The High Status Male

Mike I have a few questions…

1) How do you impress in group conversations? Being rather shy and quiet, I often get left out… and feel uneasy about interrupting all the time.

2) For talking to girls on a regular basis, how do I get conversations started the second, third time etc., after we have already met or been introduced.

3) Icebreakers – I know I should not use pick up lines, but I’m still struggling with this as my mind really goes blank when a girl returns my signal. I hesitate and thus diminish my status in her eyes. I know you do not like to tailor lines to the situation, but could you just give me a few examples so I can get the gist of the general format?

4) I get told I am too serious, albeit I have a dry sense of humor. So I’ve tried smiling more and women seem to love that. Should I smile when I talk, smile when I listen… or does the poker faced mysterious stuff, interspersed with smiles in the appropriate places, work better?

Regards
Murray

Hi Murray,

One of the most difficult issues that a lot of guys face is what I call ‘conversational content’, or more specifically, lack thereof!

You too seem to have most of the essential elements of what is needed to make serious progress with women all worked out in your mind, but you’re still at a loss somehow.  It’s like you’re a great artist who has designed the perfect mold for a magnificent statue.  All the framework is in place, all the technical details have been managed to a tee.  Everything is all set to go, but then a problem arises — you don’t have any plaster!

There’s nothing to pour into the mold.

I can see from the techniques and processes you talk about that you’ve acquired a detailed understanding of all the things that you should or could possibly do around women, but you still can’t find a way to make it work.  Here’s why that is so… the focus of your life passion is too narrow.

I suspect that mostly all you think about is solving these social issues you have within yourself and not much else — and yet the more you drill in and focus on all the various places where you feel you’re failing — in social groups, with women, etc — the more elusive the answer seems to become.  That’s because the answer lies not in technique, but in the totality of your PASSION for life.

The more passionate you are about something — the more immersed — the greater will be the ease at which you can begin to connect with others, BASED on that passion.

You’ve already discovered the difficulty of trying to ‘manufacture’ conversation when the vessel (you) is empty.  That’s why you are struggling to sustain conversations… ratchet up the level of discussion on a second occasion of meeting someone, dream up interesting things to say on a first meeting, wonder if you should frame what you say with smiles (it’s always good to smile and have a smile in your voice around women, incidentally.  A mysterious persona seems to be getting misinterpreted as too grim on you).  And so on.  You mention your unease at repeatedly interrupting in groups. This could be because you sense that you don’t have anything important to say.  You’re smart, detailed and intuitive.  You’re just… empty.

There’s only one way to correct that — you have to develop and embrace some kind of passion about life, something that really interests you.  Learn a sport or hobby, join an acting class, become a musician, cycle cross country, join a political cause… it doesn’t matter what captures your soul.  Whatever it is will eventually pull you into it’s world — then your social circles and relationships will begin to emerge from within the framework of that new world.  Your communication and social skills will become transparent once the important thing becomes expressing that passion for life through yourself, and you’ll find yourself worrying less and less about how you’re coming across (and endlessly over-analyzing it!).

You must upgrade your current “passion” for self-improvement with this newer one.  Self-work is great, but it’s also fundamentally anti-social and not really something that can be shared with others, except perhaps in a group therapy-type setting.  That’s one of the reasons you’re having these difficulties thinking up things to talk about.  Right now the only real passion in your life is YOU — and it just doesn’t make for interesting conversation because, well, no one really cares.  Self-interest is a socializing dead-end.  People simply don’t care about someone else’s personal breakthroughs.  People will care about some outwardly directed passion, or about a life’s cause that consumes you, however.

I guess this has been a long and complicated way to say “get a life”, but that really is the message.  And I mean that with no malice intended.  No amount of studying prepared scripts or “talking points” to help you socialize with women will sustain you for very long.  They are only facades after all, with nothing genuine behind them.

What do you talk about after the script runs out?

I know you will probably find this advice difficult to swallow right now because you want to desperately solve your social difficulties first, and then — from that calm place — take up other life interests.  You will always face a struggle to focus on anything else until these issues are solved for you.  I’m telling you though, that you must spin everything around and point your passions outwards on something other than your self-work for now.  Then you will see how magically these perplexing social difficulties will begin to clear up for you.