The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give It to Them (9 page)

It is still confidence that you need to be successful with women, but if you “have” self-esteem — by deciding to act as important as you really are — you will appear certain too. In this regard, self-esteem leads to confidence, and this is why self-esteem is often confused with confidence and why you may hear females say they like a male with a lot of it.

Because self-esteem leads to confidence, anything that diminishes it will reduce your success with women. This is yet another reason why traditional socialization for males is so bad, as it attempts to lower males’ self-regard and then fool them into thinking they must earn it back by working hard and prove their worth to women and the world. But self-esteem is self-respect, not just respect in general. What you achieve in life may earn you respect from other people, but that is not self-esteem; that is “others-esteem.” It is called
self
-esteem for a reason, because it is how you regard yourself — which is a decision entirely up to you. There are no conditions to be met beyond the conditions you give yourself. It is all based on your own opinion, which you fully control.

However, those who do not trust themselves more than others tend to rely on other people’s opinion and to gauge their own worth and importance by how well other people regard them, and they then act accordingly. This is an easy mistake to make since we are raised to seek approval from other people. Plus, we actually need it as we grow up because other people truly are more important than we are when we are young; we would not have survived without them.

Nevertheless, approval from others is no longer necessary for adults who are self-reliant and independent, perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. But once a habit has been established when we are young, it often continues with a life of its own. The same type of behavior that we grew up with to please our parents remains alive and well. Thus, adult males chase success in society by focusing on academic achievements, professional careers, and competitions to prove their worth. Not until society responds by giving them recognition, acceptance, appreciation, and status do they allow themselves to feel more valuable, or at least equal to females.

Social conditioning leaves little wonder why females’ ideal male is called
Prince
Charming or why they get excited over doctors since few males except those who have either inherited or earned high status behave attractively. But once again, it is not the status per se that females are attracted to in these males, but the masculine confidence apparent from their dominance.

A male does not actually have to be important to society to be attractive to women; there is no need to achieve high status, even though the few who are dominant tend to have high social status. Without this formal status, adults tend to not give themselves the permission to act important, as we are raised to prove ourselves and our value before we can do so. Raising children that way may be necessary, but this self-regulatory behavior eventually turns out to be a huge obstacle to a male’s success with women, as acting important is a necessity to be attractive to them. When a female meets a male, she gauges his confidence by the way he relates to other people, not only to her but also to everyone else, including bystanders, family, friends, strangers, and potential or hypothetical boyfriends. She is looking for a masculine male, not only a male with a lot of confidence, but one who actually has
more
confidence than she does — a dominant male — a man she can look up to, and she will pay close attention to how a male behaves to judge his value.

Nevertheless, deeming yourself as the most important person, including more important than the women you want, does not mean that you have to or should disrespect them. There is no need to insult women off-handedly every now and then when you approach them; you can in fact treat them well as long as you make sure to treat yourself even better and expect to be treated like that by other people, including her.

People are commonly raised to believe that they are worthless to begin with, that they should sacrifice themselves for their peers, and that the only way to regain their natural self-worth is by working hard and serving society. Males are unquestionably raised to believe that earning achievements is necessary to prove their value. Thus, males with status regain informal permission to think and act important, with formal authority and external recognition to back them up for as long as they still serve.

Nevertheless,
earning
your self-esteem in this way is not a good idea. Besides the fact that it confuses respect with self-respect, there are many further complications.

First, the process of earning your self-esteem is tedious. It takes a long time to earn degrees and promotions and to get in shape for competitions and to compete. Postponing your pursuit of women until you have reached your goals is a bad idea because of all the time that you are wasting in the meantime. You could literally waste a
lifetime
doing it — many males do.

Second, it is unpredictable. You cannot know how much better you will feel and how long that will last before you have reached your goals. Sometimes when you achieve even a challenging task, you are left with a feeling of disappointment, as you realize that
your accomplishments did not have the overwhelming effect you had hoped for.

Third, it is fragile. When you ground your self-worth in a specific domain, such as your professional success, your self-esteem is vulnerable to negative events within that area, for example, if you lose your job or an essential client. If whatever you built your self-esteem on crumbles entirely, you would be back to square one.

Fourth, it does not always translate well from one area to the other. At the end of the day, you still have to spend time talking to women to get them. You may feel like a million bucks at the office or the club but not necessarily when you leave it.

Finally, it is unnecessary, because women do not care about
how
you cultivate the appearance of importance. They are only attracted to your external appearance — your dominance. Even if you regard yourself extremely well on the inside, you still have to demonstrate your self-esteem with confident behavior for women to notice it. It is not enough only to
think
well of yourself if no one notices or if you act otherwise, and it actually does not matter if you feel worthless and unimportant as long as you do not
act
like it. Once you understand this, you also understand why many of the sexiest men on earth, according to women, are
actors
, but they are not actors because they are sexy; they are sexy because they are actors.

Attaching your self-esteem to anything external is just a bad idea. It creates an unnecessary intermediary that only makes your life vastly more complicated and your progress far more time consuming than it has to be. It is not natural to feel bad and less valuable without achievements or expensive gadgets. If you feel worthless because you do not have a high-paying job, a nice apartment, or an expensive car, allow me to remind you that none of
those things existed a few decades ago. None of them. Money does indeed not grow on trees.

It is also not natural to feel bad about yourself or your appearance or to worry about what other people think of you. If you feel bad about yourself when you have not cut your hair for a long time, when your clothes are not expensive, or when your white sneakers no longer look new, then you have to understand that these feelings are learned and not natural. Just look at the way kids run around buck naked or in funny costumes, with paint and mud all over their faces, completely unaffected by their appearance. They are still smiling and playing with their friends without any worries about what other people think about them. The
idea
does not even cross their minds that they look ridiculous until they grow up and their parents start telling them that they must not walk outside looking like that, that they will embarrass themselves or the rest of the family, etc. Children are conditioned to start worrying about how they look and to regard other people’s opinion more than their own. Therefore, you see, what we call high self-esteem is actually nothing but a natural state of mind. We are all born with it.

Newborns come into this world believing that they are the center of it, because they really are the center of their own world. Then social conditioning kicks in, and they learn that the world is full of other people and that they are no better than anyone else. They are told not to consider only themselves, and since they are told this so many times, they end up putting themselves last; hence, their natural self-esteem is worn down day by day.

If your self-esteem is affected by the opinions of others, even in the slightest, it is because you have accepted the idea that your self-worth is open for reevaluation depending on how useful and important you are to other people — how useful you are to society.
When other people demonstrate that they appreciate you and your contribution to the world, they will respect, encourage, celebrate, and promote you, and you have been raised to identify that treatment as a sign of being valuable. However, that is not self-esteem; that is gratification from others.

To allow other people’s opinion of you to affect how important you think you are may be normal, but normal does not equal good. Consider, for example, that it is not normal for a male to have many females, it is not normal for a male to have attractive females, and it is definitely not normal for a male to have many attractive females. What male really wants to be normal?

The only way to increase your self-esteem to its maximum and to keep it high permanently is to adopt a different mental approach. Rather than seeking acceptance from other people, you should seek it from yourself. Trust your own opinion of yourself more than that of others or learn not to rely on anyone’s opinion but your own. Decide to accept yourself
unconditionally
.

This does not mean you should stop improving yourself, but it does mean you should stop feeling bad about who you are in the meantime and stop comparing yourself to others: It is not about being better than other people; it is about being
as good as you can be
, period. No external comparisons are necessary. You are who you are. Accept it.

Unconditional acceptance is far better than constant evaluation because you will experience failures every now and then (it is how you learn and grow), and there is always someone who will be better than you are at something, which means that your self-esteem would fluctuate all too easily if you compared yourself to others. Your self-esteem should always be at its maximum, untouchable by other people and unshaken by events in the outside world. It should not fluctuate at all, which is how it was before you
were socialized to
think
differently.

When you accept yourself as you are, you will be less prone to jealousy, worry, blame, guilt, regret, lies, insults, and even compliments. Thus, you will
appear
more certain (you will
be
more confident). For example, hearing compliments or insults from somebody else will not make any difference if you know yourself or trust your own opinion the most. So when you notice someone who
reacts
strongly to other people’s remarks, even compliments, they are nonconsciously admitting their lack of confidence and self-esteem.

This is typical for women, who tend to lack both. They are easily affected by other people’s opinions about them. Even if a complete stranger gives them a negative remark, they dwell on it for days or start to argue and defend themselves rather than ignore it. They are also thrilled to hear how lovely they look every single day.

You should be the exact opposite because it is masculine never to
express
your vulnerabilities. You should be indifferent, although that doesn’t mean being impolite or a pushover: You should still thank others for giving you compliments and deal with those who insult you.

Besides being the simple thing to do, there are more benefits of accepting yourself unconditionally. Once you get a girl without having relied on any external value for your attractiveness, you also know for sure that she really likes
you
and that she will be yours for as long as you want her to be, as long as you do not change. You do not have to hide the fact that you lost your job, your car broke down, or that you are still living with your parents. Your relationship will be less stressful and more honest, which is healthy.

The only problem is that children are conditioned to avoid
“inappropriate” behavior, including acting more important than others without having earned that right, by feelings of shame.

Shameless

Shame is a painful emotion; it is when you feel bad about yourself as a person. However, it comes from a violation of cultural or social values, not from breaking your internal values or even external laws. It is one aspect of socialization that exists in all societies all over the world. It is used to repress all kinds of undesirable behavior and to preserve social cohesion in the community by rejecting members who deviate from the group until they agree to conform.

How easily you become ashamed and embarrassed is directly linked to your level of self-esteem, since shame is figuratively (and sometimes literally) about
covering
yourself. The higher your self-esteem is, the less embarrassed you allow yourself to be. You will only be embarrassed over something if you care more about what other people think of you than you think of yourself, especially if others discover something that you “ought to be ashamed of.” You would only care about that unwritten list of behaviors that are deemed socially unacceptable if your self-esteem is low to begin with because other people have passed this list on to you too. You were not born with it.

Children are not naturally embarrassed over anything. They run around naked outdoors if they feel like it, they will lie straight to their parents’ faces about who ate all the chocolate while their face is still covered with it, and they will take someone else’s toy in the sandbox without asking for permission and without worrying if someone sees them doing it. Children do not care about any of that, at least not until they have been told to be ashamed of
themselves, to go into their room and feel bad for a while, to go to bed without dinner, and to promise never to do anything like that to upset their parents again. Children are taught the basic rules of society this way (such as to not lie or steal), which is a good thing, but they are motivated to follow those rules because they will
feel bad
if they do not, rather than because not following them would cause social disruptions. Once we become adults, we understand the more complex reasons for having these rules, but the conditioned response of a strong uncomfortable emotion still prevails among many grownups.