When I was much younger I used to think that to master the game of picking up women you had to master the technique. I thought he needed to pick up lines, memorized material and he had to act cool. While those 3 things helped me a bit, I actually picked up more women when I didn’t have an agenda. In other words, when I just wanted to hang out with my group of friends and have a good time were the times I ended up having the most success with the opposite sex. For a long time I could not understand why.
After years of approaching, talking to, and dating women, experience has taught me that the most important thing in learning the game is how you think. I know, I know, it’s not sexy, it’s not “edgy,” but it’s the truth. What exactly do I mean by “mindset” anyway? Let me explain it using a sports analogy. If you were to ask any professional golfer if technique is important to their golf game, they would all agree that it is. But if you were to ask them if technique is more important than the ability to stay focused, disciplined, and have mental toughness, you would find that they would say they are just as important. Some would even say that the correct golf mindset is more important because without it you could not improve your technique.
Gambling (or picking up women) is much like most competitive sports. You have to have the right mindset and the right technique. But there’s one crucial difference between competitive sports and the game of pick-up: When it comes to meeting women, you have an almost infinite number of possibilities for success. In other words, if you’re watching basketball on TV, those athletes have 4 quarters to score enough points to win. In the pickup game you don’t have those kind of strict time restrictions. You can go out in public and approach women. You can go to different nightclubs and bars to meet and talk to women. You can even approach them on the street. Think of it as a practice.
Too often, a man walks up to a woman, says something to her, she doesn’t respond the way he wants her to, and then walks away and allows negative thoughts to wash over him. This prevents you from making another approach. If he doesn’t use his willpower and power of decision to control his own thoughts, he can soon lead to learned helplessness. This is not a good place to be. I think a lot of men settle for someone because they’ve learned that getting close to a woman equals pain and discomfort. If he can’t overcome these irrational emotional feelings, it will be very difficult to master the pick-up game.
The key to mastering the game is to get in the right mindset and you do this through what is called Gradual Conditioning. If you’re really shy like I used to be, start by dating no less than 4 times in the first week and meeting women’s gazes for longer than normal. Then for the second week, say “hello” or “hello” or “what’s up?” to a woman a day you don’t know. Your third week can double or triple that number. By the fourth week you should start doing no less than one approach per day (5 or more is much, much better and you will learn to recover much faster).
If the thought of approaching a girl you don’t know scares you, then do what I did. Imagine that you are playing a video game. I’m not kidding, this really works. You see, dating and talking to women is not reality. Think about it, she doesn’t know who you are and you don’t know who she is. You only approach her, in most situations, because she looks a certain way. She will respond to you based on how she feels at the moment, how you look and what and how you say it. So it’s not reality. It’s just a very small echo of it. So when I go out to meet new women, I don’t take anything personally. It’s all about having fun, learning and trying to make women smile.
This is what I used to do. For every woman I said “Hello” or “Hello” to, I gave myself one point. For every conversation that lasted more than 3 minutes I gave myself 5 points. For every phone number or email address I got, I gave myself 10 points. If I kissed a girl on the same night, I would get another 10 points. So every night I went out I couldn’t stop approaching women until I got to 25 points. Within 2 months I had to bring it up to 50 points because I had gotten so much better at reading a woman’s body language and had a better “feel” for what to say. So go out and try to make her smile, you will be pleasantly surprised if you try honestly.