self-limiting beliefs Archives - Page 2 of 9

5 Ways You Sabotage Your Love Life

May 18, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 506 Comments

One of the most important things I can teach people about dating is simple: dating success is 80% attitude and 20% skill and presentation. No matter how good looking you may be or how suave you may think you are, a shitty attitude is going to sabotage your success and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Behind every hot man is a line of people who are absolutely sick of his shit.

One of the things that people rarely seem to understand is how your attitude and beliefs color everything you do. Like the elephant and the mahout, what you believe controls what you perceive. When you believe that women, for example, are hypergamous bitches who are obsessed with status, you’re going to see everything as being a shit test. When you think that women only date men who are $Quality_You_Don’t_Have, you’re going to sabotage your own love life by missing out on the women who dig what you have to offer; you will literally miss every single signal and indication that they send you.

Let’s look at some of the most common self-limiting beliefs that men have that sabotage their love-lives.

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These Self-Limiting Beliefs Are Holding You Back

July 11, 2014 by Dr. NerdLove 855 Comments

Here’s a secret a lot of dating coaches won’t tell you: most of your dating problems are in your head. This isn’t to say that they don’t exist – it’s that most people’s sticking points tend to be the result of self-limiting beliefs. And the crazy part is that we tend to want to keep them. In fact, more often than not, people will fight harder to reaffirm their self-limiting beliefs than they will work to change things – no matter how miserable it makes them.

If you bang your head against the wall for long enough, eventually it stops hurting... — If you bang your head against the wall for long enough, eventually it stops hurting…

We get a lot of things wrong when it comes to dating. We tend to make a lot of assumptions about what our partners find attractive in others – usually based on incorrect information. We let intellectual fallacies color our conclusions, which quickly become self-limiting beliefs, and those beliefs quickly become the TRVTH as though they were carved into stone tablets from the top of Mount Fedora.

"Women are hypergamous bitches for indeed All Women Are Like That. I AM THE LORD... m'lady" — “Women are hypergamous bitches for indeed All Women Are Like That. I AM THE LORD… m’lady”

The problem is that – as I’m fond of saying – most of dating success is in your attitude. Your attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you believe you’re already rejected then you will be. The more you buy into these self-limiting beliefs, the more impossible you make it to get better. If you’ve been stuck in a dating rut – if you can’t get over that metaphorical hump1 – then it’s time to start checking your attitude. If you’ve been holding onto these self-limiting beliefs, you’re not going to progress until you learn to let them go.

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fnar [↩]

Starting From Zero

January 13, 2014 by Dr. NerdLove 236 Comments

One of the common complaints I hear from readers is that they have absolutely no dating history or experience and don’t know where to begin. And in fairness, while I do have a number of articles in The Basics that cover the dating fundamentals, sometimes it can be hard to know just where to begin. After all, when you’re starting from zero, it can be a little intimidating. You’re looking at trying to do something fairly massive and just the sheer scope of what there is to learn and to adapt and adjust to can make it seem like there’s just too much to overcome. And when you pair that with what are likely life-long held self-limiting beliefs about who you are and what you’re capable of doing… well, it’s a recipe for paralysis at best. You feel like you’re standing at the foot of the Matterhorn and trying to figure out just how the hell you’re going to make it to the summit… only with no gear and no preparation and at least one arm tied behind your back.

So at the urging of several readers1, I want to talk a little about how to go about getting started making your own transformation from the ground up.

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And a hat tip to long-time reader and commenter Gentleman Johnny, who suggested the article [↩]

Leveling Up: Developing An Abundance Mentality

January 3, 2014 by Dr. NerdLove 352 Comments

Welcome to 2014 folks. It’s a new year and ripe for potential and improvement.

After you're done nursing your epic hangover, anyway... — After you’re done nursing your epic hangover, anyway…

If you’re like most folks, you’ve made some New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps getting better at dating is one of them…

Usually around this time, I make my annual tirade about how New Year’s resolutions are wastes of time but I want to do things differently. You see, one of the reasons why so many resolutions fail is that you’re addressing surface issues rather than the core causes. For example, f you’re trying to lose weight, you have to adjust your entire lifestyle, not just go on a diet or adopt an overly ambitious exercise routine that you’ll inevitably quit in a month’s time.

Similarly, if you want to get better at dating, you have to do more than just learn some new techniques and snappy patter and calling it a day. Those are surface issues, not core ones. Most long-term dating problems stem from what the PUA community calls “inner game” – that is, issues that stem from your self-esteem and attitude. Your core beliefs – both about yourself and about other people – affect far more than you realize. The way you see the world acts as the filter for everything in your life, and the more negative and restrictive your views, the more negative and restrictive the world will be to you. The more self-limiting beliefs you accept, the harder of a time you’ll have with dating; you will have effectively hobbled yourself with nothing but a mistaken idea of what you can and can’t do. It becomes a self-reinforcing concept thanks to what’s known as confirmation bias: the brain’s tendency to give greater emotional weight to evidence – no matter how weak or unreliable – that validates what you already believe.

But that goes both ways. Just as self-limiting beliefs lock you into place and keep you from being able to progress, adopting positive beliefs help liberate you and empower you to pursue your goals in ways you never could before. And just as with self-limiting beliefs, those positive attitudes can become self-reinforcing as well.

So let’s talk about one of the most important beliefs when it comes to success in dating: adopting an abundance mentality.

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Redefining Failure

December 13, 2013 by Dr. NerdLove 37 Comments

I’m a failure. And I’m ok with that.

There are a lot of things I’ve failed at. I’m a failure as a professional artist and photographer. I’m a failure as a comic publisher. I’m sure you could probably find plenty of women in my past who would quite happily tell you that I’m a failure as a lover.

"That's 30 seconds of my life I'll never get back..." — “That’s 30 seconds of my life I’ll never get back…”

There was a point in my life that any of these would’ve devastated me. Hell, taking the time to tally up all the things I’ve failed at – hope you’ve got all day, it’s quite the list – would’ve been enough to throw me back into another depression spiral.

After all: we’re all under an insane amount of pressure to “succeed”. We’re taught over and over again that if we’re not “successful”, then we’re just so much human detritus, castoffs, society’s forgotten children. We don’t “count” because we don’t meet some arbitrary and external standard.

But… whose standards, exactly? And why do we accept those standards as valid?

I mean, we’re trained in school that “success” lies in regurgitating the desired answers, regardless of whether we understand them, the process behind finding those answers, or even if those answers are correct. So, is there more success in being able to reproduce facts via rote memorization and getting a high grade, or in having pulled yourself up from an F to a C?

What about fame? Fortune? The Kardashians are rich and famous… and they were born to it. Does this mean that we’re a failure if we didn’t happen to be born to the right set of parents at the right time? ((And before anyone brings it up: yes, I’ve read Outliers too. I understand that birth order, parents and timing can offer advantages in life. That isn’t what we’re talking about here.)) Building up a profitable business? Michael Lindsay of iMedia Networks is undoubtedly a successful by that standard… except his business is to send all the ads for boner pills and Russian mail-order bride services that clog up your email every day. Is success measured by pure capitalism, even when your product damages the livelihood of others?

What if you’re only kind of successful? Kurt Cobain is hailed (rightly so) as a musical genius… but he never sold as many albums as Justin Bieber. Neither did the Beatles, for that matter. Are they any less successful than The Bieb? But then there’s the famous quote about The Velvet Underground: Only 1000 people bought their albums, but every single one of them started a band. Does that make The Velvet Underground more successful than Pitbull or Christina Aguilera?

Or for that matter, look at how we view sex and relationships. Is somebody a success just because he’s slept with hundreds of women? What about the man who only ever slept with one woman, but had three kids and a blissfully happy life with her? Is a woman a failure because she never gets married, instead choosing to devote her energies to running a profitable Fortune 500 company? What if she never has children but is a beloved teacher who helped hundreds of children reach their intellectual potential?

Perhaps it’s time to redefine what it means to be a “failure”.

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