You could say that confidence is the absence of self-doubt. When you doubt yourself, you tend to become less capable of succeeding at the thing you doubt you can succeed at. That might sound like a bit of a word puzzle, but it makes sense when you think about it.
Being unsure about something doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means that you don’t feel comfortable or calm about the idea of doing it. And, of course, when self-doubt creeps into your head, it’s bound to have a debilitating effect on your behavior.
Nowhere is this fact more evident than in the dating game. When a man doesn’t feel completely confident while talking to a woman, his chances of attracting her are drastically reduced, because his ability to appear attractive has been diminished.
The answer to this dilemma, predictably enough, is increasing the man’s confidence when talking to women by decreasing his feelings of self-doubt, anxiousness and nervousness. Let’s now look at how this can be done.
The process of increasing your confidence, and therefore your attractiveness, when talking to attractive women, can be broken down into four main steps.
Step #1: Understanding Women
This step could take a lifetime, but it really doesn’t have to if you take a simple, straight-forward approach to completing it.
First you need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that women are like a different species to men, with completely different ideas, beliefs, needs and modes of behavior.
It’s true that women look for different things than men when dating, but their desires aren’t so different that they should be considered mysterious or unintelligible to men. They want to be made to feel:
– Good about themselves
– Happy
– Valued
– Respected
– Admired
Men want to be made to feel these things too by the women they date. The difference is what it takes to make men and women feel these things. There are different routes towards the same goals, depending on whether the person in question is male or female.
So, to increase your confidence with women, you need to remember that although they are different to men, they still want the same fundamental things from men that men want from women. They just want them in slightly different quantities and, to get them, a slightly different route needs to be followed.
DO NOT let people tell you that women are mysterious. They are not. You just need to know what they want and how to give it to them. The same goes for men, from a female perspective.
Step #2: Become Skilled at Having Good Conversations
Before you even consider talking to a woman and attracting her, you need to become good at talking period. You need to become a skilled conversationalist, in other words. You need to be the guy that people talk to and, after the conversation, think, “That was awesome. I really had a good time talking to him.”
You achieve this by learning to develop the most important skill a good conversationalist can possess: emotion management. It’s all about how you make the person you’re talking to feel. What they think about you is governed by how you make them feel about themselves. But we’re not talking about giving them a motivational speech.
What you need to get good at is having a relaxed conversation in which the person you’re talking to respects you (because they see you as being of high social value, confident, etc.). Then you need to engage them, by hearing what they are saying, replying thoughtfully to it and offering your own input in the right way.
And then, most importantly, you need to inject energy and emotion into the interaction by laughing, smiling and generally expressing the right emotions at the right times.
So, make a conscious effort to become good at talking to people. Your conversations should be fun, interesting and addictive. You want people to really enjoy talking to you, then and only then can you expect attractive women to enjoy a conversation with you.
Step #3: Start Making Approaches
This is the hardest step so far, because it involves doing the thing you’re probably the most afraid of. But it needs to be done.
Start making a few approaches a week. You don’t need to start in a nightclub. You can begin anywhere. Your goal is to strike up a conversation with a woman and get it to the ‘hook’ point. The hook point is the moment in the conversation at which you can see and feel that the woman is engaged and dedicated to talking to you.
She would much rather be talking to you than not talking to you, basically. You need to go beyond polite, day-to-day conversation, into a verbal interaction which is genuinely based on getting to know each other.
Don’t expect too much of yourself early on. A one minute, boring conversation with a woman is a good a place to start as any. You’ll quickly learn what makes conversations go stale. It’s usually when you’ve asked about three questions and she’s answered them all.
Step #4: Tighten Your Skills and Begin Flirting
Once you have become better at talking to women in a general sense and can hook a woman in conversation quite frequently, then you can start to concentrate on your flirting. Flirting should be approached cautiously at first.
You don’t want to give away too much too soon. You should drop one teasing comment into the conversation and then gauge the woman’s reaction. If she responds by teasing you back, then you have a green light that she is attracted to you, which means you can gradually start flirting a little more.
You keep your teasing and flirty banter in line with the signals of interest the woman is giving you (her body language, the things she says, the way she touches you, etc.). If she isn’t giving you signals, then you need to liven up the conversation and get her attracted to you more, through your demonstrations of social skill and high social value.
These four steps, when combined, allow you to become habitualised to the process of talking to women. Your levels of anxiousness and self-doubt will lower and your feelings of confidence will therefore increase.