How To Flirt and Be Charming

I came across this in my RSS feed this morning:

British police say they’ve charged a 33-year-old woman with stabbing a man through the eye with her stiletto heel.

… the man was in a critical but stable condition after the woman, with whom he was sharing a cab, assaulted him with the heel of her shoe.

Read the whole article

Funny? maybe.

Sad? maybe.

Avoidable? Definitely.

This kind of thing should not be happening. If you can’t keep your cool enough so that your woman doesn’t stab her stiletto heel through your eye, you need to work on that.

A man keeps his cool.

Random lesson from a random memory today.

You may have heard how touch is important, how you should break the touch barrier early, and ramp up the touching as the relationship gets more intimate.

The real key to understanding your touch is to understand that it is just another form of communication.

The way you touch a woman, in the end, communicates with her.

One night, a long time ago, I met a woman out at the bars. After we had dated a few times, I asked her why she liked me. What was it that made her want to see me again that night we met?

She mentioned that she liked that I could approach her and start talking to her (confidence), and that I could keep up with her verbally (banter).

Then she said something that kinda surprised me. “You know how I knew you liked me?” she asked. “When you talked to me, you put your hand on the small of my back a little bit, and that’s how I knew that you liked me.”

A light bulb turned on above my head, and I realized that I had communicated with her with by the way that I touched her.

You can communicate that you are interested in her, that you like her, that you are feeling attracted to her, that you care for her, or that you are feeling intimate with her by the way you touch her.

Touch is pretty powerful stuff, because it is a very basic communication. You can say something you don’t mean, but you can’t touch in a way you don’t mean. One touch can’t be confused for meaning something else usually.

Also, the way you guys touch each other shows what is really going on with the two of you. If you and her have talked for hours, and really gotten to know each other, but haven’t touched much, the relationship still hasn’t progressed very far in terms of intimacy.

On the other hand, you and her may not have exchanged many words, but if you are comfortable touching each other, then things have progressed pretty far.

A while back I wrote about how nice guys are manipulative bastards. It is a lovely piece of prose, I suggest you consume it. Those “nice guys” who are really nice to women are being manipulative in their own way, just in a way that every one expects and thinks is fairly normal.

And it begged the question, how do I be nice without it being manipulative?

Here’s the trick. You can be nice, but you have to be nice to yourself first. You have to expect other people to be nice to you to.

If a girl asks you to pick her up from the airport at 3am, and it is really inconvenient for you to do that, then don’t.

If you wouldn’t regularly go out to a really fancy dinner on a Saturday night, don’t bring the woman you just met there on a first date.

The trick to being nice is that if you are going to go out of your way to do something nice, then do it because you want to, and because it makes you feel good to do it.

Be nice to women, but don’t do it at the expense of being nice to yourself.

Some examples:

If I am on a date with a girl, and I get a little hungry, I’ll grab a bite to eat, and I’ll pay for whatever she gets. It’s nice to do, but I’m not going out of my way to do this nice thing to her. I don’t make it a point that I am buying something for her, but if it comes up in the situation, it’s not a problem.

I like to cook dinner, so I would be happy to cook for a woman on a date. I like to do it, I would like doing it for myself, so I would be happy to cook for her.

If a girl I knew needed a ride from somewhere, and I was in the neighborhood already, sure, I’ll give her a ride. I’m not going out of my way to make myself available to her or to help her out.

Heh, this post was a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Be nice. Be nice to yourself. Do nice things for women, but only if it was you want to do, not because you expect something in return.

I’m starting on a new book, thought I’d share.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. This book is written by some Jungian psychologists who have researched and explored the 4 archetypal types of grown men (which you can figure out from the title). I’m doing a book club reading of this with some folks in San Francisco, and I will probably be writing a bit about this book here.

You’re invited to read the book as well, and follow my discussion of the book here on my blog.

I plan to think beyond just a critical analysis of this book, and to explore how the contents of this book can apply to my life, and possibly to your life as well. I’ll be reading and posting about this from time to time over the next three weeks or so.

If you’d like to get King, Warrior, Magician, Lover at Amazon, click here

Here’s a little baout the book from the author’s home page:

Here the authors explore today’s crisis in masculine identity and describe its two major causes – the disappearance of masculine rites of passage and patriarchy itself. They define the four mature male archetypes – the King (the energy of just and creative ordering), the Warrior (the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action), the Magician (the energy of initiation and transformation), and the Lover (the energy that connects men to others and the world) – as well as the four immature patterns (Divine Child, Oedipal Child, Precocious Child, and Hero). Moore and Gillette believe the developmental history of every man is, in large part, the story of his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity.

The most interesting aspect of this book is that it does not just talk abotu the archetypes of manhood, but also talks abotu the types of boyhood, and how immature men behave, and the distractions they may find on their path to manhood.

This should prove to be an interesting read! Again, if you want to get King, Warrior, Magician, Lover at Amazon, click here.

This has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about this.

Women, if you want to make a man love you, like crazy love you, then understand him.

Put in the work to really “get” him.

This is not easy to do, and off the top of my head, I don’t have any practical advice about how to do this. My experience makes me pretty sure it works though.

I can count the number of women I felt like really “got” me on one hand, without using three of my fingers.

I still love both of them very much.

I recently watched a video with Tony Robbins, John Reese and Frank Kern, that really gelled together something I have thought about for a while. I highly recommend this video, since Frank and John talk to Tony about the question of why so many of the people that get involved with Internet Marketing never get anywhere with it. They maybe buy a few products, but never end up really acting on it and making major changes to their life.

The similarities between this and men’s efforts to improve with women should be self-evident. Plenty of men read blogs, and invest in books, programs, or workshops to improve, but don’t quite make all of the steps necessary to put it in to practice. The video is about 40 minutes long, and well worth the time to view it:

Tony Robbins, Frank Kern, and John Reese Video.

The most important part of this video, in my mind, is this diagram that Tony draws:

We all believe we have some Potential, and that Potential leads us to take the Actions that we perform. Those Actions then return a Result, and that Result either changes or reinforces our Beliefs. Our Beliefs directly effect what we believe our Potential is. The cycle continues.

This cycle can be a flat line, where nothing ever changes, it can be a downward cycle, where negative beliefs work around to negative actions, which furthers our negative beliefs, or it can be a positive cycle, that leads onwards and upwards.

Tony focuses on changing these beliefs in this video, and that is good and useful to some degree, but isn’t always the best, or most effective way to go about this.

The thing with this cycle is that there is no beginning point. Any one of these boxes can be targeted to turn this cycle into a positive, upwards cycle. You can start anywhere here, and things will improve.

For instance, take a guy with bad beliefs about his abilities and chances with women, beliefs that hold him back from taking the proper actions to get amazing results. Now put him in a hot tub with 4 Swedish bikini models that all want to take him to their room and molest him, and his inner game is gonna get fixed right away.

Those Results instantly change his Beliefs, which effects what he sees as his Potential, which will impact his Actions.

So much self help and “inner game” stuff targets the Belief portion of this cycle, and this is why I think a lot of inner game stuff is BS. Your and my Beliefs are the hardest to change out of those 4 things. After all, we have years and years of results that reinforce our beliefs.

Do you think that saying “I am sexy” 10 times to yourself in the morning can overcome being treated as unsexy since junior high? You can’t think your way out of years of experience.

I think we all have a belief about how hot of women we can get. It’s this little belief that is lurking down inside of all of us. Take the guy that thinks that he can only get girls that look so-so, let him date Megan Fox for a couple months, and his beliefs about how hot of women he can get are gonna change pretty quickly.

A strong result will do far more to change beliefs than anything else.

Here’s a real world example. I was working with a guy at a workshop a couple weekends ago, and he thought he had a problem with women. His belief was that he just didn’t quite have what it took to be successful with women, and that there was something wrong with him. I pushed him into action to talk to a woman in Union Square, and he ended up instadating her and spent an hour with her in a cafe.

That Result from his Actions did far more to change his Beliefs than inner game work could have.

Actions and Results are the fastest and easiest way to change beliefs, and with it, inner game.

This is why I have always been rubbed the wrong way when people say that they need to work on their inner game. The best way to get better Inner Game is to get better Outer Game. The inner game will improve from the outside in.

Here’s another example from my life.

I’ve noticed that I feel much more confident lately. It’s a “new level of confidence and power” (Pantera rules). I figured out what this comes from, and it comes from all the “find your purpose” crap that gets thrown around all the time.

I say it’s crap when it’s really not. It’s actually incredibly important stuff. I’ve only recently started to see the power behind this. A couple months ago I invested in some art supplies and got to work with a big art project, the first since I finished art school, other than the random drawings and doodles. I don’t need to get really deep into it, but suffice to say, creating art is VERY important to me. The world makes more sense when I create stuff.

Because I am doing this, my life feels more complete, and I have a sense of being a fuller person. I feel like I bring much more to the table when I meet a woman, and I have a rich life to bring her into, one that is very satisfying for me. If she isn’t interested, that is fine, I know that it isn’t because I have a douschy, pathetic life.

The beginning of this advance was Action. I performed an Action (started making a series of 101 prints), which led to a Result (a feeling of satisfaction about my life), which led to a Belief (I have a rich, full life to share with women), which led to Potential (more women).

Most of my inner game advances came as a result of Actions and their Results, not the other way around.

There are still specific things I remember that changed my inner game. The time I was waiting for one girl outside her apartment to pick her up for a date, when another woman called while I was waiting. There are others that I won’t share publicly here

I think that most inner game issues can be addressed by taking Proper Action. Proper Action will do far more for your inner game than anything else, and Results from that Action will improve your inner game far more than thinking about it will.

I have a new favorite Television show, Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t. If you haven’t seen it, Penn and Teller go around debunking everything from little known facts, like the fiasco that has been rebuilding at ground zero, to well established beliefs, like recycling is good, to out their crazy stuff, like alternative medicine.

I discovered this on Netflix streaming last night, and watched a few episodes.

First, Penn and Teller leverage the fact that they are (kinda) famous and have a TV show to have a bunch of hot topless chicks dance around them all the time. The episode about alternative medicine starts out with topless cheerleaders cheering them on, two of which have a set that has been augmented by the marvel of western medicine.

When have crystal chakra baths ever given us something like that?

I have to admire these dudes for what they have created. Their job is to swear and make fun of people while hot chicks hang out all around them in varying levels of dress. They seem to be doing very well for themselves indeed.

The second thing I really got to thinking about came about when I was watching the episode about people who think that dolphins have super powers.

Yes, you read that right.

There are people who think that dolphins are higher beings with powers to heal, provide spiritual fulfillment, and help mothers to painlessly give birth. Even though dolphins are pretty much just big fish. Sure, they can swim real cool and look neat when they jump out of the water, but they are pretty much just big fish.

Anyway, there was one chick on the show that explained how the dolphins increased her natural flow of energy, and then she started squealing like a dolphin. She kept squealing and clicking like a dolphin for a while. But she was hot. She was nuts, but hot.

It made me think, could I look past the fact that a woman was nuts like this, at least if she was really hot? My tolerance for stuff considerably less than rational (i.e. dumb stuff) is fairly low. My propensity for pretty girls is fairly high though. Would these cancel each other out, or would one of these trump the other?

I’m not sure. I may have to head over to Berkeley one of these days and find out.

I’m a little behind on posting, I got side tracked on other projects. I worked on a painting on Thursday night that I got thoroughly frustrated with after working on it for a few hours. I ended up scraping all the paint off of the canvas, and ended up not wanting to work on anything else.

Last night I stayed up way too late and drank way too much wine with a friend of mine. I invited her over for dinner to eat some of my healthy new groceries I said I was gonna get. Had a delightful time with her.

Now I am coming back to life, and back on track to revisit this lifestyle stuff I was talking about earlier this week. I started out the week talking about creating a healthy lifestyle for myself, and I have been doing just that.

I have been thinking about this in terms of lifestyle and habits. Lifestyle is the overall vision of how you and I want our life to be. The habits are the things we do that either makes that vision more of a reality, or less of a reality.

Some habits are good habits, and some habits are bad habits. In order to make any vision more of a reality, we have to both increase the good habits, and remove the bad habits. The reason why my vision is not reality, after all, is that I have plenty of bad habits that counteract all of my good habits.

Excising the bad habits is one of the most important, and most neglected, parts of changing any lifestyle. Bad habits can be invisible, and you and I may not even realize the effect that they have.

After thinking about this for a while, I realize another way of looking at this stuff is just strategy and tactics.

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics

Strategy is what you want to accomplish, and tactics are the specific actions necessary to accomplish that. Things that you want to do, or results that you want to get, are strategy. Specific things to do to accomplish that are tactics.

This healthy lifestyle that I am putting together can be thought of as a couple of strategies: I will eat healthy food and exercise. I will fill my kitchen with delicious, healthy foods. I will keep my kitchen clean and clutter free.

The tactics flow from this. I change in to my jogging gear every morning when I get out of bed. I go grocery shopping every Wednesday. I clean my dishes every evening after I eat dinner.

The tactics flow out of the overall strategies, and they create the results that the strategy seeks.

Not Such A Big Deal

When I started this week of thinking about lifestyle and habits, it seemed like a much bigger topic than I thought. Once I got started though, I found out that it really isn’t that big a deal. Once I got going with a few changes, it started the ball rolling and everything went from there.

A little bit of momentum led to more momentum, and made the next step to implement these lifestyle changes easier than the previous change.

My suggestion for lifestyle change is this:

Start with the first thing, and do it today. Don’t think too much, and don’t worry. Figure out what the first thing is and decide to do it.

What do I mean by this? Every change has a first step. Determine what that should be, and get to it! The best first steps are symbolic in nature. The first step should be something that is a big change from anything you did previously, something that makes you feel like “my life is different now”.

For me, cleaning my kitchen and filling it with healthy food was a good first step. With that one action, I changed my lifestyle from eating whatever food I happened to pick up, healthy or not, to a lifestyle of eating fresh, healthy foods all the time. I’m actually writing this while eating an oat bran muffin and a nectarine with my morning coffee. Tasty.

So what change do you want to make? Do you want to flirt with more women out at bars? Smile and say “hi” to every woman you see out at the bar from now on. Do you want to meet a woman while grocery shopping? When you see a pretty girl at the store, go tell her that you didn’t mean to hit on anyone today, but that she is really cute, and made you change your mind.

There all sorts of things you can do to signify to yourself that your life is different, find one simple thing, and do it today.

Still thinking about lifestyle change, and making an overall change in my life to having a healthy lifestyle, rather than just a few healthy habits. I will be lean, green, and mean.

It seems like a lot of habits cascade from other habits. One of my really bad habits is to pick up some food on the way home from work. I’ll stop at the taqueria and get a burrito, go to Uncle Vito’s for some heavy pasta, or get Thai takeout from King of Thai Noodle.

Not good for the health. It’s always too much food (that I eat all of anyway), and the way restaurants make their food so good is by extra helping of oil, cream, and cheese. Tasty, but not healthy.

It’s a bad habit, and is one I want to change.

Not so fast though, I realized that there are a lot of other habits I have to change to do this. Part of the reason I get take out a lot is that it is tasty, but another reason is that I don’t have much tasty food at home to make a good, healthy meal.

Another habit I need to change is to go to the grocery store often to get groceries. Makes a lot of sense. I also need to get to the farmers market on Saturday morning to get a nice bag of fruits and veggies for the week. Two new habits. Great!

Now I’m thinking about how these will fit in. One of the reasons I don’t go to the grocery store often is parking. It sucks in my neighborhood. If I move my truck, it can take a while to find a new parking spot. I never want to move my truck for just a few groceries.

Turns out that I head over to a friend’s house most Wednesday’s for our band practice. It is always more of a hang out and drink beer session than a serious band practice, but it is good fun, and it is a good time to spend time with one of my best friends. I can tack the grocery shopping on to that trip, when I’ll have to re-park my car anyway.

That was easy!

As for Saturday morning, it’s easy enough to head down to the Farmer’s Market, I just don’t think to do it. Just added a reminder in my phone for Saturday morning. That aughta do it.

Anyway, so I’m working backwards to figure out the habits that effect other habits, and addressing those. I may decide to make a habit of eating only healthy food, but if I don’t have the habit of going to buy healthy groceries often, then this isn’t really gonna stick.

The habits seem to cascade into the next, so I am working on addressing these high level habits. There are a few others that I know I can implement that will cascade down to the “end result” habits, bur I won’t bore you with the details.

This week’s posts are a week in progress, we’ll see where this takes me. Should be interesting.

Any high level habits that you can think to change?

I’ve been thinking a bit about lifestyle lately, how it effects behavior, and more importantly, how it effects efforts to change ourselves.

I’ve struggled throughout my life to maintain a healthy, athletic weight. I gain weight from the calories in the air, and it has been pretty tough for me to keep up an ongoing exercise plan.

I’ve done all the usual goal setting with rewards, plans, and so on, and I’ve even made this work for me. This stuff has gotten me in gear and gotten me results, but it hasn’t quite stuck though in a long term sense.

I had been trying to incorporate a bunch of habits into my life, but those habits haven’t seemed to create the overall change that I have been hoping for. I can get a new habit into my life, but I never removed the old habits that are counter productive.

The other day I was watching a video online, I can’t remember if it was Tony Robbins or Frank Kern (or if it was the video with both of them). Anyway, in this video, a visualization exercise was presented. The exercise was to imagine an average perfect day.

Kinda seems contradictory, to say average and perfect, I know. The idea is that if everything in my life were just right, the big three of health, wealth, and relationships were all squared away and how I wanted them, what would an average day in that life be like?

Anyway, like an idiot I closed my eyes and got to work figuring out what that life would be like. I’ll leave out the mansion in the hills and the Swedish bikini team from the vision, and just talk about the aspect of this vision that relates to health.

What I realized is that the the overall picture of this healthy life was very different from the way I live my life now. A lot of the components were the same, like jogging, triathlon training, healthy food and lots of fruits and veggies.

I noticed that this vision was as much defined by what I did do as much as by what I didn’t do. Certain bad habits of mine weren’t there. In this vision, I don’t get dinner from Uncle Vito’s Italian Food, don’t buy a fast, unhealthy lunch instead of bringing a good lunch with me to work, and don’t stay up so late that I don’t wake up and exercise.

In fact, I could describe my vision of a healthy life as much by what was included as with what wasn’t included. What I realized is that what I saw when I envisioned a healthy life was an overall healthy lifestyle.

The lifestyle I saw would naturally lead to a strong healthy body:

• I wake up in the morning ready to exercise, and after a jog and workout I enjoy natural, wholesome fruits and foods that made me feel invigorated in a way that lasts throughout the day. I continue to eat good food throughout the day, and eat foods that are both good for me and delicious. I have alcohol in moderation, when I have any at all. I eat healthy foods because it makes me feel good, and get a restful night sleep anticipating waking up in the morning for a new, fresh day.

My approach to getting my health in gear has been to add habits into my current lifestyle, and I should have been focusing on changing my lifestyle. By changing my lifestyle, the results I want will fall in to place.

Lifestyle is the backdrop to our habits, the things we do every day. Overall lifestyle shapes and colors all of the habits that we do every day.

I am spending this week wrapping my head around changing one aspect of my lifestyle, that of exercise, health, diet, and well being. As I wrap my head around this, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on lifestyle change.

Why does this matter? Especially on a blog about dating women? Lifestyle, and changing it, applies as much to dating and being attractive as it does to health. The ideas that are gonna go into this discussion will carry over to a change in lifestyle that includes dating more, or being more flirtatious.

Lifestyle is lifestyle, and it effects everything we do. It may be one of the most important aspects that influences our habits and our ability to change those habits.

Anyhow, check back later in the week for more on this subject.