Here’s something nobody will tell you about being successful with women: nobody is “naturally” good with women. Nobody is born with an instinctual ability to get dates. Everyone — people who seem to be naturally gifted and people who learned later in life — all developed their skills the same way.
That’s why all the people who are successful with women have the same things in common. If you want to learn how to have the love life you deserve, then you want to master the four key components to developing the skill to meet, connect with and date amazing women.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:
- Why “naturals” don’t really exist
- How people learned the right — and wrong — lessons about how to be good with women
- Why confidence is a vital part of success with women — but not for the reasons you’d expect
- Why most people fail when they try to get better at dating
- What makes the difference between someone who succeeds at dating, and someone who will never improve
…and so much more.
RELATED LINKS:
Become Someone Worth Dating – https://www.doctornerdlove.com/become-someone-worth-dating/
Level Up: Face Your Dating Fears – https://www.doctornerdlove.com/facing-your-dating-fears/
Developing An Abundance Mentality – https://www.doctornerdlove.com/leveling-up-abundance-mentality/
Your Attitude Controls Your Dating Success — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/your-attitude-controls-your-dating-success/
How to Use Humor in Your Flirting — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/use-humor-flirting/
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Want more dating advice? Check out my books at www.www.doctornerdlove.com/books
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone, Harris O’Malley from doctornerdlove.com, brought to you by my generous patrons at patreon.com/drnerdlove, and this week, I want to tell you about what it takes to be someone that women want to date.
Which, of course, leads to the usual “have to be rich/tall/unreasonably handsome” arguments… all of which can be easily dismissed with a quick trip to Wal-Mart or Costco or Target on any given Sunday. You’ll see people ALL THE TIME with their partners and kids and they aren’t all billionaires with model good looks, abs like woah and teeth like chicklets.
It is MUCH easier to be socially successful in general — and successful with women in particular — that people want to believe. The problem is that more often than not, we get so blinded by what we ASSUME to be true that we ignore the realities of it. After all, it’s much easier to believe in the worst for us because it confirms what we already believe, and we believe it because it’s the worst. It’s our old friend Masochistic Epistemology again: “It’s true, because it hurts.”
But that’s not true at all.
Here’s the thing nobody realizes: nobody is naturally good with women. Nobody is born with an instinctual ability to get dates or get laid, any more than people are born with an instinctual ability for basketball or math or coding.
That’s why the people who are successful with women all have the same things in common:
CONFIDENCE, CONSISTENCY, PRACTICE AND ATTITUDE
Everyone — EVERYONE, even the most gifted “natural” you know — came to those skills through those four key components. The difference between someone who seemingly has an instinctual grasp of social dynamics — a natural if you will — and someone who learned later in life, is that the supposed “natural” didn’t KNOW that they were developing those skills. Those skills and attitudes were things that they learned over time that they had NO IDEA would apply towards getting laid. In a very real way, they got Miyagi’d into being good with women.
But the same is true for people who think they CAN’T be good with women; the biggest difference is that they got taught all the wrong lessons without realizing it. They were trained to believe they were hapless and helpless and they internalized it and it became a core part of who they were, and they’ve refused to change it ever since. Confirmation bias sets in and now they’ll dismiss any progress as irrelevant or decide that it doesn’t “count”, while every setback or failure becomes “proof” of how helpless they are. This means they don’t try and when they DO, they don’t give it their all because why bother; it’s all pointless anyway.
So that’s why I want to tell you about how you can BREAK this cycle. And trust me, it’s important to pay attention to this episode all the way through because everything we talk about today is going to build and reinforce every other part.
And with that in mind, let’s talk about what it takes to become someone who’s successful with women.
Key #1: Confidence. Confidence is one of those areas that people misunderstand all the time. We get told “if you want to be more attractive, just be confident”, as though it were that easy when in reality, this is about as useful as being told that “it’s easy to fly, you just have to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
And at the same time, confidence isn’t about just sitting there and puffing out your chest and giving off the attitude that you can’t fail and suddenly women come running. And it’s not about never being wrong or being convinced that you’re the hottest thing since World War III.
Confidence is simply about experience, it’s about knowing what you can do and having faith in your ability to do it, which comes from experience.
You already have confidence in so many things in your life, but you don’t think about them because you don’t remember the process it took to develop the experience to get you to where you are today and it doesn’t seem as monumental or difficult as something like talking to women you’re attracted to.
The fact of the matter is that most of the things that we lack confidence in are things that intimidate us because we’re not used to it. The more we get used to something, the more familiar we get with it, the more confident we become because we KNOW that can handle it.
The first time I ever travelled internationally on my own was intensely intimidating; yeah I was used to navigating around the US by myself, I’d been doing that since I was a kid. But here I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language, where I didn’t know what to expect or how to get around or make myself understood. But the more traveling I did, the more I learned what I would need to know and what to do and if I didn’t know something, I knew how I could find it out. Now it’s something I do with confidence because I’ve had that experience.
The same goes with playing a sport, learning a musical instrument or learning how to drive; at first it’s intimidating and scary and you’re probably more than a little nervous and apprehensive. But as you get that experience under your belt, it just becomes one more thing you can do, often without thinking about it.
That same formula — experience + time = confidence — applies to talking to women. At first, you are so aware of what you don’t know that you’re terrified, because you’re convinced that one mistake will ruin everything.
And, spoiler alert: it won’t. Trust me: I’ve made more mistakes than you’ve had hot meals. I’ve LITERALLY insulted people to their face — without realizing I was doing so — and still dated them for months afterwards.
But the more you get used to talking to people, especially people you’re attracted to, the easier it becomes because hey, you’ve done it before, you realize that the fact that they’re attractive to you doesn’t mean they’re different or above you or special or whatever. Now you’re better able to relax, be real with them, flirt with them and build that connection that leads to attraction, sex and romance.
But how do you get that experience? Well, it’s really good that you asked that, convenient rhetorical device, because that leads us to the next key.
Key #2: practice. One of the things I can never emphasize enough is that social skills are precisely that: skills. They’re the skills you use to connect with folks in social settings that help you communicate, navigate the world and build relationships. And any skill can be improved with deliberate practice.
The trick is understanding how to practice and what you need to work on. I see a lot of folks, for example, who focus almost all of their attention on trying to do cold approaches and talking to total strangers. Which, hey, great, that’s a valuable skill to have. It’s something that can serve you well, especially when you’re in places where you don’t know anybody and you want to build up your social circle.
But it’s not necessarily the skill you need to be good with women. A far more important skill is being able to have good conversations with someone. If you ask women part of what made them fall in love with someone, they will almost always tell you that a huge part is how much they enjoyed talking to them, how much their partner made them laugh and how their partner made them feel. How you START the conversation is less important than the QUALITY of the conversation. People will almost never remember the first thing that you said to them when you first met them; they WILL, however, remember how you made them feel and whether they enjoyed talking to you.
And that’s important, because good conversation is part of what helps create oxytocin in the brain, and oxytocin is the chemical that prompts bonding, trust and attraction. Oxytocin makes us feel good, and we instinctually prioritize our relationships with the people who make us feel good.
The more you become someone who can have great conversations with people, the more you become someone people want to spend time with. That, in turn, leads to being someone they want to spend naked time with.
The same is true for other skills related to success with women, such as flirting or being able to escalate things sexually or romantically; the more you do it, the better you become at it and the more confident you become in your ability to do so because you’ve been gaining experience.
And yeah, that involves being willing to do it badly and to fail and not being AFRAID to fail, because failure is how you learn. Like the sage once said, the greatest teacher, failure is. Failing and learning from that failure is part of how you build that experience… especially learning the lesson that failure won’t destroy you and that you can get back up and try again.
But there’s more to it than practice. Which brings us to the next key…
Key #3: Consistency. This is the one that trips a lot of people up. Practice by itself isn’t what builds experience. It’s practice and CONSISTENCY.
The reason why consistency is important when it comes to improving your social skills is the same reason why it’s important for improving your average pace when you’re running or increasing the amount of weight you’re lifting or improving your ability to speak another language… or literally any other skill.
It’s because if you don’t do something consistently, you lose competency. If you look at anything you’re good at — which includes reading, speaking, driving or walking, things you take for granted — a big part of the reason why you’re able to do it, is that you did it consistently when you were still learning, until it became second nature to you.
Consistency is how you build habits and turn experience into muscle memory, which lets you do it without thinking about it. Doing it sporadically, on the other hand, will just frustrate you and lead to your giving up.
One of the things I see ALL the time in the clients I coach are guys who got inspired by reading The Game or going to various PUA sites and starting going out more, but they don’t seem to be getting anywhere. When they come to me, the first thing I ask them is “so how many times a week are you practicing?”
The answer is usually the same: “Well, I practiced a lot at first, but I wasn’t getting the results I wanted so I stopped practicing so much.”
Well, there’s your problem.
The thing a lot of people experience is that, much like folks who’ve made New Years Resolutions or decided to lose weight or start an exercise program is that they go gung-ho at first… but then they start to slow down… and then they quit doing it entirely.
The problem is that a lot of folks expect immediate, dramatic changes, and they’re excited at the prospect of making those changes. But they don’t stick to it. They don’t keep going, they don’t KEEP practicing and sticking to a consistent schedule. They start practicing sporadically at best — not going out, not talking to people except maybe once every couple of weeks when they remember — or they did it once and never did it again.
Small wonder they don’t improve. Getting good at ANYTHING, whether it’s cooking or music or yes, dating, requires consistent, regular practice. It doesn’t need to be an insane, training-from-hell schedule where you’re doing it four hours a day, every day… but you have to do it regularly and on a consistent basis. Maybe you designate one day a week to go out and just talk to people. Maybe you make a point of joining a particular Meet-Up group and going every week or going to a particular dance class for an hour a week. The important part is that it’s something you do continually, something that you carve out time for at least every week. That consistency is how you turn that new behavior into muscle memory — and that takes time; in fact, it takes a little over two months for that behavior to become automatic. It’s an investment you have to make
But it can’t happen if you don’t commit to it. You can’t improve if you don’t keep at it, and doing it for four hours one week, then nothing for two weeks, then 30 minutes the week after that just means that you’re going to get frustrated and quit.
Even a little bit at a time works, as long as you’re doing it repeatedly and consistently. That consistency will improve the efficacy of your practice and increase the amount of experience you gain… which in turn, increases your confidence.
Key #4: Your attitude. This is possibly THE most important aspect of getting better with women, because it’s going to touch on literally EVERYTHING ELSE. Your attitude is, ultimately, destiny. This is something I’ve talked about before in a previous episode — I’ve linked to it in the description or you can just click the dohicky — but the way you choose to look at the world changes how you interact with it.
The old saying that the optimist and the pessimist are both right is 100% true. When you go through life with the attitude of “this is all unfair and nothing is going to help” then yeah, of course you’re going to fail, because you’ve already convinced yourself of the impossibility of improvement. You’re not going to even BOTHER giving something your all because you’ve already decided it’s not worth it, and then you end up failing because you half-assed it. Worse, you don’t even LEARN from that failure because it was inevitable and unchangeable so what’s the point?
On the other hand, people who believe that they CAN do better, that they CAN advance that they CAN re…do…
… I’m just quoting Evangelion reboot titles now.
They’re the ones who do better because they depersonalize things. They see failure not as something inherent but something that happened, and something that can be overcome. They bounce back from mistakes and failures because they see them as temporary, and they’re much more likely to try to learn from them, adjust their approach and try again.
And that out look applies to EVERYTHING, when it comes to dating. It applies to talking to people in person, it applies to changing up your dating profile to see what works, it even applies to who you’re dating and why. Because people who are more optimistic don’t believe that they’re defined by their limitations or their mistakes. They have more confidence, take more risks and have more successes.
And frankly, they are more fun to be around. Negative people suck the energy out of the room. People are already dealing with their own misery; they don’t need someone else just pouring more on top of it. People who are more positive and more optimistic make OTHER people feel good and more capable.
So ask yourself which you’d rather hang out with? Someone who wants you to believe that everything’s bullshit and unfair, or someone who makes you feel like you can win if you dare?
And look, I know it’s not easy to do on your own, which is why it’s important to have the things that will set you up for success — including a community that’s going to support you and cheer you on and people who can help guide you. That’s part of why I created the NerdLove Academy group on Facebook and why I offer private coaching – because this can be hard and confusing and sometimes you need a little help. Part of working with me means that together we come up with a plan to help you develop YOUR skills, meet more amazing people and create the love life you want. If you’re ready to invest in yourself, then check out some of the private coaching options at nerdloveacademy.com/private-coaching or hit the link the the description.
But the thing to keep in mind is that no matter what, you have the power to change your life. You are only as limited as you believe you are. You’ve only got the one life. It’s time to take control… and make it a good one.