The Distilled Man - Essential Skills for Gentlemen
This is a guest post by Andrew Long of FierceGentleman.com.
How many times has this happened to you?
You see a beautiful woman on the street. You want to meet her, but… “She looks busy”
Or you’re in line at Starbucks and there’s an attractive woman right behind you.
The two of you make eye contact. What do you say? What do you do?
The line moves on. She leaves the store.
FUDGE!
Another opportunity wasted, never to return.
I was this guy myself for YEARS.
How many of these opportunities have you missed?
How many of these opportunities are you prepared to miss in the future?
Hey, I know all about it—I was this guy for years.
I missed these openings all the time (and then lay awake in bed, kicking myself after thinking up the “perfect” opening line.)
Eventually, I got fed up.
I studied. I learned. I pushed myself into interactions. I struggled. I fell flat on my face.
I got better at it.
Now I help guys with this all the time, and I believe it’s high time that we become confident men, who are not afraid to walk up to a woman and introduce ourselves.
Now I want to share what I’ve learned.
The problem is we rely on our logical minds in social interactions.
Our minds see talking to an attractive stranger as a problem to be solved.
They think, “Hmmm let’s just optimize all the variables! Then, once we’ve done that, we’ll come up with the PERFECT thing to say!”
Here’s the problem.
The human conscious mind can only process about 2,000 bits of information per second.
And that’s everything—including the ambient air temperature, the feeling of your clothes on your skin, and the thousands of non-verbal body language signals you’re getting from the attractive woman.
It’s not nearly fast enough to “maximize all the variables” on-the-fly.
This is why you’ll never come up with the perfect thing to say if you’re consciously thinking about it.
To truly be good at social interaction, to be spontaneous, witty, fun, charismatic, charming, and all the other qualities that we want in ourselves an in a partner—we need to use the subconscious mind.
How fast does the subconscious run?
About 2 million times faster.
If we were comparing the speeds of these two parts of our mind in terms of miles per hour, the conscious mind would run at 150 mph, and the subconscious mind would run at 100,000 mph.
In my private practice, I help guys get out of their heads and into action, so they can go talk to her without thinking about it.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Talking to yourself works. Say “left foot move, right foot move” to start yourself walking. Focus only on moving your feet. You can handle that, right? With any kind of anxiety, you need to focus on the smallest possible unit of action to get yourself started. Once you’re started, you’ve got momentum to run on, and things will tend to snowball.
Lying to yourself also works. Saying, “I’m NOT going to talk to that girl,” helps relax your conscious mind. Be very convincing in your lying. Think of this as tricking your conscious mind to get it on your side. If you don’t do this, it will prevent you from taking action, and you’ll be much more likely to be alone the rest of your life.
What you say doesn’t matter. How you say it matters. Men love to obsess over the “perfect opening line”—or should I say, the conscious mind loves this topic, because it believes there is a formula that will work every time. But this line doesn’t exist. The best you can hope for is a statement that 50% of the time, it works every time. What is this statement? “Hey, how’s it going?” The perfect opening line is simply the one you’ve said a thousand times and can therefore say in a calm, comfortable, suave, confident tone of voice and with relaxed, open, warm, inviting body language.
The truth is, she knows what you’re up to within the first few seconds of you opening your mouth, so you might as well be direct. Studies have shown that our “first impression” takes place in 1/10th of a second, and over the next 40 seconds, your brain is processing 10,000 individual data points to form a “cold read” on a person that is 76% accurate to a person’s actual character.
The last point is why working on yourself is one of the most powerful ways you can become more confident about going to talk to an attractive stranger.
How you smell, your posture, the steadiness of your eye contact, the rapidity and extent of your pupillary dilations, these are all part of the 10,000 data points women are evaluating (unconsciously) when you “present” to them during that first interaction.
And although we don’t like to admit this, men who have been working out, eating right, sleeping well, meditating, and not drinking much alcohol present significantly better than your typical man. These men carry a “nimbus”, a sort of healthy glow that causes them to stand out from other men.
But the class of men that tends to perform the best? Men who have been practicing. Show me a healthy man who hasn’t walked up to a strange woman in 1 year and an unhealthy man who’s been practicing his intonation, posture, and eye contact 60 hours in the last week and I can tell you, with a high degree of confidence, which one is going to make a better first impression.
So apart from the 3 tips above, here are 3 bonus tips that you know you should be doing, but probably aren’t:
Work out at least 3x / week. You don’t have to hit the gym or lift huge weights. You can go for a run, do calisthenics, boulder, play frisbee in the park, whatever you want—but it needs to be at least 20 minutes in length and you do need to sweat.
Cut out whichever of the following is the biggest problem for you: alcohol, sugar, marijuana, porn, video games.
Learn how to stand, walk, talk, and hold yourself to convey maximum confidence. This takes some self-reflection and knowledge, but I’ve got an online vault of free resources that is usually only available to participants in my live workshops, but I’ll hook you up here: Fierce Gentleman Dating.
If you can follow even some of the advice in this article, you’ll soon be rewarded with this:
Andrew is the Lead Trainer at FierceGentleman.com and a dating coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s been featured on the Art of Charm podcast and in COSMOPOLITAN magazine. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
To view this post on The Distilled Man website, visit Go Talk To Her: 3 Tips for Starting a Conversation With a Beautiful Woman Anywhere
For a Free copy of our 42-page eBook, visit http://www.thedistilledman.com/48-hour-gentleman-ebook/