Dating Essentials for Men

by Robert Glover

  I decided instead to attune myself to how all of these people had uniquely loved me. I focused on at least one unique gift every significant person in my life has given me. Not only did my overall mood change, it changed how I perceived these people, and it began to attract people to me who could love me more completely than those in the past could.

  Practice Receiving

  Receiving is probably inconsistent with your beliefs about yourself and the world. If you don’t believe you and your needs are important, you won’t be receptive to the good things the world wants to give you. In order to experience the abundance of the world, you have to practice being a good receiver.

  If you aren’t comfortable receiving, you will never get what you want (this seems like a pretty straight-forward principle, but it is amazing how your mind will fight against it).

  For example, if you want a girlfriend or great sex, you have to be open to receiving these things. Receiving takes practice.

  Try this. Every day this week, ask three people to do three things for you that you can do yourself. As you practice asking people to do things for you and give you things, lean into the anxiety. Listen to the chatter in your mind that resists asking and receiving. Give yourself affirmations to calm the anxiety.

  Change What Your Mind Attunes Itself Too

  Current brain research has revealed that your mind has thousands of thought impulses every moment. You aren’t conscious of the majority of them. They are like the constant noises in your daily life that your mind learns to minimize or filter out. This is good news because you would go crazy if every thought impulse made it into consciousness simultaneously.

  Over time, your mind has attuned itself to the thoughts that most closely reflect your deepest held beliefs about yourself and the world that arise from your emotional core. These thoughts become the familiar, well-worn, neural goat paths of your consciousness.

  The good news is the human mind is capable of choosing to attune itself to whatever thought impulses it wants. It is extremely difficult for the mind to attune itself to contradictory thoughts at the same time (thought the mind is capable of entertaining conflicting thoughts or beliefs in close time proximity – “she loves me; she loves me not.”) In general, your mind would prefer to stick with one type of thought over time.

  If your mind is in the habit of thinking negatively, it will do it pretty consistently and instinctively. It is almost impossible to make yourself quit thinking negatively because those thoughts will always make up a certain percentage of the thoughts bouncing around in your mind at any time. If you mind feels at home with them, it will want to keep going back to familiar territory.

  The only way to change negative or deprivation thinking is to consciously attune yourself to positive or abundant thoughts. They are already there, you don’t have to make them up, you just have to attune yourself to them.

  A gratitude practice is a powerful way to attune yourself to different types of thought impulse in your mind. By practicing thinking about things you are grateful for, for example, your mind will begin to attune to other thought impulses that are consistent with this type of thinking. Thought impulses that are contrary, tend to go unnoticed.

  Challenge What Your Mind Believes to Be True

  Your mind believes what your mind tells itself is true.

  The paradigm effect insures that you will find lots of evidence to support your beliefs. Your mind will make sure that your thoughts become reality. Your mind determines your reality. What you think about is what you will attract and create.

  If your mind dwells on what you don’t want, that is what you will attract to yourself. If you focus on how lonely you are, what you lack, how angry you are, how badly women have hurt you, etc., that is what you will attract.

  If you believe all women are angry, needy, liars, gold-diggers, incapable of fidelity, etc., these are the only traits you will see in women (you won’t notice all the women who don’t possess these traits). You will attract these kinds of women, and this is the only kind of woman with whom you will be comfortable.

  If you believe you are unattractive and uninteresting, you’ll never be receptive to a really great woman coming into your life. If you do bump into one, your mind will convince you this is a fluke and she will soon find out what a loser you are. Your mind will find creative ways to push her away in order to make your outer reality fit your inner belief.

  I have worked with a number of men whom have been cheated on a number of times. These men expect to be cheated on by women. Consequently, they tend to attract women who can’t be faithful. If they do find a good woman, these men put up so many emotional walls, that in time, even a woman who has never cheated before eventually responds to the attention of another man. This reinforces the belief and reinforces the reality.

  The only way to change reality is to change your thinking. This doesn’t mean you have to develop a Pollyanna way of viewing the world. It does mean changing the way you think so you can change the way you see the world.

  Expect A Miracle

  Every relationship is a miracle. Every time you leave your house and talk to another person, you open the door for the miraculous.

  Very few amazing things happen when you are sitting home by yourself – miracles happen in the context of people.

  Abundance thinking opens you up to miracles. The more time you spend outside your house talking to people, the more you increase the potential for great things to happen. I anticipate some kind of miracle every time I walk out my front door. I am constantly amazed at the truly unexpected encounters, events, and opportunities that occur in my life almost daily.

  You can’t make miracles happen, but you can put yourself in a position to let them happen. Just as luck favors the prepared mind, miracles happen to the guy who gets out of his house and talks to people everywhere he goes!

  The greatest miracles typically happen when we least expect them. This is called, “serendipity” – finding what you weren’t looking for.

  How many of your most memorable life experiences were the result of serendipity – a new friendship, a great day, a new girlfriend, an unexpected sexual opportunity?

  The more you become conscious of the abundant world you live in, the more likely you are to recognize and walk through open doors.

  When you walk through open doors you change your core beliefs about yourself and the world. The more you embrace abundance, the more you will see abundance. The more that you see abundance, the more you will walk through the open doors.

  The result is that you begin to see the world as a bountiful place filled with opportunities for great love, great sex, and great relationships with some really great women!

  You live in an abundant world. Get out and enjoy it!

  Chapter 5: Overcome Your Anxiety with Women

  Thinking causes anxiety, acting cures it.

  When I began teaching dating skills to men, I noticed that many of the guys who attended my classes and seminars applied the skills I taught them with great success. At the same time, other men in these same classes and seminars resisted applying the skills and continued to feel frustrated and negative about their love life. This puzzled me.

  Why did some men apply the information with great success while others didn’t?

  After pondering this issue for a while, I realized the problem wasn’t what it seemed on the surface. The roadblock for these men wasn’t a lack of knowledge or skills. It wasn’t an inability to apply what they had learned.

  The problem was a fear of success.

  These resistant guys realized that their new skills and insights would actually work, and this scared the bejeezus out of them.

  Let me explain.

  Your mind is like the boardroom of a large corporation. This board is made up of many voting members. Some of these members exert more influence than others. The most powerful members of the board have one goal and one goal only – to avoid having to experience the anxiety of the unknown.
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br />   The goal of these powerful mental board members is to keep you doing things the way that you have always done them. Even if this behavior perpetuates feelings of frustration and loneliness, it helps you avoid the anxiety of the unknown.

  For example, if I gave you the assignment to say hello to three strangers a day, your mind would experience an immediate and overwhelming panic. This is because this is a new behavior with unknown outcomes.

  Here is the way the powerful board members in your mind would spring into action if I gave you this assignment. They would approach another board member, mention how much work you need to get done, and suggest there really isn’t time to approach three strangers and talk to them. Your powerful mental board members would lobby another board member and remind him how tired you are right now, and that it is probably a good idea to stay home tonight, surf the internet and relax.

  The other mental board members are often quick to agree and vote for these proposals, not realizing that the primary agenda is not the one being voted on. The real, unspoken goal is to avoid doing anything new and unknown that would lead to discomfort, fear and anxiety.

  So instead of talking to three strangers (which will cause anxiety), you decide it is more important to take it easy or get some more work done (it doesn’t really matter what as long it provides an effective distraction from the anxiety of the unknown).

  Fear of Success

  Success is scary. Your mind is much more comfortable traveling down the same old familiar neural goat paths than it is venturing into the unknown. Your mind will do all it can to keep you doing the same familiar things over and over again, even if these things are causing you pain, frustration, and don’t take you where you want to go.

  Doing things that might lead to success will take your mind out of the old familiar neighborhood (even if it is a ghetto) into new uncharted territories. The old familiar neighborhood might really suck, but you know your way around.

  Applying the principles I teach in Dating Essentials for Men will greatly increases the likelihood of your dating success. While this may sound like good news, what it really means is a ten-fold increase in the anxiety factor.

  Geeks With Techniques

  Here is an interesting discovery I’ve made about bad daters – they love techniques.

  If you are like most bad daters, you believe that there is some opener, some pickup line, some magic trick that will miraculously make women attracted to you (especially the women you are most attracted to). You might have purchased this book and ordered numerous other dating and pickup products looking for that one magic bullet.

  This phenomenon is the result of not understanding the real reason for your dating and mating frustration. You have probably spent years analyzing why women don’t seem to be attracted to you. You have attributed it to things like not being good looking enough, not having interesting things to say, or just being a f**ked up loser. Maybe you’ve blamed the women – they’re all gold-diggers, they only want the really successful guy.

  Your mind has settled on one or more of these dynamics to explain your bad luck with women. Your mind then goes out and finds loads of evidence to support these belief systems. That is why you believe that finding some super powerful pickup technique will overcome all of these supposed limitations on your ability to attract women. Funny thing is, no matter how many of the cool approaches or pickup lines you hear or read about, you’re still sitting at home on Friday night researching shit on the web that you’ll probably never buy.

  What’s the problem?

  The problem is, you’ve misdiagnosed the disease. What if you went to the doctor suffering from a sinus infection and he gave you medicine to treat jock itch? No matter how religiously you applied the jock itch powder, your sinus infections would linger on. Get the point?

  By misdiagnosing your dating ills, you’ve kept seeking the wrong cure for what ails you. More techniques will only make you a “geek with techniques.”

  No matter how many pickup lines, openers, and “negs” you memorize, you’ll still find yourself stuck in the same old frustrating place. The only remedy seems to be to keep searching for the one magic bullet that will turn your luck around.

  Here’s the real problem. The idea of approaching women, talking to them, getting phone numbers, taking them to bed – all make you anxious. The real reason you aren’t out dating and getting laid right now is not all the ones you have convinced yourself of. The real reason is FEAR AND ANXIETY.

  That’s it. Your dating frustration isn’t the result of not being good looking enough or women all being flakes. It is the result of being scared.

  If you go out and apply all the techniques you’ve learned, you would actually have to interact with women and talk to them and you would probably end up dating them and sleeping with them. Even though your mind thinks you would love for these things to happen, you really don’t.

  Success is scary. Because having a great girlfriend or lots of great sex is outside the norm of your past experience, these things make you anxious. The possibility of really getting what you want makes your palms sweat and knees knock. Because you don’t like feeling anxious, you never apply all the dating skills and pickup techniques you’ve spent time and money studying.

  Managing Anxiety vs. Soothing Anxiety

  Bad daters spend a lot of time doing something I call “anxiety management”. Anxiety management is the ongoing, often unconscious attempt to prevent uncomfortable feelings.

  It usually takes the form of:

  •Avoidance

  •Isolation

  •Procrastination

  •Playing it safe

  •Avoiding risks

  •Doing the same old thing over and over again

  Like most bad daters, you probably spend a lot of time and energy trying to manage your anxiety by avoiding doing things that might take you into unknown or uncharted territory. Your mind would rather manage old familiar anxieties than to confront new and unknown ones.

  Managing anxiety may keep you stuck in all kinds of unhappy, dead-end – even painful situations – but as they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

  Anxiety management focuses on trying to control people, situations, and things outside of you.

  In contrast, soothing anxiety is an internal process. Self-soothing is calming the anxiety inside of you instead of trying to manage events outside of you. It involves you consciously leaning into fear while calming yourself from within.

  Managing anxiety keeps you stuck. Soothing anxiety sets you free.

  Let me tell you a secret. All men experience some degree of anxiety when interacting with women, especially women they find attractive. This is normal. Our goal isn’t to make this anxiety go away.

  If you are like most bad daters, you have spent a lot of time and energy since adolescence trying to find a way to approach desirable women without having to feel any anxiety. As a result, you have probably tried to manage your anxiety in a couple of ways.

  The first has been avoiding women altogether. You might have gone out with women who approached you first, or you might have dated down. But your anxiety has prevented you from interacting with women to whom you are attracted.

  A second way you might have tried to attract desirable women while managing your anxiety is by becoming a “girlfriend with a penis.”

  A girlfriend with a penis is the guy who becomes a woman’s friend because his anxiety prevents him from coming on too strong or doing something that might scare her off.

  A girlfriend with a penis spends lots of time listening to a woman complain about her “jerk” boyfriend. He’ll volunteer to help her sister move. He’ll be on call 24/7 to help her solve her problems. All the while he hopes that someday, she’ll see what a great guy he is and want to date him and/or sleep with him.

  Unfortunately, becoming a girlfriend with a penis is terrible foreplay and it does nothing to turn a woman on or make her think about dating the guy who is s
o eager to do whatever it takes to make her happy.

  Not only do these strategies do nothing to diminish your anxiety, they prevent you from getting what you want.

  In order to date successfully and get what you want in love and sex, you have to learn to calm your anxious mind. Learning to soothe anxiety is the single most effective way to improve your dating skills and get the love and sex you want.

  Anxiety is Real. But it Won’t Kill You. Instead of waiting for the anxiety to go away, this chapter will teach you how to soothe it from within while you venture into the unknown.

  Change Your Thinking

  One of the most effective ways to soothe your anxiety is to change the basic message your mind is telling you about the things you fear. In the book “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway,” Susan Jeffers asserts that all fear is the result of your mind telling you “I can’t handle it.” Your mind is convinced that you can’t handle things like rejection, looking foolish, being found out, getting dumped, or having to break-up.

  Because your mind believes what your mind tells you, you are convinced that you really can’t handle these things. Dr. Jeffers asserts that one of the most effective ways to calm your mind is to consciously replace these lies with the truth – You CAN handle it!

  Think about this; you have handled everything so far in life (even when you didn’t believe you could) – you will handle everything else that comes your way. “I can handle it” is one of the most powerful self-soothing techniques you can use.

  Even when your negative self-limiting beliefs are screaming at you:

  •“I’m too fat.”

  •“She’ll think I’m coming on to her.”

  •“She’ll find out I’m a loser.”

  •“Women like her don’t go for guys like me.”