Forget Your Game and Get More Women

There’s a particularly grueling moment that most of us have experienced at least once before in our lives.

That’s the moment we find a guy who’s really good with women and has been great with them his whole life, the kind of guy we typically refer to as a ‘Natural’.

We then ask this guy the question “What’s your secret dude?”

And his response is invariable a variation on the theme of “No secret man, it’s easy, you just have to relax and wing it in the moment”.

No doubt you walk away feeling terribly unfulfilled. I mean, how does that smug bastard manage to do it so easily? Odds are that same smug bastard is less intelligent than you which usually only serves to add fuel to the burning frustration that has become your sex life.

The naturals’ secrets are in fact hidden in plain view, but the trick is knowing what you are looking for. You see, they’re using a different part of their brains to attract women from most guys, and that’s where the secret often lies.

Psychologists have long broken down the brain’s thinking process into two distinct functions

1)Cognitive Thinking – If I ask you what 23 x 13 is, and you don’t have a calculator then most readers will have to engage in some form of effortful thought process to come to the right answer. It is as though you will have to switch on your brain to do ‘brain work’ and most of you will be too lazy to bother because it’s perceived as work. Cognitive thinking is slow and methodical and we are always conscious of the thought processes going on. Cognitive thinking is very limited in the number of factors it can think of at once, and as we reach that limit we experience high cognitive load and induce a lot of stress on the entire body.

2)Associative Thinking – If I show you a picture of a guy who looks like a hobo, most of you will correctly guess his likely occupation as ‘Hobo’, and you will likely make that guess in less than a second. Yet identifying someone’s occupation from the way they look is far more complicated than a simple multiplication. The thought will come to us without effort in the form of something a lot of us will call intuition. We Intuit that a man looks like a bum without making a logical argument for it. Associative thinking relies heavily on a complex emotional process – Choosing between a glass of clear water and murky brown water for example is an associative process because you make the choice based on a feeling of repulsion for murky brown water rather than a logical thought process based on likely health outcomes. You attach the logical reason for your choice after the decision has been made.

The majority of men who I work with to help them get better with women are incredibly intelligent cognitive thinkers. They are Engineers, highly respected IT workers, university students, even builders and plumbers. Their IQ is well above average and they are used to logically thinking through every problem in their paths and it has served them well in their professional lives for the most part.

As a result, the attraction community is dominated by high-level cognitive solutions to the dating problem. Which isn’t all bad because after all we need to start learning somewhere and a little theory is usually a good thing.

The bad news lies with something I mentioned briefly above called ‘Cognitive Load’, that is when our cognitive thinking abilities are pushed to their limits, our associative thinking abilities plummet and our bodies release stress hormones into the system. Our emotional brains shut down and we find ourselves very much stuck in our heads and detached from our ability to ‘feel’ or utilize intuition.

When we reach cognitive load, our brains lose all ability to be creative, and even worse we lose all ability to socially calibrate ourselves due to our lack of intuition, and we have no way of engaging in humor because again humor is a high level associative task.

In short, high cognitive load is makes us horrible in all social contexts.

Now attracting a woman is a highly complex act that is far more complex than 100 people’s cognitive brains could process all at once. For starters, every little facial twitch, every intonation on every word, the relative motion of her hands relative to her body, the words she says, the timing she uses for certain words, the location of her friends relative to your newfound friend. Not to mention the issue of social calibration, judging accurately the right time to sit down, the right moment to say something sexual, the right moment for a joke, the right moment to make a physical touch, and the list goes on and on and on.

Men need to learn to rely more heavily on their instinct rather than trying to logically work everything out. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t spend a great deal of time after our approaches trying to logically work out what we need to improve on, that’s what field reports are for. But around women, too much thinking is our enemy.

I believe however that the balance of our cognitive function needs to be shifted from being 90% Cognitive and 10% Associative to 30% Cognitive and 70% Associative. The naturals have two tricks up their sleeves, number one is that they have lots of experience talking to women (any of us can get that by doing lots and lots of approaches), and number two is they’ve learned to stop actively thinking around women and simply making all decisions based on gut instinct. That’s why they feel talking to women is such a simple task, as associative thinking requires no effort, despite the fact that it’s far more complex than Cognitive thinking.

So guys, here are some steps more of you need to be taking to get you relying more heavily on Associative thinking.

1)Let go of every trying to fully control your body language. Eliminate the obvious stuff like standing too close or too far away, giving poor eye contact etc. Then forget about your body language completely. Too many new guys overload their brains thinking about body language all night. Body language will fix itself once you relax and get out of your head by thinking associatively.

2)Only focus on making ONE improvement in any interaction. Too many guys go into interactions with a whole laundry list of things they want to do/say/change, and it stresses them out, and prevents them from being present and feeling the present situation to make better Associative decisions.

3)Go out 1x a month with no game plan at all – I challenge my students to go out on occasion and to drop everything they’ve learned and simply approach and talk to women without consciously utilizing anything they’ve learned about attracting women. Many times the guys are surprised by how well they perform on those nights. Not to mention how much more relaxed they suddenly feel.

4)Laugh Often – The best way to release your cognitive load if you get stuck overthinking everything is to laugh with friends. Laughter also releases massive amounts of stress, stops you getting sick, improves your energy levels for interactions, combats depression, tightens your abs, reduces your hunger and the list goes on – Honestly laughter is all win-win.

5)Go easy on the flirting theory – Reading lots of theory is a favourite pass time of many men wanting to improve their flirting skills, but it’s often a very dangerous pursuit. Firstly because at least 50% (I’d argue over 80%) of the theory you read is wrong or highly misleading or at the very least half of what you read will conflict with the other half since attraction theory is heavily polarized which alone creates cognitive strain. Secondly because you find yourself out on a night with all this cognitively loaded theory bouncing around in your head and you won’t be able to let go of it. I learned to be great with women without any theory at all, I’m sure you can do with a little less that usual. Human’s don’t learn associatively from writing, we’ve proven it time and again that we never embed into our associative brain wiring the things we read, only the things we directly experience gives us associative conditioning which leads to better quality decision making.