The #1 reason why so many men struggle with dating is very simple: they don’t know what it takes to be successful with women. Attraction isn’t a checklist; having all the right “stats” isn’t going to magically make you attractive to women. Learning to succeed with women isn’t about having the right car or the right body, it’s about learning how to become your best, most desirable self.
That’s why this week, I’m going to teach you the 5 things YOU need to know in order to succeed with women, become the man you’ve always wanted to be and build the love life you’ve always wanted.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:
- Why the men who have everything women want still struggle with dating
- How to build your dream life… by working backwards from success
- Why attraction ISN’T about your body, your height, or your income
- How to escape the trap of your comfort zone
- Why your own brain tricks you into failing with women
…and so much more.
RELATED LINKS:
NerdLove Academy Merchandise — https://nerdloveacademy.com/shop/
Book a Private Coaching Session — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/private-coaching/
Level Up: Facing Your Dating Fears — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/facing-your-dating-fears/
How To Take Your Love Life To The Next Level — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/level-up-your-dating/
“I Took The Red Pill. Why Am I Still Not Happy?” — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/i-took-the-red-pill-why-am-i-still-not-happy/
What Women Wish Men Knew About Attraction — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/what-men-need-to-know-about-attraction/
The Value of Failure — https://www.doctornerdlove.com/value-of-failure/
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone, Harris O’Malley from doctornerdlove.com, brought to you by my generous patrons at patreon.com/drnerdlove.
This week, I fielded a question for my column from a member of the Red Pill community — someone who theoretically had all the qualities that women supposedly look for in a man; the 6 6s’. This is admittedly a new one on me; I actually had to google that.
I’m not gonna get into what all that is; it’s pretty much exactly what you’d think.
Except for the 600 horsepower car. That one actually caught me by surprise.
But for all that he could run down the checklist and say “hey, I’ve got this, this and this”… he was miserable. He couldn’t get a girlfriend and if he did, he couldn’t keep her. It was playing hell with his self-esteem because there was always that “bigger fish” who had better stats than he did. And all he wanted was to get his self-esteem back and start feeling like he was ‘enough’ again.
Really, it’s kind of amazing how someone can run headfirst into the point and STILL miss it.
I mean, this dude supposedly had ALL the shit women were supposed to want and it didn’t work for him because ALL of that? Had nothing to do with dating or even attraction. The problem is that there was no there, there.
I bring this up because he was hitting the same problems that a LOT of people — my readers, the clients I work with, even folks like you who’re checking out this episode — run into. They struggle with dating because they get hung up on the wrong things. Folks don’t know HOW to get better; they have all of these self-limiting beliefs, or they got frustrated and quit or in some cases never started.
And I get it; I’ve been there, done that, printed the t-shirt
— which, incidentally, is available for sale, check out the show notes for the link —
That’s why this week we’re going to talk about the 5 things you need to get better at dating.
And incidentally: I realize right now we’re in a pandemic, we’re all in lockdown and it feels pointless because: who can go anywhere or do anything? But now is actually the BEST time to focus on improving yourself and building yourself up for the life you want. Having a goal to work towards is important. It gives you a reason to keep getting up in the morning. Having a plan and taking action is how you conquer despair.
First things first: if you want to get better at dating, then you need to figure out your end goal and work backwards to reverse-engineer how to get there. This is the sort of thing a lot of people miss. They have a vague idea of what they want — more dates, more sex and so on — but no idea what that looks like, what it would mean for them. This is part of what trips people up; because they aren’t entirely sure what the end goal looks like, they don’t know how to get there or even where to begin. As a result, it seems so overwhelming that they vapor-lock and go into analysis paralysis, rather than getting started.
So start from the end. Ask yourself, in detail: what would your ideal life look like, who would your ideal partner be, what would you be doing — then work backwards. If you’re not entirely sure, find a relationship role-model, someone who represents what your ideal life would be and work backwards from there, taking each stage and asking what it would take to get to there, then examine the step before THAT and the step before that. Work the problem backwards until you get to your current state. It seems a little weird and counterintuitive, but trust me: not only does it work, but it gets you better results. One of the biggest mistakes people make when they try to visualize achieving their goals is that they leave out the steps of how they’re going to GET there in the first place — which is the important part.
Working from backwards from the end result forces you to look at each of those steps and figure out how you’re going to achieve them.
Incidentally: you don’t want to make the mistake of thinking that you need to work this in a linear fashion. A lot of guys get into what author Jenna Birch calls linear progressive thinking; they have to work on one thing at a time in sequential order. I see a lot of men do this when it comes to working on themselves to get better at dating: “first I have to get in shape THEN I work on my social skills THEN I can develop my style THEN I can start practicing approaching women”.
Not only do you not NEED to take things linearly, but it ultimately just slows you down and causes you to miss out on a lot of opportunities and amazing people because you thought you had to hit 100% on each status bar before you could ask someone on a date. In a LOT of ways, it becomes a method of avoidance — something we’ll get into in a second — because it gives you the excuse of “oh, I can’t do this, I’m not ready, I have to do this other thing first.”
It’s actually more effective to take a more holistic approach — closer to a web rather than a line — where you work on developing different aspects at the same time, rather than one at a time in a line.
Or to put it another way: if you can work different muscle groups on different days of the week at the gym, you can work on building up different aspects of your personal development, instead of ONLY working one stat at a time.
Of course, part of what’s important is that you need a realistic understanding of how attraction and social skills work in order to backwards engineer the progress. Which is why you want to make sure that you’re focusing on the things that work — and the things that actually matter to attraction, especially in the long-term.
The Red Pill bro who wrote into me is a great example of people who don’t get how attraction works. He, like a lot of people, treat attraction like a checklist; if you say I have this, this, this and this, then people will like me. And, well, nope.
Part of the problem with treating attraction like a matter of points in a spreadsheet is that you are sabotaging your own sense of worth and self-esteem. When you’re focused on those metaphorical points, you’re setting up an antagonistic frame — not just between you and the people you’re interested in, but everyone else too. There’s never a point where you can relax and actually just BE with someone because there’s always a bigger fish — someone who’s going to be taller, richer, have a better car, whatever.
That’s why it’s important to realize that attraction isn’t about who’s got the best stats; it’s about why should someone be interested in YOU, SPECIFICALLY? As I’ve said before: when you’re flirting with someone, whether in person or on a dating app, you’re not competing against other men. The decision she’s making is whether she’d rather go out on a date with YOU or spend a night at home ALONE.
That’s why attraction isn’t about the checklist or the 6 6’s, it’s about the energy and the connection you can build and the way you make someone feel.
Speaking for myself: my success with women didn’t come because I suddenly changed my build or the car I drove, it came about because I learned how to CONNECT with people. The changes I made, like developing my style and presentation helped me unlock that ability… but it was far more about giving myself permission to do the things I knew I could do, rather than creating it out of nowhere.
In another recent column, I break down some of the lessons from Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle, and one of the most important lessons you can take away is that the checklist doesn’t help — not the way you’d think. The most important takeaways from the show were that the things that lead to people finding a connection were humor, vulnerability and emotional intelligence. In fact, the man who became the breakaway favorite with the audience was the man who the most positive, open-hearted, even openly emotional.
Like I’ve said elsewhere: if you can embody strength, kindness and compassion, with a little humor mixed in? Then you’re going to need to invest in some tear-away pants.
#3: But if you’re going to improve, then you need to do more than just work out your progression plan. You’re going to need to learn to get comfortable with discomfort.
Part of why so many people have a hard time improving — or finding the relationships they want when they HAVE put in the effort — is that they avoid the things that make them uncomfortable.
You’ve probably heard something like “life begins at the end of your comfort zone” or “progress starts where your comfort zone ends” or some other pithy saying. And while that sounds like the sort of thing that the Live, Laugh, Love types throw up on their Instagram feeds… it’s true.
Your comfort zone can hold you back — and not in the way that you think. We tend to think of our comfort zone as just being the area where we’re most at ease or least anxious, and so we don’t want to leave it. But your comfort zone isn’t just the place were you feel most confident; it can also be the place you feel stuck BECAUSE you’re anxious or afraid. You can get stuck in your comfort zone because you’re AVOIDING the challenge of doing things differently or things that are “out of character” for you.
Maybe you look at people who represent the life you want and think “Well that can’t be me; I’m not the person who can do that.” Or that you can’t wear the clothes you like because you aren’t the right shape or that you’re not cool enough or confident enough to something our that women just don’t like guys like you.
In reality, the issue is that you are AFRAID to try, because challenging yourself can be incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe you’ve tried it before and you failed THAT time and so now you don’t want to face the potential discomfort again because… what if you fail again?
Your comfort zone quickly becomes an excuse, not even because of the discomfort of failing but because the FEAR of feeling that discomfort. The sensation of that FEAR becomes the thing that you try to avoid, even more than the ACTUAL discomfort of trying something and failing. And so, in order to avoid the potential of feeling that fear, you stop trying. You give in, because despair is easier than hope. Hope isn’t comfortable; hope represents a challenge. It represents RISK.
That’s why your comfort zone is often the product of your self-limiting beliefs, rather than where you feel the most secure. You’re telling yourself that you CAN’T because you don’t to face the discomfort of the challenge and taking the risk of failing… even though that ALSO means that you can’t SUCCEED.
When your comfort zone is defined by your self-limiting beliefs, you aren’t sticking with what you know, you’re cutting yourself off from what you WANT — and on some level, you know it. That’s why so many folks blame others — such as, say, insisting that women are all hypergamous gold-diggers, or who’re incapable of loyalty — rather than looking inwards and admitting that what you’re doing isn’t working. Or, for that matter, accepting that YOU need to change and do things differently.
And hey, I get it: sometimes those beliefs are the results of trauma. Nobody’s saying that you didn’t experience some heinous shit. But if you want to break out of your comfort zone and actually get better at dating, then you need to find the experiences that caused you pain and work towards resolving your feelings about them so that you can learn to face them without fear.
There’s no change or improvement without discomfort. Even just getting in shape is going to demand that you get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Getting out of your comfort zone is difficult. It’s not fun. But as the man once said: that’s not pain, that’s just premature enlightenment.
Another important thing you need to learn is to hack your confirmation bias.
Part of what holds you back and keeps you from having the success you COULD have with dating is your willingness to believe what you ALREADY believe.
I realize that sounds strange, but stick with me. One of the psychological blindspots that ALL people have is what’s known as confirmation bias: the tendency to ONLY accept things that support what you already believe and disregard everything else.
The Red Pill community, the incel community and so on are all very, VERY full of this; it’s not that folks found groups of free-thinkers sharing forbidden knowledge, it’s that they found people who’re willing to confirm and amplify the things that they ALREADY believe.
To give you an example: confirmation bias why it’s so easy to believe that all women only like guys who’re 6’ tall or taller. If you’re insecure about your height and you believe that people aren’t attracted to you because of it, you’re priming yourself to ONLY notice the occasions where height is an issue. You see all the people on Tinder or OKCupid who mention that they only want to date dudes who’re taller than you because you’re expecting to see it. You’re already feeling excluded and so you’re looking for the things that exclude you.
But that same confirmation bias is KEEPING you from noticing ALL of the other profiles where height isn’t an issue, where your height is well within what the range looking for, or they simply don’t care in the first place.
Breaking your confirmation bias — especially the ones that are influenced by your self-limiting beliefs — means first accepting the possibility that you could be wrong. Most folks simply aren’t strong enough to even attempt this, and so they stay stuck in the same negative patterns they’ve been in, never growing, never changing and just getting angrier and more bitter as time goes by.
The folks who do best, on the other hand, challenge their self-limiting beliefs by SEEKING OUT evidence that they’re wrong. They SPECIFICALLY go looking for proof that their beliefs might be incorrect, and, instead of disregarding it or coming up with reasons why this doesn’t “count”, they take it in and shift those beliefs.
That’s part of why you’ve got so many folks who insist that so-called “betas” are only getting used by the women who date them. The guys who feel this way don’t have the strength to challenge themselves and their beliefs. Now they have to create increasingly elaborate excuses for why their beliefs are correct despite all evidence to the contrary.
But the folks who improve the most? Are the ones who learn how to HACK their confirmation bias and make it work FOR them. They’re the ones who DECIDE that they’re going to believe differently and create a feedback loop that supports those positive changes and new beliefs.
After all: confirmation works both ways. Just as it makes you see the things that you feel exclude you, it can also make you see the things that BENEFIT you.
Look at it this way: if you’ve ever decided you were going to buy a particular make and model of a car — a Prius, a Mustang, a Mini Cooper, whatever — suddenly you’ll notice that car EVERYWHERE. It’s not that they appeared out of nowhere or had a sudden surge of popularity; they were ALWAYS there, you just never paid attention to them until it mattered to you.
By choosing to believe differently — or even just to ACT as though you believe differently — you’re priming yourself to actually find the evidence that supports those beliefs. Just as buying that car means you start seeing other cars like it everywhere, choosing your beliefs and consciously incorporating them into your life means that you’ll find it to be true wherever you go. And if that’s going to be the case, then it’s far better to consciously choose positive beliefs that help you instead of focusing on the things that make you miserable and hold you back.
Most importantly though: is that you need to do the work.
I realize this seems obvious, but a lot of folks tend to actually skip this step without realizing it. I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen who buy all the books, read all the columns, watch all the YouTube videos — even who take workshops and bootcamps — and then… don’t do anything.
Part of the problem is that they’ve convinced themselves that they’re MAKING progress because they’re doing all this research, they’re MAKING all of these plans, look at how many books they’ve read and how much they’ve studied!
But that’s not actually progress. Having all of the knowledge at your fingertips doesn’t help you. Even if you’ve studied everything so carefully you could quote chapter and verse… none of it actually makes a difference if you aren’t actually taking what you’ve learned and putting it into practice. You have to take all that theory and start turning it into muscle memory by actually going out and using it.
Now I get WHY people freeze up at this point. For a lot of folks, not only is all the studying a way of giving the illusion of progress, but it’s a way of tricking yourself into not getting out of your comfort zone. It’s the same thing that motivates men into linear thinking and progression; they’re afraid of of failing, of getting rejected or just plain messing up, and so they would rather tell themselves that they’ll get out there when they can do this PERFECTLY.
But the problem is that waiting for perfection means that you never actually do anything. The people who succeed are the ones who go out and do things imperfectly thousands of times. Because they’re out there, putting in the deliberate practice, taking chances, working at it, trying it, failing, getting up and trying again, they’re actually growing, changing and improving. They’re the ones who succeed, because they aren’t letting the fear of doing something imperfectly keep them from doing it in the first place.
And the most important thing is the folks who are out there putting in the work are also the ones who’re least likely to let setbacks stop them. Challenges happen to everyone, people run into sticking points or areas where they’re simply not sure where or how to proceed. And the people who do the best are the ones who find ways AROUND those challenges, who go seeking out the resources or knowledge to overcome them instead of giving up or assuming it’s impossible.
Sometimes that means trying harder. Sometimes it means getting help from folks who’ve got the knowledge and experience you need. And if you’re running into challenges or need a place to start, consider booking a private coaching session to help get you over those challenges and back on the path to your future success. You can learn more about that at doctornerdlove.com/private-coaching or hit the link in the show notes.
Dating can be a challenge. It can be frustrating, it can be intimidating or even terrifying. But when you let go of those self-limiting beliefs and start to develop your social skills the RIGHT way, you’ll be astounded at how incredible YOUR love life can be. You just have to ask yourself: are you ready to get started?
That’s going to do it for this episode. Thanks for being part of it,
So you heard from me and now I want to hear from you. How’ve YOU overcome challenges in YOUR dating adventures? Share your story in the comments below; I know I can’t wait to read them.
Meanwhile, if you’re ready to build up the social skills to find your perfect partner, then check out my book New Game Plus: The Geek’s Guide to Love, Sex and Dating. This is the instruction manual you’ve always wanted, the A to Z guide for learning how to take a level in sexy bad-ass and find the relationship you’ve always wanted, whether it’s for a lifetime… or just that night. Links to buy it are in the show notes, so go check it out. And if you do check it out, or any of my other books for that matter, be sure to rate and review it on Amazon and Goodreads, it’s a huge help.
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