The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want (7 page)

Just realizing this one simple fact makes a world of difference. Approach the world with the idea that “whoever is most certain wins,” and you will find that you get very different results.

When it’s lunchtime and your friends start grumbling about being hungry, make a decision. Say “Let’s go here” or “Let’s go there” with total certainty. Don’t ask if this is okay with everyone. Just assume it is—and it will be.

(Additional tip: if you want to make your statement more persuasive, add the word “because” and then just about any reason, and people will even more readily comply with your suggestion—for example, “Let’s go to that diner around the corner because they have the best burgers.”)

Start small. Begin practicing decisiveness and leadership when you and your friends are deciding where to grab lunch. Then, as you get more comfortable and confident with the process, begin stepping up in increasingly more pressure-filled situations. Before long, you will have established yourself as a natural leader in your group—and a dominant personality in every interaction you have.

Women will take notice, and their attraction to you will increase.

Just as you must hold your power with the men around you, you must exercise it when in the presence of women as well. The more beautiful the woman, the more she’s used to being given all the status. A deferential man will ask her to make decisions on everything, from whether it’s okay to take her phone number and when she’s available to meet, to where she would like to go, whether his clothes are okay, and if the food at a proposed restaurant is good. This is actually very unattractive. It’s so common for men to give away all their power like this that the rare man who
doesn’t
is prized.

The rules for maintaining status when dealing with a woman are simple:

 

1. Don’t ask lots of questions when you’re facing a decision together.
   
 

2. Don’t give her the decision-making power. Only give her the option to accept your choices. “Where would you like to eat?” gives her the decision-making power, but “Let’s go to the Italian place, yeah?” gives her only the chance to go along with your decision.
   
 

3. Don’t seek approval: “Is this okay?” “Is that all right with you?” “How’s my jacket look?”
   
 

4. Lead: “I’m hungry; let’s go eat,” or “I’m thirsty; let’s go get a drink.”
   

A perfect example of this high-status behavior is Don Draper, a character in the series
Mad Men
. If you haven’t seen him in action, I highly recommend that you get the DVDs and watch him. (Also, it’s a great show.)

If you were to observe a social situation from afar, you would likely notice that one person seemed significantly more comfortable and relaxed than the other(s). This level of comfort is a nonverbal sign of status and value and is something that, with a little bit of practice, you can absolutely achieve.

There are three types of comfort in particular that you will want to master.

The first is quite simple; it is…

Examples:
Bartenders, DJs, and bouncers are all known to do very well with women. The main reason for this is that they’re the most comfortable guys in the place, because they’re there every night and the environment can’t faze them. But let’s get something clear—most bartenders are not high-status guys. The other guys in the club could be millionaire businessmen wearing ten-thousand-dollar suits and buying bottles of exorbitantly pricey Cristal champagne. Bartenders, on the other hand, earn fairly low wages. It’s purely that they look comfortable. There is no other secret to it.

How to get comfortable:
The pickup environment that most betrays a lack of confidence at first glance is the nightclub. People don’t often feel nervous when they’re walking down the street or shopping, but in a club the pressure is so much more intense. This is even more of a problem with high-end venues. What needs to happen in this case is simple desensitization. Pick a club and a day of the week to go there. Go with friends or on your own. Your mission is not to talk to anyone or do any gaming, but purely to become comfortable in the environment. Learn the layout; start to recognize familiar faces; have some casual conversations with staff.

The key is to get comfortable and start treating the place like your own home. Sit or stand comfortably in a low-energy, chilled-out way or genuinely enjoy the music, moving around without caring what others think or retreating into your head. Those are the only two effective modes of behavior in the club; nothing in between will look comfortable. If you’re trying to look like you enjoy the music by tapping a foot out of rhythm or nodding your head because you think you should, you won’t look right. (Refer to the body language discussion earlier in this chapter for a fuller description.)

When you first enter a nightclub with the mission to become comfortable, be very observant; notice the guys who look comfortable and the ones who don’t. Try to see things from the woman’s point of view. By removing the pressure of needing to pick up or talk to women, you can start to enjoy the environment and create positive associations with it, rather than viewing it as a high-pressure place where you
must
game.

The second kind of comfort is…

So, she’s seen you and judged you as confident from a distance. As long as you don’t make any mistakes with eye contact (breaking it downward or generally being uncomfortable with it), you’ll be fine all the way up to the actual approach. But how does a woman decide if you’re a confident man when you’re actually talking to her?

The next stage, then, is appearing comfortable in conversation. How could a beautiful girl ever be attracted to a man who isn’t confident when interacting with her? Won’t this make her feel uncomfortable in herself? (Okay, in maybe 2 percent of cases she may think you’re “cute.” But 2 percent of cases aren’t any kind of game—apart from a numbers game.)

Examples:
Guys who own a model agency, work in a strip club, or manage a restaurant with hot waitresses all have something in common—they get laid. One of the major reasons is that they’re desensitized to interacting with beautiful women and are therefore comfortable around them. Someone who has worked for a model agency for two years won’t be shaking, sweating, breaking eye contact, or looking generally nervous or uncomfortable if he meets a beautiful woman. She will recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that her beauty doesn’t faze him, and this will mean he isn’t viewed as a lower life-form, unlike the other guys who are obviously very affected by her looks.

How to get comfortable:
Go to places with a high concentration of very beautiful women, like exclusive department stores and high-end clubs, or visit major cities where stunning women populate the streets, like Los Angeles, Miami, New York, or London (or countries such as Latvia, a small nation in Europe with amazing women everywhere). In these situations set an achievable goal, which is simply to open and leave. (We’ll talk more about opening later.) Have your opener and your escape line ready—except in a strip club, where an opener isn’t necessary since there the women open you. Desensitize yourself to their looks; get comfortable holding eye contact; learn to keep your composure. Through this experience you will realize that gorgeous women aren’t so different or difficult to talk to, and they, for their part, will perceive you as comfortable, which will greatly increase your chances of building attraction.

The third and last type of comfort is…

So you look confident from a distance (though most guys don’t!). You seem confident when you’re talking to her. What does she do then? She tests you out. She challenges you to see how you will react. She might ask you why you’re wearing “that sweater,” if you are “a player,” or why you don’t go to the gym. The test is to see if you are internally confident or comfortable in your own skin.

This testing is a good sign, because it starts to happen once she’s becoming committed to the interaction and wants to find out if you’re the man for her. This kind of testing will continue beyond those initial questions, and to measure up you will need to display various types of confidence, including physical escalation and sexual confidence.

Example:
A guy who consistently goes with hot girls and is comfortable with who he is is nonreactive and unemotional in the face of tests. To get to this point, you have to put in a bit of work. I have a theory that people become shy because they’re worried about exposing their weaknesses to others. They are scared of being perceived as ugly, or having a silly voice, or being poor, or whatever else. So they do little and say less so that they aren’t found out. Someone who is content with himself will not be reticent to put himself out there and won’t react as much if tested.

How to get comfortable:
Sit down and write out each of your weak points, the things about yourself that you’re not happy with. Next to each, write an action you can take to help it. That action might fix the issue by 100 percent or maybe just 20 percent, but having a plan for improving your situation, even just incrementally, will positively impact your confidence and self-esteem. Earlier in this book I talked about how I did this, and it was a massive factor in gaining the confidence I now possess. (Don’t get me wrong—there are still aspects of myself that I’m not entirely satisfied with, but there are much fewer than there used to be.)

High-status men have high levels of what is called “social intelligence.” Social intelligence is a term that encompasses many characteristics, but in general it describes an understanding and awareness of social dynamics and an ability to navigate them accordingly.

The primary component of social intelligence is the ability to connect and communicate with others—in other words, basic social skills. A socially intelligent man knows how others around him feel at all times. He understands the status hierarchies, the power dynamics, and the difference between cool and uncool.

Put simply, he’s in the know; and because of this, he comes off well in most any company.

In the coming chapters of this book, you will learn the dynamics of social situations and the skills you need to appropriately navigate any environment. When you master those skills, you will be seen as a man of high social intelligence, and this in itself will make you attractive.

The ability to walk up to a random group of women and have them fawning over you within seconds is a strong indication of social grace and intelligence. And when you’ve completed this book, it’s an ability you will possess.

In addition to your actual social skills, there is another factor that can be used—and that women in particular
do
use—to gauge your level of social intelligence, and that is your fashion. Since the beginning of time fashion has been used to communicate status; and more recently it’s become a secret language of coolness. To have good fashion sense is to communicate that you are socially in tune with what’s happening. You know what’s cool; you know what’s not.

If you think back to grade school and the kids who were made fun of, there’s a good chance that they were dressed in a particularly uncool way. I know this from experience.

On the other hand, if you think about the cool kids, they all probably dressed in clothing similar to each other’s. And no matter what that style was, it communicated, “Hey, I get it; I’m socially accepted.”

Now, when it comes to getting
your
fashion together for the purpose of signaling attractiveness to women, here are my thoughts:

First, be brutally honest with yourself. Most guys think that they dress “just fine.” However, if women aren’t complimenting you on how much they like your style, there’s a very strong possibility it’s
not
fine.

If this sounds like you, it’s completely understandable. Outside of the fashion industry magazines, there’s almost no good material out there for regular guys who want to dress well. I know, because I used to be one of the worst fashion offenders possible. I used to wear sport clothes, baggy jeans, and clothing that never got compliments. I dressed for myself, not for women. I was comfortable, sure, but my wardrobe was an absolute mess. Once I decided to ditch my cheap sneakers for stylish loafers and traded in my Airwalk hoodie for a suede sport coat, I finally started getting compliments and positive attention from women.