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| Ask The Right Question |
| Posted by Khiem in: Articles |
Last Monday, I was walking with some friends to the movie theatre to watch Iron Man.
If you guys like action or superhero movies, go watch it! It was kick ass!!!
On the way there, the girl asked:
Man… why is it so cold tonight? Brrr…
I looked at her funny and said:
It always makes me laugh when someone wonders why the weather is a certain way. It just is. Why does it matter if it’s cold or hot? It’s not like you can do anything about it. [grin]
She looked at me completely confused while her boyfriend cracked up hysterically.
Seriously… Sometimes, I think people just like to ask the most worthless questions and by doing so, they don’t realize how much mental energy they waste on things that don’t matter or on things they can’t do anything about.
A lot of guys in the Seduction Community do just that.
They focus on the wrong things. They ask the wrong questions. Therefore, they get sidetracked by things that don’t matter. Then they get frustrated that they don’t progress faster.
And sometimes… eventually, they give up.
You never fail when you give it your all…
because you learned something from the experience.
Last Sunday, a guy asked me what he could write in his first email to the woman he just met a few days beforehand.
As usual, I asked him for more background information. What do you know about her? What have you done with her so far? What do you want to say or convey to her? Where do you want to lead her?… etc.
Based on what he gave me, I suggested a cool opening topic he could use to start his email so that she would feel the desire to respond to him but as he told me more, something didn’t click.
He told me the girl was from the UK and was visiting LA. She’d soon leave to visit Las Vegas, then San Francisco before returning to London. I asked him:
So when are you going to see her?
To which he replied:
I don’t know.
So I told him:
So why does it matter what you are going to say in your email?!? You aren’t even going to be able to see her!!!
When you are learning something, make sure you ask the right questions. Focus on the right things and you’ll learn a lot faster.
There’s no point of practicing something that won’t matter.
If you are in the Seduction Community to learn to meet women, there’s not that many things that truly matter. What matters is:
- How comfortable are you with yourself (aka your identity)?
- How effortless can you make your approach?
- How vividly can you express yourself? (as in, how well can you convey who you are, genuinely and authentically?)
- How openly can the woman express herself around you?
- How strongly can you lead, emotionally and physically?
- How easily can you take a woman into a 1-on-1 situation?
- How good are you at follow-up?
Each of these points can have mutliple sub-layers but those are the basic skills you need to get good at meeting women. Anything else doesn’t matter.
Being funny helps. Having good fashion helps. Having something interesting to say helps. Being alpha/dominant helps. Being good looking or having money helps too! But those are just bonuses to being with you. What matters is all the simple things that you do to make women feel good around you.
What matters is YOU.
Love yourself. No one wants to be around someone who doesn’t love himself.
In all honesty, pickup is not as hard as you think. You get good at it by practicing the simplest things: listening, relating, leading.
The way I see it, pickup is an accelerated form of the normal dating process. This is why I call it “dating on crack”.
When I meet guys who gets all confused by the technical mumbo jumbo of the Community, I try to bring them back to the basics. I’ll ask them:
If you want to pickup a woman, you basically want sex with her, right? So what do you need, to make a woman willing to have sex with you?
Surprisingly, the answer is not that complicated.
You don’t need to have all these crazy gimmicks, tricks, routines, demonstrations of higher value (DHV), alpha body language to bed a woman. All of these things help… but they don’t matter THAT much. They are the cherry on top of the cake.
Use them after you have your basic social foundations down.
Keep it simple.
It doesn’t matter which technique you use either. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer roleplay over banter, or if you are better at sexual tension over sexual arousal, or whether you believe method A is better than method B.
What matters is that they achieve the same thing. They help you get the woman feeling connected AND sexual with you. If you remember, I mentioned that in one of my previous posts on Relationships and What Women Want.
So when you go read all the seduction advice online, don’t pay attention to the differences between methods. Instead, look for the similarities. Maybe you’ll be able to discern the REAL common behaviors you need to master to become phenomenal with women.
Learning fast is all about asking the right question.
- Instead of asking “what do I say?”, ask “how can I say it so that it works?” or “what can I NOT say?”.
- Instead of doubting yourself by asking “can I do xyz?”, ask yourself “do I want to do xyz?”.
- Instead of paralyzing yourself with “what if…”, ask yourself “what can I do now to…”.
- Instead of beating yourself up with “why did or didn’t I do…”, ask yourself “what else can I do better?” or “what did I do well already?”.
- Instead of complaining how you aren’t getting any sex, ask yourself if you’ve actually been 1-on-1 with a girl.
- Instead of whining about how the woman won’t have sex with you, ask yourself if you’ve made her feel aroused and sexual around you.
- Instead of being bummed that one girl didn’t call you back, look for what other angle you can take to contact her and incite her to be more responsive to you.
You really want to amplify the positives threads in your life. Focus on the things that make you stronger. Do more of the things you love or the things you want.
Create positive reinforcements in your learning process.
Always focus on the things you can take action on.
And stop thinking so damn hard.
You really got to trust your instincts more.
I will now leave you with a little podcast David Wygant and I did with friends while hiking. Being good at something is a journey and you got to remember what you are grateful for while going through the process.
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May 9th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Hey Khiem,
I really enjoyed picking your brain in LA last week. You have a lot of great ideas, and it was cool to see them in play and get some feedback from you on my own questions/approaches.
“Who are you” and “how do you express your personality more fully”… these are two very important questions. I think many middle-aged people haven’t even begun to broach the question of their own identities. How did you find yours? How can you help others develop their own?
Note on this from the Art of Charm bootcamp I attended:
1. you are a pastiche of your past — accept it;
2. your heroes — acknowledge and respect them;
3. and your future — make it
With regard to asking the right questions: I ask myself “Why” a lot. I know you’re a fan of “Why Not?” and “So What?” as your drill-down questions. I suggest either or both of these to everyone who’d like to understand better what works, not so much “What can I say” as “Why can I say this”.
If you teach a man to fish…
Thanks for the good stuff,
Alex Weber
May 10th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Hey Alex,
I really enjoyed my time with you too. You have a very warm, positive and fun-loving vibe to yourself, which will take you far. Best of all, you are curious about other people and you LISTEN.
I’m not sure how you want me to answer your questions. I “found” my personality by learning to express myself better. I needed to let myself out more without any form of censoring or editing ;p
When I realized that I had a lot of good things going on for myself and that I just had to let people see it, everything clicked. I wasn’t afraid anymore… of anything or anyone.
In regards to the ”why not?” and “so what?” questions that I use, I want you to know that they are only used when you start doubting yourself.
I don’t want people to overthink their emotions. I want them to ACT on things… and that’s when those questions come in handy.
However, when you are learning something and trying to understand the underlying meaning of things, asking “why” is a perfectly legitimate question. But as usual, don’t overanalyze or overthink it.
As I wrote in this post, focus on the right things (aka the big picture). When you focus on things that matter, sometimes the “why” becomes irrelevant.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Once again another quality post, Khiem.
Iron man was awesome. Tony Stark was the ultimate alpha: confident, funny, slightly sarcastic and focused only on what he wants and nothing else… truly a character who is confident without being arrogant or unlikeable, just the confidence that come from knowing you have the tools and the skills to get though pretty much anything life throws at you.
I notice that whenever I tell you about new thing’s I’ve read or seminars I have seen you at, you always explain the similarities (such as at the Jeffy seminar where you were explaining how he was talking about non-reactive behavior and alpha-nice ways of treating others). So many people use the same names to describe pretty much the same things.
I have made great strides, personally, over not overthinking things. Some things, I still overthink (dating is one prime example) but I used to overthink everything. It was like a war plan, and the woman was my enemy as I would plot four moves ahead.
Obviously, that didn’t work so well. I think for most the problem is not overthinking, but maybe overthinking when things are not going their way.
I know if I am having a fun interaction with a girl I have no thoughts of tactics or ideas or anything, I am just in the moment. Some of my greatest interactions have come this way. When I approach a girl who is initially stand-offish or somehow disinterested, that’s when I tend to go back into my own head and figure out what to do and how to fix it.
Again, great post!
May 21st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
khiem i <3 u