The bottom line is this: rejection, like confrontation is hard. No one wants to hurt another’s feelings.

No one wants to blatantly say, “I’m just not that into you.” We prefer to speak with our actions. (After

all, aren’t they louder than words?)

We are all searching for something.  For everyone, it’s something different, but I think it can be boiled down to two things: fun and fulfillment.  Let me explain.  We live our lives searching for fun, to have fun times, fun experiences, just creating fun memories.  Stories that will serve us for the rest of our lives.  Anyway, as time goes by, I believe there is a shift in what we really seek out.  Fun will always be a vital element, but pretty soon fulfillment is what we are really after.  The challenge I face as a coach, is finding a healthy balance between the two.  Some people I work with are tired of all the partying, and really want to ease into a nice long-term relationship that is more fulfilling.  While others, may be getting out of a serious relationship and are striving to re-establish themselves in the dating scene and start having more fun in their life.
Ask yourself, what am I really looking for right now?  You may think you’re searching for Mr. or Mrs. Right, but in reality because you’re looking so hard for that person, or waiting for them to come along, you’re missing the fun you can be having as a strong, single, independent person.  Conversely, if you’ve been in that long-term relationship for awhile, and it’s becoming a little stale, it may be time for a little relationship rejuvenation.  Time to spark up some fun and spontaneity.

Set Your Goals

In recent years, I’ve found goal setting to be one of the most productive activities you can do for yourself. In my experience, rather than rattle off thirty things you think you want, start with a single word.  What would you like to embody in 2010?  What’s your 2010 theme?  In terms of myself, I chose the word ‘give’ because I want to make this year about giving as much possible to the people who come into my life.  From there, apply it to every facet of your life especially in the places where you could use improvement.  What are you financial goals for 2010?  What are your health goals of 2010?  What are your spiritual goals of 2010?  What are your love life goals of 2010?  Write them down, print them out and share them with everyone. As Robert Cialdini writes in Influence, we as people want to appear as committed and as consistent as possible.  By sharing your goals with the world, you go the extra lengths to reach the finish line.

Love Your Body (by treating it right)

Love your frigging body.  That’s right, every wrinkle and roll, birth mark and receding hair line should be treated as your best friend. This sounds absurd I know, but only when you truly start to love your body do you actually take the time to nourish, restore, and take care of it.  How you physically look and feel is up to you. It’s all decisions.  What to put in your body, how often you work out, even how you hold yourself is controlled by your thinking.  Yes, you should eat healthy!  Yes, you should work out on a regular basis!  But if the same patterns have been repeating themselves year after year, it’s time to change the way you look by first changing the way you think. In 2010, it’s time to love your body! If you got it flaunt it and if you don’t, flaunt that too.

Learn a New Skill

Whether it’s something you’ve carried on from 2009 or something new altogether, decide on something you’d like to delve into for the new year. New skills are essential for a balanced life and if you aren’t learning something, it becomes impossible to improve. I’m reminded of the time I shattered my leg in a soccer game, which left me bitter and immobilized for a good three weeks until I finally decided to pick up the guitar.  Today, five years later, playing the guitar has become one of my most cherished pastimes. One of the perks of taking on a new skill is that it opens new doors and often takes you down a path you haven’t yet traveled. New friends, comies, tamunitlents and life callings can all emerge from taking on something new.

Side Note:   I highly recommend the book Masteryby George Leonard which breaks down the essentials for mastering anything you do in life.

Take Big Actions

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of doing something big.  Whether that be organizing a fundraiser for AIDS, traveling to Asia, skydiving, writing a book or even putting together a book club, do something that you know will test the boundaries of your comfort zone and ultimately make you a better person.  This can vary from person to person and only you can know what your boundaries are. The best way to start this process is to put together a list of things you want to do before you die.  Don’t be afraid to let your imagination go wild.  Often times the craziest, most outlandish things can be accomplished when you make a commitment to go for it.  I remember my first time traveling to Central America by myself thinking ‘what the hell am I doing?’ only to return a changed person with a new perspective on life (not to mention an endless obsession with traveling).  Life is meant to be lived, so live it to the fullest.

Build Key Relationships

You become who you associate with for better or worse. A famous quote once said “eagles will soar with other eagles while chickens will scavenge the ground with other chickens for scraps.”  Our habits, thoughts and emotional energies are highly susceptible to the influences of those around us. Hence the reason the rich (in material and spirit) hang out with the rich and the poor with the poor. If we’re to succeed in 2010, we need to to be around people who will challenge us, keep us accountable and ultimately make us smile. A good start is connecting up with people you admire or you aspire to be like.  If you think they’re out of reach, think again. Almost everyone I’ve contacted who I assumed was too big time for me, was happy to connect with a like mind.  The biggest challenge is picking up the phone and dialing. So if you’ve got fingers and a voice, start making key contacts in 2010.

Live Spiritually

Whether you follow a specific religion or you simply enjoy spending time out in nature it’s important to have purpose in your life and feel connected to the rest of the world. Studies show people who engage in some form of spiritual activity rate themselves as significantly happier and more fulfilled than those who are not.  A common misconception is that you must be religious to be spiritual and this is completely false.  Spirituality is a relationship between yourself and the rest of the world, religion is simply the backstory.  Depending on what you’d like to accomplish and how you’d like to do it, there are endless ways to engage in spiritual ritual.  As I cannot appeal to everyone I’ll simply suggest what I do;  meditate for 15 minutes a day and reflect daily for what I’m thankful for. That’s it folks!  Clearing the mind always shows you what’s important in life and allows you to act from a place of love and gratitude rather than bitterness and contempt.

Hustle Hard, Play Hard

Whatever you’re doing, doing it 110%.  I know I sound like your high school gym coach but this is a biggie. Working hard and playing hard is nothing more than immersing all of yourself into what you’re doing in that particular moment.  Where people often struggle is that gray area where they’re working but they’re thinking about what it would be like to be sipping Mai Tais on the beach.  As a result there work ethic struggles.  The opposite is common as well where someone who’s life has revolved around working, takes a vacation and can only think about what they need to get done when they work.  This gray zone is never enjoyable because it is alway trying to escape what’s happening right now. Through obsessing about the future or dwelling over the past, it’s impossible to live fully.  Fortunately, the cure is simple; engage yourself fully in whatever you’re doing whether it be grinding out this quarters financials or lounging in a hammock off the coast of Panama!

What’s up guys!  So I was listening to some of Eben Pagan’s audio tapes this weekend and he brought up this really great point of creating some

form of content every single day.  So what I’ve decided to do is to do a little blog every morning.  This will be all free writing with an occasional edit as my ADD addled brain can get off on some pretty crazy  tangents but here goes.  Lately, I can’t help but feel there is one thing that separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to success with women, money, and overall  abundance.

This one thing isn’t hard to do. In fact, it’s relatively easy but for a lot of us, we can’t do it!  What is it you ask?  Taking some form of action.  Putting your feet in motion and doing what it is you most you fear.  You see that sexy blonde walking into Starbucks and really you only have two options;  you can recede to the editorial in your head and say “I should go talk to her”  or before you get a chance to think about the possible outcomes, you open your mouth and say “hello.”  Now, how many times have you taken the latter route?  How many times have you seen something or someone that made you want to take action but you receded to your mind instead?  I know I’ve done it more than a few times.  Hell, I even still do it now and again.

The power of your mind can dicate what you do and do not do! The good news is, there’s always an opportunity to take action every single day.  You aren’t an eternal wussy.  You aren’t any (insert self defeating noun). Those are only words your ego’s used to identify with.  But they they sure as hell are not you. More so, you’re a product of habit. Your thinking, behavior, success and non-success is purely driven by the subtle day to day habits you engage in. That’s brilliant news.  Because that means the more you approach women, the easier it will be to approach women.

The more you’re able to show a woman who you really are without putting on a self-censored, superficial cool, the more natural it will become to create an emotional connection. It’s all habit.  Not a genetic trait.  Not something you are eternally bound by or not.  So, that being said, I’ve got one task for you today.  I want you to approach at least three people today and simpy start a conversation with “hello.”  If that’s all you say, that’s fine.  But start today building the habit of action.  Tomorrow, we’ll deal with that then!  Until next time,

Cheers to the good life!

 A question I get from a lot of people is “so do you just teach guys how to pick up women?”  and always I answer plainly and honestly: NO.  See, being an attractive person is so much more than just men picking up women or women picking up men.  An attractive person is someone who welcomes abundance into their life and as a byproduct of that comes more enriching relationships, more financial success and anything else that makes your life good. And it’s funny because when I first started studying this stuff a few years back I thought that meeting women and having ‘intimate’  relationships was the answer to everything.  And once I got those things on a consistent basis, I recognized that alone picking up a woman can be very empty, shallow and unfulfilling.  And the more I tried to convince myself that of the opposite, the more I was left unsatisfied.  Now, I still enjoy intimacy and relationships but the way I look at it is very different than I once did.  

Love the Moment

Be a Giver

Along the same lines as loving the moment, an attractive person is also a giver.  When you love yourself, you are at ease with the moment and your relationship to the world, you naturally give to others in all types of forms.  It can be a compliment, a favor or even just a smile but whatever it is, your core motivation always dwells in a place of non-neediness.  In other words, you give selflessly without expecting anything in return.  And there’s a huge distinction because a lot of people give but inside expect to get the world back.  They are playing for a transaction rather than a gift.  A great example is a guy who takes a women out on an extravagant date, pays for everything, showers her with compliments yet on a deeper level he’s doing it because he wants her to like him.  This is possibly the most common mistake ‘nice guys’  make yet it’s never their niceness that’s the problem, it’s the neediness.   Woman can smell it a mile away and it stinks. However when you give selflessly, not expecting anything back, the world always manifests a way to repay you whether that payment is intrinsic or not. So be that guy who gives value to people without expecting to get anything back. 

Be Active

I’ve been thinking about an interesting concept the last couple of weeks and it’s the barrier that stands between two people who have never met before.  When around friends we’re all social, talkative and can cut loose but for one reason or another in the presence of a stranger, we close ourselves off.  I can think of a couple reasons why we do this. 

Distraction

The first reason that comes to mind for me is distraction. During the day when we’re out we have things to do, a place to be and a time to be there by. Our daily missions and objectives come with heavy time constraints and rarely revolve around making friends or socializing.  For example, we go to a grocery store to get groceries to make dinner or go to the gym to workout.  We go to clothing store to buy clothes and all of this has to be done before 4pm! We are also heavily distracted by technology. Cell phones and mobile internet may be the greatest inventions of the 21st Century that can connect us in cyberspace, but they also draw us away from the ‘real world.’  A call here, a text there and an ever so often Facebook can chip hours away that could have been spent in the ‘real world’. 

Trust

The second and most important reason for the separation of two strangers is trust. With so many lunatics, perverts and crazies out there it can be really hard to tell who’s a good guy and who’s a not so good guy.  And seeing men have the physical edge, women have to be extra cautious. One place you can actively witness the weariness of females is in nightclubs and bars. The combination of alcohol, pent up horniness and dolled up women makes for a unique arena. 

In bars and nightclubs there is usually a high density of guys who have the same intention; pick up a woman. So it should come as no surprise that women in these places get hit on A LOT!  And every time a new guy approaches, his intentions become increasingly more visible and predictable and as a consequence, women are forced to be put up a wall that screens for any horny, houndish ‘guy’ behavior.  When guys act like this there will be an immiedate disconnect between them and her, the creeper radar has been alerted and responds with the fastest, most efficient way of getting him to leave usually involving her being having to be rude for the guy to get the clue.  Hey, she’s tried being nice and subtly showing disinterest before but that didn’t work.  Finally she realized the only way to remove themselves from this uncomfortable situation was to say something blunt enough to get him to leave. The problem is this wall also screens out a lot of good guys with good intentions who just don’t know how to connect with a woman. 

So how to connect and bring down the trust barrier. Knowing what you’ve just read, the answer should seem relatively simple. Be completely non-threatening. You have to NOT have an ulterior motive to pick her up. Firstly, this means recognizing the insignificance and natural process of sex.  Sex is natural and with the right person can be pure bliss but it’s not the end all and be all of life.  To pursue it as something greater than everything else is not only counterproductive in attracting women. Recognize this and you eliminate any need to get something from her.

The next thing that will help you lower the trust barrier is to assume everyone is already your friend and wants to meet you. Have a core intent to BE SOCIAL. We were designed to be social. By going out and simply talking to everyone you see, not as means to get something from them but just out of genuine curiosity, they will naturally be more receptive. And the only way I can really explain this is that when you have an underlying motivation or intention that is non needy, that isn’t trying to get something, people pick up on that energy and it naturally makes them more comfortable. They see it as it is, genuine sincerity and authenticity.  And I really learned from a good friend who would NEVER ‘try’ to pick up women but would talk to just about every man and women in the club and never once get rejected or told to leave.  And it was because of this idea of not having an ulterior motive, not having a need-laden intention that enabled instant trust with any person he came in contact with. 

Additional random thoughts that didn’t make it into this post…

*-You might wonder why women put up with the bar and clubs in the first place? Why go out to these “meat markets?” And the answer is attention. When you’re going to these places and receiving a ton attention and compliments from people, it’s extremely validating. You feel sexy when you know other people think you’re sexy. And even though a women may not be interested in ‘hooking up’ or meeting any man that night, the attention will keep bringing her back.*

*Have you ever noticed that as soon as you become introduced to someone either by a friend or acquaintance, it becomes easy to have a friendly, casual conversation?  It’s like that mutual contact, no matter what the relationship is, lowers that barrier to where the third party always feel comfortable talking to you. And really, this is how most couples meet; through mutual friends.  But in meeting women, relying solely on who you know and who your friends know can be incredibly limiting.*

I’m fascinated with marketing and I feel lucky to be doing something I really enjoy. Lately I’ve been watching Eben Pagan’s (David DeAngelo) Get Altitude program for entrepreneurs.

I personally find a lot of parallels between the sales / marketing world and the attraction / seduction world.

As I watched one of the videos today something dawned on me. Eban brings up a study by a university that examined the factors of success by looking at the commonalities of top sales people. You can watch the video yourself but I’ll spoil it anyways. The number one commonality between all these successful salespeople was their speed of implementation. Speed of implementation is the time is takes between hearing about an idea to acting on an idea.

Researchers found that the most successful businesses and salespeople were regularly putting ideas into action immediately. Their speed of implementation was faster.

This mindset of implementing ideas faster in my own life feels somewhat counter-intuitive. The voice in my head says “lets think about this”, “lets weigh out pros and cons, make a list of benefits and side effects”, “let me run this idea past 2 or 3 of my friends to see what they say”. And then usually through deliberation and backwards rationalization the idea fizzles and never gets implemented.

What does this mean for creating attraction and meeting beautiful women?

A mindset focused on speed of implementation shoves a lot of the logic to the side – You know, the times when you are in your head and rationalizing with yourself that she probably has a boyfriend and you shouldn’t talk to her (or any other excuse). This is your mind coming up with a reason for not approaching or doing something that you know you really should be doing.

The mindset of implementing ideas faster is useful to overcome approach anxiety and encourage spontaneous behavior. Being spontaneous keeps life fresh and will have a lot of positive side effects. A good motto I like to say is “plan big and adapt”. The next time you are presented with an opportunity or an idea that can take you to the next level – even if it’s a little out of your comfort zone – take action!

I thought it would be beneficial to take a few moments to describe what it means to me to take risks. A defining moment in my life was when I first started learning about attraction and social dynamics. As a sub category in the self development movement, one of the first things I learned was that to meet women you have be willing to ACT without thinking. You have to be willing to approach a women without thinking of how it could go wrong.

You have to be willing to jump into the fire and find a way to not to get burned.

As a result of recognizing how easy it was to take little baby steps (Insert What About Bob quote here) with meeting women, I started see how applicable it was to every other facet of my life. As a giant pussy when it came to heights, I made a point to jump off every cliff I could find. As a person who had never left the country, I made a decision to see the world. As a person who has always dealt with anxiety and panic attacks, I made a life decision to embrace my fears and not allow them to control my life. And in every fear I’ve faced, I’ve always found that it was never once as BAD or SCARY as I had previously predicted. Isn’t it strange how our mind can warp a future event and assume it’s going to be terrible yet when we’re in the moment, we never feel fear, we never feel the pain we anticipate. We are in it, experiencing it and dealing with it. You could argue fear is nothing more than anticipating some form of pain. Yet 99% of the time that pain never comes and time and time again when we encounter situations that we have been dreading, we realize how rediciulous our fretting was. In the moment, we can only act and deal with what is happening. We always find a way to not get burned. This is why fear and worry are so unproductive. They consume our vital energy and direct it towards a ‘painful’ future that never seems to come.

Besides fear, there is another reason people neglect to take risks; comfort.

People are comfortable where they are at. They can get stuck in mediocrity simply because of how easy it is. They are working at a cushy job in which they don’t take risks or make big decisions. They don’t leave their city or town and venture out into the rest of the world. They settle down with the first person that shows interest.

I heard this great analogy of a plant. A plant can survive wherever it grows, at least for a while. And maybe it is not the most nourishing and optimal environment, but for that plant, it is easier to survive in a barren, desolate environment than to uproot and venture into the unknown where there could be more rainfall and nourishing soil.

And just like a plant that lives where there is little rainfall, you can still survive in a mediocre reality. But as a person who is always trying to bring more enrichment into his life, I have a hard time NOT TRYING to better my life and the lives of others in some way. I feel there is always room to grow, improve, and bring to life a dream that starts in the mind and is manifested into a reality. This is part of purpose and part of moving towards an optimal reality-a heaven on earth.

So right now take one small step towards doing something you’ve always wanted to do. Do one thing everyday that scares you and challenges you. Make each and every day as if it were your last day to do something excellent!