More than Just Sex (15 page)

You’ll spot them easily; they’re the ones leaving with the hot girl. They are not better-looking than you, they don’t have a better watch or car or job. They are not even better conversationalists. In fact, they are not better than you at
anything other than just staying out of their own way so that the rest is easy for them, just the way nature intended it.

High emotional investment and low physical involvement is THE HIGHEST stress way to do anything.

But close on the heels of this high-emotion train wreck is…

HIGH INVESTMENT – HIGH INVOLVEMENT

This is where it matters AND you are trying really hard to do something about it. Again, you know the sort: the guys who’ll chat up anyone in a skirt in ever-decreasing circles until finally they go home with some hapless girl with equally low self-esteem, and have the kind of sex you’d struggle to stay awake through. I do not want you to be that guy and you certainly
do not
want to be that guy. Desperate but determined, and just as highly stressed as the other way round, especially in the morning when you’d rather chew your own arm off than wake her up.

Which brings me nicely to option three.

LOW INVESTMENT – LOW INVOLVEMENT

Also known as total dejection. You’ve given up and you just don’t care. You have given up on finding love, even given up on finding sex, and instead you are beginning to wonder if
Sleepless in Seattle
is just because it’s the home of Starbucks and think
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
sounds like a good idea, so long as it’s not too early.

If you are in the low investment – low involvement category, it’s probably because you have already tried the other two options and failed. No wonder, they are two of the hardest ways to do anything, never mind something as emotional as dating.

I know we guys are not supposed to talk about emotions; we are supposed to keep it all inside and just be mean and moody. That’s all very well in the movies but if you are struggling to walk up to a girl and say ‘hi’, then trust me, you are emotional, the emotion is called fear.

You have created such a state of fear in yourself that you struggle even to be yourself, and that’s just not very clever. But here’s the good news: the real you, the guy your mates know, the guy who’s sitting reading this book can have all the girls he likes.

If this is you, then here is your next project.

Fieldwork

I want you to look around and find a guy who you perceive to be on a similar ‘catch-potential’ score as you. Remember, this is your perception and not necessarily reality. What kind of girlfriend can you imagine him being with? What does she look like in your mind’s eye? Speculate about what she does for a living and anything else that matters, or at least matters to you. Then I want you to spend the rest of the day scanning for guys ‘like you’, especially those in couples. Actually, you might need to do this for a couple of days, but just notice the great variety of options for a guy ‘just like you’. The difference
between you and them is likely to be a very simple one: they’re not stopping themselves!

In reality, if you have a pulse and are not too wild-eyed and scary, then there is no real reason why you don’t have a girl on your arm right now. By far the biggest reason that guys are single is generally because they allow the power to sit with the women and further sabotage themselves with their thinking. Here is the fourth way to approach prospective relationships, and it’s by far the best in almost EVERY instance.

LOW INVESTMENT – HIGH INVOLVEMENT

When do you hit your best golf shot? When you think no one’s watching, right? When do you crack your best one-liners? When you’re not thinking about it. When do you close your easiest deal? When you’ve already made target and you don’t need the commission. It doesn’t matter what you are doing; the human body works best when you get out of its way and stay out of its way for long enough to just let it do its thing. You set it up and let it go, and the result is not just likely – it is
inevitable
.

But you do have to give yourself every chance, and that’s where the involvement comes in. The last time I spoke about involvement it was in the sense of the guy chasing girls around the nightclub until he eventually found the lame wildebeest at the back of the pack and picked her off as his night-time prey. For you, I am talking about a very different kind of involvement. I am talking about being involved only
in things that you can actually control, or in which you have at least a fair degree of influence over the outcome. A sporting analogy would go like this: you can definitely control how much and how well you practise, you can control the quality of your equipment, you can control (to some extent) when you play, you can influence the outcome by managing your state of mind to give yourself the best chance, but you CANNOT control how the opposition plays or the weather or the exact outcome of the game. You can give yourself every chance,
but you cannot control the actual outcome.

WHAT’S IN YOUR BOAT?

While interviewing Olympic rowers at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, sports broadcaster Charlie Jones spoke with a number of the competing athletes. Any time he asked them a question about something that was outside their control (such as the weather, the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents or what might go wrong during a race), the Olympians would respond with the phrase, ‘That’s outside my boat’.

By refusing to focus on anything that was beyond their control, these athletic champions were able to bring all their resources to bear on only what was within their control – everything from their physiology, mental maps and story to the actions that they took in preparing for and competing in the actual event.

In my own life, I’ve found that focusing exclusively on what’s ‘in my boat’ increases my effectiveness and reduces
my stress level dramatically. Logically it makes sense too, but how often do you find yourself getting frustrated and trying to control something that is totally outside your control anyway? Like whether someone finds you attractive, whether she already has a boyfriend, whether she had a crap day at work and is in no mood for even your best ‘witty’ banter.

You can’t control anything outside of you and your boat.

‘I’m not going to worry about the things I can’t control, because if I can’t control them there’s no point in worrying about them; and I’m not going to worry about the things I can control, because if I can control them there’s no point in worrying about them either.’

Mickey Rivers, baseball player

If you can do something about it, do it. If you can’t, don’t even try! There’s no point, you can’t do anything about it anyway.

To illustrate the point try this.

Homework

1. Pick a time from the past when you remember feeling stressed or anxious; any time, in fact, when you were in an adrenaline-induced state. It could be a sporting situation, a date, in a club or at work.
   
2. Have a careful think about it and try to pinpoint the source of the stress.
   
3. Was it something that you could have controlled?
   
4. If it wasn’t, and I’m fairly sure it wasn’t, what parts of the situation could you positively influence? That is to say, which parts could you reliably steer in a chosen general direction most of the time, and which parts did you have no control over whatsoever?
   
5. Which parts of the situation could you actually ‘control’? That is to say, which parts could you reliably make happen over and over again at will, or change anytime you wanted?
   

Controlling the game

Play the ‘Can’t Control/Can Influence/Can Control’ Game now. For every item you come up with that you don’t control, write down what you do control, and that will positively influence the result you would like to achieve.

For example: I don’t control the weather, but I do control whether there is an umbrella in my golf bag. I don’t control the pitch, but I do control whether my boots are in good condition. I don’t control the girls, but I do control where I go to meet them and how I present myself when I get there to externalize the real me. I’m sure you get the idea.

Stress comes when you try to control what is out of your control. Just like the guys screaming from the stands or at the TV set, you have no control unless you are actually in the game, and even then, at best, you can only ever influence the outcome by giving yourself every chance – completely involved in every way you can be, but with very little emotional involvement in the actual outcome.

Think about it again. How is it that guys like Tony Pike can approach women without hesitation? Simple: they don’t really mind about the outcome, as there will always be another opportunity. They control what they can and let go of what they can’t, and in doing so they give themselves every chance of the outcome they want. With a bit of practice, that is something that you can control, too. You can control whether you give yourself every chance or not. Let me show you how.

A bit of extra homework

The first step is to notice how you speak to yourself and learn to turn off your internal dialogue. We know that the problem here is not that you have thoughts; the problem is that you believe them.

Close your eyes and think of a time when you were stopped from doing what you wanted to do because you talked yourself out of it. When you have the memory, just notice the thoughts you had at the time. Never mind the content, just give them a volume rating from 1 to 10. When you have done that, begin to turn the volume all the way down, and notice how different that feels.

As soon as it feels OK, press together any finger and the thumb on your left hand.

Now I want you to think of a time when you felt really confident in yourself. Not cocky or arrogant (that’s SO not attractive), just confident and happy in your skin. When you have done that, I want you to close your eyes and go back into that memory with as much realism as you can. Make sure you are seeing the event through your own eyes. Hear
what you heard at the time, and pay particular attention to the thoughts you were having, if indeed you had any. Confidence most usually comes when you do less, not more. This is not a motivational pep talk of the ‘go get ’em tiger’ variety; this is a way to get you to stay out of your own way. If we can learn to do that, we tend to do just fine.

Remember, wellbeing, confidence and, dare I say, happiness are your default setting. They are what happen when you do less, not more, and for that reason I am not going to fill your head with pointless affirmations and other such things to ‘do’. Genuine confidence is about ‘being’, not ‘doing’, so get properly into that confident memory now and let all the feelings of confidence come flooding back into your body. Notice what feelings you have and where you feel them. Now double that feeling in size and then double it in size again, making it more and more robust. As you do so, press together the same finger and thumb on your left hand, and if you fancy it, play your favourite ‘feel-good’ song in your head.

This is all about balance. I want you to take it just as far as you need to feel good and confident and relaxed. Take it too far and you’ll behave like the happy-clappy idiot that no one’s going to want to take anywhere other than back to their nurse at the funny farm. But get it right and be yourself and you will be unstoppable.

By pressing your finger and thumb together, you are creating what in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) terms we call an anchor. In this case, it’s a physical connection to a feeling, but you can anchor any states to anything. I’ll
tell you more about this when we get to the MAN-ipulation techniques later on. It’s ethical, I promise, but is definitely designed to stack the deck in your favour.

When you have done this once, just open your eyes and come back out, then repeat it as often as you need to until you can squeeze your finger and thumb together and feel good.