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Archives for October 2018

How To Not Suck At Dating – The Easy Mistake Everyone Makes

by Visko Matich · Oct 6, 2018

How To Not Suck At Dating

A FEW WEEKS AGO, I was talking to a friend when something about dating became very clear for me. Not long before she had been walking down the street when a guy came up to her, hit on her, and asked for her number. She thought he was nice and gave it to him. They soon got talking and agreed to meet up later.

She was nervous about the date and was asking me what she should do. For context, she’s good-looking, confident, and fun to speak to. So my advice was pretty much along the lines of ‘why the fuck are you asking me for advice? Just show up.’

Ignoring this, she started describing how she was aware that she was good-looking, but that she thought her confidence in herself, and her conversational skills helped her to be attractive – and stated all of this as if she wanted me to confirm it.

I asked her what she liked about the guy, and she said she enjoyed speaking to him, found him attractive, and said he was calming (the last one being something I think only a woman would single out as an attractive trait).

I then asked her what he talked to her about, and she said they’d chatted about a bunch of things in their lives, then he spoke about his career, and how well it was going.

As she was saying this, that ‘something’ about dating started to become apparent.

She liked him for reasons that were entirely irrational. Her enjoyment, her attraction, her feeling of calmness. Yet at the same time, judged his own view towards her as a set of logical traits. She was confident, fun, good looking.

Likewise he, despite having a woman that obviously was already into him, found the need to introduce the fact that his career was going well. Something she barely mentioned, as it meant so little to her. To him, that was his ‘thing.’

Each one liked the other for irrational reasons, but each one rated themselves as attractive for logical, rational ones.

This problem sits at the heart of all dating. We’re measuring ourselves constantly. We’re seeing how good we are, and figuring out what we think works.

We’re thinking of dating as a logical problem to solve.

But in reality, dating doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not something you can wrap your head around, it’s only something you can feel.

HOW WE JUDGE OUR ATTRACTIVENESS

When we look at dating and relationships as a set of logical problems, it becomes something that we equate to trading, bartering, gambling, and simple mathematics.

Good looks + charm = winning combo. Right?

We take the metrics that make the most sense, and we add them together in the hope of equaling the result we want. In this sense, we turn dating and relationships into a house of probability and odds – we turn it into a casino. And because we turn it into a casino, we behave like we’re in one, and we treat ourselves like we’re part of one.

Here’s we do this:

We have we think matters about us – I.e. ours looks, money, and humor. Then we use these things as ways of getting what they want.

If we were playing poker, these would be our chips. So we slide these chips forward, and we either win the gamble (the person likes us) or we don’t.

Now, I’m not going to get into whether this is the correct way to look at dating (well not yet – but *spoilers* it’s not), but this is, if you’re honest, how you look at it on some level.

You’re gambling the chips you think you have.

But here’s what this does:

HOW TO BUILD A TOXIC SELF-IMAGE

Let’s say you have fuck all self-esteem. It’s rock bottom, sit around all day watching TV, cereal for every meal level. You decide that no woman will ever like you, let alone love you.

And you believe this, for a while. And for a while your life sucks. For now, you believe you have nothing. Or at least, the small amount of humor and intelligence you have aren’t enough to impress anyone.

You’re that guy at the table bleeding chips.

(Not to be confused with bleeding from the face, like that guy in James Bond).

But one day this all just gets too much, feels too shitty, and you decide that enough is enough. You’re sorting your life out.

So you do what most guys do when they decide this. You start smashing weights at the gym. After a while, your muscles begin to grow. Your confidence in yourself begins to grow. And you start getting more attention from women.

Suddenly, you look down at your pile of chips, and next to your small piles of humor and intelligence, you suddenly have another pile. A big pile. Muscles.

And when you gamble this pile, it seems to work. Women like that bet.

So what do you do?

You go all in on that it. You lift like you’re competing for Mr. Olympia. You gain more muscle, and you learn to associate any time you ‘win’ a woman as an indication that all you need is the muscles. So you start introducing them as early as possible.

You wear tight, open clothing, so that you’re, for all intents and purposes, naked at all times.

This is now the model of gambling that you’ve built for yourself. And when it doesn’t work? Guess you need more muscles. Hit the gym and try again.

This same logic applies to anyone who thinks they succeed because of their looks, humor, money, intelligence, status, fame, whatever. You can see it everywhere – hell, just look at 99.9999% of Instagram celebrities. Money, status, muscles.

They have what they perceive as there thing, and the offer it first. If it doesn’t work, they invest more heavily into it. Get richer, look cooler, be funnier. Keep going all in on that one ‘thing.’

They find the way of gambling that they ‘feel’ (not ‘know’) works and they run with it. And do you know what that makes them?

Shit gamblers.

DATING DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE

How To Not Suck At Dating

Thinking of dating and relationships in terms of gambling is an easy thing to do. It appeals to our desire to rationalize everything. To make everything neat and fit in its box.

We want it to make sense.

But in reality – dating and relationships don’t make sense. They’re messy. They don’t fit into boxes.

What woman ever ends up with the guy who’s historically been ‘her type’? What guy ever ends up being liked by a woman for the reasons he thinks make him great? What relationship isn’t awkward, unpredictable, and fumbled?

None of them.

Why can something that seems, on the outside to work on a logical level, all come crashing down when applied to reality?

Here’s why: Attraction is entirely emotional, and thus entirely irrational. Attraction doesn’t make any sense. It’s an irrational, nonsensical feeling, that comes out of nowhere, and does crazy drug addict shit to the human brain.

In no way is it experienced in a way that can be logically broken down by anything beyond simple, superficial tips. It just doesn’t work that way, no matter how hard you try, and no matter how clearly it seems it does.

Let’s go back to the gambling analogy.

In Poker, you don’t just win by having the right hand and a lot of chips, you win by how you play and how that makes the other person feel.

If you play with a bunch of people who suck – having the right hand and a lot of chips might work for you. As long as your luck doesn’t run out.

But if you play with people who don’t suck, then playing in a way that overly invests in your hand (and thus luck) is going to quickly get you sniffed out by the other players. It won’t take long for them to wipe the floor with you.

How you play and how this makes the other person feel is massive. You can only influence the latter, but you have complete control over the former.

HOW TO NOT SUCK AT DATING

Coming back to dating, this means that you understand that your ‘chips’ aren’t everything. Your looks, money, status, and so on, they aren’t nearly as important as the interaction you’re having with the other person, where you’re coming from, and how you both feel.

This is called not being a creep. And it doesn’t just apply to dating, but to all human interactions.

If your self-esteem is clearly wrapped up in some shallow detail about yourself (‘she’ll like me if she knows I’m famous’) then that’s going to drive a whole bunch of women away who sniff you out as the pathetic chump that you are. It’s a choice that poorly reflects the reality of the dating, and of people in general.

But if your self-esteem is wrapped up more in your feelings and hers (‘do I genuinely like her?’ and ‘is she genuinely into me?’), then it’s going to come across that you know exactly what you’re doing, that you have self-respect and integrity, and you treat yourself well.

Your investment is entirely in the irrational experience of dating, rather than stuck looking at it as some rational puzzle.

This is the dating and relationships equivalent of being that guy at the Poker table who understands emotions enough to send Matt Damon packing on a full house.

Measuring yourself and over investing in certain areas is actually self-limiting, and reflects a warped perspective of yourself and dating. You are never attractive because of X, Y, and Z. You’re attractive because of how the other person feels about you.

Which is always, always connected to how you feel about them.

Make sense?

I hope so… because I don’t even like Poker so I have no idea why I choose this analogy.

 


Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

 

Photo by Gianni Zanato on Unsplash

Photo by Quentin REY on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Dating Advice For Men Tagged With: Confidence, Dating, Relationships

Who Do You Admire? And What is That Saying About You?

by Visko Matich · Oct 2, 2018

who do you admire?

A CLOSE FRIEND of mine is what’s commonly known as a complete reprobate. He drinks himself into oblivion, he’s been arrested multiple times, is wildly promiscuous, frequents casinos (which he is then banned from), and never backs down from a fight. Not even against bouncers.

To most people, someone like this would sound insane.

But despite all of these flaws, he has more boldness than any guy I’ve met. And I admire him for it.

Most people would probably find an example of admiration like this at best amusing, or at worst, an indication of my stupidity – but they’d be missing the point, and misunderstanding admiration itself.

When you ask people who they admire, they usually offer up some braindead list of celebrities, historical figures, or politicians whom they claim to wish to emulate the virtues of. But when they’re pressed on what it is that they admire about these people it’s clear that they have no idea what they’re babbling about.

“I admire Barack Obama because he’s a cool guy and tells it how it is.”

“I admire Helen Keller because she’s defiant in the face of her disability.”

“I admire Leo Tolstoy because he wrote beautifully and defended his convictions.”

On the surface, these seem no different from my admiration of my friends boldness. But here’s the difference:

I’ve known my friend for over 10 years, spoken to him almost daily, spent hours, upon hours of time with him, and his life situation is extremely similar to my own. They’ve probably never met Barack, unlikely to have met Helen, and sure as shit haven’t met Leo.

Even if it’s an admiration that extends over hundreds of hours of video, or thousands of pages of writing, or even, in the case of Leo, his wife’s diaries – they’ve never met them. They’ve only met the idea of them.

Whilst the two statements might seem similar on the surface, they aren’t. One is superficial, the other is born out of tangible experience. It can be seen, interacted with, and understood. And that is the key to admiration.

If it’s superficial, it was never real in the first place.

THE SUPERFICIALITY OF ADMIRATION

When I was younger, I admired Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, cliche, I know, but bear with me.

I was one of those 18-year-olds who watched Pumping Iron and immediately went and got himself a set of weights. A few years later, I was hitting the gym to the point where I’d get withdrawal symptoms if I didn’t, I’d put on 10kg of muscle mass, and had read the Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding, cover to cover, multiple times (alongside countless other lifting books).

One simple act of admiration had made me singleminded, obsessive, and for the first time in my life, focused.

But despite admiring Schwarzenegger. And despite the impact he had on me. He was a useless, superficial role model.

Everyone knows his story – poor kid in Austria, wants to be a bodybuilder and movie star, hits the weights, wins all the competitions, travels to America, wins more competitions, conquers Hollywood, winds up in politics, balls deep in the family maid.

He’s the ultimate ‘American dream’ story, wrapped up in one big celebrity bow. But then there’s that other detail:

He’s a complete anomaly.

What’s most admirable about him is how remarkable he is. Most bodybuilders don’t have a lick of charisma, yet he’s oozing with it. Most people struggle to build decent physiques, but he pretty much had a perfect one before he’d even started. The vast majority of people who dream of making it in America never do, whilst he conquered all of America and global pop culture.

(Even The Rock hasn’t managed to do this as well. Don’t believe me? Name one of his characters… I’ll wait).

I mean, shit, Arnold’s so famous, his voice is famous. That’s a club of him, Morgan Freeman, and the guy who voiced Darth Vader and Mufasa.

Arnold doesn’t make sense. He shouldn’t make sense. And that’s why, as someone to admire, he completely and utterly sucks. Because his life is so astronomically different from yours, mine, and everyone else’s – you can only really relate to him on the most obvious, superficial level: get bigger.

And even though Arnold is one of the celebrities of celebrities, this example extends to all of them.

When we admire celebrities, we admire what is most superficially admirable about them. We see them in the light of their strengths because it is those strengths that made them celebrities in the first place. They have a great sense of humor, they’re intelligent, or they’re just great at talking to people like Joe Rogan.

But when it comes to genuine admiration, we have next to no idea who they are, and their lives are almost always nothing like ours.

In other words, we’re admiring something we can’t really see. We’re admiring something we don’t really understand. And we’re admiring something we don’t truly feel. 

Because we can’t relate to their life, it’s difficult to truly admire what their strengths are born out of. Our admiration is shallow and consists of nothing tangible.

THE MUNDANE REALITY OF ADMIRATION 

The people closest to you are the ones whose lives are most in common with your own. So despite the fact they may not be on television, or in every watch next suggestion on Youtube, they are a far, far greater focus point for admiration than anyone else.

Because their lives are similar to your own, the strengths they present in response to the similar challenges of life are far easier to see, far easier to understand, and when it comes to admiration, far easier to feel.

Which is basically rule one of admiration: before you can genuinely admire, you have to be able to relate.

Which in plain English means you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Admiration isn’t as glossy as we think it is, in reality, it exists in the mundane, grey monotony of our everyday lives. People suffering through the same issues and problems, but with different and unique solutions. Procrastination, fear of failure, social anxiety, rejection, sexual shame – these are all problems everyone you know faces, every single day. But they all do it in different ways.

Some better than others.

When I was younger I’d struggle with asserting my boundaries. I’d always fantasize about being some generic form of tough guy who had no problem doing this, and as a result, would idolize anyone I saw in popular culture who mirrored this shallow solution.

I read self-help books, biographies, and watched every video I could get my hands on – but in the end, it was someone right in front of me that helped me fix this. Someone who was more ferocious, boundaried and confident that anyone I knew.

And I never noticed them.

I’d been so focused on the far-flung images of the people I wanted to be, that I hadn’t noticed what was right in front of my eyes, existing in a way I could completely relate to.

We all instinctively know what we admire in others. We see it and we feel it. But where we’d like to find extreme examples of this in action, it’s actually the most mundane and ordinary examples which affect us and influence us the most.

If you know someone who succeeds where you fail, who is strong where you are weak – you can watch how they do it, you can ask them how they do it, you can see what they change in their life to accommodate that strength, you can see how it interacts with their priorities, their beliefs, and their choices.

You can gain a deeper understanding of where you’re going wrong, what mistakes you’re making, and what judgments you’re making about yourself that are fundamentally incorrect and self-limiting. In my case, that was learning that people who assert boundaries well aren’t fearless, they just have solid habits.

These are small details that add up to big, real, practical changes.

In other words, you have everything you need to take that strength, and start building it into yours.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

As I came to understand this, I came to understand two things about admiration.

First, what I admired about people was typically something that subtly appeared in their lives, and, even in the case of ferociously asserting boundaries, wasn’t their defining trait. It just happened to be something they did well.

You had to pay attention to see it.

This was anything from one friend’s quiet, comfortable confidence with his sexual desire, to my father persevering through illness, to another friend’s seemingly effortless ability to live rightly – to go to bed on time, get his work done, and hold realistic ambitions. Something I struggle with to this day.

All of this was there, but if you didn’t look, if you didn’t pay attention – you’d never see it.

Second, I came to understand something a little more unsettling:

What you dislike about others is almost always something you’re not seeing in yourself.

You just aren’t aware of it.

When we admire others we always see a reflection of what we lack. But when we condemn others, we always approach that condemnation as if it’s something we’d never do. But if we look closely, it almost always is.

We condemn people who are sexually promiscuous when we’re not, only to act in the same way when we get the opportunity. We condemn people who are ill-focused and poorly disciplined, whilst simultaneously pursuing more goals than we could ever hope to achieve. We condemn people for their ignorance and bigotry, racism, and sexism, only to generalize them to a group that strips them of any humanity. We look at others we find selfish, self-serving, and narcissistic, whilst simultaneously entertaining fantasies where the world is a movie and we’re the main character.

What we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves is what we so easily see in other people. 

Because it’s easier to condemn them than it is to confront ourselves.

What happens when you begin to realize this is that your relationship with condemnation changes. Just as a close attention to someone you admire exposes new possibilities within yourself, close attention to the people you judge actually reveals ways in which you’re limiting yourself, or just being a dick.

Understanding the flaws of others in more detail helps you understand the flaws in yourself. So next time you’re throwing some judgments someone’s way, ask yourself this:

“If I really look at my life, is this true of me?”

You might just realize it’s not them you hated after all. It was always you.

WHO DO YOU ADMIRE?

Admiration and condemnation are offshoots of empathy. The more we can empathize with ourselves and others, the deeper our admiration grows. The less we can, the more our condemnation grows. Not just of others, but of ourselves.

The best teacher is whatever you can experience most deeply. Because our admiration will drive us to emulate the virtues of others, it’s a better use of our time to direct our attention to the people around us, no matter how ordinary they may be, as their virtues are the only ones we’ll ever have a chance at truly understanding.

Instead of being built by pursuing vague, far off, idealized people – you’re built by the ordinary people around you. Maybe it’s your mother, maybe it’s your father, friend, or teacher. Maybe it’s a sibling, a boss, a rival, or a partner. Maybe you don’t even know. Because you haven’t been letting yourself see.

But they’re there. And they all have virtues worth paying attention to, and flaws that are mirrors of your own. You just have to look, and figure out just who it is that you really admire.

 

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Admiration, Life Choices, Personal Development, Psychology, Self Improvement

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