s centimeter toward castration. PEOPLE WILL HATE YOU. The better you are, the more people will hate you for no fucking reason whatsoever, without knowing you, maybe without knowing what you look like.

It hurts. The good thing about that, I feel, is that it means your emotional circuitry is firing. Cool. But successful, effective people look emotions in the eye, bow their head in greeting, and walk past the iniquity resident in their own hearts. Your mission as a human and a man is to stave off the demons while you have them as you retain the spark of what it means to be you. A significant component of that process is taking a good, hard, ugly look in the mirror, staring yourself in the eyes, and reaching for that box of straws.

Hey guys,

Today’s newsletter may be a bit short because I am learning how to type on a Dvorak keyboard. I would love to take the week off, but the newsletter must go on! For more info on what that is, check out my blog or Google.

I’m on day 2 and I am up to 10-15 words per minute or so. Yikes.

Here’s our question for today:

I’m the kind of guy that wants to come across as humble yet confident. I don’t particularly like bragging and I am working on portraying my personality through stories as you have suggested. However, sometimes I think that I am talking too much about my self and do not want people to think I am self-centered or conceited. Any tips on how to come across as purely confident and not insecure cocky?

-CW

Hey CW,

I wouldn’t worry too much about being humble. Confidence is important, of course, but humility really isn’t.

Some of the most attractive guys are very cocky.

In fact, a lot of “being confident” is being who you are and being proud of that. If you’re naturally a cocky guy then it’s a lot better to go with that than to try to fight it.

Insecurity, when you think about it, is really just not fully accepting something about yourself. A confident person accepts himself, including his flaws AND his strengths.

My friend Tyler from Real Social Dynamics has a great phrase, “the self always comes through.”

In other words, if you’re not a cocky guy, don’t worry about it. People will see you for who you are.

There is, however, one guideline to keep in mind. You should never put other people down to make yourself look good. This always has the opposite effect.

I’d like to write more, but this new keyboard is killing me. I should be typing fast again next week.

Tynan

If you want to get good with women, there are two essential things you need.

The first is the technical skills of gaming: how to open, negging properly, false time constraints.

The second, is faith.

Why is it that when guys first learn pickup skills, they have quite so much success with what they’re learning? Is there anything magical about opinion openers, or about the routines that are taught? Not really, BUT, you believe these things will work.

That’s why the students who get the best most quickly are the ones able to throw out their entire view of how picking up women works, and embrace the material we teach.

Their faith ultimately manifests itself as confidence, and thus ‘inner game’, where the skills learned are ‘outer game’. The best thing that can happen to a guy learning pickup is for them to be given material that they have faith in first. Then they start to develop faith in themselves as a guy who can attract women.

If you were truly 100% confident in everything you did, the only thing you’d need to do to get laid would be to escalate sexually. Your faith would overcome your lack of skills.

I was a mess when I started to learn game, BUT I have complete faith that the random guys on the internet were on to something. I truly believed that they could both help me and that they were right. Later I found out that half of them were fucking crazy or charlatans, but that faith and the good information I DID find made all the difference.

I bought in to it, and improved my life dramatically. If I hadn’t believe that a certain guy who’s stuff I was reading could go in to a group of 120 guys with one girl and take the girl out, and steal girls from celebrities, then I wouldn’t have gotten as good as I am.

I still try to maintain this faith. If I read something that sounds ridiculous, I don’t dismiss it out of hand – I try it! I use it. Sometimes that shows me that people are full of shit, but sometimes it blows me away, and I learn – I have to remember that I was skeptical about opinion openers when I first learned them.

The technical parts of game are crucial, BUT, after learning all the technical aspects of game, the final sticking point is learning to have faith in yourself. Learning to view yourself as an attractive guy, and someone able to attract and begin sexual relationships with the women you desire.