The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want (14 page)

  A women pushing past rudely: “No, my dear, do it like this.”
(Demo polite way to move past.)
“Excuse me, sir.”

All these will allow you to get into interactions without the pressure and effort of a cold approach.

One of the best ways to warm up cold approaches is to do a little groundwork by working the room. In the context of pickup this involves talking to all the groups you’re interested in, as well as some others in the room, all the time staying very indirect. At the end of a short interaction, the key is to act as if you’re about to leave that particular group and then, as if an afterthought, get the name of any girl who’s caught your interest. What you’ll be able to do in a short amount of time is:

  Meet (and learn the names of) all the girls you are attracted to.

  Create a positive, safe, nonthreatening impression in their heads—that you’re not so desperate that you have to hang around them until they tell you to go away.

  Establish yourself as Mr. Sociable. After you’ve done this, you’ll be able to reopen any of these groups at any time during the night. You’ll also notice a big increase in interest from girls that you’ve already opened. Getting the first name (and remembering it!) is the key factor. I found out by chance that reopening with the name is much more effective, as the girl will actually treat you like someone she’s known for a long time.

This technique is best used in smaller places, early on in the evening. That way, as the night progresses and people open up, your options will continue to increase. Plus you won’t have the problem of opening when it gets louder and more crowded … and more competitive.

I used to work the room at a small club in London that I went to regularly. One time I arranged to meet a friend there, but picked up a girl on the way and brought her with me. Now I was in the difficult position of being with a girl I wanted to spend time with, but also having to leave my poor friend on his own. To resolve the dilemma, I asked her to wait for a minute, and I went with my friend around the whole club, said hi to everyone, took some names, chatted for thirty seconds, made sure my buddy met them all, and then went on to the next group. I did this to everyone in the club, and on the way back literally every girl in the place was staring at me. I’d warmed up the entire club, and my friend could easily reopen any of the girls there. He used my female pal and me as a base in the club, coming back between interactions, but was easily able to get a lot of numbers because he already had huge social proof as a fun-loving, sociable guy who seemed to know everyone. If he forgot a name, he could come back and ask me because I’d memorized them all.

Assignment #2

Go to a bar, buy a drink, and go around “cheers-ing” everyone. You will find that people will always “cheers” you back, and afterward you will get a lot of attention from girls wondering why you didn’t try to pick them up. It’s an easy way to work the room because it removes the need to think of anything to say!

Most men feel a little or even a lot of anxiety as they attempt to meet and get to know women. Transition anxiety and approach anxiety are two of the most common types.

When doing something outside your comfort zone, you’ll naturally find it scary. Transition anxiety is best described as the feeling you get in your stomach at any time like this. Whether it’s the thought of riding a scary rollercoaster, jumping out of a plane to skydive, signing up for a course, meeting new people at a party, taking a test, speaking in public, or approaching a woman: what all these things share in common is that they may give us butterflies in our stomach, to varying degrees.

This feeling holds us back; it doesn’t serve us well. Anything that we haven’t done before—that puts us in an uncertain situation we don’t feel equipped for—causes at least some transition anxiety. That would be fine if the feeling were saving us from getting eaten by a lion or doing something truly hazardous, but generally it’s only stopping us from improving, learning, and changing.

Each one of us has a comfort zone within which we can safely stay inside—a daily routine, people we know. However, remaining in this comfort zone makes it hard to make big changes or improvements to your life. If you look back and remember all the times you’ve felt transition anxiety and taken action anyway, you’ll see that each time it has impacted your life in a positive way. Whether it was moving to a new area, changing jobs, or taking a class, these were likely things that benefited you greatly.

A man who decides to get a handle on his life will feel transition anxiety before he clicks the sign-up button on our website. Lots of others will feel that anxiety and simply never click the button. It’s a fact!

So what about those crazy people who always try new things and never seem to feel uncomfortable? If anything, they appear to welcome uncertain new situations.

Let me assure you: it’s not just appearances. They really have changed that feeling in their stomach from something that holds them back to something that kicks them into action. This is what I’ve done. I used to be a complete scaredy-cat when it came to almost anything that involved leaving my house! Now anytime I get that feeling, I know that I should take action and that, by the end of it, I’ll be a better person. As a result, fewer and fewer things intimidate me; in fact, I feel like I can handle almost anything. Embrace transition anxiety, and you’ll be thanking me later. That step will affect every area of your life positively and will make you a better person.

Approaching a woman you’re attracted to is one of the scariest things a guy can do. You know it doesn’t make sense to be as afraid to initiate an interaction as you would be to fight someone who’s trying to rob you. After all, in one situation, the worst that can happen is that she says no; in the second, the worst that can happen is serious physical injury. Yet over 95 percent of the people I work with have some degree of approach anxiety. Conquering it isn’t something that neurolinguistic programming or affirmations can provide a quick fix for. There is no easy way to get over it. However, I can tell you the most painless way possible: in my experience, thirty approaches will be enough to free you of crippling approach anxiety. You might still have some with each encounter, but you’ll be opening enough groups to get along.

First, let’s take away some of the fear (or “outcome dependency”). As long as you have a lot of approach anxiety, work on that first, before refining your overall technique. In your first approaches, don’t “open to close”; just open and eject—in other words, practice opening. Just go up and ask, “What’s the time?” Thanking her and leaving is a lot easier than approaching with the intention of getting her back to your place.

The next thing you can do is use indirect openers. These minimize the chance of rejection and allow you to practice opening without caring whether the girl you’re chatting up is attracted or has a boyfriend.

Finally, it helps not to be too fussy. Practice opening and extending the interaction, but do it with
any
group. Don’t try to conquer your fear or practice pickup skills only with women you find super-hot. That would take too long. You need to be out there practicing, opening twenty groups a day. You have to be focused on practicing, not on closing.

When I first started going out to work on my skills, I forced myself to do as many approaches a night as possible. I would do as many as twenty in a few hours. It gave me a buzz to be talking to so many attractive women that I’d never met before. I must have talked to more women in just a few weeks than I’d done in my entire life up to that point! I love female energy and being in the company of pretty women, so I was happy just to have these short interactions.

Doing lots of approaches at first not only helps you desensitize yourself and remove approach anxiety; it also helps you get out of your own head and get focused on the other person. When you’re thinking a lot about your own body language, your voice, what you’re saying, what you’re going to do next, you can’t focus enough on the other person to read signals and give her what she wants.

During my first thirty or so approaches after deciding to work on my skills with women, I’d be talking to a girl, but most of my attention would be focused on what to say next, how my body language was, whether my voice was loud enough, whether my sweaty palms would turn her off, and I’d miss all the little signals that she was giving me.

I remember approaching two girls in a coffee shop early on in my training. I saw that they had a Tube map—a map to the subway system—and, without thinking much, I approached and asked if I could look at it to see how to get to Earl’s Court. Since they seemed friendly enough in passing over the map, I asked them where they were from. They were Czech, they said, and studying English in London. I was laughing nervously and blushing as we talked, but I also felt a bit euphoric—I was getting a positive reaction! I did something I’d never done before: I talked for what seemed like minutes (but was probably not more than twenty seconds) about how I’d gone to Seville and gotten the TEFL qualification.