Confident Man

Confident Man A step-by-step Guide to Being Confident for Men Graham Stoney

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Getting Results From This Book This book is the result of over seven years practical research, plus another four years of hard work to write and publish. I wrote it to help you become a confident man and to pay my bills. If you got it for free, something has gone wrong. Confident men know they have the resources to pay their own way. They are not cheapskates, and do not need freebies. Getting results requires a commitment to taking action. If you are reading this book without having paid money for it, you will lack commitment and are unlikely to follow-through on completing the program. This will prevent you getting the results you want and undermine your self-confidence. When we pay money for something we naturally take it more seriously than when we get it for free. And the more seriously you take it, the greater the results you will get. Tell your friends about this book, but don't just email it to them or you'll undermine their confidence too. If you got this without paying for it, now is the time to buy a bonafide copy for yourself from the website at: http://ConfidentMan.net/ebook. I also encourage you to post a note in The Confident Man Forums to say that you are working on the program. Post whenever you make progress or have a breakthrough; you'll help inspire other guys, and get feedback to encourage even more progress. You don't have to go it alone; connect with us now.

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Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney. All rights reserved. You may save and copy this electronic book only if you are the original purchaser, and then only for your personal use. Beyond what is required to save or transfer it to your personal computer or reading device, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying, digital transmission, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. The author Graham Stoney asserts his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work throughout the world without waiver. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Title:

Stoney, Graham, 1968Confident Man: a step-by-step Guide to Being Confident for Men / Graham Stoney. Edition: 1st ed. ISBN: 9780980645309 (pdf.) Subjects: Sexual attraction. Interpersonal attraction. Sex (Psychology) Man-woman relationships. Dewey Number: 306.7 Published December 28, 2011 by Graham Stoney Cover Design by Visual Communique Design: http://vcd.net.au Created with OpenOffice.org Writer 3.2.1 Typeset in 12pt Palatino Linotype.

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For Christopher and Michael, The best nephews an uncle could have.

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Introduction

My Story I suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence from early childhood right through much of my adult life. I am a sensitive person and was deeply traumatized by the ongoing conflict, hostility and lack of empathic connection in my parent's relationship. My mother was, and still is, the dominant force in my family of origin. Highly intelligent but emotionally withheld, she was always quick to criticize and never backed down in any of the petty arguments with my father that characterized their relationship. My father was relatively passive yet would often explode with frustration due to his inability to express his emotions or to handle my mother's frequent put-downs. She would berate him saying “You stupid creature; why can't you just tell me what you're thinking!”, not realizing the irony behind her nagging criticism. Our home didn't feel like a safe or fun place to be much of the time. My two elder sisters both dealt with this in their own way, leaving me feeling excluded and abandoned a lot of the time. My sensitivity in this situation was always invalidated causing me a great deal of grief and leaving me feeling as if there was something wrong with me. My parents were regular church-goers and every Sunday I'd be dragged along to Sunday school to learn about bizarre stories from the Old Testament. Sometimes it was fun, but mostly it was plain boring. I was a boisterous kid, and enjoyed running around Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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the church a lot more than I did hearing stories that didn't quite make sense to me. God always seemed to be forcing people to do things they didn't want to do; no wonder they were so disobedient. I was taught that I was sinful and needed to confess the bad things that I did in order to be saved from going to hell. Each week I had to come up with new things to confess. My mother often complained that I never kept my room tidy, but I couldn't imagine that I was supposed to just confess this same thing every week. Keeping my room as tidy as she wanted seemed just plain impossible anyway. Over time I was gradually beaten down and learned to submit to the authority of this God that never seemed to make an actual appearance in my life. I prayed to him many times for guidance or that he would stop my parents from fighting, but never got an answer. I knew intuitively that something didn't quite make sense, but I suppressed my doubt and became a Christian in my own right during adolescence. My discernment and ability to analyze complex ideas to extract the truth got invalidated as I learned not to think critically about what I was being taught. I felt insecure, nervous, conservative, and risk-averse. I was reluctant to try new things for the fear that I might fail and look bad in front of other people. I avoided social situations that might make me feel awkward, and beat myself up in my head constantly over every little thing I did wrong. To compensate, I tried really hard to project an exterior image of confidence which left my friends and family unaware of how great an internal struggle I was going through. But inside, I felt terribly insecure, and just didn't feel how I thought I man was supposed to feel. I was so lacking in confidence that I found it difficult to make eye contact with other people, and felt a terrible sense of shame Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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about who I was. I worried constantly about what other people thought of me, even though I told myself it didn't matter. This lack of confidence in my self, my sensitivity, and my ability to discern truth from religious fiction then flowed into other areas of my life, particularly at school. I was fascinated with girls at primary school, especially the pretty ones. I always wanted to hang around with them, be their friend and get to know them. Much later I learned about sex and that there was even more fun things we could potentially do together than I possibly imagined. The problem was that the pretty girls didn't want to hang around with me. I was desperately insecure, anxious and needy; constantly on edge due to the conflict at home and the judgment of a God who was always watching my every move. Sex was laden with guilt and shame even though I wasn't having it. My basic drives and interests as a male seemed wrong and invalid. At my all-boys high school sport reined supreme. The first grade rugby team had the highest social status, leaving more academically inclined students like me as second rate citizens. I was the youngest in my year, awkward and terribly thin, leaving me humiliated to be the last person picked on sporting teams every time. I was the natural target for bullies, who had a field day with me. My religion taught me to turn the other cheek rather than stand up for myself, which just reinforced my victim mentality. My intelligence, intuition and sensitivity were again invalidated. I was very smart but was bored a lot of the time in class and didn't really thrive until I discovered electronics and computers, which weren't yet part of the normal school curriculum. ComCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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puters became my escape from the potentially hurtful world of people. My anti-technology mother never seemed to approve, saying I was “playing on the computer” even when I was learning to program and write my own games, simulation programs and even a telecommunications package. When I was working with computers, I didn't have to feel bad about myself. I could understand and master them, and they always responded in a predictable manner. People weren't so easy to get along with. Computer Engineering became a natural career for me. I excelled at university because I just loved learning about computers. I studied part time and had a number of different jobs, rapidly becoming a rising star in the industry. Each employer was devastated when I moved on to a better job, and my ability as a computer engineer was my major source of validation and selfesteem. I didn't have to worry about how bad I really felt about myself when I was being successful in my career and earning a high income made me feel good on the surface. I had a few girl friends during this time, including a couple of long term relationships which devastated me when they failed because I didn't want to marry the girls in question. I dated women who were prepared to go out with me, because I didn't think I could date women I really found attractive. Relationships with women were by far the most painful area of my life and my continued failure to find a life partner made me feel both terrible and terrified. After a particularly painful break-up with a long-term Christian girlfriend, I decided to examine my faith more closely and started reading more widely, talking to people more earnestly and scrutinizing what I believed more closely. I came to the concluCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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sion that the testimony about Jesus in the Bible consisted of unreliable reports by superstitious, poorly educated first century people who lacked discernment and were eager to justify their faith in following him. I saw their God as the personification of human traits based on the relatively harsh experience of ancient living, and the whole Christian faith as an exercise in wishful thinking and mutual self-delusion. Albeit a popular one. I decided to stop kidding myself, left the church and eventually became an atheist. Around the same time I started to lose interest in my work and moved to another company developing what I thought would be a more compelling application. In doing so I landed on the project from hell, and after three years of teamwork conflict just didn't care any more about the career I used to love so much. I was burnt out and depressed, but kept slogging away looking desperately for some way to make my career work for me again. Eighteen months later I resigned, desperate to escape, and fell into starting my own consulting business based on my reputation; but I still wasn't really enjoying engineering any more. Now I had to face the deeper question: If I was no longer Graham the Christian or Graham the Computer Engineering genius, who was I? I took up writing and spent several years exploring this question while looking for ways to make life fun again. Throughout all of this the one underlying constant was my terrible grating lack of genuine self-confidence. I just didn't trust myself and felt anxious most of the time. I was so used to feeling this way that I thought it was normal and hid the fact by overcompensating: working really hard, taking on up-front roles, performing, public speaking, whatever. But I had a critical voice in Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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my head that berated me every time I made any kind of mistake, especially in social situations and particularly around women. I was fortunate to have had a high paying career that gave me material success, but I lacked emotional satisfaction and was terribly lonely despite being highly regarded and having plenty of friends. I knew that if I was to become truly happy I needed to address the underlying problem of my lack of self-confidence. So I decided to make this my primary goal, and through a combination of the activities described in this book I tackled the problem head-on, leaving no stone unturned. In the process I rediscovered who I was on a much deeper level than ever before. I wrote this book to help offer hope and advice to other guys with similar backgrounds who also struggle with gaining self-confidence, relationships with women, and all else that it entails.

Why Confidence? I know from experience that self-confidence is the single most important factor behind our success and happiness in life. It is more important that intellect, education, career, sense of humor, looks, age, family background, social status, religion, belief systems, or anything else. When we lack confidence, we feel nervous about the challenges life offers us. We worry too much about failure, rejection, and what other people will think. We avoid taking risks that could potentially reap huge rewards because we're afraid of how we would feel if something we try doesn't work out the way we want. Our world contracts, we live a small life, and we become less of a man. We shrink instead of grow. We feel awkward and Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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social interactions become forced instead of flowing smoothly. Other people find us difficult to connect to, and we repel rather than attract the people we want to be around. More often than not we end up settling for a job we hate and a relationship with a woman nobody else wanted; or we stay single and lonely. The world feels like a hostile place, and getting our needs and wants met is an uphill battle. Life becomes a struggle. Conversely, having a sense of self-confidence makes everything in life go more smoothly. Confidence allows us to step out and take risks. Life becomes a great adventure ready for the taking. We see failure as a learning opportunity. Mistakes are OK. Trying anything new involves mistakes as a natural part of the learning process. We freely forgive ourselves and other people. We aren't afraid of conflict because we trust our own judgment. We make decisions quickly and easily, and get it right more often than not. We know when to listen to our gut instinct, and when we're simply feeling nervous but should act anyway. We become men of integrity who perform acts of courage by doing what is right regardless of what other people think. We are interesting and attractive to other people, especially women. Our world expands as other people look to us for leadership. We feel, act, and are powerful as we reap the rewards of maturity. Women can sense that we have it together, and want to be around us. Life becomes a smorgasbord of opportunity ready for us to partake in. The relationship breakdown in my mid-30's was the catalyst for me to embark on the journey of self-discovery that led me to develop a genuine sense of self-confidence. As my confidence grew and life became less of a struggle, I realized just how valuable the process I was working through was. I met many other men who also struggled with self-confidence and found that we had a Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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great deal in common. I tried many things along the way; some worked, some did not. This book describes the key steps that worked for me and that I also saw working for other men in developing their own self-confidence. If you complete even just half of the steps in this book, your confidence will skyrocket and your entire life will be transformed. You will discover who you are as a man, learn to capitalize on your strengths, and even appreciate what you currently perceive as your weaknesses. In the process you will grow from being a boy in a man's body, to a mature integrated man with a mission in life and a sense of "Just try and stop me!" when facing challenges. To make the program easy to follow, I've broken it down into four part as follows:

The Confident Mindset and Your Subconscious Confidence is a mindset; a way of thinking. A belief system about yourself. This new belief system needs to be practiced until it becomes subconscious. We like to think that most of how we act, what we do and how we relate to other people is directed by our conscious mind, but in reality this is largely an illusion. Most of what we do is guided by our subconscious, and it's operating on auto-pilot all the time. This is especially the case in our interactions with women. Our central nervous system broadcasts our subconscious beliefs about ourselves to other people in the form of facial expressions, body language and pheromones. These messages indicate, among other things, how competent we feel we are an any given situation, our sexual availability and how well matched we think we might be with any prospective Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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partner who may happen along. Our conscious mind just doesn't have the processing power needed to do all this thinking for us while also coming up with witty repartee all at the same time. If you've ever felt self-conscious around an attractive woman, it's precisely because your conscious mind has attempted to do too much all at the one time and become overwhelmed. Until you deal with your subconscious beliefs, it will sabotage any conscious actions you take which do not match the beliefs your subconscious currently holds. However, once you get your mindset right, you won't have to do anything in order to be confident and attractive. It's all about who you are, not what you do. I deal with this directly in Part 1: The Confident Man Mindset. But there's a paradox here. Your subconscious mind isn't going to change just because you've decided that you want it to. The intention of changing it is important, but it's just the first step. Your subconscious learns by focused repetition, reinforced by generating strong emotions in support of the new belief. You need to actually do stuff in order to change the behaviors and beliefs held in your subconscious. In particular, you need to generate evidence for your new subconscious beliefs. Once this evidence overwhelms your old self-limiting beliefs, your subconscious will switch and success in every area of your life will start flowing your way. Hence the activities in the rest of the book reinforce what you do in Part 1.

Mastering Your Emotions Dealing with your emotional baggage and mastering your emotions is key to making the inner transition from boyhood to manhood that will allow you to experience confidence in any situCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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ation. The memories of unpleasant events from your past that have undermined your self-confidence are locked in place by the emotional charge attached to them. Present-day events will continue to create an unpleasant emotional response in you if you don't address the way you respond emotionally to situations and circumstances. Men are routinely trained to suppress emotions in western society, and you need to start unlocking this emotional repression if you are to become a fully self-expressed, confident man. I will teach you how to do this in Part 2: Mastering Your Emotions.

Attracting Women Of all the areas of a man's life impacted by a lack of confidence, relationships with women would have to be the biggest and most painful. So I'm going to focus on women and how to attract them a lot in this book, because confidence and attraction are one and the same. The activities I recommend are heavily biased towards boosting your confidence specifically in areas that either involve or appeal directly to women. When women are asked what it is that they find attractive in a man, "Confidence!" is always their first response. Women are biologically programmed to seek out men who can protect them, and a sense of confidence indicates that we are flexible, adaptable, and capable of facing whatever challenges life throws at us. Women are emotionally intuitive and will pick up our insecurity if we lack confidence. A sense of confidence puts women at ease and makes us naturally attractive to women. Men who lack confidence invariably struggle in their relationships with women. We end up settling for partners we didn't really want, and have Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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lousy sex when we get it at all. Women become a frustrating challenge, and we can easily end up feeling bitter and resentful both of the women who we repel, and the guys who seem to have that extra something that you lack which makes relating to women so easy for them. If attracting women is a struggle for you, you need to know that you are precisely as attractive to women as you think you are. It doesn't matter how you look, what car you drive, how rich you are or anything else. Only a tiny minority of guys can capitalize on these things. For the rest of us, it all comes down to how confident we feel about ourselves. Given that you're reading this book, you've probably totally misjudged and undervalued your potential, and that's what we're here to rectify. If your life experience has led you to think you are unattractive, then unattractive is how women will find you. On the other hand, if you think you are attractive: then you are. You need to believe this deep in your subconscious for it to have any effect. Just chanting a mantra like “I'm a Chick Magnet” to yourself will not work because if your subconscious doesn't already believe it, it will think you are lying and just ignore you. I know how terrifying and discouraging approaching attractive women can be to the average guy. Instead of pushing yourself to approach women, get them to fly in under your radar where you can relax and be yourself. Put the shoe on the other foot, and get them attracted to you instead. Everything in this book will improve your ability to attract and relate to women, but I'll say a few things specifically about it in Part 3: Attracting Women.

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Life Skills and Experience Developing your subconscious mindset is one thing. The other side of the coin is the practical skills and experience you need to be successful in life, and to keep women interested in you once you've got them in your orbit. The program in this book is designed to help you develop both your mindset and life skills at the same time. Along the way, you're also going to have a lot of fun, which is important for establishing the positive emotions necessary to get this new mindset driven deep into your subconscious. Repeated success is crucial to reinforcing your new beliefs and success breeds success. You don't have to wait until the end of the program to start experiencing the benefits; I'm going to have you practicing the life skills you need to become interesting to women in the very environments where they go while they are subconsciously (or even consciously!) searching for a partner. I'll cover these in Part 4: Life Skills and Experience. I have listed the activities in each part of this book in roughly the order that I recommend you start them, but you don't have to stick to this order. You should work on at least one step from each part in parallel. It doesn't really matter where you start; what matters is that you start. Most of the steps will take some time to complete and the skills some time to learn. Many can be done in parallel, provided you don't overload yourself. You don't have to learn every skill I suggest in Part 4. For example, if you simply Learn to Play Music (Skill 7), Join a Band (Skill 12) and Change Your Profession (Skill 22) to become a musician you are certain to attract more women just with these three Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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activities alone. In some cases there are dependencies. For instance, if you Learn to Speak French (Skill 10), you'll find it easier to Travel Overseas (Skill 15) to France. And you'll find it easier to Join a Band (Skill 12) if you Learn to Play Music (Skill 7) first. But even these dependencies aren't hard and fast: There's no faster way to learn a new language than to turn up on the country's doorstep, and plenty of bands have started when a bunch of friends who couldn't play for peanuts got together and said “Hey, let's learn to play music together!”. The skills from Part 4 that you choose to develop will reflect your own personality, but you may find you have to try a few in order to discover which ones really suit you. Given that like attracts like, there's a good chance that if you're not currently brimming with confidence and success with women, your current group of buddies probably aren't either. I recommend your encourage your male friends to transform their lives by telling them about this book and about the work you're doing on yourself. You've embarked on an exciting journey, and are in for a really fun ride. I look forward to hearing your success stories so please post on The Confident Man Forums as you start having breakthroughs. If you have any questions, send them through too. Let's get cracking! Here's to your success, Email: [email protected] Creator of The Confident Man Project Web: http://ConfidentMan.net

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Contents Introduction...........................................................................................6

Part 1: The Confident Man Mindset Step 1: Make a Commitment.............................................................24 Step 2: Take Responsibility For Everything In Your Life..............28 Step 3: Stop Trying To Make People Like You................................32 Step 4: Quieten Your Inner Critic.....................................................39 Step 5: Quit Worrying What Other People Think..........................48 Step 6: Avoid Comparing Yourself to Other Guys.........................52 Step 7: Connect With Your Father....................................................55 Step 8: Forgive Your Mother.............................................................61 Step 9: Take Yourself Less Seriously................................................68 Step 10: Question Your Childhood Religion...................................71 Step 11: Change Your Thinking........................................................80

Part 2: Mastering Your Emotions Step 12: Ditch Your Emotional Baggage..........................................85 Step 13: Drain Your Sadness..............................................................91 Step 14: Heal Your Shame..................................................................94 Step 15: Master Your Fear................................................................100 Step 16: Get In Touch With Your Anger........................................110 Step 17: Learn to Love Yourself......................................................117 Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Part 3: Attracting Women Skill 1: Learn to Dance.....................................................................123 Skill 2: Learn To Flirt........................................................................130 Skill 3: Study the Art of Seduction.................................................134 Skill 4: Get Some New Clothes.......................................................157 Skill 5: Get a Personal Trainer.........................................................163 Skill 6: Get Your Teeth Straightened..............................................166 Skill 7: Learn to Play Music.............................................................168 Skill 8: Learn to Cook.......................................................................174 Skill 9: Get Into Art...........................................................................179 Skill 10: Learn to Speak French.......................................................186 Skill 11: Take Singing Lessons.........................................................189 Skill 12: Join a Band..........................................................................192

Part 4: Life Skills and Experience Skill 13: Do A Course at Community College..............................196 Skill 14: Learn Sign Language.........................................................199 Skill 15: Travel Overseas..................................................................204 Skill 16: Take up a Sport You Love.................................................208 Skill 17: Get a Motorbike..................................................................210 Skill 18: Get Your Own Place..........................................................218 Skill 19: Do an Acting Course.........................................................222 Skill 20: Get On Stage in Community Theater..............................226 Skill 21: Learn The Art of Public Speaking....................................232 Skill 22: Change Your Profession....................................................235 Skill 23: Invest in the Stock Market................................................241 Skill 24: Start Your Own Business..................................................244 Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Appendix The Next Step: Other Resources.....................................................248 Conclusion.........................................................................................252 Credits................................................................................................254

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Health Warning and Disclaimer Do Not Attempt To Do Everything Recommended By This Book All At Once! It took me about 7 years to do every step and learn every skill that this book suggests, and even then I ran myself ragged and ended up with chronic fatigue for over three years. So take it easy for your-chosen-deity's sake. You won't be much use to anybody if you're lying two feet under pushing up daises. Sure, girls love you to provide them with flowers and all, but not when they're growing out of your decaying nutrients. I disclaim all responsibility for any injury or misfortune that may happen as a result of you following the program outlined in this book. This book is provided for your entertainment purposes only and is not intended to give advice on your physical, psychological, mental, financial or reproductive health. You retain all responsibility arising from whatever you choose to do with the information in this book. So take your time, start with the steps that appeal to you most, and pay special attention to Step 2: Take Responsibility For Everything In Your Life.

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Step 1: Make a Commitment When we lack confidence, we often shy away from making commitments. We hold out for a better offer, we worry that we may be committing to the wrong thing, and we fear the consequences of making a bad choice. We don't trust our intuition, worry about getWhat To Do ting it wrong, and are afraid of miss• Spend an average of ing out on something better. half an hour a day All these fears are examples of boyover the next year on ish scarcity thinking: that there's not this program enough of whatever we want in life • Tell at least one to go around, so we can't afford to friend about the risk missing out in the future by program committing to the wrong thing now. • Join the Confident And we don't want to get stuck wastMan community ing time and energy on something that doesn't end up perfectly the way • Start setting goals, we would have liked. making and keeping commitments The obvious problem with failing to commit to things is that we miss out on enjoying the benefits that would would have got by taking a commitment on and following it through. We lose the ability to make decisions, and this undermines our self-confidence even further. It becomes a vicious cycle. The remedy is to start thinking and acting like a man instead of a boy: to start making commitments, and to following through on Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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them. Practice making decisions more rapidly, and spend less time agonizing over them. Set goals for yourself and honor them. This is particularly important if you're a person who avoids setting goals and making commitments because you're afraid that you'll fail or that you won't follow through on them. Follow through on what you tell other people you are going to do; and if you decide not to honor a particular commitment, be straight with the other people that it affects and be clear with both them and yourself as to why. Your first step is to make a commitment to yourself to follow the program in this book. Many of us are looking for quick fixes to our problems, but there are no quick fixes in real life. If there is a quick fix to lacking self-confidence, I certainly haven't found it yet. In my experience, building self-confidence requires stepping slightly outside our comfort zone on a regular basis, gradually expanding that comfort zone each time we achieve a win doing something new. Making a significant and lasting difference requires a commitment to doing this repeatedly every day over a long period of time. Continuing to want a quick fix is just more boyish thinking which won't lead you to becoming a mature, confident man. Nor will simply reading this book. But committing to taking the actions outlined in the program it contains certainly will. So set aside an average of half an hour each day over the next year to put the program into practice. Review the bonus material that came with this book, read the other books I recommend, and follow the action steps. If you do this, by this time next year you will have completely transformed your life and the way you feel about it. Take a moment to imagine how fantastic you are going

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to feel this time next year, and start feeling excited about making the commitment that's going to get you there. Making a significant new commitment like this means giving up something else that was filling that space in your life before. Chances are that with slightly better time management you can find a half hour each day without too much trouble, but it may mean giving up half an hour of blobbing out in front of the television watching mindless brain-numbing drivel each night. Or getting up half an hour earlier. Or What To Avoid spending less time with the loser friends you keep seeking approval • Setting unrealistic goals from that actually just hold you back in life, and swapping them for • Making new friends who inspire you to unsustainable reach new heights. The more imcommitments portant the thing you give up, the • People who resist or greater your level of commitment criticize your efforts will be and the stronger your conto improve your life fidence will grow. Telling other people about goals we set ourselves inspires them and helps keep us accountable which makes it much more likely that we will succeed. Nothing can have a more powerful supportive effect on your commitment to your transformation than having your buddies also transforming their lives at the same time. So before you give your current buddies the flick and ride off into the sunset, pick at least one friend who you think could benefit from greater confidence and is also open to improving his life. Tell them about this book and about what you're doing, point them to the Confident Man Project website and encourage him to get a copy and begin working on Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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the program himself. Compare notes as you go along and be there to support each other when things aren't working out. Join the Confident Man community online at http://ConfidentMan.net/forums and begin telling other men about the goals that you are setting yourself, and about your successes and failures in aiming for those goals. There are no failures in life really, just learning opportunities. Other men can learn from your experience just as you are now learning from mine. So share what you've learned with other people on the Confident Man forums, and together we can all get where we want to be in life much more quickly and easily than we can doing it alone.

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Step 2: Take Responsibility For Everything In Your Life There are only two ways to live your life: by taking responsibility for yourself, or by remaining a victim. Being a victim is disempowering, depressing and ultimately soul destroying. Yet this is what most What To Do people do. Although they would • Take full never admit it to themselves, many Responsibility for men live their lives in victim mode Each and Every Area because they are afraid of taking full of Your Life responsibility for everything in their • Look for own lives. Opportunities to Boys play victim by blaming other Take Advantage of people or circumstances when things • The Landmark go wrong. Men take responsibility Forum for whatever happens to them because they have the confidence to know that no matter what happens, they can handle it. Playing victim is so tempting because it allows us to avoid feeling bad about ourselves when things go wrong. Rather than recognizing that we are the major contributor to our failures, we shift the blame to someone else. This is partly because we don't know how to manage our distressing feelings, which I'll deal with in detail in Part 2, and partly because we are afraid of what other people think, which I'll deal with in Step 5. We've also received criticism for failing in the past and grown up with the noCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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tion that failure is a bad thing, instead of seeing it as simply a learning opportunity. The fear of failure is the driving force behind why we don't take responsibility for our lives. To do so means dealing with the ugly side of our lives that we often would rather avoid. Confident men aren't afraid of taking responsibility because they are prepared to deal with the truth that they discover about themselves when they do so. The truth that many of us avoid is that we are 100% responsible for the present circumstances of our lives. No matter what has happened to us in the past, no matter how badly we have been treated, how badly we have suffered, how deeply traumatized we have been, or how cruel a blow life has dealt us, we are completely responsible for how we have reacted to these events and hence for where we have ended up. Conventional Psychology teaches that the way we are now is a result of our genetic predispositions combined with everything that has happened to us in the past; but this makes us a victim of circumstances. A more powerful truth is that the way we are now is a function of where we see ourselves heading in the future. We alone are responsible for the future that we create for ourselves, and for taking the steps we need to take to get there. Any time we blame other people or external circumstances for things we don't like, we play victim. Often when we get angry with other people, it's because we have a victim mentality rather than a responsibility mentality. The one caveat here is that men who lack confidence often also lack the ability to express their righteous anger, meaning you probably have the opposite problem and aren't getting angry enough. I'll deal with this in more Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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detail in Step 16. Righteous anger is good and powerful; but victim anger is a disempowering waste of our energy. I have no doubt that at some point in your life, an injustice has been done to you. Life is not fair. To continue to expect or even want life to be fair is simply to perpetuate boyish thinking. The fact that life is not fair as actually an advantage to the mature man who understands this: if life were uniformly fair, there would be no way to improve your personal circumstances or the circumstances of other people you care about. You would be stuck with the average of what is. But because life is not fair, you have an unfair opportunity to learn new things, and to take action to improve both your circumstances and the lot of those around you. You can create the life you want, and if you have your wits about you it will be a better life than what you would have if life were uniformly fair. But you must be willing to do the hard work of getting there and the vital step is taking responsibility for yourself. Any time we think “That's not fair!”, we've simply regressed back to childhood thinking. The remedy is to replace this thought with “How am I responsible for this?” and to look for opportunities to take advantage of in our circumstances instead of playing victim to them. When you learn to accept that the responsibility for everything in your life lies with you and quit blaming other people and circumstances for things you don't like, you will have huge breakthroughs in your life, particularly in your relationships with other people and especially with women. The most powerful way I've found for driving home the power of responsibility is a course called The Landmark Forum. The folks Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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from Landmark Education will slap you about the head until you get it. They will point out in no uncertain terms that you and you alone are responsible for everything in your life. Along the way, they'll give you the opportunity to get in touch with the people in your life and repair some of the damage you've been unwittingly doing. This workshop is run all over the planet, so there's no excuse for you not getting along to it. There is a hole in Landmark's education because they ignore the importance of emotional healing, but I'll deal with that in Part 2. Dealing with your emoWhat To Avoid tions will prevent you getting stuck • Playing Victim living in an endless round of their • Saying “It's Not seminars. Don't worry when your Fair!” friends tell you that you've joined a cult, just say “Yeah, but at least it's • Scientology not Scientology!” Stop blaming other people when things go wrong. Drop your defensiveness and accept responsibility for your faults and failings. Quit blaming your parents for your shitty childhood, your domineering mother for crushing your self-confidence, or your ineffective father for not being able to teach you by example to be a man. Perhaps that happened, perhaps not; it doesn't matter. Only you are responsible for where your life is right now, and where you want to go with it in the future. To truly understand this is a major step towards being a powerful, confident man.

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Step 3: Stop Trying To Make People Like You The big mistake many guys make is trying to make other people like them. We self-censor what we say and do to avoid offending other people because we want them to think that we are a nice guy, and mistakenly think this will make us appealing to women. But What To Do the truth is that the more you try to • Relax! make other people like you, the less • Learn to meditate they do. • Chill out

Approval-seeking behavior comes across as insincere, fake, needy and • Be yourself desperate. Nothing repels a woman • Read No More Mr sexually like desperation and neediNice Guy by Dr ness. The survival of the species deRobert A. Glover pends on you getting your end in, so I know how powerful this craving can be, but keep it in your pants until the time is right if you want to enjoy the feeling of having a bevy of gorgeous women around you. You will blow your chances with women every time if you come across as desperate. Women are much more skilled than us men are at discerning a person's emotions and motives. Sure, all us guys have cravings for sex at times. Women get them too. But put that desperate craving out there for all to see, and the ladies will run a mile when they see you approaching.

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A big part of the problem is that as children we got invalidated and criticized when we simply relaxed and acted naturally. At the same time, we learned ineffective ways of relating to other people and then assumed that we needed to try harder when what we were doing didn't seem to work work. The way we learn to relate to women has its roots in the childhood lessons we learned from our parents. Although they most likely loved you and wanted you to be happy, your parents had their own reasons for being uncomfortable with you being free to really be yourself. To your father, your burgeoning sexuality was a threat. Each generation grows stronger than the previous one as evolution progresses, and unless your father was particularly insightful and confident in his own position as the man of the house he may have subconsciously encouraged you to hold back on being who you really are lest it be a threat to him. I'll talk more about your connection with him in Step 7. Your mother probably wasn't so keen on you expressing the real you either, because in truth you are an incredibly powerful sexual being. When you turned from a boy into a man, the love that she felt for you all started to become a bit weird to her in a Freudian sort of way. So chances are she encouraged you to suppress, rather than to express, the sexual side of your masculinity. She also probably taught you to treat women with respect, and to be nice to them. She was right in a way, but you may well have taken it too far. Just being “nice” all the time gets boring to women pretty quickly because it's neither very much fun nor very exciting.

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The more attractive a woman is to us, the nicer we often try to be around her, thinking it will get her to like us. Problem is, being nice all the time diffuses attraction and kills sexual tension. If you've lived your whole life so far without attracting the women you're interested in, there's a good chance that you've come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with you. You may well have resorted to all sorts of strategies to present a fake persona to women; one which you think will be more favorable to them than the real you. But women love guys who are real. They want the real you. Your existing inhibitions get in the way of attracting women because they prevent you from being free to be the person that you really are. When people talk about guys who have lots of “confidence”, what they really mean is guys who are simply comfortable being themselves. They don't have anything you don't have; they're just not racked with inhibition and worried about what other people think of them all the time. You may be reluctant to really speak your mind or be playful and fun around attractive women because you're afraid that you might lose or offend them. And you're right: you will probably offend and end up losing some women. But you would have lost those particular women anyway, and there are plenty more fish in the sea. When you are prepared to let go of your attachment to getting what you want from a woman and are willing to lose her, you will find yourself much more able to relax and relate to her in a way which is more fun and playful for both of you. Trying too hard to avoid offending people just limits you to safe, boring territory where you're not particularly interesting or attractive; you're just like every other guy. Avoiding offending Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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people is a defense mechanism we use to avoid having to deal with the possible pain of rejection, which I'll talk more about in Step 17 Take a long hard look at how much of the time and mental energy you expend during your conversations with other people is really just focused on trying to get them to like you. Consider how often the statements you make are defensive ones intended to ensure that they don't think you're a bad person. Any time you feel the need to be defensive, stop yourself. Try throwing a fun, playful tease back at the other person or just smile mischievously instead. Trying to make other people like us not only backfires in our relationships with everyone else, it also sends our brains a constant reminder that we need other people's approval all the time. We end up caught in a viscous cycle of self-reinforcing low selfesteem. The keys to breaking the cycle are to decide to stop reinforcing this need by no longer seeking other people's approval, and to Learn to Love Yourself as I'll describe in Step 17. Persistent cases of approval-seeking behavior are often indications of Nice Guy Syndrome. As a recovering Nice Guy myself, I know this condition all too well. It is characterized by: • Constantly seeking approval and validation from other people. • Trying to make other people like you. • Worrying too much what other people think. • Avoiding conflict. • Worrying about offending other people.

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• Trying really hard not to upset people. • Taking responsibility for other people's feelings. • Apologizing for other people's feelings of upset. • Not allowing yourself to feel or express anger. • Not asking for what you really want. • Not speaking up for yourself. • Avoiding rejection. • Feeling like you are never good enough. • Believing that if you just try harder to please people, they will give you what you want without you having to ask. • Telling people what you think they want to hear. • Avoiding feelings of shame by not exposing thoughts, feelings or desires you think are morally unacceptable. • Pandering to the lowest common conservative denominator. If this list resonates with you, and in particular if the thought of rejection chills you to the core, there's a good chance that you're suffering from Nice Guy Syndrome. The bitter irony here is that many of the beliefs of the Nice Guy mindset turn out to be the complete opposite of the truth. For example, women are attracted to men who are interesting; even if they are sometimes offensive. Girls hang out with bad guys because they are exciting, even if though they don't always approve of their behavior. You are much more likely to lose a woman by boring her with your fake blandness than you are by offending her.

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Underlying Nice Guy Syndrome is generally a web of anxiety about being your true self. Liberating yourself from this anxiety will yield massive benefits to your confidence. Anxiety is often associated with unprocessed emotional baggage, which we'll deal with in Step 12. You don't have to be Mr Perfect to attract women; in fact, to even try is counter-productive. There is nothing wrong with the real you. Trying to get women to like you will get you slayed, it will not get you laid. So stop trying to What To Avoid get people to like you, and start learning how to have fun and enjoy • Being desperate life without rating your success in • Trying too hard life by whether you managed to • Trying to get people pick up that hot blond you saw last to like you night. Attracting women isn't about what you do, it's about who you are being. Who you are inside right now is just fine; you don't have to change that one iota. What you do need to do is unlearn some of the things you've been taught about the way to relate to women, and remove the inhibitions that prevent the real you from shining your light to the world. It may take some time for you to chill out to the point where your desperation is not showing. I know the goal of hooking women is important to you and all, but calm down, take a deep breath and plunge into the activities I recommend in Parts 3 & 4 of this book for their own sake. Do them primarily because they are good fun, rather than because you're desperate to hook up this Saturday night. When women notice your easy-going demeanor and feel comfortable around you, you'll start attracting Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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more women and then others will also want to get to know you so they can find out what all the fuss is about for themselves. Love yourself and your life, develop some interests that women find appealing too and they will start flowing your way. That's what the rest of this book is all about.

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Step 4: Quieten Your Inner Critic “The harder you try to change your self, the stronger it [your Inner Critic] gets. Try to please it, and it will grow. The answer is to learn how not to play … the critic game.” Hal and Sidra Stone, Embracing Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic is that voice inside your head that warns you about the impending risks and dangers of what you are doing, or what you are about to do. It's the voice that tells you “I'm not good enough, I won't get that job” when you see your dream job in the paper or “She's not going to go for a guy like me!” when you see an attractive woman at a party. So you don't apply, or you don't approach. You play life small and safe instead. The critic is like an internalized parental voice which developed in your childhood with the purpose of protecting you from danger, rejection, or the pain of embarrassment by dissuading you from getting into “dangerous” situations. It may even sound like the voice of one of your parents. It is a carry-over from when you were younger and more vulnerable, and its original purpose was to protect you from pain. You won't have to deal with the pain of being told that you've missed out on your dream job at the interview if your critic has talked you out of even applying. And if you don't talk to the woman at the party, you don't have to face the possible pain of being brushed off or ignored by her and feeling like a loser.

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However, in its motivation to avoid short-term pain, your critic can end up causing you enormous problems in the longer term. Avoiding interviews will leave you unemployed, and avoiding women will leave you single and lonely. Each of these can add up to much greater suffering than the short-term pain that your critic was trying to save you and your inner child from. As an adult it can be a right pain in the ass, so it's time for you to stop listening so intently to your inner critic.

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If you had a reasonably supportive childhood where you felt encouraged, loved and accepted for who you are, your inner critic probably gives you relatively benign messages. Like telling you “Be careful!” in social situations, “We better go to the toilet” before a long trip or class, “Watch your manners” in front of royalty, “Don't fart!” in front of the woman at the party, or “Let's not offend this guy!” when interviewing you for that dream job. But if you grew up like I did with an overly critical parent, your inner critic may have developed a viWhat To Do cious nasty streak, ready to attack • Learn to recognize you any time you step out and assert the voice of your yourself or take any kind of risk. The Inner Critic problem with a critic like this is that it constantly undermines our self• Thank your Inner esteem, causes us to avoid risks, and Critic when it tries to play it small in our life. All of these “help” traits are the opposite of those you • Start ignoring its want in order to be confident and advice nothing is more likely to trigger your • Develop your social critic like an interaction with a wocompetence man that you find attractive. • Read Embracing Your Your inner critic will never go away Inner Critic by completely, but there are some Hal and Sidra Stone strategies that you can use to stop it from controlling your life. As you apply them, you will find that the volume with which it speaks reduces over time, and the situations in which it attacks you gradually diminish. It can even become your friend and start feeding you positive messages instead of scary negative ones.

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The first step in dealing with a hostile inner critic is to remind yourself that the original purpose of this voice was actually to keep you safe, and stop you from straying into dangerous situations. It's just that your critic's idea of “dangerous” doesn't match your current reality. Annoying as it may seem, hating your inner critic won't make it go away; it's part of you and you need to learn to love it. It is motivated by the paranoid delusions of your inner child at its most vulnerable. The more terrified it feels, the louder it will shout at you to get your attention. The more you learn to love your whole self (Step 17) including your inner critic, the softer it will become. I have found the act of loving the parts of myself like my critic that cause me so much grief a tremendously difficult exercise. Start by acknowledging it and paying lip service to its desire to help you, by saying “Thanks!” when it attacks you, then gently remind it “But I'm an adult now, and I can handle this.” When you see that job ad in the paper and your critic responds with “You'll never get that job!”, tell it “Thanks for the advice, but I'd rather apply anyway. I can handle it if I don't get it; and you never know what it might lead to!”. When the critic tells you “She won't be interested in you!”, say “Thanks for looking out for me; but perhaps she's attracted to overweight, balding introverts. I'll never know if I don't ask!”. Or whatever fits your situation. It may seem fake at first, or like you're fighting a losing argument with your critic, but just be firm with it and keep reminding yourself that it's trying to help you; it's just working too hard and going about it in ineffective ways. Another way of dealing with your critic is to become competent at doing the things that your critic tries to dissuade you from doing. It is motivated entirely by fear, so anything you can do Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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which will lessen your fear in that particular situation will also lessen the voice of your critic. When we feel competent in a given situation, we naturally feel less fearful than when we do not. I love playing music on the keyboard, and especially playing for other people; but it used to cause me so much anxiety that my critic would attack me and I'd lose where I was up to. While playing it would say “You're stuffing it up!” when I wasn't going well, or the self-fulfilling “You're about to stuff it up!” when I was. I started learning to play quite late in adulthood, and found the task daunting in itself; playing in front of other people added even more stress. I would practice a piece over and over at home for hours and hours until I could play it really well; and then fail in front of my piano teacher. The frustration of my critic attacks was overwhelming and when I asked her how to learn to play in front of other people she answered: “Practice until you know that you can do it.” It sounds simplistic, but she was right. Competence builds confidence. When we know for sure that we can do something we're much more likely to feel confident and to succeed. We don't need so many warnings from our inner critic because we have evidence that we've succeeded before, and we'll succeed again. We're less likely to even have to deal with failure because we'll encounter it less often. This is one reason why guys who are competent around women go from one success to another, while guys who aren't end up holding back to avoid the next failure. Building your social competence will boost your self-confidence, and quieten what your inner critic tells while you are relating to women. This will come naturally as you develop the way you interact with women and Learn To Flirt (Skill 2).

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Your inner critic can launch attacks on you at very inopportune times. I was once in a stage production of the musical Les Miserables. If you don't know the story, I recommend you check it out; I'm yet to meet a woman who doesn't love “Les Mis”, and have fantasies about meeting a real-life Jean Valjean or Marius. On the day of the show, the director rang me to say that the guy who plays the factory foreman in Act 1 was sick, had lost his voice and couldn't sing. He asked me if I could fill in for him. I knew that without a factory foreman the show would be screwed, so although I didn't know the part, I said “Yes, I'll do it”; and set about learning the lines in the hour or so before we went on stage. The foreman is a lecherous asshole who treats his workers terribly. In the scene in question, he's just discovered that one of his workers named Fantine has a secret child. Fantine is a very pretty and rather naive girl, and the foreman is angry with her because she refuses all his sleazy sexual advances. When he finds out about the child, he explodes with rage at her. My role was to storm across the stage screaming abuse at her in song (well it's a musical after all!), singing: I might have known the bitch would bite I might have known the cat had claws I should have guessed your little secret. Ah yes the virtuous Fantine Who keeps herself so clean You'd be the cause I have no doubt Of any trouble here about You play a virgin in the light But need no urging in the night!

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And with that, to throw Fantine to the ground. On the night of the performance I didn't even know which stage door I was supposed to go on stage from. The actors playing the other factory workers had to tell me where to go and when to walk on-stage. Then in the middle of my tirade against Fantine, with stage lights blaring, an audience of 400 people, and the orchestra playing at full-pelt, me furiously trying to remember the words I'd learned just that afternoon, and as I'm singing them this voice in my head screams “YOU'RE BEING YOUR FATHER!!! STOP!!!”. All I could do was scream back in my head: “OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE. I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING HERE, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”, as I kept singing angrily while striding across the stage towards the hapless Fantine, who I then threw to the floor violently. Externally, the scene went off without a hitch. I managed to keep my inner critic from distracting me, and somehow remember the words in just enough time to sing them. But internally, I was a wreck. I went off-stage back to the dressing room to calm down again, my whole body shaking. My inner critic had simply reminded me of my childhood pledge that I would never be like my father, who was sometimes violent in the frequent arguments between my parents. It doesn't know the difference between a real argument and a staged one, so it's advice was inappropriate and merely added to my on-stage stress. Whenever we are stressed out, we are more vulnerable and therefore more likely to be at the mercy of our inner critic. There are some times when we just have to tell our inner critic to shut up, because we can't deal with it right now.

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If your inner critic is particularly loud and brutal, I recommend finding a facilitator to work with you using a technique called Voice Dialogue, as described in Hal and Sidra Stone's book Embracing Your Inner Critic. The technique treats your personality as the product of multiple independent sub-personalities, each of which plays a role in protecting you and keeping you safe and happy. Your inner critic and your inner child are two such subpersonalities, and there are also many others. The problem is that these sub-personalities can sometimes be at war with each other because they have conflicting objectives due to different ideas about what exactly will keep you safe and happy. In the voice dialogue process, a facilitator begins a dialogue directly with these sub-personalities to determine what it is that each of them want for you. Accessing aspects of your personality that you may not otherwise be aware of can allow you to release pent-up emotions and frustrations which could be controlling you in ways that are counter-productive. When I tried this technique, I was surprised how much emotion I had bottled up inside that no conventional therapy had managed to get to. I also got in touch with my “Rock Star”, which is the side of my personality with is really playful, seductive, sexy, and fun for women to be around. Using voice dialogue to talk directly to your inner critic can enable you to understand exactly why it is doing what it does in order to keep you safe. With this awareness, you will be more able to deal with its attacks because you will see that they aren't actually attacks at all; they are in fact well-intentioned. Talking to your inner child about how it feels about your critic can also help you resolve the grief that you are likely to be carrying about the way that your abusive self-talk has been treating you. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Sometimes the messages we get from our inner critic about ourselves are just plain frightening. They form part of a vicious cycle which keeps us fearful of going after what we want. When we're immobilized by being stuck in a cycle of fear, we stop challenging these messages from our critic in the real world, and so we go on believing them to be true. Although it will initially cause our critic to voice fears that we've been avoiding, when you begin to consistently Master Your Fear (Step 15), you will learn that the scary messages it tells you aren't true and find that over What To Avoid time its severity diminishes. • Critical People There is no quick-fix to a harsh in- • Women who remind ner critic, but greater self-awareyou of your Critical ness, emotional healing, improved Mother social skills and general self-confidence can enable you to gradually chip away at its ability to undermine you and release you from its grip. The division between the steps that build your mindset in Part 1 of this book, and those that build your skillset in Parts 3 & 4 is somewhat arbitrary. You will find that as you learn the skills in Parts 3 & 4, your self-confidence will grow. Each time this happens, your critic will remind you that you are taking a risk. As you do so, gently reassure it that what you're doing is OK; in fact, that it's good for you! The voice of your inner critic will gradually become softer and less persistent as your skills develop and self-confidence grows. This will ultimately allow you to do what you want in your adult life, rather than being controlled internally by having your outdated childhood fears continually reinforced by your critic.

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Step 5: Quit Worrying What Other People Think You cannot be free to truly be yourself if you are overly concerned about what other people think of you. Worrying about what other people think will stifle your creativity, suppress your instinctive masculinity and cause you to become so self-conscious and wracked with inhibitions that women will think you're either boring, or creepy. Possibly both. If you want to be truly confident and attractive to women you need to give up caring about what they think of you. The fear of other people's judgments of us often develops in our early childhood experiences. It's even encoded in our genes to some extent: We evolved living in tribes where each tribe member had a specific role to play in ensuring the survival of the tribe. Some became hunters, others gathers, some cared for the children while others knew how to light fires and scare away predators. This specialization gave tight-knit tribes a survival advantage because each tribe member could do what they were best at. The downside of all this was that our ancestors became highly interdependent on each other for survival and it was vital that each tribe member made a contribution. Rejection from the tribe meant they stopped feeding and protecting you, which would lead to almost certain death. As a result we developed an instinctive fear of rejection which predisposes us to worrying far too much about what other people think for our own good. This Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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is the reason why public speaking (Skill 21) causes such anxiety even though there is no physical danger involved. Worrying about what other people think will cause you to question your every move and you'll end up looking like a robot. You can still care about how people feel; that's an innate part of being human and not something that you want to suppress. You don't want to become a psychopath. But worrying about what other people think will lead you to act out of obligation instead of acting out of your deeper intuitive deWhat To Do sire to be the person that you want to • Care how other be. people feel, but not By the time we become adults we've what they think often had an enormous amount of • Start telling yourself practice at trying to be what we think “I don't give a shit other people want. Everything from what you think” as the way we act in social situations, to you see random the work we choose, and even to our strangers sexual self-expression can be impacted by our learned behavior of • Listen to I Don't Care questioning everything we do in orWhat You Think by der to ensure that we don't offend Fallout Boy anybody. Often other people don't actually think the way we assume they do, and we end up falling for some lowest-common-denominator when it comes to how we behave; which explains why so many men are conservative, inhibited, risk-averse, anxious and ultimately unhappy. We might think that we're being a “nice guy” by being so considerate of other people's wishes, but in fact we're being quite Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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selfish because we're usually trying to avoid offending people so that they won't reject us. Or we're trying to passively manipulate people into treating us the way that we want, rather than us being free to be ourselves and allowing people to respond to that in whatever way they wish. Given all the practice we get at it, giving up caring what other people think can take some time and effort. Start by deciding that you're going to do it, and remind yourself that it's really important. Then tell yourself “I don't care what other people think!” as you go through the day. When you encounter strangers in traffic, on the sidewalk, in the shopping mall, or just anyone you pass by, say to yourself “I don't give a shit what you think!”. Swear when you say it to yourself, just to make sure you get the point that you really don't care. They're a complete stranger, and you just don't give a damn any more what they think. If they think nice thoughts about you, you don't care. If they hate your guts, you don't care about that either. “I don't give a fuck whether you like what I'm doing or not.” becomes your self-talk instead of “I hope this doesn't offend you”. Learning to love yourself (Step 17) will make this much easier, because when you love yourself you're no longer dependent on other people for approval. Loving yourself is a life-long process so start giving up your concern about what other people think at the same time. This is very different to not giving a damn about other people themselves; you can still care a lot about someone without necessarily caring what they think of you or needing to agree with them all the time. Start doing things you want to do whether you think other people will approve or not. Live your life on your terms. Part of Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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the process of writing and publishing this book involved getting over caring about what other people thought about it. Some people will love it, some will hate it. My own family may well think that it's totally bogus or morally reprehensible. I don't give a shit. I love my family, but I spent far too much of my life caring about what they thought so that they would love me back. That's conditional love, and conditional love is not worth the enormous personal cost you pay for it. You can't please all of the people all What To Avoid of the time. The people who love you unconditionally will continue • Becoming a Psychopath to love you regardless of what you do, so stop trying to make everyone happy by worrying about what they think all the time. If you're always trying to make other people happy, all you're doing is making yourself, and therefore everyone around you, miserable. Let other people take care of their own happiness while you learn to be yourself and contribute uniquely to the world. Before long you'll find that you're acting spontaneously rather than acting out of obligation all the time, and spontaneity is an extremely attractive quality, naturally linked to fun and good times in the minds of women. The paradox here is that the less we worry about what other people think of us, and the less we try to make people like us, the more attractive we become. So quit caring what other people think, and get out there and enjoy your life!

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Step 6: Avoid Comparing Yourself to Other Guys Comparing yourself to other men is a sure-fire way to undermine your confidence and erode your attractiveness to women. Even when the comparison is favorable, comparisons are inherently problemWhat To Do atic because someone always loses. • Be true to yourself And for every favorable comparison, • Develop yourself to there are as many potentially unfamaximize your vorable ones as you care to count. personal potential You could be the very best in the world at any particular chosen field • Treat other guys as or personal attribute, and there will potential friends, not still be other guys that are better than as the competition you at virtually everything else. • Read Manhood by Steve Biddulph and The Way of The Superior Man by David Deida

The world's best golfer is not the best tennis player. The world's smartest man will be well and truly whipped on the waves by the world's best surfer. Nobody is the best at everything so any comparison you choose to make can backfire. This is particularly true because we often end up comparing ourselves to an imaginary persona that other guys project where we see only their strengths and don't notice their weaknesses.

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Comparing yourself to other guys will merely make you more self-conscious, and make it even more difficult for you to learn to love yourself just as you are (Step 17). Women are attracted to the man who is honest with himself, capitalizing on his strengths and working on developing his weaknesses so that he can be his personal best. It's not about beating other people or needing to be the best all the time, it's simply about fulfilling our maximum potential. Part of that is developing your skillset which I'll talk What To Avoid about more in Parts 3 & 4, but it's important that you're doing it for • Comparisons your own personal development • Beating up on other rather than because you're trying to guys mentally out-do some other poor schmuck all • Beating up on the time. Even comparing yourself yourself against a complete loser who appears inferior to us in every regard means that we're just playing bully in our own mind, and beating up on weaker kids is hardly the stuff a confident man is made of. Women will notice if we're constantly trying to out-do other guys all the time, and this comes across as insecure, fake, and tryhardish (see Step 3). When we're comfortable with who we are warts and all, we no longer have to rely on artificial comparisons to bolster our self-esteem. We become much more attractive to women because a man who is comfortable in his own skin makes other people around him comfortable too. Women like to feel comfortable around guys, so confidence makes us attractive regardless of whether we're the best looking, the most sporting, the

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richest, or any other particular supposed measure of a man that you care to choose. Practice being your genuine self regardless of what other guys around you appear to be like. As you stop worrying about what other people think (Step 5) also make a conscious effort to stop comparing yourself to other people. Learn, grow and improve yourself simply because you want to maximize your own personal potential.

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Step 7: Connect With Your Father Your father is your original source of the masculine energy which makes you a hot item in the women's department of life's variety store. One way of getting in touch with this masculine energy is to develop a powerful, meaningful relationship with your father if What To Do you haven't already done so. • Call your Father If you don't already have close rela• Read And When Did tionship with your father, it will help You Last See Your if he's still alive and living nearby. Father? by Blake Start by taking him out to dinner, for Morrison and Losing a drink at the pub, out fishing, or to My Virginity by any activity where he's likely to feel Richard Branson comfortable opening up to you and you to him. This may take time so a little persistence could be required. Don't give up if the barrier between you doesn't disintegrate on the first attempt; you've both had a lifetime of learning to relate the way you do now so don't worry if that doesn't change instantly. Start sharing how you feel about relatively safe topics like sport, politics or global finance, and then get more personal gradually as you both feel comfortable. Chances are your father has been waiting for the opportunity to have a closer relationship with you, but hasn't known how to get through to you because you're always so damn busy working, socializing or chasing skirts all the time. Take some time out to Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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connect with the guy responsible for your male existence and you'll be amazed what you might find. If your father is anything like mine, and there's a good chance that he is since you're reading this book, this step may be fraught with as much pain as progress. By his own definition my father is “timid”. He married a dominant woman who bossed him around whenever she felt like it, and knew exactly how to push all his hot buttons. He was so out of touch with his feelings and unable to express them that he bottled up his frustration until he would explode with rage, and sometimes violence towards other people, especially my mother. He was not the picture of a man living powerfully, nor did he have powerful relationships with women. Despite the way they my parents treat each other, my father still considers my mother to be the best thing that ever happened to him. This made me wonder what on earth had happened to him before. Now you wouldn't expect a 76 year old to be pulling the hot babes or anything, but what every man needs is power over his own destiny and a sense of competence and mastery when it comes to relating to women. A retired man with this kind of mindset would have powerful relationships with his wife, his adult children and his grandchildren. He would be a master of all things in his life. This isn't how I see my father, and frankly when I got to know him better as an adult I questioned whether I had it in my genes to be the sort of man I wanted to be at all. If this was what I had inherited, what hope did I possibly have? My family background is one of dominant women and submissive men, and that means that the lifeblood of masculine energy has been squeezed out of Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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us guys for a couple of generations. What was I to gain from connecting with my father then? Well, for one thing, I realized how much further I had come than my father. All that hard work dealing with my emotional baggage (Step 12) meant I was actually able to talk about how I felt; something my father never learned to do until I began to teach him. He's an ex-Mechanical Engineer with no grasp of feelings whatsoever, and that made him hard to relate to. So I had my work cut out for me but it seemed worth a shot. By asking him about his life before meeting my mother, I learned about my father's relationships with other women; something I previously knew nothing about whatsoever. It turned out he'd had a few girlfriends, none of whom I'd heard spoken of. He sounded like a naive little kid when he spoke about them; again, his relationships with girls was characterized by timidity and not really seeming to know what to do with them. He'd go to pick up a girl for a date, and end up remembering more about the conversation with her father about trains than about the girl herself. His head was somewhere else and although it was a somewhere that he was pretty happy with, it wasn't the sort of life I wanted. My father wasn't in touch with his masculine strength, because his father before him wasn't in touch with it either. His father hadn't taught him anything much about how to be a man so my father's older sister tried to fill the gap; but a woman can't really fill that role completely. It takes a man to teach you how to be a man. Given that my father had very little to teach me with regards to mastery in my relationships with women, the main thing I got from connecting with him was the real sense of how much he alCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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ways appreciated seeing me, and how deeply he loved me; even if he couldn't express it directly. Taking the effort to get to know him better meant that he valued having me around even more. One of the certainties in my life is knowing that my father is always glad to see me. I even taught him to say “I love you” to me, which helped tremendously with learning to love myself (Step 17). If your father lives a long way away, you can still do this via telephone, letters, email, and the occasional visit. If your father-figure isn't your biological father, that doesn't matter: the mindset you want is mostly a learned thing rather than genetic. Try to connect with whoever you saw as a father figure during your adolescence. If you have ceased contact over some dispute, now could be the time to reconcile and start to heal the pain associated with that too. If your father or father-figure is deceased see what you can dig up about them in terms of journals, letters, diaries, and stories from other family members who still remember them. Visit their grave, favorite place, your old family home, or any other place where you can visualize yourself having a conversation with them, imagining what they would say to you about their experience of being a man. I can't say, in the end, that I got in touch with a great deal of powerful masculine energy within my father, but I did learn some valuable things about myself and where I'd come from. I ended up deciding that I didn't have to follow in my father's footsteps when it came to relationships and that if he couldn't pass on what I needed, I would find it from other men and develop it in myself instead. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Find other men you respect and can learn from. Seek out other adult male role models who embody the qualities that you want to learn for yourself and enlist them as mentors formally or informally. Read autobiographies of powerful, successful men whose values you admire like Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity. Pay close attention to their mindset: successful men go after what they want in life without hesitation; they aren't afraid of failure, or worried about what other people What To Avoid think of them. When they fail, they pick up the pieces and move on • Blaming your Dad for your shitty without dwelling on it; failure is just childhood a learning exercise for them. They have their flaws but they aren't • Making all the same ashamed of them, nor do they use mistakes he did them as an excuse for not living powerfully. If your father didn't have this mindset to pass on to you it's up to you to develop it for yourself. Delve deep inside to find your inner wellspring of masculine energy which may have been dormant for several generations. But it's there, waiting to be untapped. Beware of not expecting too much from your father. After all, he's already had your whole life to teach you how to be a confident man. If he knew how to do it, this would all have happened by now without you even thinking about it. Having a better understanding of where your father was coming from may help you to unlock your own inner confidence even more powerfully than he ever could. Your job is to evolve beyond where your father got to Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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in his life, while also being kind to yourself in terms of how well you're doing given where you've come from. You are a man and you have the goods that women want; a billion years of evolutionary biology guarantees it. The other obvious reason to connect with your father now if he's still alive is that you won't be able to do it so easily once he's dead. Ask any guy whose father has died, and they'll tell you “I wish I'd gotten around to really talking with my father earlier... while I still had the chance”. Connecting with your father can help you get in touch with the magnetism that already lies within you, so it's worth picking up the phone and saying “Hi Dad, it's me. What are you up to this evening?”

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Step 8: Forgive Your Mother “An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us.” John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

Your relationship with your mother sets the default style for your relationships with women. If that statement is enough to make you want to run screaming from the building, don't worry: there is hope. You can choose to relate to women very differently if you deal with the emotional impact on you of your relationship with your mother. And you do that by letting go of your emotional attachment to the relationship you had with her as a boy. No matter how good or bad your mother was, there will have been ways in which the relationship you had with her as a boy was less than perfect. Invariably we all get hurt by the people who love us one way or another. Even if you had a great relationship with your mother while growing up, you need a different kind of relationship now as a man to what you had as a boy. The process of releasing your emotional attachment to past hurts is called forgiveness. This is a widely misunderstood process. It means letting go of any emotional attachment that you have to the actions of another person. It is not about “letting them get away with it”, or “letting them off the hook”. It's about letting you off the hook.

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Other people do not suffer greatly when we maintain resentment, anger and bitterness towards them. We may think we are punishing them by depriving them of our love, or self-righteously holding them accountable for their actions. But in fact, when we refuse to forgive someone else we are merely punishing ourselves by allowing ourselves to suffer needlessly and endlessly for whatever it is that they have done. We remain a victim to our circumstances; and victimized men are very unattractive to women. Your mother had her own reasons for acting the way that she did when you were a kid. I don't believe in the romanticized notion of purely selfless parenthood that many long-suffering parents like to project. Yes, being a parent means many sleepless nights, hard work, and years of constant demands from needy children. But the brutal truth is that the reason your parents had you in the first place was because they wanted to meet their own biological needs. Even if you were an accident, your creation was the result of them attempting to meet their own needs and fulfill their own desires. Once you came on the scene, they couldn't help but love you; it's a biological imperative that parents love their children, whether they could communicate it to you or not. The way they raised you, and the relationships that they established with you, then reflected a combination of their love for you, and their own self-interest.

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You need to come to terms with the fact that at least part of the way your mother treated you and chose to relate to you was based not on your best interests, but on hers. Everyone has relational styles with which they are comfortable, and styles with which they are uncomfortable. Unless she was particularly insightful, your mother would have chosen a relational style to use with you which was comfortable for her. Not necessarily one which was good for you. In my case for instance, my mother's default relational style is cold, distant, and critical. As a sensitive perWhat To Do son, this didn't go down so well for • Let go of any me. What I wanted was warmth, acresentment towards ceptance, emotional support and love your Mother that I could feel. What I got instead • Release the ties of was stoic practical support and “ademotional control vice” which to me just felt like a • Love Your Mother stream of invalidating criticism. • Read The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

Feeling loved and nurtured during childhood is an important part of any person's development into a secure adult. We expect much of this love and nurture to come from our mothers. When this doesn't happen because she is unable, unwilling, or unavailable, we can end up feeling insecure as adults and resentful towards our mother for withholding the love, approval and acceptance that we craved. Gary Chapman's book The Five Love Languages describes five different styles through which we give and receive love to and from each other. If your mother's style matches your style, there is a good chance that you would have felt loved and nurtured by her Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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fairly naturally. But if your styles differed, you may have grown up feeling unloved. In my case, my mother's style is by doing things for other people, what Chapman calls Acts of service, whereas mine is by affirming, encouraging and hugging, what he calls Words of affirmation and Physical touch. I grew up feeling that there was something wrong with me, because I didn't see my parents using the style that felt natural for me between each other or with me. I thought my parents didn't love each other, and that my mother didn't appear to love me very much either. When I learned about the different styles of giving and receiving love, I realized that this was the result of a disconnect in communication rather than an intrinsic lack of love. Forgiving my mother did not come easily for me. It started when I decided I needed to tell my parents the impact of their abusive relationship on me. Even though I went about this as gently as I could, everyone else in the family resisted me bringing this skeleton out of the family closet. My mother screamed and wailed like a stuck pig as I faced my fear of her head-on. It wasn't pretty, but it was necessary if I was to take myself seriously as a man. I did a tremendous amount of work on the emotional baggage (Step 12) I was still carrying around this, especially regarding fear and anxiety towards my mother. I even managed to drag her along to one of my therapy sessions, where she proceeded to get into an argument with my therapist. At the height of their argument as she streamed critical vindictives towards my psychologist, she said: “I don't know what it is Graham's so afraid of!” “Being on the receiving end of that!”, was my reply.

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My fear of conflict and sensitivity towards my mother's criticism led me to avoid ever doing anything to upset her. This stopped me being free to do what I wanted because I was always constrained by what I feared she wanted. Yet I was often wrong about what I thought she wanted. The whole family system worked hard to avoid upsetting her. Eventually I decided that there was a higher goal in life than avoiding upset to my mother, and I was going to pursue that instead even if it meant her disapproval and some degree of alienation from my family. Whatever went on between you and your mother, you need to understand that she was doing the best she could with the resources she had available. There will inevitably have been times when your mother attempted to control you to protect you from danger, partly out of her sense of love for you, and partly out of her anxiety over how she would feel should anything bad happen to you. While there are times when parents need to protect their children from harm, many parents don't let go of the strings of emotional control when their children have grown up into adults. It's up to you to break the apron strings. Forgiving your mother is about releasing yourself from the controlling ties of the emotional bond that you had when you were a child. Continuing to seek your sense of validation and approval from your mother now that you are an adult will stop you from being free to be yourself. There are times when you will want to do things that your mother will disapprove of, and you need to be free to act anyway in these instances. It is impossible to fully develop your own sense of who you are as a man and what you have to offer women and the world, when you are still constrained by the emotional heartstrings of maternal control.

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Your mother may have taught you that parts of you such as your drive to have what you want, your natural aggression when threatened or your sexuality were bad. Most of us don't like to imagine our mothers having sex with our fathers, even though it obviously happened. Chances are that your mother was as uncomfortable with your developing sexuality as you are with hers. She may have tried to educate you in how to be a gentleman in the way you relate to women, but it's unlikely that she was comfortable with the idea of you being sexual with women. Whatever sexual morals you choose to adopt, you need to do so without being influenced by any latent sense of shame that you may be carrying based on your relationship with your mother. Connecting with your father or with other men more closely can help here (Step 7). It took me a long time and several attempts for me to truly feel like I have forgiven my mother. It's not necessarily a one-off event; it's an ongoing process. Truly forgiving someone means accepting someone just the way they are without trying to change them or manipulate them into being different. You don't forgive for their sake; you forgive for yours. My mother still is stoic, emotionally detached and occasionally critical. She still says and does things that I don't like, so I need to keep forgiving her on an ongoing basis. I'm human too and resentment over past events I haven't fully let go of keep surfacing in me from time to time too.

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Women will judge you by the quality of the relationship you have with your mother. Dating guides aimed at women quite rightly suggest that they examine a man's relationship with his mother, for all the reasons I've suggested here. You owe it to yourself to resolve any unresolved issues that you have with your mother because they will show through in the way you relate to women. She's waiting for you to cut the apron strings and learn to forgive her so you release yourself from her control and become free to be the confident man you were meant to be. What To Avoid • Seeking Your Mother's Approval • Killing the bitch when she pisses you off • Becoming a Mommy's Boy

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Step 9: Take Yourself Less Seriously Life doesn't always go the way we'd like it to. A girl we're keen on ditches us for someone else. Some guy we've never even met cuts us off in traffic, then goes ballistic at us with road rage for no reason. We approach a girl in a nightclub and ask if she wants to What To Do dance, and we face rejection for the • Learn to laugh at third time in ten minutes. We lose yourself our job, blame ourselves and take it • Chill out all personally. We look at other people and feel envious of what they • Learn to meditate have that we don't have; not realizing that they're looking back at us feeling exactly the same way. We feel good when we succeed, but we feel terrible when we fail at something. We get upset when things don't go our way, and while outwardly we might look like we're calm and handling it all really well, inside we're throwing the biggest tantrum in the history of the universe. These are all signs that we're taking ourselves and our lives way too seriously. If you're spending your time brooding over how brilliantly your life isn't going, and moping over your failures, you'll be repelling every positive human being within a mile radius. Especially the women. You are vastly more attractive when you aren't taking yourself too seriously. Women like guys with a sense of humor, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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and that means being able to laugh at yourself. If you worry about every little thing in your life, nobody is going to be interested in you. You live in a world threatened by Global Warming, the next impending Ice Age, deforestation, environmental destruction, global terrorism, nuclear destruction, collision between the Earth and an unexpected comet, or whatever impending doomsday theory is in the news this week. Consider the big picture, notice how fortunate you really are, and worry less about the minor details of how your life is going. Nobody likes a worrier. If you worry too much, or you get upset really easily, there's a good chance that you're taking yourself and your life way too seriously. Caring too much about what other people think (Step 5) is just another symptom of taking yourself too seriously, so you can work on these two at the same time. When you quit taking yourself so seriously, a whole bunch of things become possible that weren't possible before. Women want a guy with a sense of humor who will be able to get them through the tough times in life when things aren't working out. A guy who can laugh at the $100,000 he just lost in the stock market (Skill 23) is much more likely to bounce back than one who goes ape shit screaming “I'm never trying that again!”. The difference all comes down to how seriously you take life, and how you handle the inevitable set-backs. Women like guys who can handle set-backs gracefully because deep down, women are just as afraid as you are about whether things are going to work out or not, and it helps put them at ease when they're with a guy who doesn't go to pieces when things go wrong. After all, going to pieces is their job, not yours. They Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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want you to reassure them, and that means you have to be taking it all just a little less seriously than they are. There's a big difference between taking life less seriously, and not giving a damn. Nobody likes a no-hoper. You need to care about your life, but not get all hung up on getting everything you want right now like a baby does. Laugh at yourself and at your mistakes; a little self-deprecation is charming and when a woman starts teasing you playfully, the last thing you want to do is get defensive. Just go with the flow. But What To Avoid don't be flogging yourself or broadcasting your low self-esteem to all • Taking yourself too seriously and sundry; that's just a turn-off. Remember that you are learning to love yourself (Step 17) without taking yourself so seriously that everything becomes a big drama. Learn when to take charge of a situation, and when to let life flow for you. Start taking yourself and your life a little less seriously, and have more fun with whatever it is that you're doing in life. When women spot your easy-going attitude and see how much fun it is to hang around you, they'll come flocking your way like bees to a honey pot.

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Step 10: Question Your Childhood Religion When we are young, our brains are like a sponge. We soak up whatever we are taught unquestioningly, as we haven't yet developed the maturity or analytical thinking skills to discern truth and wisdom from falsehood and dysfunction. At the very same time, our What To Do parents often feel that it is imperative • Move on from your that their children grow up to follow childhood Church, in their parental spiritual footsteps. A Synagogue, Mosque great deal of time and effort is spent or Temple on religious education of children in • Find a new the belief that it will assist us by incommunity culcating a sense of morals, values and religious beliefs that will keep us • Think for yourself on track in life and prevent us from • Read The God straying from the straight and narDelusion by Richard row. We are often taught that there Dawkins are cosmic consequences to our sins, and are shamed by our religious teachers for thinking for ourselves. This stops us really questioning what we are taught, and the impact on most of us is vastly underestimated even by ourselves. We often end up defending and even promoting the very same beliefs that have damaged us. This is all done supposedly for our own good. But is it really? The reality is that many adults never truly grow up, instead preferring to defer to belief systems devised and imposed on them

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by other people. When parents teach a belief systems to their children that they have never really questioned themselves, they create a perpetual cycle of adherence and repression which undermines self-confidence in a family for multiple generations. Perfectionism is passed down from parent to child backed by threats of eternal punishment that awaits us when we make trivial mistakes, and our independent choices are labeled a sinful when the exercise of our basic wants and needs threatens the control of some religious authority over us. You may have been brought up in a religion that sought to crush or suppress your natural masculinity. Even seemingly patriarchal religions tend to destroy a man's natural sense of power and dominance by showing you your place in the hierarchy. If you were taught that you needed forgiveness, salvation, or to bow down to some deity or towards some distant city by a religion foisted on you by your parents, now is the time to let it go. You don't need forgiveness from an invented deity: you can learn to do that yourself. There is nothing to be saved from: you are fine the way you are. There is no deity to bow down to: that's just a means of social control. You are a man in your own right, you are not just the product of your parent's values, ideals, morals or religion. Religion is a human invention devised to make life in a hostile universe seem less harsh. All major religions consist of a combination of wisdom to live by, rituals devised to assuage anxiety, and mythology used to convince new believers of the supposed truth behind it all. The wisdom is often valuable but it comes packaged with rituals which disempower individuals and mythology which has evolved over time like the stories in a game of Chinese Whispers. The fact that so many adult men readily beCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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lieve these stories as literal truth belies just how few of us really have the balls to truly grow up. The core belief systems behind all the major religions are based on fantasy that evolved to make the vicissitudes of life more palatable. We live in a modern society which is relatively comfortable and free of physical pain. We have medical procedures and services which roughly double our life expectancy, and anesthetics and drugs of all sort to ease our pain. Today's major religions evolved in a time when life was much more harsh, and people were particularly desperate for a relief from their physical suffering. Their teachings give people hope when life seems hopeless, and help deal with the devastating finality of death by spinning stories of heaven and hell, nirvana, and reincarnation which soften the blow of reality. There is no benevolent deity looking after our interests, regardless of what you call it: God, Yaweh, Allah, Earth Mother, whatever. All are childish projections of the over-active collective human imagination seeking protection and fairness. Following them blindly involves abrogating responsibility for yourself, a problem already outlined in Step 2. You do not need to bow down three times towards Mecca each day, attend church on Sundays, or visit the synagogue on the Sabbath to achieve inner peace. You can learn to relax and meditate without taking on a supernatural belief system. You can deal with your anxiety directly, as I'll describe in Step 15. Cows are just another animal. You may eat them, and pigs if you wish. We have refrigeration nowadays, and eating such animals is quite safe.

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Most religions teach a good deal of shame about the normal male sexual drive. You are biologically programmed to want to spread your seed as widely as possible, but most religion will shame you unless you keep it in your pants. This is just a method of social control supposedly for your own good and the good of community. Prudishness and sexual conservatism is rife in many religious circles, and adherents feel a sense of moral superiority due to their belief that their ideas are backed by the ultimate authority while they go about crushing your wild spirit. Meanwhile, Catholic Priests abuse young boys because they are part of a repressive system and have no sexual outlet. They are just one obvious example of the evils of religious sexual oppression, but they are far from the only one. No wonder so many men feel sexually frustrated and become addicted to pornography and other dysfunctional sexual outlets. Most of my Sunday School teachers were women unable to cope with male boy energy, so they controlled and repressed it by adult force. When I became an adolescent, I was taught that unfettered sexuality was bad. If you had your masculine energy and sexuality repressed by childhood religious teachings, you may have some work to do to get back in touch with your natural impulses and drives, and to find healthy constructive outlets for them. Man has created many gods in our own image, rather than the other way round. If you examine the character of God described in the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament times where he gets jealous, vindictive, temperamental, spiteful, authoritarian and judgemental, you'll notice a remarkable similarity to the average human being. The god you believe in is a projection of yourself and the way you view life. If life seems harsh, your god Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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will seem harsh. If life seems rosy, your god will seem loving. There is no actual god out there; it's all projection. Life is difficult, and unfair. We've constructed a social system in modern society that attempts to redress this balance to some degree, by dictating that everyone should generally get married to one partner so that nobody has to miss out. As I pointed out in Step 2, the desire for life to be fair is boy thinking, not man thinking. Our nearest primate neighbors, the great apes, operate very differently. A single alpha male enjoys all the benefits of ruling his tribe, including sex with any and all of the women as he so chooses. This is what you are biologically programmed to want too. The other males either compete with him for his position, or give up and get selected out of the gene pool. Scientists studying these less fortunate apes find signs of chronic stress and depression in those that fail to step up to challenge the alpha male. Most religious systems reflect this to some degree. Religious leaders reap the rewards of influence and power afforded to the alpha male, but do so at your expense if you happen to be lower down in the hierarchy. The Catholic Church and its supposedly infallible Pope is the most obvious dysfunctional example, with all men in that system dispossessed of their basic sexuality. This is not healthy. Part of the purpose of all hierarchies is to avoid the inherent conflict that arises because there can be only one alpha male at the top of any group. The people who taught you your childhood religion did so as much to avoid their own anxiety by keeping you in your place and stopping you rocking the boat as they did to help you find your way in life. Religious rituals are mechanisms for avoiding the pain and anxiety inherent in the human condition living in an unpredictable Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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universe. Rituals are like hand-washing to the obsessive compulsive; they defer the anxiety somewhat, but never really allow us to deal with the root cause and dispense with it. They are especially controlling when conducted in groups. A better way to deal with anxiety is to acknowledge and face it directly as I'll describe in Step 15, rather than avoiding it with some ritual. Blind adherence to religious rituals reflects childish thinking that you want to outgrow if you wish to fully take your place as a confident man. If you disagree with me about all this, that's fine. You should stand up and say so. It's about time you started standing up for yourself. You're likely to be standing up for someone else's ideas though, since you didn't come up with your childhood religion on your own: you were taught it. At the very least, if you still attend the church that your parents took you to as a child, I recommend you leave it and find a new church to begin again in as an adult. The social pressure from older people who still remember you as a child will hold you back from developing your own confident adult identity so long as you remain in the religious group in which you were indoctrinated as a child. The greater the change in religion you make, the more challenging it will be for you and the more self-confidence you will generate as a result. Changing denominations is better than simply changing churches; changing religions is better still, and dispensing entirely with flawed belief systems based on supernatural beings is the most challenging and rewarding. Many people give up their parent's religion during adolescence, but often they substitute another flawed belief system in its place. We have an inherent need for community because we Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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evolved living interdependently in tribes, and a sense of community is one of the major draw-cards and benefits of common religious beliefs. Leaving any community is painful, and leaving a religious community is doubly so. Often we have to deal both with our own grief and with shame from other people whose control we are escaping in the process. Rejecting their belief system reminds them of their own doubts which is painful for them, so they may fight you and your new found freedom any way they can. This is not easy, but it does build character, maturity and confidence. Ultimately you want to develop an intuitive believe in yourself, and that means stopping investing your time and energy in rituals that reinforce beliefs that constrain rather than liberate you; like bowing down towards Mecca, hours spent in prayer to a deity who doesn't exist, endless church attendance, bible study groups, ancient religious language classes or personal development seminars. Find and join a community based around something you find inherently enjoyable and rewarding where you get to think for yourself, rather than a common belief system. Some religions consider a renouncement of faith to be a mortal sin punishable by eternal suffering in hell. Pretty heavy stuff if you still believe that such a place exists. Fortunately it exists only in the minds of unfortunate believers. Sticking with your childhood religion may be the path of least resistance because it allows us to avoid the conflict and shame that we may encounter when we choose to move on; but the personal cost can be enormous. This is all the more difficult when we lack confidence and are averse to conflict. Confidence is built by facing rather than avoiding the conflict with others and within ourselves that is an inherent part of being human. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Dispensing with my childhood religion of Christianity was deeply unsettling for me at the time when I did so, even at the relatively late age of 35. Finding other communities where I felt nurtured, supported and socially connected without the baggage of a made-up belief system took some time. I know other men who made the transition more easily, but that wasn't the case for me. I thought that I was a relatively open-minded Christian but looking back I can see how mind-numbingly closed and narrow my thinking was. I believed that non-believers were evil and incapWhat To Avoid able of genuine love. I was both a • Taking any major victim and a perpetrator of fearful religion too seriously narrow-minded judgementalism. • Replacing one flawed And I thought I was one of the good belief system with guys! Learning to question the ideas another that were deeply embedded in my childhood brain to truly think for • Getting involved in a Cult myself and to break away from this flawed belief system was the most • The Church of difficult but also the most rewardScientology ing decision I have ever made. Many men never break away from the restraints of their childhood religious indoctrination. To do so may not be easy, but is tremendously rewarding in terms of your self confidence. You become master of your own destiny and release yourself from subservience to other men and their ideas. Often we fool ourselves into thinking that we've chosen the religion of our parents and are thinking for ourselves, when we are merely operating based on our childhood indoctrination.

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If your parents were particularly insightful and taught you that belief systems are simply ideas that people treat as being true rather than the truth itself, then your self confidence may have made it through relatively unscathed. Otherwise, now is the time to question everything you were taught as a child and really begin to think for yourself as an adult.

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Step 11: Change Your Thinking Ultimately all this mindset talk comes down to changing your thinking about yourself and your life. Changing your thinking in isolation is hard because you've been practicing your current thought patterns repeatedly for a long time. You'll find it much easier What To Do to change your thought patterns if • Resolving The you have support from other people Mindset Riddle who have more productive thought • Breakthrough To patterns, or are at least working on Success developing them. • Study NLP

One of the most powerful things to change about the way you think is to • Watch What The Bleep detach yourself from the outcomes Do We Know!? that you would like in life. This is especially true in your interactions with women. Buddhists have been teaching that attachment causes suffering for thousands of years, and it's especially true in relationships and social interactions. The more we feel attached to a particular outcome, the more desperate we appear and therefore the less likely we are to actually get what we want. And the more emotional pain and suffering we will experience as a result. The irony is that the less attached we are to having what we want, the more likely we are to get it. Workshops and courses can be invaluable for retraining the way you think. In a workshop, you'll meet other like-minded people Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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to yourself who also want to change the way they think so that they can get the most out of life. The workshop doesn't have to be focused solely on attracting women, because the sort of thoughts that make you a success with women are the same as those that will make you a success in life generally. Here are some of the workshops I've done which I recommend you getting yourself along to:

Resolving The Mindset Riddle The philosophy behind this this workshop is that your subconscious is in control of your life, and you'd better learn how to take control of it if you want to be successful. If you didn't get this message from the Introduction to this book, these guys will explain it again until you get it. They'll also help you deal with the blocked emotions that help keep your subconscious stuck in its old self-defeating ways. It's this emphasis that I believe makes this the most powerful and lasting of the workshops I recommend here. Check the website at http://www.resolvingthemindsetriddle.com/ for dates and venues. At the time of writing, the cost was $1970 Australian dollars, but this is mainly a promotional gimmick and if you use my promotional code GRASTO when you register on the website the price drops to $197. I get a commission on anything you spend at the workshop in return for recommending it, but it's great value and I'd recommend it anyway. At present the workshop is only run in Australia, so if you don't live in The Lucky Country, now is your big opportunity to head Down-Under and check the place out, while also doing something about your subconscious belief patterns. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Breakthrough To Success Christopher Howard's workshop is another way to tap into your subconscious mindset and make the changes you want to be more effective with women. Their techniques are based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to tap into your underlying thought patterns and shift them in the direction that you want to go. At the time of writing, this workshop is available in The United States, The United Kingdom, and Australia. Tickets in Australia are priced at $895.00, but again it's a gimmick. You can register for free if you use my affiliate code by visiting: http://www.breakthroughtosuccess.com.au/?af=CLA1078376 I get a commission on anything you spend at the workshop, but it's free and there's no obligation to buy any of the courses and products. I've heard of guys who go to Breakthrough To Success just to meet women. It works.

Neuro Linguistic Programming Richard Bandler and John Grinder invented a way of changing your thinking called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP is pretty much what you'd expect an engineer to come up with if he suddenly became fascinated with psychology, psychotherapy and human interaction. Bandler and Grinder looked at what effective psychotherapists did with their clients, and broke their behaviors down into programs of behavior that could be modeled or reproduced by other people who wanted to get the same results in their human interactions.

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Learning NLP will also enhance your communication skills, which is particularly valuable when it comes to interacting with women. Most women are going to run rings around you when it comes to their ability to communicate. You can start by copying the behavior of someone already skilled in the art, and NLP offers some powerful techniques to do that. Start thinking like a person who communicates powerfully, and this is the quickest way I know to get there. Read everything you can on the topic and if you like what you find, try a workshop. What To Avoid • Getting sued by the “church” of Scientology

Getting the most out of workshops and courses aimed at changing your thinking means participating as much as you possibly can. Get over your fear of what other people think (See Step 5) by putting up your hand whenever they give you the opportunity, and sharing what's really going on for you. The people who get up the front and share authentically at workshops get the most value out of them. These things work if you're prepared to commit yourself to the process and participate fully; so throw yourself into the process and forget about whether you're looking foolish or not.

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Step 12: Ditch Your Emotional Baggage “The healing is in the feeling” Nicholas de Castella, Keys to Emotional Mastery

That ever-growing stock of emotional baggage that you've been carrying around since childhood is like big red flashing neon sign over your head that says “Run away!!!” to the women you want to attract and “Come and get some more!!!” to damaged women with unhealed emotional baggage of their own. The effects of your unprocessed emotional baggage are on display for all to see, whether you acknowledge it or not. Sometimes we're the last people to notice that we even have anything there to process. Yet it's like a millstone around your neck, and a huge weight on your back which stops you from feeling good about yourself, having what you want in life, and ultimately getting the sort of relationships with women that you want. Women have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. Even if they can't describe it exactly, they'll know that there's something going on that makes them wary of you. The only way to hide this is to completely shut down emotionally; which is a tactic that many men often learn with the tacit approval of those around them. Our society often encourages men to shut their emotions down, and even many women fail to notice the inherent conflict in the notion of the “ideal” man being both invincible, and emotionally available all at the same time.

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Attempting to engage with a woman before we have dealt with the weighty emotional baggage that we all inevitably end up carrying in life is like starting out by handing her a huge suitcase and saying “Here... how would you like to help me carry this?” We can whine about it all we want and blame women for not wanting to go near us with a barge pole, or we can accept that emotional baggage will repel women and is our responsibility to deal with.

What To Do • Get in touch with your feelings • Broaden your emotional vocabulary • Get some therapy • Watch Good Will Hunting

If you don't deal with this, the women that you attract will be carrying their own complementary baggage that you don't really want either. Chances are that if you get involved with a damaged woman you'll both end up even more damaged than when you started. Psychologists call this kind of relationship codependency. Don't go there.

Now if you happen to think that you have never had any emotional baggage to deal with, I suspect it's just that you're so out of touch with your emotions that you can't see it. Nobody makes it out of childhood alive without some form of emotional injury that needs to be healed if we are to maximize our full potential. Us guys are typically so crap at getting in touch with our emotions that we've often got some work to do just to find out what the baggage is, let alone how to deal with it. Often some life-crisis like a relationship breakdown, the onset of serious depression, major financial loss or a business failure is Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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necessary to wake us up to what we've been dragging around most of our lives. The upside of all this is that once we recognize that we are carrying some emotional baggage and begin to deal with it, the positive impact in our lives far exceeds what we expected because we were underestimating just how badly it had been weighing us down before. Women are attracted to guys who are capable of expressing emotion. This is why artists, musicians, writers, dancers and other professions which involve some form of emotional connection are so appealing to women. If you find that you never cry, never get angry, never feel joy, never experience ecstasy, never feel excited or that any other normal emotion is not a natural part of your emotional repertoire, that's a great place to explore to start the healing process. Despite the bullshit you were taught at school, boys can, do, and should cry whenever it's appropriate; and that doesn't just mean at funerals, when your team wins the grand final, or at the birth of your children. If you find yourself restricted to these occasions only, it's a good hint that you've shut down emotionally and have a backlog of unprocessed pain to deal with like the ever-growing catchment of a dam on a river which is completely blocked. If you're a dribbling mess, depressed, anxious, alcoholic, gambling, or just generally unhappy much of the time, that's a hint for where you should start too. Chances are you could do with some emotional healing. There are a myriad of avenues for this available, all of which will involve enabling you to experience the full spectrum of emotions from the most pleasant to the most unpleasant. Do not avoid this step simply because you want to avoid experiencing unpleasant emotions; this is the very thing that causes the emotional baggage to accumulate in the first place. Emotional problems often Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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manifest themselves in specific life problems such as addictions, gambling, alcoholism, smoking, and using recreational drugs or religion to avoid reality. There are specialist services for dealing with each of these and other specific problems which can help you get to the root cause of your buried emotional pain faster. There is often no clear dividing line between buried pain, with all it's troubling emotional consequences, and full-on mental health problems. They are different degrees of the same thing. Most people are deeply ashamed of the idea of seeking help with any kind of emotional or mental problem. If you feel this way, your buried shame is preventing you from being completely free and this is a symptom of the very problem which is keeping your unprocessed emotional issues buried. Reluctance to approach a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, doctor, life coach, minister or other professional to begin dealing with your emotional baggage because you're worried what other people would think if they find out is a strong hint that you need to go ahead and doing it anyway. When I first saw a psychologist to deal with the deep emotional wounds that I carried from my childhood well into adulthood, I was petrified about other people finding out. I didn't even want to park my car in the car park of the office 10 miles from where I lived in case someone recognized it and worked out why I was there. It was several years before I told anyone other than the girlfriend who had dragged me there kicking and screaming, that I even went. My weekly visits to the psychologist were like a clandestine operation, conducted under the cover of darkness. Many of us are still carrying shame from our childhood, and this shame is exactly what will stop us from getting the help we need Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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to deal with it. I wish I had started to deal with mine earlier; the sooner I started, the sooner I would have finished. Us guys tend to bury our emotional baggage very deep, and often it will bubble up unexpectedly in some area other than where we first encountered it, like our health, our finances, or our relationships. Even once we think we've dealt with it, often there are other layers yet to discover, much like peeling an onion. Don't be discouraged if you have huge breakthroughs in therapy one minute and yet find stuff coming up again a day, week, month or year later. It's not that the previous attempts at healing didn't work; it's just that those attempts have got you closer to the core of your pain and now something else is exposed that you are in a place to deal with. Bad shit happens in life sometimes. Unless we have ways to deal with emotional baggage on an ongoing basis we will keep accumulating it in the future. You can't just deal with it once and expect to go the rest of your life without accumulating any more. Life is as painful, disappointing, depressing, discouraging and frustrating at times as it is joyous, wonderful, encouraging, fantastic, inspiring and effortless at others. You need a supportive environment around you which allows you to deal with emotional upsets as they occur so that the baggage doesn't regenerate. Meaningful relationships with other men are ideal for this; but sadly most friendships us guys tend to have with other men don't qualify since they lack emotional depth. Find yourself some male friends with whom you can relate without censoring the painful or emotionally unpleasant parts of your experience of being a man. You will be surprised to find that other men go through exactly the same sort of stuff that Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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you've been through and often are not dealing with it even half as well as you are. Group situations like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous are often helpful, but beware the philosophy that says “Once an X, always an X”. Your job is to deal with the pain and move on so you can have a great life; not get stuck in some perpetual support group where you only hang around with other people who have the same problem that you once had. Have an exit strategy that gets you out of the What To Avoid group once your buried pain has been revealed and healed, and into • Burying unpleasant emotions even another social context with people deeper by avoiding who have what you want to move them towards in life; not what you want to move away from. • Women with weighty emotional baggage of Becoming a confident man will be a their own struggle unless you deal with your emotional baggage. So suck it in, and get those tear ducts flowing. Be a man: pick up the phone, and book an appointment with some capable professional who you can relate to, and start to deal with your emotional baggage, and your buried pain. Next we'll look at some specific emotions and how to master them.

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Step 13: Drain Your Sadness I used to feel like I had an ocean of sadness inside me so deep that I would drown if I were to dive into it. It was the accumulated grief and emotional baggage I carried from my anxious childhood, my painful adolescence and my not-so-successful adult relaWhat To Do tionships. Other emotions such as an• Let the tears flow ger and jealousy added to the sad• Find music that ness I felt, because those emotions moves you were deemed unacceptable in my family of origin and the religion of • Watch Into The Wild my upbringing. I unwittingly substituted sadness for them as well, and as a result I had a tremendous amount of unexpressed sadness in me. After a highly-valued adult relationship triggered an enormous amount of grief in me and eventually failed, I shut down and felt guilt instead for several years until I became bitter, resentful and depressed. The solution was to express the emotions I had been repressing, including sadness. We are generally get taught from a very young age that men aren't supposed to cry. This is a huge problem because crying is the mechanism that heals the emotional wounds associated with sadness and grief. Crying is also one of the most visibly obvious displays of emotion that other people can see, allowing them to empathize with us. When we can't or won't cry, the sadness and Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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grief accumulates and other people see us as emotional brick walls which are difficult to connect to. Women intuitively know that crying is cathartic, which is why they go and see tear-jerker movies such like Beaches. Uninhibited by the shame that men are often laden with regarding crying, this emotional release is both healing and enjoyable even if they've never lived the exact circumstances depicted in the movie. It's true that women are attracted to rugged, strong men; but once they get to know us they crave connection and vulnerability with a man that they can relate to deeply in the relationship. They don't actually want an emotional robot like the John Wayne stereotype. I can remember many times as an adolescent suppressing the tears that I felt during occasions that moved me, such as a particularly emotional church service. I'd sit there in the pew thinking "I'll get through this!" as I forced the tears back down. Or I thought about some cold, unfeeling aspect of technology like how to interface a Z80 microprocessor to an external peripheral. At the time, I thought these things got me through but in fact it was really just plain damaging emotionally to do that to myself. The way to heal sadness is to let yourself cry when you feel sad. It happens naturally if you don't suppress it, and you eventually cry yourself out as the emotional wound is healed. Just avoid making up a sob-story with negative beliefs about yourself in your head as you do it. If you think it's not socially appropriate to cry in your circumstances or you feel embarrassed about it then you may be coming across as cold-hearted to the people around you. Every time you hold back tears, whether they be of sadness or joy, you're suppressing part of your aliveness. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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After years of that sort of thing, I came to realize how important it is to be able to express all kinds of emotions. Sadness is relatively easy to work with because you can feel when you get sad. I learned to recognize and gradually undo my instinctive reaction of suppressing the tears as I started actively looking for opportunities to let them flow. I found music that moved me which I even learned to play myself, and television programs and films that I could watch for a cathartic emotional release. One of my favorite films is Into The Wild for precisely this reason. I could relate What To Avoid deeply to the pain Christopher Mc- • Pushing the tears Candless carried from his family down background which spurred him on • Other people in his quest to renounce human inuncomfortable with timacy for his journey into the wild. their own sadness Like all emotions, sadness accumu• Attempting to just lates as emotional baggage if not exthink positively pressed. When we are already carwhen deep down rying a great deal of it we get you're really upset triggered very easily which leads us to appear overly emotional and feminine. Once we learn to let the tears flow, the sadness can dissipate and we can become more sensitive, emotionally stable and masculine all at the same time.

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Step 14: Heal Your Shame “Believe it or not, the natural human condition is confident enthusiasm, creative intelligence, zest, and loving appreciation for other people. The natural child is full of life and full of love. Unfortunately, in the process of teaching children rules for living, parents also teach them to be ashamed—ashamed of their feelings, ashamed of their needs, ashamed of themselves.” Michael P. Nichols, Ph.D., No Place to Hide: Facing Shame So We Can Find Self-Respect

Shame is a psychic wound initially inflicted on many men in childhood which gets reinforced during adolescence and leaves us as adults acting ineffectively in our interactions with other people; especially with women. It is part of the emotional baggage that I talked about in Step 12 but its impact on us is so pervasive that it deserves special attention. Guilt and shame are similar emotions, and chances are you recognize guilt more easily. Guilt is about something bad that we have done. It's usually over something specific, and it goes away when we apologize and make amends with the person we have hurt. Shame on the other hand cuts much deeper; it's about who we are. It tells us that we are bad. That we are defective in some way, and that we are not good enough. If you've ever felt that you're somehow not good enough for the women that you're attracted to, or that a woman is “out of your league”, it's your buried shame talking. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Shame is the underlying emotion behind shyness, awkwardness, inhibitions, embarrassment, low self-esteem and our fear of failure. It's so powerful and so shameful that we rarely discuss it, yet many men are walking around carrying shame by the bucketload. It is most obvious in our interactions with women where it prevents us from being our true selves and stops us from revealing the naturally attractive parts of our personalities. Another way of recognizing shame is identifying whenever we are fearful of what other people think of us. Shame can totally control and conWhat To Do strain our natural behavior. • Reveal Yourself in a Supportive Environment

If you are ashamed of your body, your looks, your relationships, your parents, your single status, your car, • Join a Men's Group your house, your flatmates, your • Go to Path of Love friends and associates, your job, your • Read Healing The income, your natural instincts, your Shame That Binds You sex drive, your sexual fantasies, what by John Bradshaw you do for a living, where you grew up, where you are at in life or any other aspect of who you are, it will lead you to being inhibited, cagey and/or defensive around women. You won't come across as a relaxed, cool guy who is easy to relate to; you'll come across as someone with something to hide. It's pretty much impossible to make it through childhood and adolescence without picking up shame of some sort. Some parents use it deliberately to control and discipline their children, and many religions use it to help keep the faithful on the straight and narrow. Teachers use it, although not so much these days, to help

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them keep naturally effervescent children sitting still for hours every day in classrooms. This is a powerful way of controlling us because once shame is instilled in us, it works automatically. The person exercising the control can walk away and we remain controlled by our internalized shame for days, weeks, months or even years afterward. They get to sleep easy at night knowing that you're too fearful to do anything that might cause harm or hurt to you or them. But for you it causes enormous internal conflict and stress. Even if shame is used as a means of well-intentioned discipline for our own good, the effect is long-lasting damage that persists into adulthood. Rather than being able to freely choose what we do based on our own moral compass, we end up constrained by this powerful emotion which is just as real as the fear of a lifethreatening situation; even though there is no physical danger involved. Even if you weren't deliberately shamed by your parents, friends and teachers, if any of these people you looked up to or who were really important to you as a child had shame of their own buried in their psyche, there's a good chance that you will have picked it up yourself. We can't help but model ourselves on the people we're closest to and that means we will have copied the inhibitions resulting from their shame too even if we don't know where or why they picked it up themselves. We can survive childhood with a minimal amount of shame if we had parents who acknowledged our emotions when we were growing up. What happened to you as a child isn't as important as whether your parents allowed and encouraged you to express how you felt about what happened. My own parents are so emoCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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tionally shut down that they had little chance of doing this for me. They carry tremendous amounts of their own shame around particularly around how they feel. Because they keep their emotions to themselves, I grew up learning to do the same. Women don't like guys who hide how they feel; we come across as poker-faced and it gives them very little to connect to. Connection and relationships are important to women and when we act like an emotional brick wall they find us off-putting. If you've been shamed or invalidated for your anger, sadness, fear, joy, happiness, or any other emotion, chances are you've shut down a key part of your emotional repertoire that women are looking to connect to. The way to stand out from the crowd is to heal your shame so that you can drop the inhibitions that make you look awkward and unattractive. Peer influence is a huge social pressure that can work for you or against you. When it works against us it does so by triggering our shame. We tend to hang around other guys who are similar to us because they don't make us feel inadequate; they don't make us feel ashamed of ourselves. Unfortunately if we aren't much good with women we're probably hanging around with other guys who are in the same boat. We won't learn how to do it from them and they may even shame us when we decide to get our act with women together. If you feel intimidated by powerful men and are more used to hanging around with strong women or bra-burning feminists, it could be because you are ashamed of your masculine energy. It's time to get out and hang around with men who aren't ashamed of relating to women powerfully. If you're ashamed of your an-

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ger and don't normally express it, that will be working against you too; I'll talk more about anger specifically in Step 16. The cure for shame is to expose the aspects of ourselves that we are ashamed of in a supportive environment where we can get love and acceptance rather than more shame. By doing this repeatedly we gradually re-learn the lessons of our childhood and adolescence that no longer work in our favor as adults. We discover that the aspects of ourselves that we are ashamed of are the very aspects that make us attractive and interesting to other people: our vulnerability, our emotions, our secret fantasies, our strength and power. Women love this kind of stuff but we've often learned to shut it down and this learning has been reinforced by shame. Often it's easiest to start by opening up with a close friend who you trust. Take it gradually, one step at a time. If they respond by shutting you down, shaming you more or making you feel awkward, move on to someone more receptive. Not everyone is open to dealing with difficult emotions like shame. If your shame triggers another person's pain they may get defensive or begin shaming you even more to make you stop. Pick people who seem receptive to going deeper than what you would normally go or see a professional like a psychologist, counselor, life coach or minister. Beware of starting with your immediate family as you may have inherited much of your shame from them and unless they've done some serious emotional healing work they may not be too receptive to your new-found openness. Revealing yourself to another man will give you the opportunity to discover that you are normal, and that other men suffer from shame too. It's also likely to be very healing for them. Talking to Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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a woman will allow you to experience the gratitude that women have for men who are real, and are brave enough to be vulnerable. The more you open up to existing friends and other receptive, encouraging people you meet about the shameful areas of your life, the more attractive you will become. Deshaming works best in therapy groups, because groups harness the power of peer group pressure. This is why 12-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous are so powerful and so popular. When you reveal something What To Avoid about yourself which you are ashamed of in a supportive group • Defensive People, Too Afraid of Their environment and receive only lovOwn Shame ing approval in return, it lessens the emotional charge on your shame. • Getting Stuck in You just need to be careful not to get Other People's stuck in other group member's dysDysfunction function. The best short-term workshop environment I've encountered for healing shame is Path of Love. Any group emotional healing process which allows you to fully experience and express your feelings without being judged will heal shame and dramatically improve your level of confidence and self-acceptance.

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Step 15: Master Your Fear “Feel the fear... And do it anyway!” Susan Jeffers

Fear is a major problem for many men who lack confidence. Often the problem isn't really a lack of confidence at all; it's simply an excess of fear. Learning how to master fear is the key element to exercising courage and building confidence. Difficulty attracting women is caused by feeling fearful around them. The reason for this is that human emotion is contagious and everyone finds fear unpleasant; if you're fearful approaching a woman, she is going to feel your awkwardness. Women are biologically wired to seek protection from men and will be repelled if they sense that a man is fearful when he's around them. So we need to be able to master our fear, rather than having it master us. The purpose of fear is to keep us alive by alerting us to dangerous circumstances and either triggering our fight-or-flight response so that we either defend ourselves or escape, or inhibiting us from getting into danger in the first place. So fear itself is not a bad thing. The problem is that many of us have an overdeveloped fear response or one that triggers in situations around women which stop us from interacting naturally with them. In her excellent book Feel The Fear... And Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers points out that “all you have to do to diminish your fear is to Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way”. Once you learn that you can handle any situation, you will no longer feel fearful.

How Fear Develops I lived much of my life in a state of fear. This led to massive selfconsciousness and terrible difficulty interacting with women. At various times in my life I have been, and to some degree still am, afraid of: • Making mistakes • Failure • Embarrassing myself • Being rejected • Dying • Punishment • What other people think • Other people knowing how really think and feel • Being vulnerable • Other men • Women Many of these things trace back to events when I was growing up. My parent's toxic relationship had an enormous impact on me: I had a very dominant, stubborn mother and a relatively passive yet sometimes explosive father. There was tremendous conflict and little warmth in their relationship. They were both too afraid to be vulnerable or admit to any personal flaws or Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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weaknesses. I repeatedly heard my mother berate my father for trivial mistakes; the same material dragged up again and again in repeated arguments which went nowhere. Nothing was ever truly resolved. From this I learned deep down at an early age that any form of weakness was likely to be targeted for attack by other people, that mistakes were a terrible thing, and that vulnerability was a horrible failing. Being a sensitive kid made this all the worse. Living in a household full of hostility made the world seem like a dangerous and fearful place. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy when I turned up to school, fearful of whether I would make friends and fit in or not. Fearful people aren't particularly attractive What To Do and other people generally don't • Face your Fears in a want to hang around them. So instead Supportive of making the many friends I really Environment wanted, I was targeted by the bullies. • Read Feel The Fear... The icing on the cake was a religious And Do It Anyway by upbringing that taught me that I was Susan Jeffers inherently sinful and was going to • See every attempt as suffer for all eternity in hell if I didn't a learning experience say, do and believe the right things. All of these sorts of things create emotional baggage which raises our level of basic fear about the world. Women can sense when we are fearful because it causes social awkwardness in our mannerisms and physical tension in the muscles in our body. When she sees the way we talk, act, stand or walk, this subconsciously affects whether she sees us as attractive or not.

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An excess of fear can leave us feeling like a victim. Research studies have shown that people who have lower self-esteem and higher levels of basic fear are more readily targeted as victims of crime. Other people can sense when we are fearful, and although they may empathize because everyone feels fear, it's just not an attractive trait. The bad news is that fear never completely goes away, unless you decide to start living under a rock somewhere. Even then that's not likely to work. Hiding from your fears and not facing them tends to make the fear grow. Facing your fears in a safe, supportive environment where you are likely to experience success reduces our level of fear.

Components of Fear Fear is partly generalized, and partly contextual. We all have a basic level of fear about certain common events or circumstances, and a specific response which appears when we actually experience those events or circumstances. Our basic level of fears all add to form the platform upon which the fear about our immediate situation sits. If the sum total of these fears is great enough we get tense, start acting inhibited or agitated, and start repelling women.

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Threshold where Fear becomes apparent to others

Contextual Fear of Rejection

Basic Fear of Rejection Contextual Fear of Death

Contextual Fear of Rejection

Contextual Fear of Embarrassment

Basic Fear of Embarrassment

Basic Fear of Death

Basic Fear of Rejection

Basic Fear of Embarrassment

Basic Fear of Death

Fear of Death

Fear of Rejection

Fear of Embarrassment

Fear around Women

Illustration 1: Contextual and Basic Components of Fear Illustration 1 shows the relationship between the basic generalized component of our fears, and the contextual component. The basic components tend to add to the component associated with whatever context we're currently in. So when interacting with a woman, all the generalized fears that we have come to the surface in addition to the specific fear we have about rejection, or whatever negative outcome we fear from the interaction. If the sum of these fears is great enough we feel anxiety in our bodies and this alters our behavior. Dealing with the fear that you experience in a certain circumstance will help you with fears that you have in other circumstances too, because of the generalized nature of fear. It may not help entirely because fear is partly contextual. You may be fearless in some circumstances, yet fearful in others. You can reduce the fear that you feel around women by attacking other fears in your life to a certain degree. Overcoming specific fears through activities like going skydiving or learning public speaking will Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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help because it reduces the generalized component of your fears and gives your subconscious the message that you're the kind of guy who faces up to his fears. This mindset makes you more attractive. But the contextual fear around women will still remain unless you do something about it more directly through activities that involve women such as learning to flirt (Skill 2) or dance (Skill 1). Fear generated by traumatic early-life experiences gets stuck in our subconscious and carried around until we deal with it by healing the underlying emotional trauma. If fear is a major issue for you, you may need to do some work to reduce the basic level of fear that you're carrying so that you aren't constantly stressing out to the point where your fear is frequently evident to other people. Every guy experiences fear to some degree. The key is to learn to master it so that it remains below the level where it's not predominant, and therefore not off-putting to women.

Control and Shame People who are particularly fearful often feel out of control. One way of dealing with this fear is to attempt to control their circumstances and the people around them. They do this because they think it is easier than dealing with the emotional baggage that is causing them to be fearful in the first place. But the result is that the fear is never dealt with, and is simply passed onto someone else. Parents often unwittingly transmit their fear to their children in this way, while justifying to themselves that this is OK because they just want to protect their children from getting hurt.

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The most successful way to control another person is by instilling fear and shame into them, especially at an early age. If you've had particularly controlling parents, you may have some fearful emotional baggage to unload before you can start acting naturally by being liberated from controlling shame.

Religion As I've already mentioned in Step 1510, if you were brought up in a religious environment it's time to take a hard critical look at some of what you have been taught about yourself and your world. Organized religion has two diametrically opposed purposes: the first is to help you cope with the inherent difficulties of the human condition, and the second is to exercise social control over you. It's hard to take one without also getting a serious dose of the other. Like fearful parents, religious leaders instill fear and shame in their followers to help assuage their own anxiety and give them a sense of power in a world where they would otherwise be powerless. If you had a religious upbringing which instilled fear and shame into you, you will need to start ditching some of this baggage. Stop reading religious books which engender fear and present a negatively skewed view of humanity, especially religious texts which claim divine inspiration. Begin questioning the underlying assumptions on which the ideas you have been taught are based, if you haven't already done so. Will you really burn in hell if you're naughty? No, you won't. Are you really born in a state of sin? No, you're not. Do you really need “saving”, and if so, from what? Are you really responsible for some guy hanging on a dead tree 2000 years ago, and was he really doing you a favor? You get the drift. It's time for you to start thinking for yourself. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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The problem here is that just because you've started to offload the accumulated fear and shame of a religious upbringing by adjusting your thinking, the emotional stress that it causes may hang around for some time. Be patient with yourself. Find yourself a group of people who are more accepting and less judgmental than the deity you were brought up to believe in. Start practicing self-acceptance (Step 17), rather than seeking “salvation” in ideas created by delusional theologians pushing their own agenda.

Being Socially Competent When we know we are competent at something we don't fear failure because we don't expect to encounter it. Competence builds confidence. This bypasses the whole fear of failure and embarrassment altogether. We can learn to diminish our fear of embarrassment and the likelihood that we will “fail” at a social interaction by practice. This is why it is good to learn to interact successfully with women, and particularly good to learn to flirt (Skill 2). Social skills are hugely important when relating to and attracting women. Once you feel competent around women, your fear around them will virtually disappear. I recommend you learn everything you can about social interaction and social dynamics. Read books, attend workshops, start practicing. Take acting classes (Skill 19) and learn how to interact more effectively with other people. Women have a huge head-start on most men with this, and the more you can close the gap, the more attractive you can become. If you can display even higher social competence than a woman, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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she will compete for your attention rather than the other way around. This isn't something you can fake; it's just something you need to learn.

Facing Your Fears There is a popular notion that it's good to face your fears, and provided you can do it in a safe way, it works. But often our fears are deeply rooted in past experiences or traumatic memories which need to be dealt with if we are to be liberated from its control. To do that effectively, you need to deal with the associated emotional baggage as described in Step 12. Have a look at what underlying belief is causing the fear and what other emotion is attached to it. Deal with whatever repressed emotions might be present. For example if you have repressed your anger, you are likely to feel much more fearful when under threat because the defense mechanism that would normally be stimulated by anger is not operating. If this is the case for you, focus on getting in touch with your anger in Step 16. For facing your fears to work, you need to have an emotionally positive outcome so that your subconscious learns that the fear was unfounded. A supportive environment is important for this. If you attempt to face your fears in an environment where failure is likely and is traumatic, you will be more anxious and you run the risk of simply retraumatising yourself. Take things step-bystep and expand your comfort zone gradually. Keep expanding and you will get there eventually. Find people who are willing to support you and will not judge you whether you succeed or “fail”. This is where your buddies can be helpful. Consider every Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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activity you do a learning experience and stop judging yourself and the outcomes you get as “success” and “failure”.

Don't Just Sit There... Do Something! You master fear by getting out there and doing the things that you fear, in an environment where you are likely to succeed. Or at the very least where you won't be punished for failure either by yourself or other people. Many of the activities in Parts 3 & 4 of this book involve mastering fear in some form or other, so get stuck into the activities that appeal the most to you. If there are some that don't appeal to you specifically because of some sort of fear or anxiety, then this is a clue that this activity could be particularly beneficial to you.

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What To Avoid • Taking too big a step in one go • Beating yourself up for “failure” • Giving up

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Step 16: Get In Touch With Your Anger “Anger is a self-preserving and self-protecting energy. Without this energy you become a doormat and a people-pleaser.” John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

It may seem obvious that guys who get angry easily and react readily have little to fear in physically threatening situations, thus feeling more confident than guys who do not. What is not so obvious is that guys who are able to freely express anger are very attractive to women. When a woman sees a man expressing anger, her subconscious recognizes his ability to protect her from physical threats. He seems strong, determined, able to act to defend his turf and the things that are important to him; including her. It's no surprise that boxers invariably have hot girlfriends, and that violent men never have any problem finding damaged women to abuse. They are drawn together like the poles of a magnet. Often us “Nice Guys” think we're not supposed to get angry, that we should have a more controlled emotional response to difficult situations, or that we're somehow doing women a favor that they'll appreciate if we never get angry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women want a man who is prepared to go into bat for them, and while a smart man knows Sun Tzu's dictum that the best battle is the one that you didn't have to fight, never getting angry just makes you look like a pathetic sop.

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Some guys have no problem at all getting in touch with their anger; in fact, it's so powerful that it seems to take control and the problem for them is expressing it in a manner that is constructive rather than destructive. Men who express anger destructively may still attract women but they'll be the damaged ones you don't want. If you can learn to express your anger constructively, you will attract psychologically healthier women. But there are many guys who don't even seem to feel anger and this is a problem. I know, because I'm one of them.

What To Do • Allow yourself to get angry • Stand up for yourself • Get a punching bag or baseball bat • Take up boxing or martial arts • Read Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton, Ph D. • In relationships, express the hurt and sadness beneath your anger

Anger is an emotional response to situations where someone is threatening us or violating our core values. Its purpose is to motivate us to act in such situations so that we, and the people we care about, are protected. Someone cuts you off in traffic or drives through a red light causing you danger, and so you get angry: your adrenaline starts pumping, your senses become heightened and you're more alert and ready to drive defensively to avoid a collision. That's a constructive response. If you fly into a massive fit of road rage and try to ram the bastard right off the road, that's not going to work so well. But if you just don't feel anger

at all, that's a problem. Some of us grew up in situations where we were taught that anger was bad, or wrong. We got punished severely when we exCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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pressed anger naturally or we saw it expressed so destructively by adults that we decided that it was just plain evil. As a result we promised ourselves that we weren't ever going to feel our anger regardless of whether it was warranted or not. We put a lid on it and shut down part of our normal emotions. Often this happens when we are very young while our parents are our main teachers of how emotions should be handled. We saw how they handled their emotions and either learned from their example or rejected their example and went to the other extreme. Shutting down your anger is particularly likely if your parents were the typical emotionally repressed parents of the 1970's or 1980's where every emotion was switched off or subdued. In my case, both my parents were emotionally constricted. And that's putting it nicely. My father seethed with such unexpressed frustration that he would fidget, fuss and mutter angrily under his breath loud enough that it was audible in the next room. All it took was for my mother to walk in and rip into him for being such an idiot, and the powder keg would explode. Their loud screaming matches would go on late into the night, and often turn violent. They were unable to constructively express their anger so they bottled it up until it exploded, again and again and again. Destructive expressions of anger like this just hurt other people, and that leads to a cycle of guilt and remorse that feeds further resentment and anger towards each other. If you grew up around a situation like this, it's possible that you did what I did and shut down and/or internalized your anger. The problem with this is that the pressure cooker still needs to vent somehow, and if we couldn't vent through the normal emotion of anger, the emotional center of our brain substitutes some other emotion that we think will be acceptable instead. In my Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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case, I substituted sadness. My childish thinking was that it seemed OK for me to feel sad whereas anger seemed wrong because it hurt other people. When mummy got angry she said horrible things about daddy, and when daddy got angry, he got violent. Thus began years of training my brain to respond to situations where I had every right to be angry, with sadness. Now imagine what happens to a child who has chosen to substitute sadness for anger when he turns up to school and starts getting bullied. Instant target. And the more pissed off I should have got, the sadder I felt. I wasn't taught to tell bullies to “Fuck Off!”; I was taught to turn the other cheek. Perfect recipe for low self-esteem and life-long misery. As time drew on, sadness morphed into frustration and depression. All because I decided that anger was inherently wrong. Big mistake. If you find that you never get angry, there's a good chance that you've repressed your anger and it's coming out as some other emotion. You may be so out-of-touch with your anger that you don't even feel it, and never express it. In this case you need to start practicing expressing your resentment in order to get back in touch with it. Brad Blanton's excellent book Radical Honesty has a chapter devoted to learning how to express anger and resentment constructively, which I highly recommend. When you're in a situation where someone violates your values, observe your own response and consider whether it's the appropriate one. If a shopkeeper rips you off or sells you something that's clearly broken, do you think “Why me?” or do you think “You bastard!”. Get in touch with how you feel when people do things that should rightly upset you, and start expressing your resentment when it's the appropriate response. Simply say “I reCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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sent you for ...”. Be specific. Talk about behavior, not about personality. Keep it formulaic until you begin to get in touch with your resentment when people violate your values. Even if you only begin feeling mildly-irritated, that's a start. When people ask you how you are, start telling the truth; if you're pissed off about something, say so. You'll be amazed how accepting other people can be and even how it can build rapport with women. I recently spent three months rehearsing for a musical during which I was sick the whole time. As a result, I was pissed off and in a bad mood at pretty much every rehearsal. I finally decided I'd had enough, and told people how I was really feeling whenever they asked. Instead of being repelled by my anger, women were attracted. Every rehearsal they would come up and ask me how I was, and give me loads of hugs. I ended up at the after-show party hanging out with three women: one on my lap, one on in my left arm and one in my right. I was truly shocked because the notion that anger was bad and that other people wouldn't accept me if I expressed it had been so strong for me. Violence against another human being is never a good option but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get angry. You need to find a constructive way to express your anger that doesn't hurt anyone else. Otherwise you end up either repressing your anger internally, or stuck in a vicious cycle externally; neither of which is where you want to be. Once you've verbalized your resentment to the person you're angry with you may still feel agitated. Sometimes it isn't even possible. The best way to express your remaining anger constructively is to punch or smash the crap out of some inanimate Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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object when nobody else is around. Don't do this in front of children or other people who might be frightened by what you're up to. Buy yourself a punching bag and some gloves, and go hell for leather when you feel irritated. If a punching bag doesn't do it for you, try something like a baseball bat; I find this works much better for me. I have an old lounge which cops a hammering every time I'm feeling anxious, frustrated or irritated, because I know these are really just displaced anger coming out as something else. Your parents are often sources of repressed anger. No matter how good they were, or pretended to be, they will invariably have let you down at some point and you have every right to feel angry with them for those times. If you grew up with commandments like “Honor your father and mother”, you may have some work to do to get in touch with the anger you feel towards them for overlooking the next biblical verse: “Parents, don't frustrate your children”.

What To Avoid • Violence • Getting into fights • Hurting yourself • Substituting other more “socially acceptable” emotions for anger • Freaking out the neighbors • Scaring children

Believing that it's wrong to be angry with someone who has done so much for you will push that anger deep down where it might take a while to connect with. You cannot truly honor your parents, or forgive them for their failings, until you have processed the anger towards them that you might have buried. When they continue to treat you as a child long into adulthood, tell them that you resent them for it. Be specific. In my case, it Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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took a long time to get in touch with the anger I felt towards my parents. Being free to express your anger will relieve a lot of internal stress, but it's not the end of the story. Underneath anger is almost always either hurt or sadness. The defensive protection of anger is helpful in situations where the relationship with the other person isn't especially important, such as with a stranger. You get angry, stand up for yourself in the situation, and move on. But in an ongoing relationship it is better to be willing to be vulnerable and expose the underlying hurt or sadness behind the anger. Otherwise it's possible to get stuck in a vicious cycle of perpetual anger towards another person. Research has shown that venting anger simply makes you more angry, and this happens when you're using anger to avoid feeling the underlying hurt. Learn to express your hurt and sadness towards the person who has “made you angry”. Allow yourself to feel whatever you feel without judgment. Learn to express these feelings constructively. When you feel angry, consider whether what you're really feeling deep down is hurt and sadness. Don't use anger as a cover to avoid feeling vulnerable. Learn to expose these more vulnerable emotions in your relationships and you'll find your relationships becoming deeper and more authentic.

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Step 17: Learn to Love Yourself “I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.” M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Women are attracted to guys who are at ease with who they are. You need to learn to love yourself, warts and all, if you want to be confidently attractive to women. It's not about being perfect; it's about learning to accept yourself complete with your imperfections and limitations. Face the fact that you're not perfect and will never be, and you're half way there. The girls you'll be attracting aren't perfect either and women often feel even more insecure about themselves then we do. So finding a guy who is at ease with his imperfections helps them feel more comfortable with theirs. Women generally feel more deeply than men do so this is a bigger deal for them than you probably imagine. Learning to love yourself is an essential step to allowing yourself to be who you really are without being fake. Women are much more attracted to guys who are relaxed and real than they are to guys who are trying to “fake it until they make it” in order to get girls to like them. This is another reason why you need to stop trying so hard (Step 3) and start being yourself. There's a better than even chance that underneath that exterior shell you've constructed in a vain attempt to get people to like you is a warm, funny, smart guy that any girl would just love to have some fun with if she could only get to the real you. The problem is that Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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you're probably projecting a facade to protect yourself from getting hurt, and that's just pushing the girls you like away. For the longest time, I tried really hard to get people to like me by trying to be what I thought they wanted. This was most apparent in my relationships with the women I was attracted to, and the effect was buried pretty deep down in my subconscious. I had to start by allowing myself to be real with the people around me and sharing what I really thought and how I actually felt with them; rather than telling What To Do them what I thought they wanted to • Focus on your hear. In many cases, I was shocked to strengths find that people accepted me the way I was even though I didn't feel the • Get a Life Coach way I wanted all the time and wasn't • Read The Road Less perfect. In fact, I found we could reTraveled by late better because they often felt the M. Scott Peck way I did too. • Do The Human Occasionally I encountered someone Awareness Institute's who found it off-putting when I workshop on Loving shared what was real for me, because Yourself it triggered their insecurities. If you come across people like this don't try to justify yourself to them, just move on. After a while I learned to be more authentic with women and started attracting them without even trying. Initially, they weren't the women that I found attractive; women I found attractive freaked me out and caused me to raise my defenses again. This never worked. However, being authentic with women whether I found them attractive or not became a stepping stone towards being real with women who I did find attractive. As I gradually learned to love myCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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self for who I was, I found less need to maintain the facade to protect myself. Then the attractive women I'd always wanted started flowing my way rather than being repelled in the opposite direction. Dealing with your emotional baggage (Step 12) is an essential part of learning to love yourself. If you hate yourself deep down because you've got trapped emotions that have never been expressed, then you'll just be trying to stick a Band-Aid ® over a bullet wound without ever removing the bullet. The surgery to remove the bullet may be painful, but it's better than leaving it there to give you lead poisoning. Once you've learned to exist without the approval of the women who you would like to attract, you'll find that they start gravitating towards you. The other steps in this book will give you some handy skills to keep these women interested in you but none of those skills will make up for the shortfall of not loving yourself. While it may be difficult at first, the rewards are well and truly worth it. Loving yourself helps enormously whenever we encounter rejection from women. Learning to deal with rejection is especially important if you are attracted to stereotypically attractive women because they get so much attention from men that they develop an automatic tendency to reject any advance, as a defense mechanism. You need to learn to be comfortable with an apparent initial rejection and not take it personally. Learn that rejection is about what happens in someone else's head based on their world view and their prejudices, and has nothing to do with you. Don't mistake a playful tease or criticism from a woman for rejection either; a tease actually means that she's interested in you on some level. She's putting you to the test to see whether you have Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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what it takes to play ball at her level. Rather than getting defensive when you encounter rejection or teasing, just play along and tease back playfully. When I stopped acting like a wounded child in the face of a woman's tests and started acting like a man who wasn't fazed by rejection, it was amazing to me how often women would respond with some kind of advance towards me. Not every woman is going to like you, so you need to start learning to deal with rejection. The way to do this is to allow yourself to experience it, and then process the feelings that arise in you when it occurs. Often nobody has taught us this fact and we just remember childhood situations involving rejection as being painful. We may be tempted to avoid rejection, when in fact dealing with these painful feelings is the key to learning to handle it. Avoiding situations where women may reject us just prolongs the process unnecessarily. Men who love themselves are powerful. Just look at any of the world's powerful men, and they all tend to have an unshakable belief in themselves, and lots of women in their orbit. Now chances are that you bought this book because you feel less than powerful when it comes to attracting women. You may even think that if you had more sex with a wider bevy of attractive babes, it would make you feel like more of a man. Be careful not to abuse your power. You can't learn to love yourself by trashing the self esteem of the women you encounter, acting like a bully in the adult sexual playground and turning them into victims. The damage you do to these women will end up eroding your own self-esteem rather than building upon it.

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Loving yourself means being true to your core values and your deep inner nature; and we all have the desire to nurture rather than destroy genetically coded in our genes. If you don't recognize it in yourself, it's because you just haven't dug deep enough. Your goal is to attract the woman of your dreams, build a great relationship with her, and have an awesome life together. That's not going to work if she spots a trail of emotional/sexual wreckage in your wake. Learn to love yourself first, and be discriminating in who you invite into your bedroom; you'll notice that this is what What To Avoid women who love themselves do too. • People who criticize or bring you down Truly learning to love yourself is a life-long process of personal growth • Negative self-talk as you get to know the real you • Beating yourself up more and more. But unless you're willing to become a Buddhist Monk and give up on everything else in life, you won't get there just by navel gazing alone. So make a decision to start learning to love yourself right away, and keep working on it actively as you move onto developing the skills in the rest of the program.

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Part 3: Attracting Women

“However expert a man may be in arts and science, however famous and important, if he is scorned by women in the art of love, he is a dead man.” Padmasrī's Nāgarasarvasva, quoted in Devadatta Shāstrā's commentary on The Kāma Sūtra

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Skill 1: Learn to Dance “Other guys at high school thought dancing was gay, but then they'd go shove their head up another guys ass on the football field, while I'd be off dancing with all these beautiful girls.” One of the contestants on So You Think You Can Dance

If you grew up like I did attending an all-boys high school where sport was the order of the day and anything even remotely arty was for poofters, then you may well have also developed the misconception that dancing was a bit gay. At my high school, the football team held the highest social status, and the better you were at beating the crap out of other kids, the smoother things generally went for you. You had to be tough, tough, tough to survive; none of this creative expression bullshit, unless it was the creative pattern into which you mangled your opponents face on the football field. Being rather isolated from girls at an all-boys school, I somehow thought that dancing was for guys who were a bit limp-wristed and failed to notice the fact that women love guys who can dance. How could I have got it so wrong? Think of Hollywood heartthrobs from other generations like Fred Astaire. Women loved him because he could dance. If that doesn't convince you, check out TV shows like So You Think You Can Dance and notice how the audience full of young women yell screams of undying love for the guys who make it through to the final 4. Your job is to be like one of those guys.

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Now the truth is that guys who succeed in serious dance competitions have generally been doing it most of their lives. The didn't get the idea from reading a book like this; they got introduced to it at a young age, loved it, and have been passionate about it ever since. You need to be passionate in order to maintain the motivation to put in the hours of practice necessary to win a serious competition. But you don't need to be a world class dancer in order to be confident with women; you just need to be a reasonably competent dancer. Even just being very average in the dance world puts What To Do you streets ahead of most other guys. • Watch So You Think The mere fact that you are learning You Can Dance will be interpreted positively by any • Pick a dance style woman you meet. that's danced to your In the animal kingdom, many species favorite style of of the feathered variety of birds use music dance as a way to attract their mates. • Find a dance class There is a primitive part of a wo• Learn to lead man's brain derived from a common ancestor to these birds that still responds with mating instincts to the sight of a man dancing. Visual cues similar to those relating to body language get picked up from seeing a man dance. A man's ability to dance sends subconscious signals about his capability as good breeding stock to the part of a woman's brain that determines whether he is a suitable sexual partner or not. She doesn't notice this going on because these cues get screened out before reaching the woman's consciousness. All she knows is that she's watched you dance, likes what she sees, and wants to go to bed with you; she doesn't necessarily know why. Women cannot help but equate your profiCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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ciency on the dance floor with your desirability in the bedroom, because it's part of the way their brains are wired. Learning to dance also gives you a massive competitive edge over other guys. Most guys don't learn to dance because they're worried that other people will think they're incompetent when they start, and they never get over this hurdle. Let's face it: when you first start learning to dance, it's hard, and you're going to look ridiculous. That's because the gross and fine motor skills and the muscles that you need to operate them haven't developed yet unless you've had a particularly athletic life or done regular gymnastics or something. Even if the muscles you'll be needing exist, they'll be moving in new ways which takes time to learn. And it's the fine movements of these muscles which sends the visual cues to the woman's subconscious that demonstrate that you have great co-ordination, are likely to be healthy and are therefore of good breeding stock. The other challenge about learning to dance is that virtually all partner dances are led by the man. This is one rare area where women are publicly allowed to put themselves in the hands of a man with wild abandon to let him lead her. And frankly, they just love it. So long as you can give a woman a good strong lead they will melt in your arms like butter. A strong lead in a dance is perceived as confidence, and women love guys with confidence. Despite the enormous payoffs, most guys baulk at the idea of learning to dance. It's hard, and until you've mastered it, dance is an opportunity to look foolish in front of a bunch of women. It requires persistence. Dancing freestyle, where you chain the moves together as you go along without any pre-planned routine, is roughly twice as difficult for a guy to learn as it is for Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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a girl. In addition to the actual dancing, the guy has to be thinking about what the next move is going to be and how it will connect to the current one. When you get beyond that, you also need to learn about musical interpretation and anticipating what's coming in the music ahead of time. All while keeping your feet doing the right thing, and providing a strong lead to your partner. The woman, on the other hand, needs to learn to follow, to do the right thing with her feet, and to throw in the sexy styling that guys love to watch and other girls love to envy. The whole aim of dancing is to make the girl look good. It takes time for many women to learn to dance; just not as long as it generally takes guys to reach the same level. It's also much more likely that a girl will have years of ballet or gymnastics in her childhood to capitalize on while most guys learning to dance are starting from scratch. Given that it's harder for guys to learn to dance, many give up and the resulting odds are stacked even higher in your favor provided you stick at it. Many men notice the gender imbalance at beginner classes and go along because they think it will be an easy way to meet women; and they're right. But few of them stick at it so the more advanced classes tend to have an even greater imbalance in your favor. The more proficient you become, the better the odds. And once you become an intermediate dancer you can start helping beginner girls with their introduction to dancing by politely giving them some pointers that you learned when you were just starting out. Aren't you a lovely guy then? Us guys tend to be particularly sensitive about being able to master situations involving interactions with women and this can be a hurdle to get over when you first learn to dance. What worked for me was to team up with some other women who started danCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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cing at the same time I did and learn with them. They didn't care so much that I couldn't dance because they couldn't either. Later I learned that the other women who could dance much better than I could didn't care too much so long as I was prepared to put the effort in of trying to lead as best I could and treated them with fun and respect. Women would rather have a dance partner who can't dance very well than one who treats them like a piece of meat, or no partner at all. Guys who are hot dancers are in short supply and the girls typically have to make the move on them if they want to get to dance with the best guys. Girls are completely dependent on a supply of guys who know how to dance in order to lead them. Many women will put effort into helping you learn because they know at the end of the day that they need guys like you if they are to be able to enjoy dancing. Let me state the key part of that again: they need guys like you. Think it over. Dancing will also improve your sense of rhythm which is helpful if you also want to learn to play a musical instrument (Skill 7) or join a band (Skill 12). It will improve your confidence relating to women who will get to meet you in a mutually non-threatening environment. Regular dancing will improve your fitness and help keep you in shape which also makes you more appealing to the discerning ladies. Women get nervous too and this is an opportunity for you to put them at ease with your confident lead, your attention to their needs, and your gracious attitude when they mess it up. A woman can learn a lot about you while dancing with you, like how assertive or aggressive you are, how much fun you are to be around, and whether you give a damn about what she wants or Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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not. My suggestion is that if you focus your energies on enjoying yourself by making sure she enjoys herself, you'll hit it off with plenty of women in no time. Then you can pick and choose who you like to get to know better. Unfortunately there are some nasty women out there in the dance world, as in the rest of the world. Not everyone is nicely well adjusted and emotionally stable; some of them haven't dealt with their emotional baggage (Step 12) and will happily dump on you if you screw anything up. Don't panic; just thank them for the dance and then run a mile. Provided you aren't the one being obnoxious, any woman who is intolerant of your mistakes on the dance floor isn't the sort that you want around. Fortunately they are in the distinct minority and once you scope them out they're easily avoided; but you will encounter them every now and then and need to remember not to be discouraged when it happens. The next lady you dance with is likely to be a whole lot nicer. As for what style of dancing to do, I suggest that you choose one which is danced to a type of music that you really enjoy because you'll be hearing a lot of it. Partner dances like Ballroom, Salsa, Swing, Rock & Roll and Modern Jive will get you into the arms of women a lot faster than solo styles like Hip-Hop, Funk, Jazz or Break dancing. But don't underestimate the allure of a really good Popper or Locker, if you've got the time to learn the craft. The benefit of the solo styles is that they'll build your muscle tone and flexibility a lot faster and more thoroughly than the partner styles. You'd have a hard time staying out of shape when you're Crumping regularly. And many solo moves can be incorporated into solo sections of partner dance styles, like throwing a little Hip-Hop into your Salsa shines to impress your partner and the other ladies in the room. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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It doesn't matter too much which style you start with. A Ballroom hold is the same in any style, and you'll impress the girls no end if you turn up to a beginner class in a style you've never done before but have already mastered basic hold positions and got the tension right in your lead. They'll think you're a super-fast learner and must be really smart; which appeals to most women's intelligence and again to their mating selection criteria. I have hooked up with more women through dancing than all the other activities in the rest of this book What To Avoid combined. It takes time to learn, so I recommend you start going to • Ballet dance classes regularly while also • Contemporary beginning some of the other activitInterpretive Dance ies. The women you meet at dan• Leotards cing will expect you to be able to do other things too if they're to find you a well-rounded individual. Dancing is complementary to many of the other activities in this book, which means you can multiply your successes. And dancing is just sex-in-public really, only done vertical with clothes on and sanctioned for public viewing. It's also really good fun. Need I say more to convince you to get along to a dance class?

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Skill 2: Learn To Flirt My whole experience of women changed when I learned to flirt. It was totally amazing and life-transforming for me. Prior to this, interacting with people in general was a bit of a chore unless we had a really strong mutual interest to discuss. Meeting and talking to woWhat To Do men certainly wasn't what I'd call • Start playfully “fun”. I had no idea how to flirt with teasing all women a woman, and considered myself to you interact with be completely crap at it. I didn't even • Develop your sense know where to start until I learned a of humor key insight: that women love being teased. Playful teasing is the basis of • Be fun and engaging flirting. Once I had this insight, my • Get David relationships with women changed DeAngelo's Cocky completely. Comedy program Women will be much more attracted • Read My Secret to you if you can tease them in a Garden and Forbidden manner which is fun and playful, Flowers by Nancy rather than being serious all the time. Friday The more attractive the woman is, the more likely that she's besieged by men who play the “nice guy” all the time. Women are looking for men who stand out from the crowd. You don't want to be a jerk or to “treat them mean to keep them keen”; you just want to develop and utilize your playful, fun sense of humor more often.

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Humor is hugely attractive to a woman not only because it makes you fun to be around, but it also tells her subconscious that you have the ability to get through hard times when the ability to relieve stress through humor will become invaluable. So develop your sense of humor and use it with women whenever you can. I got teased at school a lot when I was a kid and because I really hated it I was very reluctant to tease women; especially the ones I was most attracted to. It took me a What To Avoid long time to realize that in the adult world, playful teasing doesn't hurt a • Being a jerk woman's feelings; it tells her that • Teasing women with you're not afraid of her and that low self-esteem you're up for some fun. • Being arrogant Learning to flirt totally transformed without any humor my relationships with women. I finally realized what I had been doing wrong all those years that the women I was attracted to didn't appear to be attracted to me. I was trying to get them to like me, as covered in Step 3. As a result, I was hopeless with attractive women. Learning to tease women playfully is the basis of flirting and attraction, and will make you much more fun and attractive to be around. Women are much more perceptive than men at social interaction, so they will notice how you are treating the other women around you. If you are neglecting your female friends just because you don't find them sexually appealing, or if you are clearly trying to get into the panties of every girl who enters your peripheral vision, women will notice. Women like to be put at ease. They're Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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just like you really: they can't be themselves when they're all stressed out and up-tight, so they like a guy with whom they can relax. They don't like feeling awkward. They prefer the company of guys who make them feel comfortable without the pressure of a sexual agenda. The key to this is to be playful rather than sleazy. Flirting and sex obviously go hand in hand to some extent, but don't expect a woman to be sexually available just because she enjoys flirting with you. On the other hand if you feel uncomfortable flirting because you don't want to offend women by being sexually suggestive, you might need a reminder that women love sex. They just need to feel really comfortable in order to want to do it with you. The books My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers by Nancy Friday will change the way you think about women and sex: they're full of real life female sexual fantasies written by women. They are a handy reminder that women enjoy sex too, that they want it to be fun and exciting, and that they want to be cherished, valued and respected in the process. Reading these will open your eyes to the way that many women actually feel about sex, what they want and how they want it. That said, instead of treating women as target practice for your next sexual conquest, practice starting conversations with people you meet without having any agenda other than to get to know them and to brighten their day. Talk to men and women alike to practice your conversation skills of being fun and playful. Ask the people you sit next to at the bus stop how their day is going and where they are heading. Chat to people in elevators or in queues at the shopping mall. Talk to checkout operators or other people in the service industry with otherwise boring jobs, and see if you can make your interaction more fun and interesting for Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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them. Get practice focusing on what other people are experiencing and giving them what they want, rather than worrying about what you can get from them all the time.

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Skill 3: Study the Art of Seduction Just a couple of years ago I started attending a weekly dance lesson at a venue with a young, interesting and attractive regular crowd. There I met and befriended a delightful young lady who we'll call Helen. Helen was tall, gorgeous, sprightly and tremendous What To Do fun. Great personality; quirky and • Read The Game by funny with a brilliant laconic sense of Neil Strauss and humor. She was also drop-dead gorDouble Your Dating geous, in an unconventionally girlby David DeAngelo next-door kind of way. Being around • Connect with her my height gave me a great excuse to Emotionally before ask her to dance. Not that I needed you try to connect one because I found her extremely atMentally or tractive. She was tall and slim, yet Physically not supermodel-waif-like, with gentle female curves in all the right places and cleavage I wouldn't have minded losing myself in. Long brown wavy hair, deep blue eyes and a pretty face with a cute, mischievous smile also drew me in and had me hooked. Beneath her low-cut tops, Helen's natural breasts appeared disproportionately large for her narrow shoulders. She had a marvelous personality combining a definite femininity with a childlike playfulness and a hint of naivety. When we danced together, she would giggle uncontrollably every time she messed up a

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dance move or got something wrong. This made her tremendously endearing and we both laughed a lot when we danced. Helen was into social justice, and spent her spare time organizing benefit concerts for worthy causes. She worked for a charity doing fund raising, and was really lovely, in a self-deprecating sort of unaware-that-she-was-actually-very-cool kind of way. I was definitely drawn to her. One week at the end of class, Helen came over and said goodbye. It sounded a little final; she said she wouldn't be able to attend that class any more as she was moving suburbs and would soon have another commitment on that night anyway. I acted cool and said “I'd love to keep in touch; here's my card” as I gave her my Writer business card with my number on it. On the way to the car, I remembered that just flinging out a business card is not actually all that cool when it comes to getting a date with a girl that you like, and kicked myself for not at least also getting her number. I had no way of contacting her, and figured I'd probably never hear from her again. A couple of weeks later, I headed over to Perth on the other side of Australia for a Life Coach training course that I was doing largely in an attempt to work out what I was going to do with the rest of my life after losing interest in Engineering. The course included a bunch of emotional healing bootcamps and emotional mastery techniques, including some ideas for dealing with anxiety similar to those I mentioned in Step 15. Perth is a 5 hour flight from Sydney, and not being a great fan of getting off a long flight and hopping straight back on another to go home again, I decided to spend a few days in Perth before and after the course to check the place out. I had taken with me a Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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copy of Neil Strauss's best-selling book The Game to fill in time on the long journey. I had avoided this book since it was first released over two years before as I feared it would be deceitful, deceptive, manipulative, ... and seductive. I was raised to believe that lying and deception were evil, and I didn't like the idea one bit. But then I was also raised to be wussy, weak, powerless, easily manipulable and detached from my masculine power, because that suited the domineering women in my family. Seduction sounded pretty appealing, and eventually I overcame my reservations and decided to at least read the book with an open a mind. I found myself enthralled by the story of a nerdy writer who learns from the best to become a world-leading pick-up artist. My eyes were opened to a whole new way of relating to women that I was previously unaware of. It helped lift me out of a long depression, showed me what was possible, gave me hope and changed my life. Men are biologically programmed for powerful relationships with women and when we're not powerful, we can't fulfill our potential and end up depressed. Women are biologically programmed to respond to certain cues from you and if you're not sending them they'll lose interest before you've even worked out what's going on. That's what The Game was really all about. I came to see where the relational strategies I had been using in my life were ineffectual. I knew nothing about seduction and had never developed my powers of persuasion. It wasn't just that I'd been “too nice”; I'd failed to play and have fun because thought teasing and flirting were bad and wrong. In short, I was boring around the women I was interested in. It was little wonder I Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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lacked power in my relationships with women and often felt depressed when I thought about them. I made mental notes of many of the techniques that the author learned from the pick-up gurus, and thought about how I could integrate them into my personality to begin relating to women in a more powerful way. There was a lot to learn about interacting powerfully with women, especially on a sexually stimulating level. Two of the most powerful things I learned from The Game were the concept of the “neg”, and the idea that you've got to be detached from outcomes and prepared to lose the girl. A “neg” is a subtle, ambiguous form of teasing which women find enormously engaging. It helps them to step down from the pedestal that us guys often put them on, and motivates them to work to regain some of the status that they lose in doing so. It's not a direct put-down, but is disarming and challenging. Being prepared to lose the girl means not sucking up and acting boyish around women; being more honest and direct in your communication. Saying things to challenge her directly and stimulate her thoughts and emotions, instead of playing nice-guy and worrying about not upsetting her all the time. Any time you go to say something to a woman but hold back because you worry about what she'll think, you're breaking this rule. I had just finished reading the book on my final night in the youth hostel in Perth, when Helen SMS'd me to say hi. “Hmm...”, I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I start using some of the techniques from the book via SMS... would that work?”. So with these ideas in mind, I began teasing Helen via SMS as I traveled back to Sydney by taxi, plane, train and bus. It was like Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles only with a gorgeous, interesting girl on the end of a phone instead of an annoying John Candy. Some of the more choice bits of the dialogue went like this: Helen: Yo Graham, it's Helen here from dancing- how are you? :) I just thought I'd drop you a line, seeing as it'd be kinda rude not to considering you said you wanted to stay in touch :P Haha! Anyway, so how's everything going? Im not doing any dancing these days which sucks- you still going to Hornsby? Catch you later! Me: I'm in Perth, Western Australia, coming back to Sydney tomorrow. Let's do dinner! How's Tuesday or Thursday night? Helen: Yep I remember you mentioning you were going to WA- how was it? Wow you're rather forward though huh! Im sorry Im really naïve with such things- what exactly do you mean with dinner? As friends? Or a date? Or? Or am I just totally confused? Cos I just don't know what this usually means :/ If friends- okish. If date- Im sorry its just not something Im looking for anytime soon. & anyway, I'm working Tuesday night- sorry! I've prob made a BIG fool of myself! :/ Helen: Just wanted to say sorry if that came out as rude- if so its not what I intended at all! I know I've probably put my foot in it now... but yeah... sorry Graham! Me: Sounds like case of foot-in-SMS disease. They have drugs to treat that nowadays you know. Helen: Hah so yes, I made a fool of myself- as per usual :P Hm well I guess Ive decided that being straight from the beginning is the only way to go- as I frequently seem to get myself into

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messy situations. So thats that I guess. I feel weird bout dinner... I dunno... Sorry I'm working every night next week. :/ Me by voicemail: There's nothing to fear, and no need to feel weird. I'll call you tomorrow Helen: Hi Graham :) Sorry I didn't get back to you last nightthought I should get some sleep! Right so there's nothing to fear and no need to feel weird... Well too bad & too late ;) Feeling thouroughly awkward as is! Hah- so that aside... Im rather busy these days... but a Sunday night could potentially work... Me: What is it that makes you feel so awkward? That would make an interesting conversation. Helen: You read into things way too much! Anyway- not making any promises, but you can put me down as a maybe for Sunday. I don't drive though so transport's an issue. So we discussed what to do on Sunday, as Helen remained noncommittal. I would normally do some pathetic kind of oh-pleaseplease-say-yes thing at this point, but instead I applied the “you've got to be prepared to lose the girl” principle any time the desire to be needy hit me: Me: OK, I'll study the forecast. Helen: Yep weather sounds good :P I can prob get myself there, but a lift home might be good- thanks! Oh & Im a veg + can't eat wheat- worst person to go to dinner with! Me: I've just come off a wheat-free and fairy free diet myself, so I can feel your pain. Helen: Fairy-free diet huh? Must have been tough! ;) I live out in the sticks. Don't really go out to dinner- so I don't know? Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Me: Yeah, their wings kept getting caught in my teeth; but their bodies tasted good. So I guess meat lovers pizza is out then? Helen: Ok now that's just WEIRD! And probably not the best thing you could say to a vegetarian! Horrible! ;) Wow just had an AWESOME night at work- raised $1500 :D Me: I'm just teasing you because I like you. Wow! Congratulations on the big money. They should be giving you a big bonus. Helen: Welcome back to civilisation. :) Haha! What on earth is ROTFL or whatever it was? I don't use abreviations- so there! NO commissions- I do it cos I LOVE it :D Me: Get with the program, dude! Roll On The Floor Laughing. Aren't there two b's in abbreviation? Only one train and bus ride between me and my own bed. Mmmm... Helen: Hah ok I shouldn't have picked a grammatical fight with a writer! :) Ok- far too many texts in one day- I'm broke! And dude- I don't want to know about your bed!! Me: Yeah, you better stop hitting on me by SMS. You'll end up with a third-world style debt. Send me an email. I don't want you to go broke and me end up having to pick up the tab for your lentils on Sunday night. Helen: Oh dear! Time for me to run away now Graham- cos from here on is where it becomes messy. Argh. Perhaps dinner isn't a good idea... seriously though... hmph. At this point, it looks like she's going to bail on dinner. Previously I would have tried to talk her into it, but being prepared to lose the girl I go for a tease instead: Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Me: Is grain fed beef considered vegetarian? Helen: Avoiding my last message now huh? Oh haha very funny. Yeah my boss at the cafe often tries to offer me some vegetarian cow... But yeah- not so much... Me: LOL (Laugh Out Loud, just in case...) Don't worry, like I said I'm just teasing you because I like you. Helen: *Frowns* I DO know what LOL means thanks very much! Hmph! :) Yeah I know you were joking bout the beef thing- don't worry I'm not that thick! I just scare easy... Me: Dude, you gotta stop hitting on me by SMS. I'm starting to get funny looks from the other people at the bus stop, what with all your messages coming in and everything. Wait till Sunday. You can do it! Helen: Screw you! Goodnight and goodbye then Mr. Pig Head! P.S. my email is [email protected] - but that won't do you much good cos I'm not at a computer! Pig! That last one was my favorite. “Screw you!... Mr Pig Head!... here's my email address”; all in the one message. It turns out women work very differently to the way I had been taught by my mother. Just because a woman gets testy with you doesn't mean she's going to abandon you. She's much more likely to leave you if you bore her, and too many compliments before you really get to know her sound insincere and fake. Challenging her actually keeps her engaged in the interaction. I was starting to get it. Me: Wow! You got a feisty side. I like that. No internet in this bus stop either, so I'll be in touch later. Thanks for keeping me entertained on my long trip home today. Goodnight & sweet dreams. xox Graham Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Helen: Ha no I don't actually- I was about to apologise when I got your message cos I felt so bad ;) Well I'll catch you laterbut any mention of beds- dinner's off! Me: Ok, well you're lucky I'm feeling gracious & am prepared to overlook the fact that you mentioned it just now. ;) I'm finally on my bus- YAY! Helen: Pffft- whatever! ;) Wow- what a loonnnngggg trip! You must be exhausted!!! Well i'll let you get some rest then- goodnight :) Me: Yeah- i'm nearly home now though. Thanks for keeping me company. Goodnight. :) And then later in the week... Helen: Not a good day at work :( To start the day I slept in & so had 10 mins to get ready, then my bus was late so I was late for work, & I only made $600. Hmph! You? Me: Kinda late at night to be SMS'ing me. Are you pulling moves on me _again_? Helen: Ahem! Who's pulling moves on who huh? Geez- I thought that was supposedly my territory? Back off or I'll tell that women of yours what you're up to! Me: Do you always get what you want? ;-) Helen: Get what I want? Huh? Hmmm well I think I crossed a line there. I did warn you- you should probably keep your distance from me... Helen = trouble... Seriously... Me: You're trouble all right!

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Helen: Ah dear... yes, yes I am trouble. Mainly because... well Im kinda scared of guys... hmph. I don't know how to explain myself! Wow- so awkward. Dinner = weird! Me: Look, I'm gonna have to cancel dinner if you keep hitting on my by SMS. Behave! Helen: Sorry- Im digging a hole here aren't I? I shouldn'tve said so much these past couple of days- its only making things more awkward... I guess we can talk about it more tomorrowthat is if you're still up for it. Or I don't freak and back out... But 1 more question before bed time- how old are you Graham? Can't remember exactly how I replied to this one, but I kinda avoided that last question for now. Then on Saturday: Helen: No I am NOT stalking you ;)... Just wanted to say- if dinner's still on, give me a call after 4pm cos Im working from 8:30 til then. Im off to sleep- night! :) And finally Sunday: Helen: Beginning to freak out minute by minute... AHHH! Im so not sure about this... And it's so so far away for you... Hm I don't know... don't know... dont know! Eeeeek. Me: Just go with it. If anything goes wrong, I'll be there to hold your hand. Helen: Hmph. Scowls. Fine then. But don't say I didn't warn you . My address is xxx xxx xxxxxxx xx, xxxxxxxxx. My house is next door to xxxxx xxxxx... Grumph! Helen: I hope you're not getting too lost? Just give me a buzz when you get here, and I'll come out the front. See you soon. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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So I turned up at Helen's house, and we went out for dinner. I was charming, playful, teasing and engaging; as was she. I used the mind-reading trick from The Game. I asked her: “Do you believe in mind reading?” “Umm... Yeah, I think so”, she said hesitantly. “Let me read your mind... I'll show you. Give me your hands.” I took her hands in mine. Great excuse to hold her hands. They were warm and soft. I looked into her deep, blue eyes. “Now look into my eyes. Take deep breath. Hmm... I can sense that you have a barrier up. I can't read your mind if you have a barrier up.” “You're right, I do have a barrier up. I'm sorry.” “Well you'll need to be more open, or it won't work. So relax, and drop the barrier.” “Ok”, she replied. “Now think of a number between 1 and 10. It should be the first number that comes into your head. Don't tell me it yet. If you thought of a number and then changed to a different number, go back to the original one.” I told her. “Right. I've got it.” “Ok...”, I said as I stared into her eyes and paused for effect, “The number you are thinking of is...”, more pausing, “Seven!” “No, it's not”, she replied looking disappointed. Oh damn. In The Game this trick works most of the time; almost everyone chooses seven. Strauss didn't say what to do if they guess wrong, so I was off into improvisation land. I was going to have to fake it. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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“Mmm... you must still have a barrier up. I'm finding it hard to get in. That's why it's not working” “Yes, you're right... I do. I'm sorry. Let's try again.”, she said “Ok, just relax. Drop your barrier. Focus on my eyes. Concentrate. The number you thought of was... five!” It was a pure guess on my part. “Nope, sorry. Wrong again” Double damn. Well, time to keep winging it. “Wow, you're a tough nut to crack. Let's try one more time. Look into my eyes. Take a deep breath... in... out...”, I held her hands closer, “think of that number... the number is two!” Her eyes lit up in amazement. “Oh my God, you're right!” It had taken three goes, but I finally got it. Funny thing was, once I had got in right, she forgot all about the times I'd got it wrong. That's the thing about humans; we're always looking for evidence to confirm what we believe... or what we want to believe is true. Women are fascinated by anything to do with communication and intuition, which is why the mind reading trick is so interesting to them. At another point, I casually asked Helen “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself as a kisser?”, as I did the triangular gaze between her eyes and her lips. “Oh I dunno. Probably about a 4. I don't like kissing.” That was an interesting answer. “You don't like kissing? What's the story there?” “I just don't like it. I hate kissing. And I hate sex.” Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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“You hate sex?” “Yeah. I hate it. Don't like it at all” Well, that wasn't quite the answer I was expecting, and it wasn't boding all that well for later in the evening. Pretty unusual for a human to hate kissing and sex, which made me think she'd been treated pretty badly by guys in the past. I dug a tiny bit before moving onto more casual conversation, and a bit more neg'ing and playful teasing. We both had a lot of fun over dinner, and it was very lighthearted. I kept reminding myself of the golden rule: you've got to be prepared to lose the girl. Don't suck up to women. Don't try to manipulate them by being “nice” all the time. After dinner we walked back to the car, and I went to hold her hand. “What's with the hand-holding? I thought we were just friends?” was her response. “Sure... I just want to hold your hand.” No reason. No excuses. No justification. No defensiveness. I just want to. Women like men who know what they want, and don't need to justify why they want it all the time. As we got back to the car, I couldn't hold back. Helen looked gorgeous in the soft moonlight. I put my arms around her narrow waist and went in to kiss her. She froze. It was like kissing a surfboard. Her whole body went tense. Other than that, no response. She didn't back away or push me away, or push her lips back against mine. Nothing. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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“Well, that's odd”, I thought. I looked at her quizzically. “What's wrong?” She didn't say anything. I hesitated, and thought “Well if she didn't like it, presumably she'd say so... so...” I went to kiss her again. Same response. Rigid. Frozen. Obviously very uncomfortable. She said nothing. “What's up?”, I asked. No response. “Hey, let's get in the car and talk. Is there somewhere around her we can go and just chill out and chat?” “Yeah, there's a park near where I grew up. It's probably quiet this time of night” So we drove off to the park, and parked the car in the darkness. Then Helen spilled the beans. “Look, I'm frigid all right?” she said as she stared out the windscreen, unable to make eye contact with me. “I can't help it. That's just how I react when a guy touches me. I told you I hated kissing. I'm just frigid, OK?” I had no idea what had happened to Helen in the past, but for her body to be reacting that way, it couldn't have been good. “And listen Graham, you never told me how old you are.” “Well, you haven't told me how old you are either!”, I replied lamely. “I told you I left high school last year. You can do the math. How old do you think I am?” “Umm... 19? 20?” “I'm 18. I've just turned 18. How old are you?” Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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“I'm 40.” Oh my God. Helen started hyperventilating. Going into a fullblown panic attack. She was clutching her chest, unable to breathe, and writhing in terror. Oh shit. This date wasn't turning out so well. I was used to dates not going all that well in the past, but I didn't normally induce a panic attack in the girl. She kept grabbing at her chest. “Anxiety”, I thought. “Now what was that blockage-buster technique again?” “Helen... there's something in your chest isn't there?” “Y-Y-Y-Yeah”, she could barely speak. “I want you to describe the feeling in your chest for me, OK? Where abouts exactly is it?” She pointed to her rib cage, in the cleavage directly between her rather impressive breasts. It would have to be there, wouldn't it? “OK, so it's right in the middle of your chest. What shape is it? Is it round, square, triangular, oval, symmetrical, irregular?” “It's round. Ugh.”, she could barely breathe enough to reply “How big is it? Is it marble-sized, or golf ball-sized, tennis ballsized, basketball-sized, beach ball sized, earth ball sized?” “It's basketball sized” “OK, great. Now what color is it? Is it red, blue, green, gray, black, brown, orange?” “It's black” “Cool... so you've got this big basketball-sized black uncomfortable feeling right in the center of your chest” Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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“Yeah”, she gasped, trying to breath “What texture is it? Is it smooth, rough, furry, spiky, hard, soft?” “Furry” “Great... so you've got a furry basketball-sized black feeling stuck right in the center of your chest” “Yeah” “OK. If you could let it go, would you let it go?” “Umm... yeah!” “Good. When would now be a good time to let it go? You could pick right now, or in a minutes time, or two minutes, or five minutes, or ten minutes, or half an hour, or tomorrow, or next week. When would you like to let it go?” “Now sounds good.” “Great! You're doing brilliantly. You're very good at this! How would you like to imagine let it go? You could breathe it out, cough it out, shit it out, piss it out, spit it out, just let it float through your chest, or any other way you like. How would you like to let it go?” “I'll breathe it out” “Excellent choice. So close your eyes, and take a deep breath.” She sat back and relaxed a little in the bucket seat. “Now visualize that furry basketball-sized black feeling you've got stuck in the center of your chest, and imagine it shrinking each time you breathe in and out... Take another deep breath... In... Out... And imagine that basketball shrinking smaller and smaller. It's only tennis-ball sized now... In... Out... Golf ballCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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sized... In... Out... Marble sized... And now it's smaller than a grain of sand. Way small enough to breath out, so breathe it out now...” Helen sat in the car seat next to me, looking relaxed and peaceful again. “I'm sorry Graham. My last boyfriend was 32 and he really wanted to marry me. I broke it off with him because I couldn't commit, and I felt terrible for him. Really guilty. I'm always attracting older men, and I just end up hurting their feelings. Now here it is happening again!” “It's not your fault if you don't want to marry a guy; I mean really, you're only 18! He was kidding himself if he thought you'd be marrying him any time soon; it's just not realistic. You're still very young. I don't expect anything from you. You're free to do what you want, really.” That said, Helen looked gorgeous again in the moonlight coming through the car window. I just wanted to go over and give her a big cuddle. But that wasn't looking so good. “Listen, I'd love to come over and give you a cuddle, but I really don't want to freak you out. Is there any way I could do that?”, I asked. “Well, as long as it's not going to go anywhere!”, she replied with a hint of bitterness towards men who always expected something sexual from her. “Well, I promise that I'm not going to take it anywhere. I'm just giving you a cuddle. OK?” “Yeah; that would be nice” So I climbed over, and gave her a cuddle in my rather uncomfortable RAV4 front bucket seats. I don't know what Toyota were Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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thinking when they designed this car, but they clearly weren't preparing for a moment like this. As I gazed into Helen's pretty eyes and she gazed back into mine, I felt the urge to kiss her. She looked so peaceful and contented; not scared anymore. No more surfboard. But I had given my word. A kiss would be so nice. What to do? “Listen, I promised that I wasn't going to take this anywhere, and I'm going to stand by that. But if by any chance you wanted to kiss me, I just want to let you know that I'm totally open to that. You don't have to; I'm very happy just cuddling you here. This is really nice... But if you did want to kiss me... well... I'm fine with that too.” Thirty seconds later, she pecks me on the neck, and starts working up to my lips. We kiss. Passionately. She's clearly turned on. She grabs my hand and puts in on top of her funky low-cut Tshirt smack bang over her left breast. I get the hint. I slowly begin untucking her T-shirt, as she starts unbuttoning my shirt and we both explore what lies beneath, rubbing and caressing each other's bare skin with our hands. We keep kissing, and she's clearly enjoying herself and wants to go further. I reach around behind her back and unhook her bra in one smooth movement. No adolescent fumbling like those other guys she's been with before who just made her feel uncomfortable. “Wow, you're good at that!” “Well you know, I've had girlfriends” I ask her “Arms up!” and she raises her arms high so I can remove her T-shirt over her head. She smiles back at me a big, ex-

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cited smile. Her soft newly formed 18-year-old breasts look amazingly perfect in the gentle light, and feel so soft and playful. Our naked chests rub against each other as we kiss, and I feel my sensitive nipples squeezing her spongy breasts between us like thick, luscious pancakes. “Look at this”, she says as she jiggles her body up and down to make them wobble as she laughs bra-less and uninhibitedly. Frigid? I don't think so! I start licking around her nipples and down towards her belly button. As I do, she asks me with a big smirk: “What size do you think they are?” “Well, I'm guessing”, as I carefully inspect the most perfectly formed pair of breasts I've seen in a long time, “They've got to be at least a double D” “Yes!”, she replies proudly, “They are double D!” I worked my way back up to her lips as my hands massaged her bare shoulders, arms, chest, and breasts. My fingers teased her nipples, sending shivers down her spine. “I love the way you touch me!” she says in a sultry voice. Wow. That really hit me. “Wow Helen... that's huge. An hour ago you thought you were frigid and couldn't stand being touched. You said you hated kissing too. You're not frigid; you've just been treated poorly. You don't deserve that. You deserve to be treated like a princess. I figured that you'd be comfortable if you were the one initiating things. You just need to be with a guy who treats you properly, and lets you take the lead sometimes. That's how to get past your body freezing up.”

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"Yeah...", she replies, "When you came over to cuddle me, and I was looking into your eyes I really wanted you would kiss me... and hoped that you'd read my mind." We are all sexual creatures with biological triggers that enable and inhibit us, and they're operating all the time whether you know about them or not. Mental, emotional and physical triggers for intimacy and sexuality exist inside every woman you meet, and they generally work consistently. We have similar things going on., although a man's triggers are different. They can either work for you, or against you. Learning the art of seduction is really about learning the behavioral triggers which enable a woman to experience sexual attraction towards you and stimulate her sexual drive. Women love men who can do this because the experience of being seduced and sexually turned-on is so powerfully enjoyable. Most men are dead boring to be around for women because guys talk about topics that either have no relevance to women or have no emotional content for them to connect to. Seduction is all about learning how to affect a woman emotionally so she experiences sexual attraction to you. Whether you both act on that attraction, and to what degree, is up to the two of you. It's not about manipulation, deceit, or lying; although it may involve some playful storytelling. If you are like I was, and hated the idea of saying anything that wasn't literally absolute truth, you may have to loosen up a little. Women love guys who can spin a great seductive story; they'll know when you're kidding because they've got better intuition than you probably do. When women go to chick flicks with their friends, they don't sit there going “This is unrealistic. They're just actors on a screen”. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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They get into it. They love to be drawn along by a romantic story that hooks them in and plays with their emotions. Once you learn to tell stories that engage women and activate their dormant sexual energy, your relationships with women will change completely and your self-confidence with women will go through the roof. Be careful not to push a sexual agenda on a woman. Be prepared to “lose the girl” and let the opportunity go by rather than wanting sex from her all the time. David DeAngelo in Double Your Dating describes seduction as a dance of two steps forward, one step back. You make a move on a girl, and if she responds positively then you move forward some more, and then you back off a bit to give her time and space to yearn for more of you. Then you repeat, always being respectful of her needs. Women get anxious about all sorts of things regarding intimacy, seduction and sex. They are programmed by society not to enjoy their natural biological drives too much, or they get branded “sluts”. This is one of the worst things a woman can hear, even if it's only in her own head. Women also want to know that you appreciate them for more than just their good looks and sexual potential before they're going to give up the golden goose for you. The best way to demonstrate this is to always treat them with genuine respect, and engage them in conversation about things that are interesting to them even if you have to go out and expand your field of interest first to do so. There is a whole level of communication possible between men and women that most guys are completely unaware of. The pickup artistry described in The Game is really about tapping into this deeper level of communication by learning a bunch of routines Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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that eventually get integrated naturally into your communication style. It's a bit hit-and-miss, and there will be crash-and-burn experiences along the way. Personally, I prefer the well-rounded-individual approach where you broaden your communication style while creating an interesting life that makes you genuinely confident and uniquely attractive. Develop the personality traits that women naturally find attractive and seductive as you go, like confidence, charisma, wit and humor. The skills you'll learn studying seWhat To Avoid duction are like anything else: they can be used for good or for evil. • Being a Jerk Even if you don't want to use these • Lies, Deciet, skills yourself, it's important to Manipulation know how they work so you can • Misusing Your Power understand the underlying triggers in human nature. Understanding • Anything The Girl Isn't Completely how women work and the mechanComfortable Doing isms that activate their sexual responses will turn you into a first- • Unwanted Pregnancy class lover that women will want to be with. Learn about a woman's needs and how best to satisfy them, and you're well on the way. There is a bunch of material about seduction out there. The best material generally isn't at your local library, but is available from pick-up gurus on the internet. These guys aren't always the brightest; in fact, high intellect can be a real barrier to getting in touch with your natural sexually intuitive communication skills. You may need to eat some humble pie and swallow your pride like I did before you are willing to admit that you need to study this. But if your father didn't teach you and your mates were Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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clueless, you need to learn it from the men that know how to do it. Learning to apply the art of seduction will boost your confidence enormously. I recommend starting with David DeAngelo's Double Your Dating eBook, and then moving on to his more advanced video and audio programs.

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Skill 4: Get Some New Clothes Let's face it: those rags you're currently wearing are not exactly pulling streams of hot babes into your orbit now, are they? If you're still being dressed by your mother or still buying clothes that your mother would buy for you, then you have two problems: Firstly, What To Do unless you're ideal woman's target • Venture into those age is significantly older than yourbrightly lit Men's self, you're dressing for completely Clothing stores at the the wrong generation. And secondly, mall that you've the clothes your mother likes to see never been in before you in aren't likely to be the ones that • Ask for some help maximize the exhibition of your male sexual potential. That would just be • Be prepared to spend weird to her. So you've got to get out there and get yourself some new gear. Women have a much greater appreciation for and perception of style and fashion than most men and will notice the finer points of your attention to detail, or lack thereof, when it comes to your appearance. We don't relate immediately tot his because our brains are wired so that when we see a woman who has gone to a lot of trouble to seek out, purchase and wear clothes that look nice for our benefit, we just want to see her without them. When we go to a little trouble with our appearance, women respond by thinking that we look nice and would therefore be Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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worth getting to know better. All the getting naked business that comes instantly to us comes further down the track for the average woman, but the point is that if you want to get there you need to put something nice on first. There's no point wearing crap on the basis that you'll only be taking it off as soon as you've hooked your dream girl anyway. This sort of thinking just won't get you there. Women generally spend a good deal more than men do on their appearance, but your gender is no excuse for you to be a slacker. There's a good chance that the girls you find attractive are spending around six times as much as you do on your clothes. I'm not expecting you to suddenly fall in love with clothes shopping or take up retail therapy when you're feeling stressed, but you need to narrow this gap to less than two times if you want to be taken seriously. This is not as difficult as you may first imagine. The first hurdle to cross is that your mother probably never dragged you through the sort of menswear store that you need to venture into in order to get the clothes you need as a mature man. Get yourself down to the local mall and find one of the smaller chain stores full of men's clothes that are staffed by women. You'll know the ones I mean, because they're the ones you've never been in before. Don't go for the menswear shops full of suits with gentlemen serving; that's where you go to get a formal suit for a wedding or end of year party. I'm thinking day-to-day going out here. Go during the day when the store isn't particularly busy so the sales staff have time to serve you, because you need help on this buddy.

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Fashion sense doesn't arrive genetically and yours is probably too crippled to even consider using for this important purpose, so forget about doing this on your own. Walk up to the saleswoman you think looks most attractive and say: “Hi! I need a couple of new outfits for going out in; could you help me please?” When she asks what sort you want, say “Something smart but casual that looks great.” She'll reply: “Sure! This will be fun!”. Then do what she says as you play dress-up. This will involve you stripping off in the change room while she brings you a steadily increasing stream of garments to try on and to model for her. Knowing your size ahead of time will help, but isn't essential. You need stuff that fits and looks good. Don't buy it if it doesn't fit just so you can get the heck out of there. The saleswoman will be able to help you get the size right. Expect a little invasion of your personal space but don't try to crack onto her. Your job is to use her expertise to help you look great so you'll attract women once you leave the store. Trying to score with the saleswoman will just distract you both from the process. Don't expect to immediately love what she brings you, but try it on anyway. You've had a lifetime of acclimatising to your mother's fashion sense so it's going to take a little while for you to adjust to the look that women around your age actually like. If you've picked a decent store they'll sell you shoes to match too. Don't baulk when the saleswoman brings you a pair of shoes that you think look patently ridiculous: chances are your fashion sense, rather than the shoes, are at fault. Remember, the stuff you've been wearing up till now has not been cool so the truly cool stuff is going to look odd to you until you start mixing in the right circles with other people who share your newly enCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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lightened sense of fashion. These are the circles where the girls you want hang out, so it's time to get with the program. Ignore the numbers on the price tags; treat them as irrelevant. They're just numbers. Accept that fact that the number on your credit card statement is going to be larger than usual. It's just a number too. It's not as big a deal as you think. Given that you probably hate shopping as much as I do, you want to maximize the returns you get from the time you spend in the store. Usually after about ten minutes of trying clothes on in a store, I'm feeling really restless; by twenty minutes I've got a very strong urge to be elsewhere,;and by half an hour I'm ready to run screaming from the building. Just breath deeply, focus on all the women you'll be hooking up with in your new threads, and you'll get through this OK. Fortunately buying multiple outfits at the one time is relatively easy for a guy: once you've found a pair of jeans or pants you like and whose cut appears to fit, you just buy two: one in a lighter color, and one in a darker color. Similarly with shirts: find a cut that you like, and then buy a few with different colors or patterns. Mixing and matching these with the pants will give you six whole outfits just by forking out for two pairs of pants and three shirts. Get a striped shirt and you don't need a tie; which is perfect for smart-casual occasions. Get the same shirt in a plain color with a tie, and you've covered more formal dos. Add a couple of different pairs of shoes and belts, and the number of permutations goes up explosively. Pretty soon you'll be set for anything, and you won't be caught in the same outfit twice for months. Fashion has a habit of changing every year. You can whine about the fact that this is because people in the fashion industry only Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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make money through the turnover of new fashions all the time, or you can get over it and start attracting the women you want. Reality is that you'll have to make a shopping expedition at least once a season if you want to retain a confident, current look. This is sufficient to get enough summer and winter outfits to get you through most social events, but don't mention that you only go shopping twice a year to the pretty blond thing that you meet at the office Christmas party, because she'll laugh at you. She goes shopping every second day, remember. You've got it easy. What To Avoid If you happen to be a stingy bastard, • The discount rack you probably hate sales people be- • Male sales assistants; cause you think they're just there to unless they're gay sell you something. Well, duh. More • Discount department importantly, you probably think stores they'll just sell you the most expensive stuff to maximize their cut because they work on commission. If this is your mindset then slap yourself about the head a few times before heading out to the mall. The sales people are there to help you. They work in sales, they know what sells, and they therefore know what's in fashion and what's not way better than you do. The stuff you normally buy from the discount rack is the stuff that doesn't sell. It's not what you want. Do not be surprised when the saleswoman brings you the more expensive gear to try on. She's doing you a favor by showing you the clothes that women will be attracted too. This is not the time to start selling yourself short by knocking back all the non-discount stuff in preference for the clothes that nobody else is prepared to buy. Now is not the time to deal with your issues reCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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garding sales people; do that when you ditch your emotional baggage in Step 12. Don't wince when the final bill comes through; just offer up your credit card and smile at the magnitude of the investment that you're now prepared to make in yourself. This speaks volumes about the sort of confidence that you'll be showing when you hit the town in your plurality of new outfits. So bring it on, and get yourself down to the mall. Before you know it, your new outfits will give you a new sense of confidence with the pulling power of Saturn and you'll have rings of women orbiting you.

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Skill 5: Get a Personal Trainer Women are attracted to guys who look after themselves. Not only does a better-toned body make you look more attractive physically, it also sends the subconscious message that if you look after yourself, you're also likely to look after her and her offspring. What To Do Biologically, this is a very powerful • Find a gym that message which sitting on your butt specializes in watching television doesn't send. Personal Training You need a regular exercise program • Get a full assessment and some way to motivate yourself and program from to keep at it when you get discouryour trainer aged or feel like giving up. That's • Start lifting those where your personal trainer comes weights in. The other advantage of a personal trainer is that it sends a message to your subconscious that you're important enough to warrant personal attention, raising your self-esteem at the same time. You'll find plenty of personal trainers at your local gym. If you've never been to a gym before there's a good chance that you've got no idea how to use the equipment properly and you're likely to injure yourself. Even with a personal trainer I still managed to pinch tendons and pull muscles when I didn't concentrate hard enough on following his instructions about keeping my shoulders back and down.

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You need to be working out in the gym at least 3 times a week to make any serious progress. A reasonable way to do this is to have one personal training session per week and two visits by yourself where you work on your program. If you don't have a program to work on you won't take this seriously and will get nowhere. If you don't go to the gym by yourself between personal training sessions, that's not going to do you much good either. Your subconscious isn't going to be fooled if you're not putting the effort in, and the exercise your What To Avoid arm gets just by pulling out your credit card to pay for a gym mem- • Forking out your hard earned cash on bership that you don't actually end a 12-month gym up using is negligible. You actually membership that you have to turn up and start moving never end up using those weights around on a regular basis for it to make any difference. Try and get a trainer who has the sort of body and fitness outlook that you want. A good trainer will be highly motivated and will be able to motivate you and encourage you on the days when you feel like you don't want to be there. You're paying them to motivate and teach you to get the results you want, and improving your fitness translates into you being good breeding stock for the ladies. Sitting around watching Star Trek just isn't going to lose that chubby tummy you're developing, and the Vulcan salute won't strengthen your hand muscles like one of those spring-loaded hand exercisers will. Women are very wary of guys trying to pick up at gyms; which is one reason for the recent fad of female-only fitness clubs. The best way to meet women in a gym is to concentrate on what Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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you're doing with your fitness program and wait until one of them makes eye contact with you. Shoot them a friendly smile and then say hello next time you bump into them near the water cooler. Don't overdo it. An easy conversation topic is whether they have a trainer or not. If it's a small gym, they may even have the same trainer as you do in which case you can compare notes. If they don't have a trainer you'll be looking pretty good by the fact that you do and will be able to talk about the benefits you've gained by it. Unless you're a total freak it's unlikely you'll last the distance at the gym without a trainer to motivate you. Many gyms make a lot of money out of chumps who sign up for a twelve month membership and then only turn up a couple of times in the first few months. Nobody meets their fitness goals doing that. Get a personal trainer so that you don't just end up wasting your time and money.

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Skill 6: Get Your Teeth Straightened Flashing your winning smile at the girl of your dreams is the easiest way to give her the first sign that you're interested; and if she smiles back you know you've crossed the first and most difficult hurdle. A smile says “I like what I see, and I'd like some more please”. What To Do It lets her know you're comfortable • Visit your dentist around her, which puts her at ease. • Get braces if you And it lets you know she's able to reneed them lax around you... and may even be romantically and/or sexually avail• Consider having able. your teeth whitened But what if your fangs look more like the projection by the dentist from hell of Lisa Simpson's future teeth in the episode where Lisa needs braces? You'll feel self-conscious if your molars and your incisors are back to front, or pointing horizontally instead of vertically. Holding back on your smile won't cure this because it sends the message that you're feeling awkward and are unavailable or uninterested. Letting rip with a mouth full of random boulders isn't going to go so well either. However you look at it, if you didn't go through the fun of having braces in high school, now is your big chance. Our teeth evolved over millions of years back when our ancestor's diets were much harsher than they are now. Meat came galloping past on the savanna and we had to hunt it ourselves which is dirty work. It didn't come in grit-free Styrofoam packets Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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from the supermarket. Life was harsh and that took its toll on our teeth. Nowadays, your toothpaste is probably the harshest abrasive your teeth are going to encounter and most of them won't fall out until your 70's. But your genes don't know that so most of us end up with an overcrowded set of chompers. It's pretty much standard practice these days for every kid to have four of the less important teeth removed and the rest shuffled along to fill the gap just so we don't end up with an overpopulated dental ghetto in our gums. And then there are the wisdom What To Avoid teeth which don't get much of a • The dentist from The workout these days and often end Little Shop of Horrors up growing sideways through your gums in protest. None of these are good looks. You need a beautiful smile if you want to be able to flash it unselfconsciously. So if your teeth are growing ballistic rather than marching in nice straight lines, now is the time to head down to the dentist and get yourself friendly with the local orthodontist because he's gonna be your buddy for the next 18 months or so. And when he says “This won't hurt a bit”, he's lying. It'll be worth it in the end though, when a simple flash of your pearly whites will send the ladies into fits of erotic hysteria.

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Skill 7: Learn to Play Music Mrs. Tarantino: Are you the police? Elwood Blues: No, ma'am. We're Musicians. The Blues Brothers

Women fall for Musicians like rain falls from the sky. They just can't help it. Learning to play music is a fantastic way to meet and attract women; but I'm afraid being able to play a CD doesn't qualify. You need to learn to play a musical instrument. Guys who can play music that will charm a girl's soul are immediately perceived as both sensitive and intelligent all at the same time. You don't have to be a genius to play music; it's mainly a matter of practice, practice, practice. But it will still make you register high on a female's intellect scale and also give you a good rating on emotional intelligence. This is one of the rare skills where your analytical mind and your emotional mind can actually work together for a common goal for a change. And besides, it's really good fun. If you learned a musical instrument as a kid but gave it up years ago, you're ahead of the game already. Now is the time to rekindle whatever passion you had for playing music. And if you hated it as a kid because of all those hours spent practicing before nightmare lessons at Miss Dracula's, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that it's a lot more enjoyable learning as an adult when you're doing it because you want to and not because your parents or teachers force you to. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Music has a certain ephemeral quality to it which engages with the emotional center of a woman's brain and allows her to project whatever fantasy images she has onto you as you play. If you have learned to play one of her favorite songs, you've absolutely struck gold. Ask for requests whenever you play around people, even if your repertoire is so small that there's no chance in hell that you'll actually be able to play what they ask for. Go home and learn the songs the women most attractive to you ask for so that you're in a better position next time. What To Do • Pick a genre and instrument that appeals to you

I was at a weekend workshop and had the opportunity to play a song for the Saturday Night talent show. While practicing, a gorgeous woman • Get a teacher you asked me all excitedly “Can you play relate to Piano Man?”. Unfortunately I could • Go to a class not, and given that it's a popular • Find other people to song which I also quite like, I went practice with home and spent the next 4 weeks rectifying this deficiency in my tiny musical repertoire so I'm in a much better position next time around. If you already know a lot of songs or can sight-read and have a library of popular sheet music or fake books, then you've got a gold pass to the bedroom. Pick whatever instrument you think is coolest, but go for something reasonably mainstream. I wouldn't recommend a piccolo or a lute unless you're going for a specific brand of woman. Playing air guitar is only cool in certain rather limited circles dominated by blokes so I wouldn't recommend that one either. I personally liked the idea of being a keyboard virtuoso and started with that; Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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but it takes a long time to get to a reasonable level of proficiency on keyboard or piano. We're talking several years of constant practice here. Playing Jingle Bells isn't going to impress anyone I'm afraid. You want to be able to sit down and rattle out something reasonably contemporary or sufficiently well known that the girls you invite back to your place have actually heard of the song you're going to play, and aren't immediately transported back to 2nd Grade music lessons of their own. Miss Dracula wasn't any more fun for the girls than she was with you. Guitar will get you playing real songs and having them sound good much quicker than a keyboard instrument, because you naturally play chords on a guitar. The other advantage of a guitar is its portability. Chucking a keyboard in the car is time consuming and pianos don't move anywhere in a hurry, whereas it's easy to lug your guitar along to social events where you can woo women with your musical prowess while other guys hang back feeling envy and loathing towards you. The guitar's portability also helps make it a more social instrument and that's important because it takes some time to learn and it gets lonely doing it all by yourself. After a couple of years of heavy going on the keyboard, I got myself a guitar and signed up for a Beginners course at my local Community College (Skill 13). And surprise, surprise, what did I find? A bevy of single women waiting to meet me. It wasn't long before I was practicing weekly with a group of girls between classes. This is where the other activities in your life come in handy because it's hard to stand out as interesting at any given activity that other people are already doing too. There's no point going along to a nudist club and saying “Hey, guess what! I'm a nudist!”. You're just one of the crowd there; but everywhere else, you're edgy and fascinating. These girls were Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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all in the process of ditching their boring, neglectful, emotionally retarded boyfriends in search of greener pastures when I showed up. So when I turn up all singing (Skill 11) and dancing (Skill 1), they were pretty keen to meet me. I was crap at actually playing guitar because I was a total novice but women don't mind so much the fact that you're not brilliant yet as they can still fall in love with your potential. All guys have plenty of potential but you've got to be out there developing it in order for women to notice you. Mastering any musical instrument takes a life-time. And I'm talking a life-time filled with hours of practice every week, if not every day. So you need to enjoy it for its own sake; just the potential for attracting women is not going to do it for you when you hit a dry spell and lose your motivation. I suggest you work towards learning to play the music that you love first, since this will help keep you motivated. Avoid anything too grungey or depressing unless you're interested in Goth chicks or Emos, and anything too alternative unless you're planning to retire to a hippy commune once you've snagged the love of your life. Pop music has the widest appeal and will maximize your success rate with the ladies. There's a reason they call it popular. But you want to learn music that you never get sick of hearing, because you're going to be hearing it a lot as you practice. You may end up playing any given song 1000 or more times if you want to be able to play it from memory without music, so your personal favorites are a good place to start. And besides, there's nothing more alluring to a woman than hearing you say “Let me play you my favorite song!” and having her recognize it as one of her favorites too. Instant look-what-we've-got-in-common chemistry. Unless you're playing stuff you actually like, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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you're likely to give up on days when your fingers just won't do what they're told and your sense of rhythm seems shot to pieces. The most stirring renditions of your favorite songs aren't the ones you're going to learn in 1 st Grade Music Theory, so you need to have some persistence to pull this off. But if you choose the combination of an instrument that appeals to you, and music that you never get sick of hearing, you will eventually get there. Picture yourself up on stage with a crowd filled of gorgeous, screaming women throwing their underwear at you, and stay motivated. Learning music in isolation you can develop bad habits if you try to work it all out yourself. You need a music teacher. This can be something of a problem if you are an adult learner. My first adult keyboard teacher had very different musical tastes to me and I naively thought that this didn't matter because she still had a wealth of experience and knowledge that I could learn from. But her personal taste came into the equation. I was into Rock Synthesizer while she was into Classical Piano. She just wasn't passionate about what I was passionate about and she ended up mistaking my enthusiasm for arrogance. She was used to dictating how and what her students were going to learn. Most of her students were children who probably weren't in a position to argue with her if they didn't like it. But being an adult I wanted to have more say over what I was going to play and she was always suggesting pieces at the other end of the musical spectrum from what I enjoyed. We ended up spending more time arguing over music choice than actually learning and I felt criticized instead of encouraged. So my recommendation is that you look for a music teacher who shares your passion for the type of music that you want to learn. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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You want a teacher who goes “Yeah, Cool!” when you come in and play the legendary chord sequence from Jump that you've just spent 2 months at home learning; not one that screws up her face with contempt and indignation. Private lessons are one option. You can save quite a bit of cash on music lessons by doing a course at Community College (Skill 13), where you are also likely to meet real live women who share your burgeoning interest in playing music. You may not get the individual attention that private lessons give you, but nothing beats learning music in a group. What To Avoid Music connects people. It will con- • Girlie instruments nect you with the female of the spelike xylophone and cies, especially if you learn it togethtambourine er. If you pursue your music long and hard enough, it will get you out there performing on stage, where you will be perceived as even more confident and alluring by women. Women will fall for the fantasy image of you that they develop in their mind when they see you looking all confident and yet emotionally connected all at the same time. But beware that you need to start living up to it when you come offstage, so get working on some of the other activities in this book to back up your real life persona. Learning to play music will assist you with your sense of rhythm which will also help you Learn to Dance (Skill 1). It will make it much easier for you to Join a Band (Skill 12). It will transform even the nerdiest geek into an all-round charmer by enabling you to feel and express emotion through music, which will even assist you to Ditch Your Emotional Baggage (Step 12). Get down to the music store, grab an instrument, and get into it. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Skill 8: Learn to Cook So let's say you meet a girl that you like and you'd like to get a little closer to her... physically perhaps. What are you going to do? You can always start by taking her out to dinner and/or a movie, bowling, ice skating, bushwalking... whatever you're into is What To Do fine. Then what? Invite her back to • Find some basic or your place for "coffee" late in the beginners recipe evening? She'll know what you're up books to; and even if she's up to it too, she • Get yourself to a may not be too keen to go for it out cooking class of fear of what you might think about her later. Girls don't like other • Learn to operate your people to think that they're too oven “easy”, you know. Or it could be fear that you may turn out to be a serial date rapist should she change her mind after seeing your place, or meeting your flatmates; or worse, your parents. And what if you panic over dinner, and blow the whole thing before even mentioning coffee? It's bye-bye happy future, or night of passion, or anything else you may have had in mind involving the two of you. One obvious solution to staying comfortable and relaxed when getting to know a girl is to invite her around for dinner to your place, where you're on familiar territory. That way you're much more likely to relax and be yourself. Girls love guys who are re-

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laxed around them because moods are contagious and it puts them at ease too. Sure, she would like to be impressed by you, but she wants it to actually be you, not someone who looks like you putting on a show all the time. Your own place is where you feel most at home so this gives it a huge advantage over other venues. You know exactly where the corkscrew is without having to fidget around all over the kitchen nervously and can get down to the business of social lubrication without a great deal of fuss. Now it's all very well to plan a fun night in of dinner, laughter, wining, dining and a little nude Twister; but what are you going to do if you can't cook? Get her to come via the McDonald's drive-thru? Order in KFC? Dial up Domino's? Get home delivery from the local Chinese? That's not likely to impress and if you fail to get out of the starting gates by baulking at providing basic sustenance for your new belle you're certainly not going to end up spinning that big Twister dial later in the evening. When a woman who finds you attractive or interesting meets you her mind goes into overdrive spinning a fantasy in her head about your future life together which you need to start living up to pretty quick if you're to have any chance with her at all. We all do this; it's not just a female thing. Part of the way we humans plan for the future and deal with the harsh realities of life is by using our creative imaginations to spin stories in our mind about what our future might be like given any new scenario that comes our way. The more positive the fantasy we spin about the future the happier we are. If she thinks you could be in with a chance of playing a role in her future, it won't be long before she's got

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everything from the wedding day to retirement mapped out in her mind both consciously and subconsciously. A major skillset omission like the inability to cook will cause this fantasy to dissolve into a nightmare of domestic subservience which will cause her to lose interest in you and your perverted adult games altogether. Suddenly what seemed fun minutes before now just seems sick and tasteless. And that means you can forget about that threesome fantasy, and all the others that you spun in your head while getting to know her, too. If the future with you that she sees for herself involves being handcuffed to a stove that you don't know how to operate, that's quite a hurdle to overcome. Women these days are a little more egalitarian than that. In case you didn't notice, it's the 21 st Century already and the Women's Liberation revolution occurred before you were even born. So you gotta learn to cook. Anything you just shove in the microwave and serve straight onto the table in its own box just doesn't qualify as “cooking”. It's not that hard really. You don't have to resort to growing your own herbs and spices or anything; you can do quite a respectable job with packet mixes once you get the hang of it. Following a recipe from a cookbook and using fresh ingredients (a.k.a. “starting from scratch”) will earn you bonus points, as will coming up with something that tastes delicious. There is some risk involved in cooking to impress a woman because planting something so burnt, undercooked or otherwise mistreated as to become plainly inedible on the table in front of her will detract from the whole scenario. But women love guys who are prepared to take risks and with a little foresight and Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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some training you can minimize the likelihood of any culinary disasters wrecking the ambiance you've worked so hard to create. The best way to learn to cook is to do a cooking course at your local Community College (Skill 13). Not only is it more fun learning in a group but I guarantee you'll meet single women there who will be relatively easy to impress with your newfound culinary skills provided you can stay slightly ahead of the game. After all, they're there because they can't What To Avoid do it (yet) either so the standard you need to meet is not unrealistically • Classes titled “Cooking for high. Basic competence will do it, blokes”; there won't and that's the aim of the course after be any women there all. Provided you can show that you have the interest and capacity to • Foods you can't stand learn you're halfway there. Her • Lentils, Brussel fantasy spin about you becoming Sprouts, Chick peas the world's greatest chef can fill the gap while you're getting your egg- • Level 4 Vegans boiling skills up to speed. My 16-year-old nephew can cook a decent roast and all of the world's greatest chefs are guys so there's no excuse for you not being able to cook too. The old “I can't cook; I'm a guy” just doesn't wash with any woman who's ever seen Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver on TV. One of whom, by the way, is considered quite a lady magnet because he can cook. Actually, the other can cook too, but he's got such a filthy attitude I doubt any respectable girl would go near him. You don't want to be an arrogant prick about it; just learn to cook adequately and you'll discover

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that the way to a woman's heart, and her other organs slightly further south, is through her stomach.

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Skill 9: Get Into Art If you want to maximize your potential as a guy with depth and sensitivity you need to understand a little about the Art world. You don't necessarily have to like everything that gets called “Art” and you don't have to join the ranks of the snotty-nose art critic fraWhat To Do ternity. But it's handy to know what • Find an artist whose you like and what you don't so that work you like you can hold up your end of a con• By some prints for versation on the topic with the pretty your walls young thing you bump into while viewing the Mona Lisa on your next • Visit your local art trip to Paris. Merely saying “It's gallery smaller than I expected” is just stat• Do a Life Drawing or ing the obvious, and won't get you Painting course very far. Finding an artist whose work you like is a real bonus because it means you can deck out your new place (Skill 18) with prints of their work. You can buy prints on eBay of most popular artist's work for next to nothing; get them framed at your local framing shop, whack 'em on the wall, learn a bit about the story behind them and suddenly you're an instant art expert. A limited edition print will set you back big money and allow you to join the ranks of the art collector world. Limited edition prints mean that you don't get to buy the original of an art work, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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but you do get a high-quality reproduction made by the artist, who in turn guarantees that they will only produce a limited number of copies each with their own serial number and certificate of authenticity. Get in early and they can appreciate in value quite significantly; the lower the serial number, the more valuable the print. Or if you find an emerging local artist whose work you like you may even be able to purchase an original work. Art is a rather speculative investment but if you buy a piece you really like this doesn't matter so much because you're not likely to be parting with it any time soon. The best way to learn about art is to actually do some yourself. There are a myriad of different styles, from watercolor painting to sketching, sculpture and casting. Choose one that appeals to you. Be prepared to spend some time perfecting your art because it may not come easily to you if you've never tried anything this creative before. Personally, I found sketching a good place to start, and what better to sketch that a live female nude model? If you've been totally out of touch with the art world since birth, you may not be aware that there are plenty of artistic types out there who enjoy sitting around a naked woman while she poses for them to sketch and paint each gentle curve of her body on paper or canvas. This is the sort of gig that you want to be getting into and it's as easy as getting in touch with your local art school or community college (Skill 9) and signing up for the class. You can even take the opportunity to chat up the model during the breaks. Your art teacher will impress upon you the importance of looking at the

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nude model in order to sketch her accurately and who are you to argue? I didn't persist with life drawing long enough to really get brilliant at it but I didn't do too badly considering that I couldn't draw for peanuts before I started. Here's one of my more credible works:

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Illustration 2: Nude on couch Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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I never really got the hang of faces, so I just left them blank. Either that, or they looked like something a first-grader could draw. Funnily enough, Picasso's work also looks like something a first-grader could draw and that doesn't stop them selling for megabucks. Upon returning to class after the holiday break one time my art teacher asked me: “So, did you practice over the holidays?” “No.” I joked, “None of my female friends were willing to model for me!” “You can just draw fruit, you know”, she answered wryly. “Fruit? Fruit??? Why would I want to draw fruit?” Well, some people do apparently. Not me though. Possibly not you either. Here's another work that will be worth millions when I'm famous:

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Illustration 3: Crouching Nude, Hidden Privates Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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You will certainly meet some interesting and open-minded people doing an art class, especially one where the model is wearing no clothes. If you go really crazy you may even find one where the artists are wearing no clothes too; these are quite popular at nudist resorts. It's hard for me to imagine that the great artists who pushed the boundaries of conventional morality by having models strip naked for them didn't get into the action a bit themselves. No wonder the rest of the world looked on with intrigue and outrage; of course the rest of the world were really just What To Avoid jealous that they weren't in on the • Suffering for your art action too. • Cutting your own ear Art and aesthetics is an interesting off topic to many women and a surpris• “Art Video” ing number of women do life drawinstallations ing courses, even though very few of the nude models are male. This is • Drugs, drugs, drugs a great way to meet creative, inter- • Blatant pornography esting women while also building your confidence along with some artistic skills. If you want a bit of edge to help you attract a sophisticated woman who's keen to lose a few inhibitions I recommend getting into art. Then when she's around at your place admiring all your Salvador Dali prints on your walls, you can casually ask “So, would you like to model for me?” Get out your charcoals, and take it from there.

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Skill 10: Learn to Speak French What woman can resist the seductive allure of a man who sidles up to her with an authentic-sounding accent saying “Voulez vous couche avec moi, ce soir?” (literally, “Would you like to bed with me this evening?”) You'd never get away with that in English, that's What To Do for sure. Not until you'd done a • Pick a language you whole lot more leg-work anyway. But think would be fun French is Le langue d'amour (The to learn Language of Love). So somehow sud• Make it a sexy one denly anything is possible. • Visit the library and borrow books and CDs on learning that language

Of course, you're going to have to know more than just a single pick-up line if you want to demonstrate your creative genius in a foreign language. There is always the risk that the wo• Join a conversation man of your dreams had nothing betclass ter to do during her high school years than French lessons and will run rings around you if you're not careful. That's not likely to impress. So you've got to actually learn to speak the language, not just learn a few glib phrases from the Dating and Sex section of the Lonely Planet phrasebook. Being multilingual is a huge draw card to women and you will start to find appropriate opportunities to drop into your new language popping up all over the place. Skill with languages is Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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widely thought to be related to intelligence so women will think you're super-smart if you can demonstrate that you can speak more than one. And like playing music (Step 7) this brand of intelligence doesn't have the nerdy geek stereotype about it, provided you haven't chosen to learn Esperanto. The chance of the language of love fulfilling its promise are relatively high. Research shows that skill with multiple languages actually has little to do with traditional notions of intelligence, but most women don't know that. All they know is that when you start spouting words in French with an authentic-sounding accent, their juices start flowing. You don't even need to get it perfect for it to work; somehow making a total goose of yourself in a foreign language conversation has a certain appeal to it, while being a goose in your native tongue is just a turn-off. By far the most fun way to learn a language is to do a course at a Community College (Skill 13). When you're learning a language, it's particularly important to be able to practice. And what do you speak about when you're learning a language? Well, yourself of course. This gives the women in the group the perfect opportunity to get to know and like you without any special effort on your part. All you have to do is focus on your verbs, nouns, grammar and pronunciation, and the language of love will do the rest for you. Learning a foreign language will also be a valuable asset when you travel overseas (Skill 15) to countries where your new tongue is widely spoken. French is not everyone's cup of tea but there are plenty of other alternatives. I recommend something reasonably widely spoken so that when you're attempting to impress a girl with your linguistic abilities, there is at least some Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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chance that she may know it too and be able to join in. This makes it a whole lot more fun for her, and after all, some fun with her is what you want to be creating. Statistically speaking, Mandarin is the language with the most speakers, but given that it has no relation to English whatsoever, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're going for a Chinese girl or thinking of heading to Asia for your next overseas trip. Most European languages are indirectly related to parts of English, which is actually a bit of a linguistic What To Avoid dumping ground with several different variants of the kitchen sink in • Esperanto it thanks to the contribution of Ger- • Klingon manic and Romance languages all • Any language where lumped in together. This makes any the vowels are spat European language relatively easy rather than spoken for us Anglophones to pick up compared to Asian or African languages. Discovering more about the origins of language is an added benefit of learning a language and will allow you to engross women in conversations about linguistic intricacies even more interesting than whether “favorite sexual position” or “favourite sexual position” is in fact the correct spelling. On the other hand, if you're not even aware that there are parts of the English speaking world where the u is and isn't required, you need to check out Skill 15 and get yourself overseas pronto.

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Skill 11: Take Singing Lessons Before you baulk at my suggestion that you should take singing lessons, consider that Gene Simmons, lead singer of the rock band Kiss, claims to have had sex with over four thousand women. Over four thousand. Think about it. And he hooked them while wearing What To Do make-up. If that's not testimony to the • Find a vocal coach attraction power of a guy who can • Learn diaphragmatic sing, I don't know what is. breathing You can learn to sing whatever sort • Join a choir or of songs you want, so pick a favorite musical society genre and find a teacher willing to teach you how to nail it. I don't sug• Kick ass at Karaoke gest that you pretend to be a songbird and learn Italian arias although there is a certain class of woman who may find this appealing. They are probably in the minority and they probably live in Italy, which you most likely do not. Gene worked his magic by screaming “I was made for loving you, baby” into a microphone and it's not hard to improve on that technique-wise; so you can do it too. Taking singing lessons will demonstrate your sensitive side and show your desire for self-improvement, both of which help make you a magnet for women. The girls you will meet on stage in the leading roles when you get into musical theater (Skill 20) are invariably the better looking types who you want hanging on your Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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arm; but you're going to need to have something in common with them when you meet. Casually dropping in some remark about an amusing event that happened on the way to your singing lesson will enable you to engage them in conversation easily when she asks: “Who's your teacher?” Explain and then ask the same of her. Very few guys take singing lessons because they're under the misapprehension that singing is all a bit gay and there's a good chance that your subconscious has been programmed with this myth too. The easiest way to get over that is to remind yourself of What To Avoid our buddy Gene each time the • Anything by ABBA thought arises. Over four thousand. That's a lot. Singing lessons will teach you the fine art of voice projection and diaphragmatic breathing which will also assist you in sounding more confident when you speak. You'll learn to open your mouth wider and articulate properly which will make you appear both more commanding and more intelligent. Singing is one way to get women to project their fantasies about meeting a wonderful, confident, intelligent guy straight onto you. No woman can resist being serenaded. You remember that scene in Top Gun, right? Yeah, you know the one I mean. Tacky, yes. But does it work? Yes. And Tom Cruise can't sing. Of course just going to lessons will be a waste of time if you don't actually practice. To do that, you need to hook up with other people and join a choir, or get involved in musical theater (Skill 20). Both these activities will put you in an environment where men are in tremendous demand and that translates subconsciously into the mind of the women that you will meet there into the belief that you are a valuable and precious commodity Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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worth pursuing. The odds will be stacked in your favor. They will approach you, and you'll be ready with the conversation starter about your singing teacher when they do.

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Skill 12: Join a Band “If I'm in a rock band, I've got a better than average chance of bedding you down than if I was a dentist.” Gene Simmons, lead singer of Kiss

Girls just love guys who play music in bands. Not only do you get the opportunity to entertain them, you'll demonstrate your confidence by getting up on stage and your teamwork skills by the fact that you're able to perform with other people. Playing in a band is much less nerve-wracking than playing solo because you've got other band members there to support you. Even if they're on different instruments you've still got the psychological support of your fellow band members when performing. So join a band and the groupies will follow. Being in a band makes for very easy conversation starters when meeting women. If they ask you what you did last weekend and you reply “I was playing this gig at the stadium”, you will have their attention immediately. “Gig? What sort of gig?”, they will reply. “Oh, I play drums in this band named U2” may be a dead give-away that you're a dishonest prick, but “Oh, I play drums in this band named The Ghost Munchers”, or some other name she's never heard of, will do almost as well. Playing in a band that's famous will go a really really long way but there's no guarantees on fame, so just play because you love it and if you do become famous that's an awesome bonus. Once you've got the word “Gig” into your regular everyday lingo, your groupies will Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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be wanting to know when the next one is on so they can come along. If you have already learned to play music (Skill 7) you'll have an advantage when it comes to joining a band, but it's not essential. Plenty of bands form when a bunch of friends who want to learn to play music get together to do it as a group. The key is to find people who are around about your level, or perhaps slightly more advanced so that you can learn from them. If there's a wide discrepancy between the musical What To Do abilities of the band members, people • Find other people at are likely to get frustrated, and that your level and start will be bad for your Karma. Bands practicing together often tend to form spontaneously when people meet at music classes so • Join an existing band if you aren't already learning to play • Look in music a musical instrument (Skill 7) now is newspapers for the time to take a class and start. advertisements If you've never played any musical seeking band instrument whatsoever, I suggest you members look around for a percussion group • Go to a music class to join like a band playing Brazilian and see if any Samba or African Drumming. classmates want to Classes in rhythmic instruments ofform a band ten have bands attached which play informal gigs, and you'll get invited along once you've got the basic hang of it. Percussion is a good way to start because you can focus on your rhythmic skills first on the drums and worry about melodic instruments later. Learning rhythm and melody at the same time will take you longer before you're able to actually get up on stage and perform anyCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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thing. Sticking just to rhythmic instruments short-circuits the process somewhat. The advantage of playing in a Samba band is that the dancers who perform with you will be wearing next to nothing. Samba girls basically dance virtually naked with lots of feathers and skimpy bikini costumes just to keep themselves from getting arrested. Give them half a chance and they'd go the Full Monty under the trance of your hypnotic rhythms. And while the guys in the crowd will be drooling over What To Avoid themselves while gazing at this spectacular sight, they've really got • Getting mobbed by all your groupies no chance with the girls. You, on the other hand, are already in the inner • Sleeping with other circle. Not only can you chat with band members the dancing girls in the dressing room before and after the gig, you have ample opportunities to get to know them, ask for phone numbers, addresses and bra cup sizes. A word of caution is in order lest you end up playing in a band with girls in it. Do not be tempted to attempt to crack onto other members of your own band, unless you're very certain that it's going to be a long-term thing. A one-night stand with another band member is sure to wreck the whole dynamic of the thing and just leave everyone feeling awkward come next rehearsal. Hooking up with one of the dancing girls isn't such a bad idea, depending on how tight your dancers and performers are. But any intra-band relationships run the risk of a Fleetwood Mac style debacle where everything goes a bit haywire. Hook up with your groupies but treat your female band members as another one of the guys. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Skill 13: Do A Course at Community College One of the easiest ways to meet women is to do a course at a Community College. Not only is it more fun to learn new life skills in a group where you can practice with other people, but Community Colleges are a vast untapped resource for meeting women.

What To Do

Single women don't just sit around sucking down beers at the pub or in front of the television while lamenting the fact that they haven't met • Find a course to do “the right person” yet like us guys which will get you do: they pick a new hobby and go started out to a Community College to learn • Meet like-minded it with other people. But few guys women with the realize this, so these women end up same interests meeting other women who haven't met Mr Right yet, and lamenting about it collectively in song (Skill 11), drama (Skill 19) or some foreign language (Skill 10). • Pick a hobby or interest you'd like to develop

I can pretty much guarantee that if you do a Community College course, you will meet women. Not only that but you will meet them in an non-threatening environment where they are particularly receptive to getting to know you. Women tend to have their guards down in a learning environment much more than somewhere like a nightclub, and the mere fact that you'll be spending a number of weeks together in the same room interacting as you Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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learn your new hobby provides the opportunity for them to find out what a great guy you are without any special effort on your part whatsoever. When a woman meets you at a community college she will naturally assume that you're the sort of guy who is interested in expanding your own mind, are open to new ideas, and will therefore be more likely to make an interesting partner over the long haul. People get bored and relationships go stale if there's no new input. And while your idea of What To Avoid some “new input to keep the relationship fresh” might be the fantasy • Doing it just to meet women of your future girlfriend inviting one of her cute friends to join you in • Anything to do with a threesome, she's more likely to be Feng Shui looking at whether you've got the capacity to learn new skills and hobbies that will keep her interested in you. Turning up to Community College demonstrates that you do. This is one reason why it's so much easier to meet women in an educational environment than just about anywhere else. It doesn't really matter too much which course you do, but I suggest something from the creative arts, music, or languages. I wouldn't really recommend studying philately, for instance; but hey, you never know. Sometimes the women lurking beneath cloistered exteriors turn out to be rampaging sex machines just waiting to meet a guy they can trust for the opportunity to break free into wild abandon.

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So pick a course studying something that you find personally interesting. Just try to avoid topics that don't appeal to anything in the female psyche, like The Science of Star Trek say.

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Skill 14: Learn Sign Language If you grew up in a family where emotions were suppressed rather than expressed, there's a good chance that you started putting a lid on own emotional expressiveness way back before you can even remember. Your face may well be a blank slate and you probWhat To Do ably don't gesture very much when • Get your arms and you talk either. Let's face it: you look facial muscles like a robot, even when you're at moving your very most impassioned talking • Find a course near about a subject that you really love, you like your favorite sports team or web content management system. • Hang out with the Deaf community

We'll tackle your nerdy hobbies elsewhere, but for now we've got to get those facial muscles moving and get you looking a bit more animated. That permanent blank-slate look on your face which you acquired when your 1st Grade teacher screamed “Wipe that stupid grin off your face!!!” after you flushed her handbag down the toilet, is not doing you any favors nowadays in attracting women. Girls dig guys who are real; guys who are capable of showing some kind of emotions, especially excitement and joy upon meeting them. They like it because they can relate. Women have very strong feelings and if you're suppressing yours all the time when you talk, they end up thinking that there's just nothing there for Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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them to connect to. If you want to be relaxed in social situations you need to let go a bit when you talk to people. One strategy for getting you gesturing and using facial expression more comfortably is to learn the sign language that the Deaf community use to communicate. Every country has it's own sign language. Even English speaking countries like the United States, England and Australia have different sign languages. Learn the one that's spoken in your country because that way you've got the most likelihood of hooking up with Deaf people and others learning the language to practice with. People who are multi-lingual are perceived as more intelligent by other people and knowing sign language as opposed to a second spoken language will set you apart from other guys as a little different and more interesting without appearing nerdy. Women love men who are smart but they're not after an emotionally inexpressive geek. So here we're tackling two birds with one stone. And we all want two birds now, don't we? Sign language consists of a series of gestures and associated facial expressions each of which communicate a certain widely-understood meaning. The best way to learn sign language is to do a course at community college (see Skill 13) while also immersing yourself in the Deaf culture in your local area. Find out where Deaf people hang around, and start hanging out there yourself. Get onto the mailing lists of Deaf societies or organizations in your area and find out about social events to which hearing people are invited. There's a good chance your teacher will know about these events and be able to let you know how to get yourself an invitation. Many Deaf people will be happy to meet you because they are reliant on hearing people learning their lan-

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guage in order to provide them with interpreters; the more people who learn sign language the better it is for them. When I first started learning sign language I went to a huge Deaf community event where there were hundreds of Deaf people having dinner in a club. I remember walking into the room and being overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds of people gesticulating like crazy and pulling faces at each other. What the hell is wrong with these people?, I thought. They all seemed really upset or angry or something, waving their arms around like there's no tomorrow. A Deaf person telling a story about someone who is angry will use facial expression, body movements and gestures which depict anger, much as hearing people would do using tone of voice. It doesn't actually mean that the person telling the story is angry though. One minute they might be portraying anger and the next they'll be telling a joke and laughing. I could see that these people had something valuable to offer in making my own gestures a little more animated. Deaf people are masters at portraying emotion through facial expression and once you start hanging around with them you'll start picking it up too. Deaf people tend to love sports. It's hard for them to communicate with hearing people but they have the same desire to bond with people in community as anyone else. Sport brings people together and most Deaf people love to play sport as a result. Once you've found a sport that you love (Skill 16) you've got a good chance of hooking up with Deaf people who also play it. This will give you an opportunity to interact with them on a nonthreatening level while offering lots of opportunities to chat between games, sets, or whatever.

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It can be difficult to break into the Deaf community; you will always be something of an outsider unless you're actually deaf yourself. I wouldn't recommend going this far just to fit in. The other problem talking to a Deaf person is that they sign extremely fast; way too fast for us learners to understand so we have to constantly ask them to slow down. They're generally happy to oblige but it makes the conversation a little less enthralling for them than a conversation with a fluent sign language speaker would be. Talking in their native language doesn't have What To Avoid the novelty value that it does for • Cochlear Implants you and while they're often happy • Assuming that Deaf to teach you new signs, occasionally people are all the they just want to have a chat with same someone who doesn't talk like a 2 • Going too far with a year old. Deaf girl before I learned sign language for about 3 you've learned the years, and probably ended up with sign for “condom” the vocabulary of a Deaf 3 year old. However, you will soon discover a community of hearing people who are also learning sign language just like you with whom you can practice. This community will contain another potential pool of women who will be keen to meet you because you share a common interest. Few guys ever bother to learn a second language once they've left high school but women are more inclined to do so because they put a higher premium on communication with other people. So the numbers will be stacked in your favor. Many of these women will have been attracted to it because they want to work with the Deaf community or help Deaf people in Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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some way, meaning that there's a better-than-average chance that they are the sort of caring, compassionate, good-natured girls that you want to be hooking up with. Once you're learning sign language together, there will be lots of opportunities to talk to them because that's how you practice. You'll need a steady flow of conversation topics to use for this and the easiest topic to talk about is yourself which gives them the perfect opportunity to find out what an interesting guy you are. If you're following the other advice in this book you've got a zillion fascinating activities to talk about and it gives you the opportunity to find out about them before making your move. When you decide you want to get together with them for some one-on-one time outside of class, it's easy to ask “Would you like to get together to practice sometime?” Even if they only say yes because they need the sign language practice it won't be long before you feel comfortable inviting them along with you to check out that nudist club you heard about on the Internet.

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Skill 15: Travel Overseas It's all very well to draw a bevy of gorgeous babes into your orbit with your projections of self-confidence (Skill 20), your motorbike (Skill 17) or your dancing prowess (Skill 1); but what are you going to talk with them about once they're close to you? If you want What To Do to entertain your new belle with • Pick a country that exotic stories of distant lands, you're interests you, and go going to need to have actually visited visit it some. Traveling overseas will expand • Grab a Lonely Planet your horizons, bring you into contact guidebook and with new and interesting people that highlight the bits that you just don't meet at home, and set sound cool you up with a stack of cool tales about people and places you've vis• Find your own ited. country on the world map so you can get home again

Many women love the idea of traveling and if you visit the popular destinations like Europe, Australia, Asia • Keep your valuables or America, there's a better than even on you at all times chance that you're going to bump into women who have also been there when you get home. Finding you've both visited London creates an instant connection which allows both of you to see each other as old friends. Never mind the fact 10 million people live in London, that 99% of the world's overseas travelers have

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been there and decided not to stay, nor that half the world's daily air traffic flies via Heathrow. Now that you've got this in common, you're sure to hit it off. Even the inevitable disasters that occur while traveling turn into pots of gold when you return home to tell your family, friends, and new female attractants about them. Like the time I missed my flight out of London's Stanstead airport because I spent too long in the British Museum the day I headed to visit the world's largest nudist resort on the Mediterranean coast in France. There are so many angles to go with on this story, it's just ridiculous. I'm set if I meet one of those smart, reserved girls who are right into science and museums. Or those who love the mystique of traveling to France. Or the allure of the Cote d'Azur and the Mediterranean; at least for anyone who hasn't actually lived there and put up with the freezing water, lack of surf, absurd prices and all those goddamn tourists. And then there's the nudist resort reference which always raises a few eyelids. It's the perfect opportunity for her to say “Oh, yeah; my family are nudists too”, or for me to throw in “It was great. Have you ever tried it?... Would you like to?” You'll have her clothes off faster than you can say “Where's the nearest nude beach?” Aside from its potential for spinning interesting stories once you return home, traveling is also damn good fun in its own right. The people you meet are likely to be more relaxed and open minded than the ones you're used to meeting at home; this is partly because these sort of people are more likely to travel and partly because they're on holidays and invariably up for a good time. You'll also be amazed when you bump into people from your home town that you would never expect in some far-flung city. Again: instant connection. Never mind that you'd walk past Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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the same person without even making eye-contact back home; now that you're in a foreign land you'll become best friends instantly and if they're half-ways good looking, you know where that could lead. Women traveling are often a long way from family and friends, and girls are often craving a hug, cuddle and a bit of affection. Be generous and you will be rewarded. It doesn't really matter where you go but generally the more interesting the better. If you've learned to speak a foreign language (Skill 10) this is the ideal opportunWhat To Avoid ity to go and get some practice on the ground in one of the countries • Getting ripped off where your newfound verbal skills • Overly friendly are the language of choice. This is people who invite why you will have lucked out by you to places where deciding to learn Esperanto; if that's you feel you, I really can't help. For the rest uncomfortable of you who chose wisely with • Dark alleys French, Spanish or Portuguese, the world is your oyster as colonial • Ghettos times have set you up with a huge • Missing your flight range of destinations where you can get the linguistic practice you need. And this is what makes it really good fun. If you haven't learned a language yet, spend the few months between when you book your flights and when you take off borrowing language books and CDs from your local library to get as much of the new lingo into you as possible. This will definitely pay off once you're on the ground there. If you really think you can't hack the added difficulty of not being able to understand whether the cute topless girl sitting next Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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to you on the French beach is asking you to help her with her sunscreen, or to get the hell away from her because you're acting like a stalker; you can always travel to another country where they speak English. At least you're still getting out there and will be ahead of a lot of other guys. Venture into the foreign language zone next time. You're fortunate if you were born in an English language speaking country because it's pretty much become the international language of choice for traveling and diplomacy; much to the chagrin of the French. Placate them by learning their mother tongue (Skill 10) when you get home, so it doesn't die out completely. The sophisticated modern girl is invariably a seasoned traveler so if you've spent your life up till now barely venturing out the front door, let alone outside your home town, it's time for a little adventure. Women these days will expect you to have a broad world view that you can only get by actually getting out there. If you want to be taken seriously by a girl, you need to have visited at least as many countries as she has. So if you haven't done so already, now is the time to travel overseas.

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Skill 16: Take up a Sport You Love Consider elite sportsmen from any sports you choose and you'll notice they all have one thing in common: drop-dead-gorgeous female partners. It's no co-incidence that red hot sportsmen attract red hot women. Sport is a sort of modern peaceful equivalent of war, where men com• Try a few sports to pete against each other for a prize infind one you enjoy stead of to the death. And while the playing official trophy may be the stated ob• Join a team jective, the other trophy awaiting • Practice and play sportsmen is the affection of regularly whichever women they choose. Girls go crazy over sportsmen because sport is a sanctioned outlet for aggression and displays of strength which trigger a woman's in-built desire for strength and security.

What To Do

Be they golfers, tennis players, or footballers, seeing men excel at sport makes women feel secure and this makes these guys very attractive. Never mind that the average elite athlete's body is pretty much destroyed by the time he's forced into retirement in his mid 30's, and that what these women will be taking to bed for the rest of their lives is an arthritic, decrepit bag of spent bones: these guys get the prize that we all want. Playing sport will also help keep you fit and is generally a lot more fun than just spending all your time in the gym (Skill 5). Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Your personal trainer can even tailor your exercises to suit the sport of your choice. Simply watching the sport on TV won't do anything for you; women don't generally like doing this, and merely tolerate it at best. You need to be out there actually playing the sport you love. If you weren't one of the sporty guys at high school and haven't been playing sport regularly since there's a good chance that your muscle co-ordination could use a bit of work; and believe it or not women will be able to notice What To Avoid this in your body language. This is why women find sportsmen more • Curling attractive even before they know • Lawn Bowls; at least what the guy does for a living. If until you're older you're a professional desk jockey • BASE Jumping you really need to be getting out there onto a field or court of some sort to build your fitness, muscle strength and co-ordination with a little sport. After brief forays into soccer, tennis and basketball, I found that volleyball was a sport I actually enjoyed playing for its own right. This meant I wasn't doing it merely to impress girls, and would therefore keep it up even when none were watching; and keeping it up regularly is important if you want to build the sort of fine muscle co-ordination that will increase your pulling power over a woman's subconscious. It's time to take up playing a sport that you love. Even if you find the idea completely objectionable, give it a go. In fact, the more objectionable it sounds, the more reason to get yourself out there. The only half-way passable excuses are if you're too busy doing other physical activities like going to the gym (Skill 5) or going dancing (Skill 1). Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Skill 17: Get a Motorbike “Having a motorbike is an instant turn-on!” Hot girl I met recently

Let's face it; chicks dig danger. Or more specifically, chicks dig guys who aren't fazed by danger. And bikes are dangerous. You're about 30 times more likely to die on a motorbike than you are in a car. And frankly, cars aren't that safe to begin with. Just look at the annual road toll and you'll get the idea. But the point is that while we downplay the danger involved in cruising around in our tin missiles at 55 mph, everyone can see that riding fast on a bike with no protection around you whatsoever is either crazy... or really really brave. A guy who appears unafraid in the face of danger is immediately appealing to a primitive part of the female brain which is hardwired to seek out a guy with a bit of “edge” who will not baulk in the face of lions and tigers on the savanna. Now lions and tigers aren't much of a threat to the modern girl, but nonetheless that primitive part of her brain is still there; and what's more it's right near another primitive part involving sexual selection that ensures the survival of the species. You want to get both these parts on side, and it's well worth the effort to learn a skill to help you harness their power to your advantage. I first realized that I had to get a motorbike while traveling in France. I was in Nice, on the Cote d'Azur, crossing the road to walk to the boulangerie when an Australian guy pulled up on a Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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motorbike with a hot looking girl on the back. As they got off the bike she removed her helmet and swished her head to straighten out her long blond hair, just like they do in those shampoo commercials on TV. Right, I thought, I've got to get me a motorbike! And so the hot-blond-on-the-back-of-the-motorbike fantasy was born. The trick about getting a motorbike is that while you want to appear to be boldly facing death, you don't actually want to die doing it. Nor do you want to end up as a spinal injury casualty for the rest of your life. Riding a motorWhat To Do bike significantly increases the risks of • As many rider doing both. I cannot state this enough: training courses as you can easily die doing this. Go you can back an re-read the disclaimer on page 22 before proceeding. Fortu• Get decent protective nately you can reduce the risk you gear face by taking a few sensible precau• Start with a 250 cc tions. There are enough idiot riders • Learn good cornering out there doing mind-bogglingly stutechnique pid things to ensure that the accident rate statistics remain high without • Read Zen and the Art you necessarily needing to be counof Motorcycle ted among them. Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig The first trick to getting a motorbike is learning to ride one. Nobody is likely to lend you their motorbike for this purpose because you're likely to drop it. And you'll have trouble getting your first motorbike home to your place until you've learned to ride, so there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. The best approach is to do a rider training course where they provide you with a bike. This is also a good way to get a taste-test for what Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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riding is like and see if you enjoy it. If not, perhaps you should try public speaking (Skill 21) instead, where the danger is only imaginary. In the state where I live, pre-license training is mandatory and subsidized by the government. It's quite a cheap way to try out riding a bike if you've never done so even if you don't end up going ahead and getting your license. But the mandatory courses are the bare minimum you need if you want to survive. Find out what additional courses are available and do them too once you've got the basic hang of it. Even if you're simply chomping at the bit to get out there on the road, at least try to pay attention during the rider training courses. They will teach you really important stuff like emergency procedures and safe cornering, which you will only learn on the road by dropping your bike and going “Well, that didn't work; I'll have to try it differently”; or worse, by straying into the oncoming traffic, the guard rail or other obstacles by the side of the road. None of these are time- or cost-effective learning strategies when you factor in the bike repairs, the hospital stays, and the funeral costs that you or your estate will encounter each time you get it wrong. One of the guys in my first rider training course complained the whole time that he had to do this damned course at all when what he really wanted to be doing was caning his bike out on the open road. He rode like crap during the course and being a teenage guy he was in the perfect demographic to boost the casualty statistics. One way to avoid this happening to you is to wait until you're in your 30's before learning to ride, when you no longer think of yourself as indestructible and are already coming to terms with your potential mortality. Both of these insights are helpful when riding a motorbike. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Before you actually get a bike, you need a set of protective gear for your body. Expect to spend at least 40% of the cost of your first bike on a full set of leathers and a high quality helmet. If you have a good head, you need a good helmet. If you can't afford an extra 40%, get a cheaper bike. You can always buy a more expensive one later so long as you're still alive. You'll also want a second set of protective gear to loan to the girls you'll be taking for a spin on the back of the bike. But you should wait a year before contemplating doing this. The last thing you want is to be explaining from your hospital bed to the parents of your pillion passenger why she didn't make it. Given you'll want to learn to ride for at least a year before taking a pillion passenger, you don't have to fork out for their protective gear straight away.

Illustration 4: My first bike was one of these; a Kawasaki ZZR 250

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Don't get a 1200cc monster behemoth power-blasting death-machine for your first bike because your first mistake will kill you for sure. And if you think you aren't going to make any mistakes, well... you're being hopelessly naïve. We're all naïve sometimes, but please stick to being naïve about activities that aren't going to get you killed. Starting with a 250cc will be more forgiving. Get used to the added danger of barbs and jibes you're going to cop from other riders for being on a “girls bike”, at least they won't kill you. And unless you live in Europe, don't get one of those crappy little Vespa scooter things either; you'll just look like a complete joke. If you find that you just love the sensation of speed and need more power then upgrade after a year or so when you've got some solid riding experience behind you. Keep in mind that most girls know nothing about motorbikes and won't know that 250cc means you've got an engine the size of a small teacup. To them, it's still a motorbike. However, if you want to take them on the back and get the rush of acceleration when you take off, or if you want to try to impress other biker chicks, then you'll need something more serious eventually. Just remember that the chicks you attract to your funeral won't be all that sexually available to you, so for God's sake, be careful. Getting your first bike home is something of a challenge. I live in a city of over 4 million people, and the bike I chose to buy was from a guy (well, a girl actually... after all, it was a 250) who lived on the other side of town. There was no way I would have been able to ride it home through the middle of the city after only a few hours riding practice on my first rider training course. So I asked a friend of mine who had been riding for ages to come with me to pick it up and ride it home for me. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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Once I had my new bike back at my place, I could start riding around the back streets near where I live until I progressively increased my confidence to the point where I could try a main road, then a highway, then a freeway, then... the sky's the limit. At first, 30mph seemed very fast. Then I tried 35mph, and that seemed very fast; but 30mph was no big deal any more. Then I tried 40mph, and that seemed very fast; but 35mph was no big deal. And so and and so on. It wasn't long before I worked my way up to freeway speeds. Then I conquered wet-weather riding too. The golden rule of motorbike steering is that the bike will tend to head in the direction that you are looking. One of the guys on my rider training course literally ran off the course straight into a tree simply because he was so worried about hitting the tree that he kept looking at it. You need to keep looking in the direction that you want to go, and use your peripheral vision to detect objects that you want to miss. This is most important on a corner. I had the occasional panic attack when I first learned to ride, and this rule saved my life. I was cruising along the road one day when I came to a corner with a large concrete crash barrier on my left, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I hit that crash barrier, it was likely to kill me. I became fixated on the crash barrier. A bit like the guy with the tree. I snapped out of it by reminding myself to look in the direction I wanted to head, which meant at the exit of the corner, and I made it through unscathed. If you panic, look at the spot on the road where you want to end up and the bike will take you there. Don't look at the middle of a corner, look at the position on the road where you want to exit the corner. And when you get half way to that spot, shift your gaze to the exit of the next corner you want to take. Fixating on Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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any spot will cause you to fall off when you get there, so remember to keep moving your gaze on. Do this over and over until it becomes automatic, so you can do it even if you get distracted or start to panic over how dangerous what you are doing is. Turn your head deliberately when you want to check over your shoulder, or for traffic on your left or right; then turn back to look at the road in the direction you want to go. Keep in mind that the only reason we can ride or drive at all is that we as a society have desensitWhat To Avoid ized ourselves to how dangerous motor vehicle travel is. When cars • Getting killed were first introduced, people de- • Big Trucks manded that someone walk in front • Outlaw Bikie gangs ringing a bell so that pedestrians wouldn't get hurt. Nowadays over a • Idiot drivers million people die in motor vehicle • Bikie Chicks with too accidents world-wide every year, many tattoos and pedestrians routinely account • Motor scooters for 50% of the road toll. We have become accustomed to the danger through desensitization to it, but the danger is still there. Of course, that's why you're doing this, because chicks dig danger; but don't be an idiot about it. I wouldn't recommend commuting in a big city on a bike, and I personally hate riding in winter. As I write this, it's autumn and I haven't actually ridden my bike for over six months. But that's not entirely a problem. When a girl asks me if I have a motorbike, the answer is still yes and it's ready to be cranked up as soon as she's interested in going out for a spin.

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About a year after I got my bike, I asked a hot looking blond girl who I had met at Salsa dancing if she'd like to come for a spin with me. Of course she said yes, and so the hot-blond-on-theback-of-the-bike fantasy was fulfilled. I even got her to swish her hair when she took the helmet off and we took photos of each other on the back of my big dangerous 250. Well, she wasn't a biker chick, so she wasn't to know, was she? Get a bike. It works. Just don't kill yourself, OK?

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Skill 18: Get Your Own Place Those idiots you're living with don't just lower the tone of the place where you live, they lower the tone of your whole life. Like it or not, women will judge you by the company you keep, and your flatmates are the closest people to you so they're going to factor into What To Do this pretty heavily. All that time you • Ditch your idiot spend arguing over washing up, flatmates cleaning, lawn mowing or whose • Create your own turn it is to put out the trash is time space to live in that you could be spending on something much more conducive to your • Have a plan to buy attractive abilities. Almost anything your own place is more fun than arguing with flat• Watch He Died With a mates about why the washing up has Falafel In His Hand been sitting on the sink for over a month and finding that nobody takes responsibility for it. It just materialized there like that or was one of the household fixtures when the place was first built, and you've only just noticed now. I watched the movie He Died With a Falafel In His Hand with one of my loser ex-flatmates one day back when I was still living in the shared house from hell. It's the story of how one man barely survives the craziness living with a continuous stream of annoying morons in shared household after household. My flatmate

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thought it was hilarious, but he didn't get that he was part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you can possibly afford it, escape the madness and get your own place. A place where you can live on your own terms. A place that you can invite girls back to whenever you want without having to worry about whether your flatmates will have a bunch of their idiot friends commandeering the lounge room. Now of course this is more easily said than done. I lived in shared acWhat To Avoid commodation for over 13 years • Share while saving up the money to buy accommodation ads my own place, so I know what it's that say “Come and like. I saved a stack of money in the Party!” process and given that I've now escaped share accommodation hell I • Compulsive gamblers, drug can look back and say that it was addicts, alcoholics, worth it. But it sure was painful at and people who times. Some of my flatmates were don't pay bills great but there are others who I am glad are out of my life; the ones who • Living with morons I shudder to think of meeting a prospective lady-friend because I just know it would make her run a mile. It's not like my lady-friend would be going out with them or anything, it's that she'd be thinking “Why are you living with that guy?” The hardest part of getting your own place is usually finding the money. Women are more attracted to your income-earning potential than they are your world-leading thriftiness. If you can't afford to get your own place right now at least have a plan in Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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place for getting one at some point in the future. Preferably a plan that the lady of your choice can see herself joining in on. Start saving for a deposit and start thinking about where you would like to live. Dream a little. Think and talk about your plans for the future where you're living without the company of idiots. Give her some hope to cling to that your crazy flatmates are not going to be a part of your life forever.

Idiots Idiot Free Zone Illustration 5: Your New Place When you have your own place, you can do whatever you want with it. Declare it clothing-optional if you like. Deck the walls with prints of your favorite nudes. Put an Idiot Free Zone sign up on the wall and only let in the people you really like. Make it your sanctuary from the craziness outside and women will love

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being invited into your domestic intimate zone to escape the madness and spend some quality time... just with you.

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Skill 19: Do an Acting Course “Acting is telling the truth under imaginary circumstances.” Sanford Meisner

Those inhibitions you've been carrying around since you were a kid stop you from relaxing around other people, and this will prevent you from getting what you want in life unless you do something about it. The area in which it will bite hardest is your relationships with women. You've become so used to your own inhibitions that you think they are part of who you are, and that you just are this way. But you're not. Who you really are is who you are when you're not busy worrying about what other people think, over-analyzing yourself and dumping a shit load of criticism on yourself internally. All of which makes you much less attractive to women than you should otherwise be. You are a man, after all. Hopefully you're dealing with some of this stuff in Steps 12 and 17, but that's not the only angle you can attack this from and a multi-pronged assault with give you faster results than just one thing at a time. One of the ironies of learning to act is that learning how to pretend to be someone else can actually loosen you up and make you more comfortable being yourself, acting intuitively in your daily life. When you're acting intuitively, you're not actually acting at all: you're being your true uninhibited self. Acting will also Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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teach you to connect emotionally to other people. Women flock to actors because they can relate on an emotional level which women crave and naturally make the people around them feel comfortable. The most powerful technique for getting in touch with your intuitions and connecting emotionally with other people was developed by acting teacher Sanford Meisner. He looked at the way actors trained using Stanislavsky's Method appeared and thought they looked fake because What To Do they were acting rather than being • Find a school emotionally truthful. In Meisner's view teaching the Meisner acting is about living truthfully unTechnique der imaginary circumstances. So he came up with a training technique • Learn voice based on repetitious exercises that projection overcomes inhibitions, gets you “out • Lose your inhibitions of your head”, stops you overanalys• Learn to ad-lib ing everything all the time, and connects you emotionally to other • Have fun people. The result on stage is an actor who appears more genuine because they are in the moment, responding intuitively to what's going on around them. Offstage, the result is that you start behaving like a human being rather than a robot. You end up in touch with your core self and can overcome a lot of the social programming that has forced you to be “polite”, inoffensive, bland and unattractive to women. If you can find a school that teaches the Meisner technique, sign up and get into it. Do your homework and practice the repetition exercises as often as you can. If there isn't such a school near you Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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try a Theatrical Improvisation class, where you'll also learn techniques for overcoming inhibitions and have a lot of fun in the process. Or a traditional acting class. All of these are different paths to the same goal of being less inhibited, more self-expressed, and more naturally attractive. It's also an inherently interesting story when women ask “What do you do?”, to say “I'm studying acting”. Tell them about the techniques you're learning, and you'll immediately have their attention and interest. You can't learn to act or do drama from a book. You have to get out there, get up in front of other people and actually start doing it. There are introductory drama course at your local community college and small acting schools where you'll get individual attention in any major city. This will get your adrenaline pumping. You'll learn breathing techniques for coping with anxiety as they throw you into the deep end with impromptu drama and more lines to learn than you'll know what to do with. You'll meet other fascinating people who are either out-there larger than life or well on their way with whom you can network. Many of them will be women and many of the guys will be gay, so this is yet-another-activity where the ratios are stacked in your favor. I got picked up by a girl at a drama course with no effort on my part whatsoever and we subsequently dated on and off for a few years. That's not to say that the drama course was no effort; but it made meeting women effortless by comparison.

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Most people are terrified of getting up in front of other people and this will surely bring all your anxieties to the surface where you can start to deal with them. It can also be surprisingly fun once you're able to get into it and begin playing characters that you would never have dreamed of in the past. Doing a drama course will also stand you in good stead when you get to Skill 20 and start to ply your craft on stage. Many community theater organizations either run drama courses themselves or are affiliated with What To Avoid schools which do. If you want to take this a little more seriously, find • Techniques where they “break you a course affiliated with a theater down” in order to group where you're guaranteed to reconstruct you end up on-stage by the end of it. differently This is the really fun part. You are guaranteed to meet women by do- • Taking it all too ing this; and they'll be the fun sort seriously of women who are prepared to get up and give things a go. And this is the easiest way to hook up with them. Get into it.

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Skill 20: Get On Stage in Community Theater Once you've learned to dance (Skill 1), sing (Skill 11), and act (Skill 19), you've got all the ingredients you need to get up on stage in community theater. Most guys wouldn't be caught dead up on stage in front of other people. So imagine the image of confidence What To Do you'll be projecting when you get up • Seek out amateur and do a full-on song and dance act theater companies in in front of your friends, family, and a your area and join bunch of strangers including hot wotheir emailing list men just waiting to be entertained by • Audition for roles you. You'll be pulling the babes like matching the kind of there's no tomorrow. guy you'd like to be Stage-fright can be overcome simply • Avoid having to by knowing what you're doing, and audition by joining by experience. That's why people rethe chorus of shows hearse, rehearse, rehearse for three that are desperate for months before going in front of an men audience. By that time you've done it so many times that it's become auto• Learn your lines matic and opening night just feels like yet-another-rehearsal but with lots of heads barely visible behind the spotlights. When you're on stage, you can barely even see that there's an audience out there because of all the lights shining on you. It's your moment to

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shine and you'll be like a star attracting women into your orbit all over the place. And it's not only women in the audience that you'll be attracting. This is also a brilliant opportunity to meet gorgeous women in the cast of the show itself, in an environment where the odds are massively stacked in your favor. There is a desperate shortage of men in community theater so it's relatively easy for any guy to get a minor role in a show. Yet getting any role in a show is difficult for girls because there is so much competition. When a director is casting a show he's looking for talent and appearance to match the characters in question. The competitive pressure between the girls means that only the talented, gorgeous ones are likely to get through. Whereas there's always a shortage of guys so you can generally waltz on in provided you can hold a tune and have both a left and a right foot. And if that's not currently you, just check out Steps 11 and 1 so you can learn. Once you're in the cast you'll spend three months rehearsing with that bevy of gorgeous girls who made it through the auditions. One of the shows I did was a community production of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats. Now before you dismiss dancing around in a leotard as the gayest thing you've ever heard of, consider that all the female cats in the cast were drop-dead-gorgeous dancers with svelte bodies and that we shared dressing rooms because there wasn't enough space to separate all the guys and girls, and still have everyone close enough to the stage for their costume changes and stage entries. It's not about perving at half-naked girls in dressing rooms though; you'll be in trouble quick smart if you get into that sort of caper. Doing a show means working on something really fun Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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with a group of fascinating people and having plenty of rehearsal time to give the ladies in the cast the opportunity to get to know what a great guy you are. After all, you can sing, act, and dance; what more could a girl want? So by the time you get to go on-stage, they'll be so comfortable around you that they'll be prepared to strip down to their underwear around you. Think of what else they'll be wanting to do with you in private. The other reason that community theater vastly stacks the odds in your favor is that most of the guys involved in theater are gay. You wouldn't know that when you see them on-stage unless you've got a particularly sensitive gaydar because they are acting. What this means in practical terms is that there are very few straight male guys like yourself to go around a cast full of beautiful women. You just don't get odds as favorable as this out in the pub and club scene, even with rumors of the global mandrought. Men are not in short supply; quality men are in short supply, and what you need is something to make you stand out from the crowd to make you especially appealing. You'll be standing out from the crowd alright when you're up on stage. Women in the audience who see you will subconsciously judge you by the women you're hanging around with; who in this case will be your gorgeous, talented female fellow thespians. “Bitches!”, the girls in the audience will be thinking, as they hatch their evil plans to steal you away from those other beauties and right into their loving arms. Theater is great fun because you get to choose who you would like to be and then play that character so you get to experience being like them. My first role was playing Kenicke in Grease. He's the cool tough guy who owns the car Greased Lightning, and even though you don't remember his name, all the babes do. Even Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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just mention the story and they're like “Wella wella wella uh... tell me more, tell me more?” It's an instant hook-in. Plus I got to make out with the girl who played Rizzo in the park scene. Pity she was a lesbian in real life; but I didn't pick her, the director did. If making out with a lesbian troubles you, just switch on your dormant lesbian sex fantasy and you'll get through fine. Most guys have trouble turning it off, what's wrong with you? Never seen yourself as a tough guy? Always been a bit of a walkover? Well audition for the role of Riff, gang leader of The Jets in West Side Story. That'll show 'em. I did. You'll get into punch ups, have the hottest youngest girlfriend in the show, run with the bad boys for a change, play with knives and guns, and die on stage. You won't die literally or even figuratively, we don't want that. But your character will. It's the perfect opportunity to get in touch with your repressed aggression even while entertaining other people. And if you get out-Riffed at the audition like I did, you can still end up in the gang anyway because they're bound to be short of guys. A show like West Side Story needs lots of guys. Or try launching a revolution by auditioning for Les Miserables. As the my vocal coach said to me “You can't launch a revolution without a lot of men in the cast”, so you'll have no trouble getting a part on stage where you'll run around with guns and shoot people. Whoever you want to be there's bound to be some part in some play some playwright has constructed that fits the bill. All you've got to do is find the part you'd like to play, audition for it, land the role, and the director will spend the next 3 months working with you on how to be that character. Before long the part will be Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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rubbing off on your subconscious and you'll start acting like the character you want to be in real life. Your subconscious doesn't know it's all an act. You'll be pulling the babes just walking down the street in your white T-shirt, blue jeans and black leather jacket. Just don't get one with T-birds emblazoned on the back, or they'll know you're going a bit far. Different theater companies have different standards and attract people with different levels of talent. That means whatever level you're at there's somewhere for you. What To Avoid Everyone hates auditions so before you let stage-fright at an audition • Dork roles like Eugene in Grease wreck your chances of getting anywhere in this world, here's my tip • Lesbian leading for bypassing them altogether: ladies Minor roles or even just a spot in the chorus are a great place to start and as a guy you can often get these roles in amateur shows without auditioning at all. Find a show you would like to do and get the audition notice. Then a week or so after the auditions, ring the director to say that you're very sorry that you've missed the auditions but that you're interested in a minor role. Mention the singing teacher that you've been working with (Skill 11) and ask if he still needs any men for the chorus. Unless it's a musical society with especially high standards, you'll be in like Errol Flynn. If you want to go for a leading role though you will need to audition. Playing Kenicke was my very first show and I got the role even though I froze on stage during the audition. Why? Because I had the look that the director wanted. The girl who auditioned for Rizzo happened to be very short and the director thought it Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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would be funny to have a short Rizzo pushing around a tall Kenicke. I had shown that I could sing in key during the first line of Greased Lightning before freezing up at the audition, so he went for me. I didn't freeze at my next audition because I sang the same song again, which by then I'd already sung on-stage in front of a couple of thousand people. Each role you play will lead to the next one, and more and more things will become possible as you go along. The world will not end if your audition falls flat; you may even still get the role as I did. And even if you don't, you can still have a great time playing lesser roles. The Thespian world is your oyster and there are lots of pearls to be had in there. Your guy friends will be green with envy when they see the gorgeous girls you'll be hanging around with from now on. So break a leg!

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Skill 21: Learn The Art of Public Speaking "According to most studies, people's number-one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two! Now, this means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy." Jerry Seinfeld

People who appear at ease while public speaking are invariably seen as extremely confident. Having learned to love yourself (Step 17) will come in really handy here, but note that women love guys who appear confident and you don't actually have to feel 100% confident all the time in order to appear confident. Public speaking is seen by many as the ultimate demonstration of confidence, yet it's a skill which can be learned like any other. So if you're thinking I could never do that; I don't have the confidence, you don't need amazing confidence in order to do public speaking. Even the best public speakers feel nervous; they just learn to channel that nervousness and the associated adrenaline rush into an energetic performance as they speak. What you need is something you're passionate about to talk about, the desire to share it, and the willingness to learn. The confidence you need to do it will come as you acquire the skill just as it does with any other activity. I was at a wealth creation conference a few years back, and when lunch time came I wandered down to the cafeteria with much of the rest of the group. There was a group of attractive women Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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having lunch together and since I was on my own it was relatively easy to muscle in on them by wandering up and say “Hi! I'm here by myself; do you mind if I join you for lunch?” It turned out they were all friends and had come along together to learn how to change their mindset about money. I ended up sitting next to the prettiest one, who at one point in their conversation made this remark about the main presenter at the conference: “How do you meet guys like that? So confident and yet sensitive all at the same time” My immediate unspoken internal reWhat To Do sponse was There's one sitting right • Join Toastmasters next to you! and I resolved to get on • Speak on topics you with learning the art of public speakare passionate about ing as quickly as possible. • Believe that the If you can get up in front of an audiaudience needs to ence, communicate a message with hear your message them, make them laugh, make them • Speak from the heart think, and reveal something about yourself in the process, you will invariably be seen as confident, sensitive, and alluring. Women project a charismatic persona onto public speakers which is based mostly on fantasy because they don't really know who you are or what you are thinking inside. It's a little like being a celebrity: we attribute all sorts of favorable characteristics to celebrities because we know very little about who they really are inside. This is why people get so excited about celebrity gossip where we discover that they are actually fallible human beings just like ourselves. You don't need to go so far as to being a world famous celebrity in order to have women project their fantasies onto you; you just Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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need to be able to get up in front of an audience and entertain and inform them. And the most important thing to remember about this is that it is a skill that can be learned. The way to learn any practical skill is to find a teacher or do some kind of course and then to practice practice practice. There are plenty of ways to do this but probably the most popular is the worldwide public speaking organization called Toastmasters, so hit their website to find a meeting near you and drag yourself off to it pronto. About a week after I did the ToastWhat To Avoid masters introductory course on public speaking, a woman from the • Taking yourself too seriously group that ran the course rang me and said “God Graham, I am so • Forgetting what you horny. Are you doing anything this wanted to say evening? Can I come around for... a video... or something?”. I kid you not. I could tell that a video wasn't really what she was after, but I did think it would make a good start to the evening. As for the ending... well, do I really have to spell it out for you? I remarked later during the evening “If I'd known that public speaking was going to have this side-benefit, I would have got onto it sooner!”. Get onto it Fabio, now.

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Skill 22: Change Your Profession Some professions pay more than others, and some professions pull more than others when it comes to women. While you are a unique individual with your own set of attractive qualities, women cannot help but project their own image of your profession onto What To Do you and this can work either for or • Find a profession or against you depending on how they vocation that you see that profession generally. love You'll find it much easier showing • Lean towards jobs that you're a really funny guy if that the sort of you're a stand-up comic than if you women you want to have to break through the stereotype attract will find of being an accountant. And being a appealing telemarketer, parking inspector or tax collector is likely to come across as annoying no matter how great you may be inside. If the girls you're hoping to attract can't get past their preconceptions of your profession you're not going to make a lot of headway despite your rugged good looks and great personality. Women are attracted to men in uniform so any profession involving a uniform is likely to be a hit right off the bat. Not only do you look smart in a uniform, but a uniform projects confidence and offers a sense of protection that triggers a woman's desire for a guy who makes her feel safe. Firemen are widely regarded as the sexiest profession by women: you wear a uniform, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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you save people's lives, and you are prepared to experience danger in order to do it. Never mind that most of your callouts are false-alarms and you're often literally asleep on the job until there's something to do; in a woman's eyes, you're hot property. Policemen and armed service personnel are in a similar boat. It's ironic that the very uniform that makes these professions so attractive actually makes you look much the same as every other guy. There is a reason it's called a “uniform”; that's how it makes us all look when we wear them. But at some basic biological level, women are more interested in knowing that you've got what it takes to protect them and are a real man than they are in your distinctive differences from other guys. If you don't like wearing a uniform, get a trade with a tool belt. Tradesmen are hot because they trigger a woman's innate desire for a guy who is practical and will be able to protect them over the long haul by building them a shelter and solving practical problems that may occur on the savanna. Tradies also tend to do quite a bit of manual work which makes you fitter than the average desk jockey and builds a nice buffed physique without you spending hours in the gym perving at the other girls on the treadmill. If you're good at what you do you can earn very good money as a tradesman by starting your own business (Skill 24) and contracting your services out to the highest bidder. High income, hot body, and practical life skills make tradesmen a natural catch for women looking for a life-long soul mate. In most professions it's not the actual work you do that makes the difference, it's the image you'll be projecting. Being an airline pilot puts you in a position of super-responsibility with hundreds of peoples lives in your hands on a daily basis. Plus you Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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get to wear a uniform, earn a stack of cash, fly all over the world and hang around with a bunch of hot-looking airline hostesses who are feeling lonely at least 50% of the time because they're away from friends and family just hanging out for a cuddle. Many airline pilots and co-pilots are gay, so the numbers are even better stacked in your favor. But the reality is that the job is shit-boring most of the time you're in the air and you can hardly run screaming from the building when it starts to get to you. While men in uniform and tradesmen appeal to a woman's instincts for a life partner, creative types appeal to her emotional and creative drives. Women are generally more emotional than men and often find many men frustrating when it comes to having a deep connection with us. Artists, musicians, actors, and writers all pull women like you wouldn't believe because these professions engage the creative side of a woman's brain which most men just don't stimulate. This will help her to fall for you all the way into your bedroom without you having to do anything.

What To Avoid • Engineering, Accountancy, Dentistry, Law • Unfair and often inaccurate stereotypes • Hasty decisions about something as important as your future career • Doing it just for the money or the women

On the other hand, creative types are flaky as all hell when it comes to commitment and most of us are a bit crazy. While women might find your creativity and spontaneity attractive, most of them do want to settle down eventually with someone steadfast and reliable to go through the routine of making babies, Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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bringing them up and seeing them prosper. All of this takes a long-term commitment which arty types aren't usually into, and women know it. So these professions are more powerful when it comes to a quick fling or a bit of fun than a life-long partnership. Some professions are easier to switch to than others. Becoming a freelance writer is as easy as saying “I'm a writer!” when people ask what you do. Being able to write helps. There are courses you can do to learn the craft and books you can read on the topic. You need to read widely if you want to write well. Printing yourself a business card also helps your credibility. Here's mine:

Illustration 6: Becoming a Writer. Exciting! Actually making money out of a creative endeavor like writing is another story altogether. It took me about three years before I worked out how to do it, but you can do it quicker if you know what you're doing or are prepared to write copy for someone else. Very few writers earn enough from book sales to live off this activity alone. You have to rise to the very top of any creative field in order to make gobs of money out of it, and that takes time. So my suggestion is that you save up a stack of cash from your high-paying engineering job in order to give yourself a bufCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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fer zone before making the transition. By the way, here's my engineering card for comparison:

Illustration 7: Engineer: Boring! Note that it's not half as exciting, except to women who are naturally turned on by the thought of you being an engineer. I haven't met many of those. But if you really, really want to stick at your job as an accountant, engineer, dentist or doctor, all is not lost. At least you're in a relatively high paying profession and women will be attracted to your ability to provide for them and their offspring, along with the notion that you're pretty stable and not likely to be sent away to war any time soon. The real truth is that who you are will always be far more important than what you do. Some professions will give you an edge when it comes to being confident and attracting women, but ultimately it's what's deeper inside that's going to keep the ladies by your side in the journey through life; or through the evening, whichever you're looking for. The most important thing vocationally is to find a profession that you love so that you can be as happy as you can possibly be. Your happiness will attract girls way more than a cool uniform that you're miserable wearCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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ing. Pursue your passion professionally whatever it may be, and the women will gravitate to you faster than a 747 hurtles to earth after the pilot bails through the emergency exit because he just can't take the boredom of cruising for 8 hours on autopilot any more.

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Skill 23: Invest in the Stock Market If you want to pull women from the big end of town, you need to understand the world of high finance; and in particular you need to know how to invest in the stock market. When the conversation comes around to discussing the ins and outs of your financial portfoWhat To Do lio, it's better to have your money in • Go to a class on Stock bank shares than just in a bank acMarket Investing at count if you want to impress. If you your local stock don't yet know the difference, now is exchange the time to learn. • Get investment But before you dabble with investing advice from a in the stock market, re-read the disprofessional claimer on page 22. I'm neither • Start small with a trained nor licensed nor sufficiently low-risk strategy at experienced to offer financial advice. least until you get the You must accept full responsibility hang of it for the financial outcome and any implications on your life that arise • Experience a marketfrom buying stocks. Buying stocks is downturn before you inherently risky; which is why wostart “leveraging” men will dig you for having gone through with it. It's a bit like riding a motorbike (Skill 17) in that respect. But they won't dig you if you lose your house by doing it stupid and recklessly. So you need to be successful at it and either not blow all your dough, or have

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some super-duper plan to earn it all back again pronto if you do. Nobody wants to get involved with a compulsive gambler, and plenty of people gamble rather than invest in the stock market. There's a big difference. I can't give you tips on which stocks are going to go ballistic next week. I can't tell you which companies will inspire your personal interest when it comes to plowing through annual reports and reading pages of financial statements. You'll either find this fascinating or you won't; but either way, you'll probably want to buy stocks at some point if you're going to be financially successful so it's worth learning a bit about. I don't want to get myself sued so my only tips are that a reasonably low-risk strategy is to start with small parcels of a couple of thousand dollars per stock, and mitigate your risks by diversifying into several different stocks in different industries rather than putting all your eggs in the one basket. A major technology company, a major retailer, a major bank, a large diversified industrial company, and a transport or infrastructure company would make a decent start. Picking “blue chip” stocks that are successful household names with a history of solid earnings is a good way to get some exposure to the market and learn how it works. Don't do anything involving borrowed money or “gearing” until you've been through at least one market downturn and felt the pain of losing your own money. Magnify that feeling several times when it comes to losing someone else's who you still need to pay back even after the stocks you bought with it tanked. This is the real reason it's called “gearing”: the pain you feel from losses is multiplied too. Lenders will sell you on the idea by talking about the gains which are multiplied but the people with Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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geared investments lose the most when market downturns hits, and this is one way to lose your home. Don't let this be you. Start out by investing money you can afford to lose. I have invested in companies where I lost everything I put into them. It happens to everyone if you invest widely enough. Get used to the idea. Fortunately I diversified and other companies did quite well so I was still ahead overall despite the losers. Stay away from speculative investments in “penny dreadful” stocks with no earnings history, at least until What To Avoid you've got a decent portfolio of historical earners going. Get yourself • Taking investment advice from people some books on stock market investlike me, who don't ment and go to a stockbroker to get work in the industry some serious advice before you start investing your millions. • Your best buddy's hot tip Bear in mind that everything I just said could be terrible advice. If you • Pump-and-dump take investment advice from a guy scams who writes books on how to attract • Insider trading women, you'll get what you deserve. Listen to Warren Buffet instead. Stock exchanges and community colleges (Skill 13) run training courses on stock market investment where people who know what they're talking about can teach you what you need to know much better than I can. The cost of the course will pay itself back many times over.

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Skill 24: Start Your Own Business “Later, it became apparent to me that business could be a creative enterprise in itself. ... Above all, you want to create something you are proud of. That has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving; it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.” Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity

Nothing says go-getter like having your own business. Women are biologically predetermined to seek out partners who are likely to make good providers, and in the 21 st Century that means income earning potential rather than ability to hunt bison and gather wild yams. There's generally only so far you can go working for someone else, whereas the sky's the limit if you've got your own business. Having your own business means a sense of self-determination that you just don't get as someone's employee. You write the rules and you get to say what you do and don't do. This brings with it a sense of self-confidence that women find very appealing. You become a master of your own destiny and that makes you a powerful man. Of course to really reap the benefits of having your own business you also have to be successful at it; but even the mere fact that you're having a go demonstrates that

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you've got what it takes to take the odd risk here and there in order to get what you really want out of life. Even if you're only earning the same amount as you would as an employee, having your own business sets you in a whole different league. The easiest way to start your own business is to begin by learning your chosen craft while working for someone else doing something you love. If you're just starting out, now may be the ideal time to choose your profession (Skill 22) with your potential future in mind. Learn your craft What To Do to the point where you become really • Get a job doing what good at it and your reputation will you love spread throughout the industry. You don't necessarily have to change jobs • Get really, really for this to happen as people you good at it work with will invariably move • Start your own around anyway. I stayed for 9 years business offering at the one company but few of my excellent service or colleagues did so when I quit and quality products started my own consulting business I got calls from companies all over the place offering me work. Once you're red hot at what you do, quit and start your own subcontracting or consulting business. Whether you are a tradie or a pen-and-paper-pushing professional, if you are the best at what you do your skills will be in demand and the phone calls and emails will start flowing your way. It helps to have some savings behind you for the lean times or for when you get offered work that you really would rather not have to do. Learning to say “No” is also a valuable part of the whole experience. You'll be amazed at how much respect you will start garnering in your inCopyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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dustry when you turn the occasional job down simply because you don't want to do it. I worked for 15 years as a computer and biomedical engineer and developed such a reputation that when I quit work to go sit on the beach for a few years, people kept on hassling me by email to go and work with them. And they were red hot job offers with the top companies in the industry. My reputation preceded me so I never had to seek clients. They came to me and I got to choose what sort of work I What To Avoid wanted to do. It worked because I was really good at what I did and • Letting your business take over your life people I worked with could see that just by the way I went about it and • Losing your sense of the quality of the work I produced. perspective Whatever you do, take pride in your • Flogging a dead work and be a leader in your chosen horse if it doesn't field. work out Set a career direction that will ulti• Taking a risk you're mately allow you to start your own not prepared to deal business one day, and the focus on with getting really good at it. Then when you meet women and they ask you • Network Marketing and Pyramid scams what you do, you can answer with • Treating your friends “I have my own business...” as mere potential clients

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The Next Step: Other Resources Confidence is most valuable in social interactions with other people and the whole area of success with women in dating and relationships is enormous. This book has focused on gaining the confidence that attracts women to you. Most women are streets ahead of men when it comes to social and relational skills, so if you want to be more successful with women, I recommend that you continue learning everything you can about the topic. Remember: the stuff your mother taught you doesn't work and if your father knew what he was doing, you wouldn't be reading this now. But other men have worked it out and my experience of learning from their wisdom has yielded amazing results for me. There is a vast array of books, ebooks, DVDs, courses and workshops out there on women and dating. The quality varies enormously from absolutely brilliant to almost completely useless. Because I run The Confident Man Project, I get to review a lot of these products. There is also a lot of duplication out there. You really only need one great product to cover each area you want to learn about. Here are the products which represent the best information I've come across in each niche. I recommend you grab them all:

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General Women, Dating and Seduction David DeAngelo's Double Your Dating is the best starting point for information about women, dating and seduction. His genius is in distilling information on everything from evolutionary psychology to conversation skills and humor, into a digestible form that will change your outlook on women and dating, and thence change your life. He invented the term Cocky Comedy, and it's a concept you should investigate. My friend Bradley was 38 and overweight when he used it to hook a drop-dead-gorgeous 24 year-old Russian beauty. I've already talked about the importance of having your buddies on side. Having a mastermind group of other guys who are successful with women is an essential part of developing that all-important mindset. Subscribe to the Interviews With Dating Gurus Series and you'll hear from other guys who used to be just like you before getting this area of their lives handled. You need to find a new relational style that suits you otherwise you'll just come across as a lame-ass faker. Find a guru who you think you resonate with, and grab their products as well. Or just listen to the interview series and learn, learn, learn as much as you can. Click here to visit the Double Your Dating website.

Approaching Women While this book has focused on becoming the man that will attract women to you, if you want the absolutely widest choice of Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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women on the planet there are times when you will need to make the move. Approach anxiety is the big killer here, along with worrying what to say. There are a lot of books on this topic but the clear leader is Joseph Matthew's The Art Of Approaching. I recommend you go all the way and totally defeat this fear because doing so will give you confidence in so many other areas of your life that you'll be amazed. I highly recommend the advanced course. Click here to visit The Art of Approaching website.

Internet Dating My initial attempts at meeting women online were ineffective and discouraging to say the least! I just went away feeling poorer and even more rejected than what I had experienced with attractive women in person. Other guys I've spoken to have had the same experience. If you just whack up a profile and send your standard sort of emails you'll get little or no response. The online world is even more crowded with guys lacking social skills than the real world. Try registering a female profile and you'll be bombarded with guys contacting you. You need something special to stand out here or you are likely to fail and waste a lot of time and money.

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The best program I've come across teaching online dating skills is Dave M.'s Insider Internet Dating. He tells you how to write an appealing profile and how to construct emails that get a woman's attention. Being your regular nice guy here doesn't cut it; women are bombarded with that every day from every other guy out there, which is why they don't reply to you. If she never gets to meet you in person, she never gets to find out what a great guy you are. Follow Dave M.'s advice and you'll have a much better online (and thence real world) experience. Click here to visit the Insider Internet Dating website.

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Conclusion If you've made it this far, you don't need any further advice from me when it comes to developing self-confidence. Perhaps you just wanted to read to the very end before you really got stuck into getting out there and taking action to be the man you were meant to What To Do be. If that's the case, now is the time • Take action to go back and get started on some • Keep learning action. • Read the other books and resources I've recommended

Just reading this book is a step in the right direction but you've actually got to put the advice into practice if it's going to make a difference in your life. Pick the step that appeals the most to you, and go for it. If I were you, I'd start dealing with your emotional baggage (Step 12) and loving yourself (Step 17), while you start learning to dance (Skill 1) and play music (Skill 7). But that's just me. You have to be your own man and make your own choices in life. The most important thing isn't where you start, but that you start. All the other resources I've mentioned here are summarized on the Confident Man Resources Page, so pay it a quick visit too. Now get out there, and let me know how it goes! I'd love to hear what you thought of this book including any suggestion or tips for improvement or any struggles you have. Visit The Confident Man Forums at http://ConfidentMan.net/forums and post a message saying whatever you're up to and any feedback you have. Copyright © 2009-2011 Graham Stoney

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I look forward to hearing of your success as a Confident Man!

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Credits Thanks are long overdue to the following people who helped make this book possible by giving valuable feedback, constructive criticism, or encouragement when it was most needed: •

Peter Tuziak

•

Erica Jankus

•

Philipe Gaundillet

•

Richelle Hampton

•

Todd Sedelmeier

•

Melissa Dax

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