Hey guys,

Clark here, theApproach’s intern and official “before picture.” This past Thursday, Sebastian hit me with a doozy of a lesson – lots of detailed information to process. I’ll do my best to get the gist of it down here.

Lesson 3 with Sebastian Drake: Command Presence and Nonverbal Communication

Command Presence

First, we discussed what Sebastian calls “command presence,” referring to the vibe that you give off when you approach a woman. Sebastian taught this within the context of approaching a woman walking toward you. You can sum up command presence in one phrase: “Approach like she dropped her wallet.” If a woman drops her wallet and you pick it up, you don’t address her tentatively, as if you’re worried she’ll blow you off. You just say, fairly loudly and with no hesitation, “Hey, you dropped your wallet.” Right? It’s the same way with asking someone for the time, asking them where the nearest subway station is, etc. No hesitation – why would you hesitate? You have something to say that she’s going to want to hear.

That’s the idea here. Approach like she dropped her wallet. Don’t be tentative or meek; it gives the impression that you’re about to say something unpleasant or at least unimportant. When you have to give someone bad news, you approach tentatively and speak softly. Likewise if you have something unimportant to say and know that you’re encroaching on the person’s time without good reason. When you have something positive and important to say, you approach confidently and speak clearly. Before your words even register, the woman is going to judge whether you’re worth her time or not based on the way you approach, so do it well.

When you speak to her, don’t apologize, qualify yourself, or ask for permission. No “just,” as in, “Hey, I just had to say…” No “excuse me.” No “I’m sorry.” You’re not sorry, and you don’t need to be excused. You’re not imposing on her; you’re telling her something important that she’s going to want to hear.

Again: approach like she dropped her wallet. Be warm and friendly, not aggressive but certainly not tentative. Let her know that she caught your eye: “Hey. I saw you over there, and I had to stop you. You are… stunning.” No pussyfooting around. Like you mean it, girly man.

Sebastian also taught me the mechanics of the approach, some nuances regarding timing and how to hold your body and things like that. The way Sebastian taught it, the idea is to actually stop her in her tracks. I can’t fully capture this part of the lesson in writing, but I’ll at least give a summary, and you can do what you will with that. In brief:

Square your shoulders and continue walking more or less toward her. Start speaking when you’re far enough away that, by the time you two are face to face, you’re about halfway done with your statement. This is probably further away than you think. The distance closes quickly; remember that she’s walking too.

At the same time that you start speaking, raise your hand slightly, as if to say “Hold on a second…” This should not seem aggressive. It’s light, almost quizzical, the way you might lift your hand to signal that you need to pause and think something over. Don’t raise your hand too high; Sebastian didn’t give a guideline, but I feel good raising it to about solar plexus level. Don’t make a forceful gesture with your hand, like a single pointing finger or a flat palm (”Halt!”).

Stop when you’re in front of her. You want to be slightly within her “polite zone” (remember dominance), but not too much – she doesn’t know you yet, and women tend not to appreciate strange men getting all up in their grills on the street. Plant your feet – put one foot down quite heavily – to anchor yourself in place and nonverbally communicate that she should stop too. Say what you came to say. Make someone smile; it feels good.

This is important: do not hone in on her. If she starts to veer out of your way, which is a fairly natural thing to do, don’t move to block her path or adjust so that you stay in front of her. That would be creepy, which is just slightly left of what we’re shooting for. Stay with your shoulders squared forward, and turn your head to speak over your shoulder as she walks by.

Nonverbal Communication

Sebastian told me that powerful people do as little as possible to get their point across. A schoolteacher who isn’t in control of his class tries to assert himself by yelling and clapping his hands, which the kids of course ignore. A more powerful teacher will just gaze calmly at a kid speaking out of turn, and the kid will sheepishly apologize. The lesson here is that a powerful person can often get his point across nonverbally. By learning to communicate in this way, you can convey that you are powerful.

Here’s an example from the major literary influence of my childhood, Marvel Comics: the king of the Inhumans, Black Bolt, almost never speaks. He communicates entirely through body language and subtle modulations of his facial expression. Black Bolt is treated as a person of almost godlike eminence and authority, and few would even dream of disobeying him. Why does he never speak? Because his voice is superhumanly powerful - one whisper would vaporize everything for miles around, and a shout would destroy the planet. That’s kinda what we’re going for here: you communicate nonverbally when possible, because you are so powerful that anything more would be overkill.

In this lesson, Sebastian taught me two aspects of nonverbal communication.

Eye Contact

First, we talked about eye contact. Sebastian taught me three different kinds. These are:

Leader’s Eye Contact: this is the default. Use this whenever. Look with your right eye into their right eye. At first I didn’t quite understand this, because I’m not sure that you can really move your eyes independently of each other. I didn’t get how you could look at something just with your right eye. Sebastian said that you sort of line up your right eye with theirs, which I took to mean that you’ll be moving your head a little bit to make that happen. I’m not sure that’s so necessary now. I find that if you just try to look with your right eye, you can sorta feel like you’re doing it, although I’m not sure if you actually are or not. If that’s not what Sebastian means, he’ll correct me and I’ll edit this post to reflect that.

Soft Eye Contact: this is used to convey a powerful feeling of intimacy. Sebastian says to use this if you need to convey attainability (I imagine we’ll talk much more about attainability soon, when we go into Sebastian’s VAC model of attraction), or as a reward once you’re an hour or so into a good interaction. What you do: look at the bridge of her nose. It sounds weird, but Sebastian says that this gives her the feeling that you’re looking directly into both of her eyes. I’m not sure how I feel about this one – if I’m having a powerful, emotional moment with a woman that I like, I actually want to look into her eyes, not just give her the impression that I am. On the other hand, I guess it’s either this or dart back and forth from one eye to the other. This might actually be the closest you can come to staring deeply into someone’s eyes in a sustained way; I’ll have to experiment more with this.

Hard Eye Contact: this is used to deal with aggressive people. Sebastian doesn’t want me to use this too often, and he said that he only taught it to me for the sake of completeness. What you do: pick one of their eyes, and focus on the pupil. Really focus on it, and try to clearly pick out its shape. This causes your eyes to narrow and your face to subtly assume a tighter, more intimidating expression. Sebastian said that this is also useful for negotiating in a dominant, hard-line manner, for instance asking for a discount at a store. “That’ll be $40.” “[Hard eye contact] Can you do better?”

The “Retarded Look”

We are definitely going to need a more politically correct name for this, but until we think of one, I’m just going to call it what Sebastian calls it. The “retarded look” is how you punish bad behavior. Powerful people respond to rude or annoying statements only to the slightest degree, usually nonverbally. After all, any sort of verbal response is actually a reward of a sort, since that’s what the person was trying to elicit from you.

Here’s the idea: don’t respond to rudeness, aggressiveness, or other bad behavior verbally. Instead, just look at the person like he or she is retarded. It’s that simple. Sebastian learned this from women, who do this all the time to shut down guys who say stupid stuff to them. The “retarded look” should convey skepticism and slight amusement, as if you’re puzzled by such bad behavior. You’re not fazed or upset, just surprised and amused that someone would commit such a social faux pas. The reaction should be slight, barely even a reaction at all. Don’t go big with this; that would indicate that whatever was said had an impact on you, enough to elicit a real response.

Here are the mechanics:

Figure out your “retarded look” for yourself; there are plenty of ways to do it. Be careful to avoid the extremes of “too hateful” and “too amused.” Also, like we said before, remember not to go too big. The way I do it is with a little brow-furrow action, a little smirk action, but not too much of either. After a second or so, I sorta squint a bit, as if I’m trying to get a better look at something bizarre that caught my eye.

Hold the look. This is important. Once you start, you can’t break it. Wait until the person “cracks;” this could consist of looking away, muttering something, laughing nervously, anything that indicates they’ve reached a threshold of discomfort. When this happens, you say: “Don’t worry about it.” That’s it. “Don’t worry about it.” Note: NOT “no problem.” There WAS a problem; the person screwed up and committed a social no-no. You just aren’t bothered, so they shouldn’t worry about it. Say it warmly – all is forgiven, no harm done. You can also add “it happens,” which Sebastian likes to do sometimes.

Thoughts:

The command presence stuff seemed complicated when I was drilling it with Sebastian during the lesson. “Approach like she dropped her wallet” I get, and I was already kinda doing that during my daytime approaches, but adding in the mechanics turned me into an uncoordinated mess. It’s not easy to think of all these physical details while also trying to speak confidently and execute the approach smoothly. Man, the things that came out of my mouth: “Oh, uh, excuse me, I’m sorry, I just wanted to apologize over and over and maybe qualify myself before stammering out a weak compliment. Uh, you’re pretty?” It was not good. But weirdly, when I was out on the street and saw an attractive woman, I would go into autopilot and lay it down textbook. Maybe it was because I didn’t have time to think. It was pretty successful, too. I’ve got a coffee date later this week with an extremely hot woman I stopped on the street – possibly hotter than anyone I’ve ever been with or dated, definitely way up there. I also had a nice evening with a pretty, intelligent girl whom I stopped on the street near my house. She’s the subject of my field report, below.

As for the eye contact, it’s hard to say what it’s doing for me because it’s so subtle. My understanding is that leader’s eye contact gives you a powerful, steady gaze, but you can’t exactly measure the results of that. I’ve used soft eye contact in intimate moments, but it’s hard to separate out the marginal effect of the eye contact as opposed to everything else that was going on. Even before this lesson, I tended to make deep eye contact with a woman during these types of moments. I guess this is just a better way of doing that. In the final assessment, this eye contact stuff appears not to be destined to bring enormous changes to my social skill-set. That being said, if I want to be as good as I can be, that means cleaning up even the small details. As Sebastian said, he’s not building me to be above-average; he’s building me to be a Terminator. To that end, I’ll learn eye contact and every other little nuance that he wants to toss my way.

The retarded look was hilarious. A few times, I think I miscalibrated and used it when it wasn’t really called for, which didn’t inflict any undue suffering on the world (I did it to my housemates, and we mess with each other all the time). But in the few times I deployed it correctly, it was textbook – it went exactly the way Sebastian said it would. Give them the look, hold it… hollllldddd itttt… and they crack. “Hey, don’t worry about it.”

Field Report

It’s Saturday. My friend gives me a ride home from a meeting and drops me off near my place. I’m about to turn onto my street when I see a cute girl, maybe twenty feet away, walking in my direction. I veer back onto the main street and stop her. I do this just the way Sebastian showed me – hand out, starting to speak before we close the distance, approaching like she dropped her wallet, etc. I only have a few seconds between seeing her and crossing paths, and I think this helps keep me from over-t­hinking and getting in my own way. I say, “Hey, I saw you over there, and I wanted to tell you that you’re very cute. I’d be pissed at myself if I didn’t stop you and say hi.” She doesn’t light up and grin like a kid being handed a candy apple, the way it sometimes happens with direct approaches, but she’s being friendly, and that’s good enough. Anyway, up close, she’s very attractive – straight brown hair, very full lips, and green eyes that remind me of a cat’s. We chat a little, and it turns out she lives a few streets away and is heading home. I suggest that she come get coffee with me instead.

We go get coffee and the conversation is AWK-ward! It’s not weird or uncomfortable, but it’s just not locking into any sort of groove. I always hesitate to blame anyone but myself for difficulties in an interaction, but in this case it was definitely her. I’m being friendly and interesting (or at least I like to think so), but she’s just not contributing. I find myself doing more storytelling than I usually do, in order to fill the air a little and give her opportunities to jump in. I get a little tired of carrying the conversation and start to let the silences hang a little bit. Nothing wrong with pauses in conversation, after all. At some point I call it out: “Wow, gotta love those ‘I just met you a half-hour ago’ pauses in the conversation.” I make sure to convey that I’m not uncomfortable, just amused by the situation. We have more fun when we get to the topic of her college – she went to William & Mary, which is in colonial Williamsburg, so we joke about her going to frat parties in a bonnet and frock, and stuff like that. I tell her that I have to run because I have a ton of work to do (true), but that we should meet for drinks later in the evening. She’s game, but she says she doesn’t want to get in the way of my work. I tell her I won’t let myself go out if I don’t get it done, and she can be like an incentive for me to do it. We agree to meet at 11, at a bar close to both our places (logistics!).

11 rolls around. I call her and tell her I’m just out of the shower, so she should come meet me at my place and we can leave from there. She comes over, and I tell her to come upstairs with me for a second while I run to my room to grab my wallet. She doesn’t follow me; instead, she stays downstairs and chats with my housemate. Ok, fair enough, she just met me. We head out to the bar, where we have more slightly awkward but enjoyable conversation. She’s a pretty interesting girl and very intelligent. I ask her what kind of music she listens to – this is screening, I guess, although I think of it more as casually getting to know each other with screening as a byproduct. Turns out she’s very into female teen pop singers – this girl graduated from Harvard, and her favorite singers are Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson. I actually think this is adorable and qualify* her on it. We talk about music for a little bit; I’m pretty knowledgeable in this area and play music myself, so this line of conversation unearths some value for her to see.

Things are going well, but again, I have no feeling that the interaction is clicking. I can’t really tell if it’s on or not. In that situation, I just assume that it is. As last call approaches, I suggest that we go somewhere else. She asks where, and I say we should watch a movie at my place. She says sure, which leads me to suspect that it must be on despite the ambivalent signals from her. As we walk back, we pass a Tibetan craft shop, and I talk about my meditation practice a little bit.

Back at my place, we put Fight Club into the DVD player and settle in on the couch. I’m kind of choding out – I’m pretty sure that she’s into me at this point, so I have no excuse for not just escalating and making it happen early on. But about twenty minutes in, she mentions that she’s cold, and I just put my arm around her and pull her in so that we can both get warm from body heat. Within a minute or two, we’re making out. We stop paying attention to the movie – which is actually too bad, because she’s never seen it and really should. It’s one of the defining movies of our generation. I feel a little bad about that. No I don’t. Anyway, we head upstairs – and that’s where I’m lowering the curtains on this tale, you dirty little voyeurs.

Lessons learned:

Command presence totally works. All the various little mechanics are hard to process consciously, but they click into place on their own if you don’t have time to think and have to act fast.

A somewhat awkward interaction does not mean that she’s not attracted to you. In the absence of indications that she’s not interested, you might as well proceed as if she is. In this interaction, it really didn’t seem to be “on” in terms of overt indications – she didn’t open hard when I approached, she wasn’t comfortable coming briefly to my room before we went out, and the conversation didn’t really flow that well. And yet, in spite of all that, it was on, and we had a great evening. It would have been a shame if I’d benched myself early on a hunch.

Thanks for reading. Take care, guys.

 

Cheers,

Clark

 

 

 

*Qualifying: letting a woman know that you like a quality of hers, something she said, or something she did. Instead of just showing a woman unconditional interest, which is a pretty clear sign that you’re interested for shallow reasons, you convey interest only when she actually wins it. It makes the interaction more genuine and rooted in something more substantial than looks or the desire for sex. It also makes you more attractive by establishing that you’re a non-needy person with real standards, not a fawning supplicant.

 

Hey guys. It’s Clark, mild-mannered theApproach intern, giving you the rundown from my second lesson in attractiveness training and social dynamics (or “pickup,” as the kids say) with Sebastian Drake. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to share with mankind, I’m placing life and limb – nay, my very soul – in peril to seize the secrets of social supremacy from the stronghold of the masters. I hear this sort of thing usually ends with the hero chained to a rock while enormous, predatory birds feast on his entrails, so I sure hope you guys are getting something out of it.

Ok, now that I’ve come down from my crack high, let’s cut the crap and get to…

Lesson 2 with Sebastian Drake: Body Language and Beliefs

High-Status Body Language

Continuing with our mission to crank up my passive value traits, Sebastian and I turned to the subject of body language. According to Sebastian, here’s how you set your body language in order to hold yourself like a high-status, elite man:

Stand straight. Bring your shoulders out and back as far as you can. Push out your chest as far as it can go. Suck your stomach in as much as you can. Raise your chin into the air. All this stuff should be exaggerated; this isn’t how the final product will look, this is just the prep stage.

Take the deepest breath you can. Hold it for a second, then let it out and allow your body to relax while still holding a looser, less extreme version of the position you’d assumed before. Your shoulders are held back, rather than hunched forward; your chest is broad and pushed slightly outward; your stomach is held in a bit; your spine is straight and your head is tilted somewhat upward.

This will feel weird for a little while, but the more I walk around like this, the more natural it feels and the more able I am to relax into it. By far the weirdest part for me is holding my head high, with my chin up and my nose in the air. Sebastian says that you can see this behavior “out in the wild” by observing the way that some very rich, high-society people hold their heads. Standing with good body language and your chin up will make you look taller, since most people slouch quite a bit more than they realize.

The chin thing feels particularly odd because Sebastian, recognizing that my head will probably drop over time without my noticing it, is having me hold it absurdly high for now, beyond where it should really be. So I’m walking all over town looking like a… what’s the word I’m searching for… moron. That’s ok. This isn’t about kicking ass; this is about drilling something until I internalize it. I can calibrate it down to the appropriate level later. Actually, even the appropriate level feels pretty weird, although Sebastian assures me I look awesome.

As I walk around this way, I haven’t gotten any weird looks. In fact, I’ve gotten some glances, the good kind, from attractive women on the street. Maybe this actually does look good.

Setting Your Beliefs to Reflect Your High-Status Reality

Beliefs are important to your social success. While you can train yourself to look and speak like a high-status guy, you can’t pull it off fully without also thinking and feeling like one. There are plenty of reasons for this, but to give just one: there are very subtle, unconscious behaviors and mannerisms, which Sebastian calls “micro-nonverbals,” that convey a lot about your thoughts, mood, and beliefs about yourself. One of many examples is the unconscious movement of the muscles around your eyes. This explains why looking into someone’s eyes can reveal so much, despite the fact that they’re basically just squishy balls of jelly. You can’t “fake” your micro-nonverbals the way you can imitate, say, the walk of a high-status man. Only the correct beliefs can help you here.*

That being said, Sebastian isn’t huge on “inner game” as a substitute for learning and internalizing strong social skills. The way he sees it, visualizing golden light in your heart chakra or repeating “I’m a 10!” or whatever won’t amount to much if, the first time the man approaches a woman, she blows him out like a candle because his mannerisms and vibe are just as creepy as they’ve always been.

I can see what Sebastian’s saying. I was a confident guy with high self-esteem and a positive attitude before I got into any of this stuff, and yet I was only decent socially. This was because I lacked excellent social skills, and for all my confidence and success in most areas of my life, I couldn’t delude myself into believing that I was a social ninja when I knew that I wasn’t. Even if I could, this fragile belief would have shattered against the brick wall of reality on my very first approach.

Our behaviors and beliefs are either reinforced or undermined by the external feedback they elicit; let’s use this instead of fighting it. Instead of trying to bootstrap ourselves up to awesomeness by creating deluded beliefs that clash with external reality, let’s actually get fairly awesome and then simply make sure our beliefs accurately reflect this awesomeness. Let’s take on the attributes of a high-status man, from his individual actions through his habitual mannerisms to his innermost qualities. At this point, it makes sense to believe “I’m the man. I’m elite, high-value, and unbelievably attractive,” because you actually are. The problem is that, sometimes, your beliefs don’t keep pace with your value.

Sebastian thinks that most people don’t fully believe in themselves – even guys like me who are doing pretty well overall – because we compare ourselves to our imagined ideal selves. I could be smarter, I could be stronger, I could eat better, I could read more, I could learn more languages and give more to charity, etc. We berate and judge ourselves for every inch of difference between ourselves and the person we believe we could ultimately be. This is a mistake. The desire for self-improvement is great, but we’re not competing with our ideal selves – not for women, not for anything. To the extent that we’re competing for women at all, it’s with the other guys around us. It’s time, Sebastian said, for me to realize just how high-status I already am.

Sebastian told me (rather charitably, I think) that I’m already a very high-status guy, maybe top 5% (”Partly because you’re good, partly because so many people are so bad.” Uh… thanks?). The problem is that I don’t believe I’m as high-status as I am. It’s time to “recognize that I’m already in the top 5% of guys, give myself a license to act like the top 5% of guys act, and expect to get what the top 5% of guys get.” Along those lines, Sebastian gave me an exercise to perform. When I find myself in an area with a lot of guys around, I should try to count the number of guys whom a woman would choose, based on initial impression alone, over me.

I did this exercise, and it took a sledgehammer to my limiting beliefs. Turns out I am kinda money – who knew? Armed with Sebastian’s tweaks to my body language, some decent grooming, and an ok sense of style, I was very often at or near the top in terms of the initial impression I gave (by the way, looks-wise, I’m decent but nothing extraordinary). Sometimes there would be a strikingly good-looking dude hanging out; sometimes there would be guys whom a woman might choose based on personal taste (say, a hipster dude or a thugged-out guy or something). But like Sebastian said, there are a lot of chodey-looking guys out there, and this means you can really stand out if you just step it up a little. Dress well, carry yourself well, keep yourself groomed, and boom – you convey high value without having to do anything.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
Clark

Hey everyone, I’m Clark. I’m the new guy.

Through a combination of raw persistence and judicious lying on my resume, I’ve found my way to an internship here at theApproach. I’m going to be working personally with Sebastian to help him out as he does what he does: helping men develop the qualities and skills to be incredibly attractive to women. I’m very excited to be a part of this. Being lonely sucks, and women are so wonderful – it’s stupid and senseless that so many good guys are unable to let women see how great they are because their social skills aren’t up to the task. Working with men, quality men who deserve amazing women in their lives, to improve their social and romantic lives is something that I really believe in. Calling it “pickup” doesn’t come close to conveying what this is to me and what it can mean for men and women.*

While I’m getting everything off my chest, and before we all start to gently cry together, I should mention that I’m also here to yoink some of that mojo for myself. One huge perk of this internship is that Sebastian will be training me personally. To quote a Mr. Erik von Markovik: don’t hate.

Here’s how this works: I’m going to blog my progress and serve as a “floor model” for what theApproach is capable of doing with regular guys like me. I’m wearing multiple hats here: guinea pig for Sebastian to test and refine his new material and methods, real-life demo for the work that theApproach is doing and the results they can achieve, and conduit for some free material that Sebastian wants to get out there. Hopefully, someday soon we’ll look at this blog as the chronicle of Clark’s miraculous transformation – from nice, normal guy with decent social skills to nice, normal guy with the charisma of fifty atomic-powered James Bonds. Let’s get sexy, people.

Without further ado…

Lesson 1 with Sebastian Drake: Passive Value; Universal vs. Specific Value; Dominance

Passive Value

We began by talking about what Sebastian calls passive value. That’s value that you just have, value that flows from the way you carry yourself and the personal qualities you possess. Once you’ve acquired passive value, it shines through to the people around you without your having to deliberately demonstrate it. This is a pretty sweet deal, because having to constantly demonstrate your value using active techniques is a lot of work. It’s easier, more powerful, and more enjoyable (I think so, anyway) to move, speak, think, and feel like a high-value man. In other words, it’s better to be high value then to demonstrate high value, and this passive value is learnable.

Universal vs. Specific Value

Next, we broke down value into two categories: universal value and specific value. Universal value consists of the traits that about 95% of women find attractive. Most of these are pretty intuitive – physical health, confidence, intelligence, empathy, leadership, etc. It sounds basic, but people don’t go far enough with this stuff. Improving the areas where you’re weak can drastically improve your social success. Beyond that, jacking up these elements of universal value to extreme levels is supposed to open up whole new realities of elite social ridiculousness.

Specific value is value that some woman find attractive and others find unattractive. For this reason, it’s a double-edged sword, and you have to think about what you really want before you decide to take some on. Are you mostly into goth girls? Then by all means, goth yourself up – go ahead and take on that specific value. Your success rate will go way up with your local Pale Maidens of Dusk, but you’ll lose ground with just about everyone else. Decide if the tradeoff is worth it, then do your thing.

By the way, if you’re a punk and she does ballet, don’t despair. You can overcome having the wrong type of specific value for a girl by having a massive payload of universal value, which will more than compensate. With enough universal value, you’ll be such a bad mofo that it won’t matter that she’s a (marine biologist/head cheerleader/CEO) and you’re a (hobo/mental patient/first-year dental student).

Dominance

After laying out the concepts of universal and specific value, Sebastian told me that our initial mission was to boost the hell out of my universal value traits. We started with dominance, which was to be my focus until our next lesson. According to Sebastian, dominance is one of the few universal value traits that the mainstream doesn’t acknowledge as universally attractive. He also let me know that we were not going for aggression, heavy-handedness, or rudeness. We were shooting for high-status dominance: the warm, positive assertiveness of a man who is unafraid to take up space in the world.

My mission for the next five days: slightly breach the “polite zone” of everyone I meet. Stand just a little closer than social norms dictate. Be unafraid to invade space, the way a boss is unafraid to just cheerily stroll into an employee’s office and lean over his shoulder to scrutinize his work. When shaking hands with someone, warmly touch her right arm with my left hand, Bill Clinton-style. When asking the maitre d’ of a restaurant for a table, plant my hands on his little podium and lean over it, like he’s an old buddy. Assume the level of easy familiarity that people would accord to family, a friend, or a lover.

Notes on the experience:

The hardest thing about the dominance exercise was remembering to do it. I would totally forget to breach space and smack myself in the forehead when I remembered ten seconds after the interaction was over. This happened less as time passed, and by today I was breaching space in every interaction, with good results. It’s like Sebastian says - people like interacting with a confident, high-status guy. It’s the ones who furtively hang back, who act like they need something or that they have something to hide, who give folks the creeps. It felt liberating, actually, to stop acting as if there were invisible fences walling people off from one another. This isn’t to say that I was getting all up in everyone’s grills - just that I felt a little less constrained, a little freer to connect with people and to move boldly through the world. Give it a try; it feels good.

Field Report

Thursday

After scarfing down burgers with Sebastian and saying goodbye, I hop on the T to head home. On the train, I see a gorgeous woman about forty feet away, in a different car. I look at her; she looks at me. I man up and walk over to her, go direct.** When I introduce myself and shake her hand, I do the Bill Clinton Arm Touch. This is the first time I’m running the assignment Sebastian gave me, and it feels awk-ward! She doesn’t seem to mind, though - we have a pleasant but pretty fluff-heavy conversation as we get off the train. I get her e-mail address (she’s visiting from Amsterdam for a week and doesn’t have a phone), but this doesn’t seem like a promising interaction in terms of follow-up. Oh well, it was nice enough, and it’s good to stay social and keep talking to people. I also had my first taste of the uncomfortable vibe that comes from breaching someone’s polite zone when you’re not used to it. I think this was just the feeling of my social programming reasserting itself, trying to put me back in line. I ignored it, and not only did I become more comfortable over the next few days, but the responses to my dominant behavior became much more positive.

Saturday

I’ve just finished a big test, and I’m walking down the stairs to leave the test building when a very cute girl comes up alongside me - Asian, with long hair and pretty serious curves. I open about the test, and we chat about it as we walk out of the building into the rain. When we get to the street, I ask, “Which way are you headed? I’m going this way.” Her: “Oh, I’m going that way [pointing the other way]. I’m gonna hit the gym.” Me: “Ok. Hey, do you know a good coffee shop around here?” Her: “Sure, there are a couple.” Me: “Great. I’ll tell you what: why don’t you put the gym on hold and come have coffee with me?” Her: “Ok.” And off we go.

We get to an Au Bon Pain and chat as she has tea and I have coffee and a croissant. It’s a fun, bantery conversation, and we actually learn quite a bit about each other. She’s funny and interesting; I like her. The vibe is that it’s pretty on. At some point, I mention that I need to buy a few suits, and I ask her if she has good fashion sense. She says she does, and I reply that she should come be my shopping buddy… right now. Let’s go to Newbury St. At first, she’s against it and mentions that she has work to get done. Then, she suggests that we get a drink first. Well, does she know any nearby bars? She does.

One drink becomes two becomes three (her idea), and soon we’re sitting next to each other in a booth. I find some excuse (can’t remember what) to grab her hand and hold it. She calls me on it, and I completely agree with her. “Yup, and now I’m gonna do this,” and wrap my arm around her shoulders and bring her in (dominance!). She says something like, “Oh, you just want to make out with me.” I respond, in a jokingly-hurt voice, “Hey, I don’t just want to make out with you…” and she giggles. Give it a few seconds to let the tension build, then we’re making out.

We make out and talk for a little while longer. I have to run to meet some friends for dinner, and I tell her I’ll give her a call. I end up calling her at about 1:30 AM. I suggest hanging out at her place. She thinks about it and sounds pretty indecisive, then tells she me she needs to call me back. A few minutes later, I answer the phone and she tells me, “I asked my friend what to do, and she says it’s a bad idea and you shouldn’t come over.” Me: “Ok… but you want me to.” Her: “Well, yeah.” Me: “So you want me to. And I want to. So wouldn’t it be silly not to?” Her: “Hm… yeah. Ok, come over.” I do. It’s nice. We have Thai food the next day.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, guys. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

Cheers,
Clark

 

 

*As a quick aside, sorry about the heteronormative perspective, my LGBT and/or socially-conscious readers. We just happen to be guys who like women, and so that’s what we know. Who knows how this pickup (or whatever better term someone eventually thinks of) stuff will expand and evolve over time? Everyone deserves a chance at companionship that brings them joy. So say I, anyway.

**Most people reading this probably don’t need it, but when I use “pickup” terminology (which will be sparingly), I’ll star it and give a little definition below. Like so. “Going direct” - walking up to a woman you find attractive and telling her so, warmly and confidently conveying your interest in getting to know her better. The classic form is some variation of, “Hi, I saw you and just had to come talk to you. I think you’re really cute.”