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When it comes to being attractive to women, you have to know how to talk to them. Nobody wants to just answer the same ten questions that they get on every date that they have ever been on: what do you do for a living, where do you live, what do you do for fun… you want to have an actual conversation. You want to be able to tell them about yourself and your awesome life. You want to be able to show off your wit and even to humblebrag just a little.
And to do that, you’re going to have to be able to tell stories.
People who are good with women are good at telling stories. Full stop. It’s one of the most important parts of being able to carry on an interesting conversation. When you can captivate a woman’s attention, you can touch her emotionally. If you can touch her emotionally, you can touch her… well, you know. It’s an essential skill to have when you’re trying to get better with women, and frankly, most guys are just doing it wrong.
You see, telling stories seems like it should be instinctual; A happens, followed by B which causes C, which leads to D. Simple, logical, easy.
And completely incorrect.
Storytelling, especially when it relates to meeting women, has a structure and a rhythm to it. Do it correctly and you can have people eating out of the palm of your hand. Do it wrong and you’ll see girls checking their watches and wondering how much longer they can politely be expected to put up with you before they’re allowed to get up and walk away.
If you’re going to want to be a master storyteller, you’re going to have to learn the basics.
The End Is The Beginning
Before you even start telling your story, you need to know how and where it ends. A good story is like a good joke: it’s all a lead-up to the punchline. The last thing you ever want to hear when you’re telling the story is “And then what happened?” when you reach the end. This is your number one indicator that you’ve messed up; all you have done is ramble on for five minutes, ten minutes, what have you and wasted everybody’s time. It means that your story doesn’t have a definite ending, and you need to go back to the drawing board.
The reactions you do want are simple. You want a laugh, a “Oh, that’s so cool!” or “That’s interesting!”, an “aaaaawww” or “That’s adorable!”
What do these all have in common? They’re positive emotional reactions to your story, and by transference, to you. You’ve made someone else feel good, which in turn makes you more attractive.
The Transition
The transition is what lets you launch into the story. Just leaping in is an option, but it can feel forced and awkward; it can be done, but you’ll have to hook immediately, otherwise it comes across as random. There’s phrasal lead in, where you say “Hey, that reminds me of this time…” or “Wow, that’s like when I…” “Check this out…” “The funniest thing happened…”. There’s the cold read of the person you’re talking to, where you use them as the transition: “You remind me of my buddy So-And-So. Actually, it’s funny, I was hanging out with So-And-So yesterday when…” Then there’s the observational transition, where you use someone else as a springboard into your story. Observational transitions can be incredibly useful because you can bank them in advance; with practices, you can make a canned observation sound natural. Otherwise, you use your environment, or even the person you’re talking to to transition into your storyIf someone at the party has an absurd hairstyle, you can use it as a lead-in. If the woman you’re talking to mentions she went skiing in Vale, you can say “You know, I never did like skiing. The last time I went…” and you’re off.
The Hook
This is the part that makes the listener’s ears perk up. You want to seed this as close to the beginning as you can in order to capture their attention early. The longer you take to insert the hook into the story, the less of a chance you have of capturing people’s attention; take too long and the hook becomes part of the background noise. If you’re going to tell the story about something crazy that happened to you while you were on vacation, you need to lead with it.
“Yeah, the last time we went on vacation, we went on this photo safari in Tanzania. It was kinda awesome; I mean, you’re running around in the savannah in this open-top car, just, like, right there in the middle of it. The thing is, being so close to all the animals can be kinda risky. At one point, this elephant decided it didn’t like us, so it chased us all the way down a hill. It was trying to kill us, y’know?”
This is an example of a poorly set hook. Your target’s attention is already wavering before you ever get to the fact that you were staring down death in the form of a two thousand pound pachyderm.
“Last time I went on vacation, I nearly got killed by a rampaging elephant.”
MUCH better. Launching into your story like this will make people take notice early on. The hook is akin to Alfred Hitchcock’s Bomb Theory.:If a bomb suddenly goes off in a scene, you’re surprised. But if you know the bomb is there in advance, you remain in in anticipation, waiting for it to explode and wondering whether the heroes will escape it in time.
Your hook is the bomb; you want your audience to know it’s there, waiting to go off.
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