Confidence

author:         "DCB"
date:            Tue, 9 April 2005 18:22:00 GMT
website:      http://wwv.themysterymethod.com
subject:      Confidence...I started going to the gym in college and built up some muscle mass by the time I graduated. Even though I still couldn't fight, I was no longer scared of getting into one...

The magic bullet to getting girls is supposedly having confidence. With it you can leap buildings, fuck supermodels, and demand a raise from your boss. But how important is it really? And how do you get it?

Back in high school I had a puny body and was paranoid of getting jumped because of the ghetto neighborhood I lived in. Because I believed I could not put up much of a fight if I was attacked, I avoided conflict with the kids that were bigger than me.

I started going to the gym in college and built up some muscle mass by the time I graduated. Even though I still couldn't fight, I was no longer scared of getting into one. While bigger muscles doesn't mean I'd fare any better in a fight, I believed that it would. Going to the gym took away fear of getting physically pummeled. That's all that confidence really does: it eliminates fear. When you are not scared, you suddenly have more ways to respond. And a higher chance to succeed. Instead of backing down from the meathead in the club, I could stand my ground. Instead of letting the hot girl walk by, I could talk to her.

Why do guys get drunk in a club? Is it because they like poisoning their body and waking up the next morning feeling like hell? You've heard the term ‘liquid courage' before. Alcohol gives men a temporary state of confidence. They drink to eliminate the fear of having to talk to a woman and get rejected. I know over a dozen guys who can only talk to a woman under the influence. They have not trained their mind to go work through touch social situations with women. Guys who can only approach under alcohol think it improves their game, but there is a common pattern that they all show: they never talk to the hottest girls. It's always the 6's and 7's. It hurts them more than they think.

Every man is confident in something, but when it comes to women, confidence means the ability to take social risk. In the book Mean Genes, the authors claim that men are wired to not take social risk. In your small social tribe, failing with a girl in the hut next to you means humiliation and embarrassment. But we don't live in tribes anymore. Not taking social risk is the quickest way to lonely nights at home.

Several years ago I could approach lone-wolfs with ease. These are girls who are standing alone in a bar or club. But most girls are not alone in bars. They are in groups, sometimes very large groups. I'm sure you've seen the circle of girls dancing at the club with their jackets and purses in the middle. To build myself up, I approached the biggest groups I could find. Five girls, six girls, seven girls. I usually bombed. It is just impossible for me to keep all the girls in a big group interested, and it just takes one girl to ruin it for you, to send that nonverbal signal of death to all the others. I got the eye-rolls, the back-turns, the " we're just going to dance." But I did it so much that I no longer fear it. Guys see me work the room and think I was born with this ability to talk to any girl. I wasn't. Like any skill, you need to put the time and energy to get it. And once you have it, you have it for life.

Confidence is not an on-off switch that you have or don't have. It's a sliding dial that slowly changes with time. Getting confidence is like a long war, putting yourself through battles to harden your mind, and stretch what you think you are capable of. This means spectacular failure and rejection. This means feeling uncomfortable and getting upset. There is no other way to it. You have to do what you've never done to get what you've never gotten. Every man has to ask himself how badly he wants to improve and feel capable in all social settings. Or does he want to be the guy who needs to order a few more rounds of alcohol until he can say hi to the girl staring at him.