The High Status Male

Little Bobby is 2 years old.  He likes to run around the house naked — laughing and screaming with joy as his parents chase him from room to room with the camcorder.  They tell him to “quit showing everybody that silly poo-poo bottom….”, but they think it’s hysterical and do nothing to stop it.  Why should they?  Dashing around butt naked is appropriate, healthy behavior for a 2 year old who’s just discovered the most delightful means of coordinating the rapid movement of his legs in such a way that he can now run!… (an absolutely transcendent advancement over mere walking, which was last month’s big achievement).  Being without clothing is no big deal either, of course — as long as it’s not too cold in the house.  Life is good.  Life is magical.

A year later Bobby is 3, and grandma is visiting.  Bobby decides to run out of the bathroom after his bath and surprise grandma… make her laugh and be silly.  But today it’s Bobby who’s in for the surprise, because when grandma sees him running towards her au naturel with his ding dong happily bouncing around, she gets an angry look on her face which stops him cold.  She scolds him, “Shame on you Bobby, go put some clothes on!”.  Bobby is confused.  Mom and dad never said anything like that to him.  They never yelled at Bobby for being a silly poo-poo head.  As far as he was concerned, there was no real difference between wearing clothes and not wearing them anyway, right?

So what’s wrong with grandma anyway?  Why is she making Bobby feel so bad about being naked all of a sudden?  “You shouldn’t run around like that, it’s not right…” grandma scolds.  Bobby looks to his parents, moving around in the kitchen getting dinner ready, for some support.  “Mom?” he asks quizzically.  But now both his parents have funny looks on their faces too, adding to Bobby’s dismay.  Mom quickly grabs Bobby by the hand and takes him upstairs and gets him into his PJ’s.  Now when he comes back, grandma is happy again.  But why?  What was the big deal about being naked?

Soon, anytime Bobby thinks about running around the house naked, he gets a funny, uncomfortable feeling inside of him that he doesn’t like.  This strange bad feeling goes away if he puts his clothes back on.  And he would never, ever dream of running around the house naked in front of grandma again… that’s for sure!

Soon, he won’t be comfortable doing it in front of his parents either, and they seem to be okay with that.  They never want to play ‘chase my poo-poo bottom with the camcorder’ any more anyway.  Oh well…

Welcome to Behavioral Modification 101.

This is of course a very common story that every parent has faced at some point in their children’s development, seemingly straightforward… but do you see what really just happened here?  Little Bobby has just learned to associate the emotion of SHAME with the act of being naked in front of others.  In the coming years, he will also learn that it’s shameful to touch himself “down there” in public, nor to let anyone look at him when he’s in the bathroom on the toilet, and then even in the bathtub.  Things are sure becoming different around here.

Now, Bobby’s new sense of modesty certainly may not be considered anything close to being toxic, but he’ll have plenty of opportunity for that to happen as the years roll by.  The development of a sense of shame is normal and healthy when it serves to set appropriate boundaries for our actions at various stages in our evolution from toddler to adult.  Shame endows our flowering sense of ego-dominated identity with a certain humility that guides our interactions with other individuals.  It helps us learn to take on more and more responsibility for our actions by slowly becoming aware of how they affect everyone else around us.  We discover empathy in this way.

It’s important to understand that the mechanism of shame is mainly one of association, that is, we learn to associate the unpleasant sensation of being ashamed with behaviors that society wishes for us to control or suppress in some way.  Shame is commonly wielded by parents to control the behavior of adolescents, but it is most certainly used against adults as well.  Morals and values and the boundaries of acceptable public and private behavior are all “taught” to us by way of inducing shameful experiences at some point in our lives in order to make them “sink in”.

To a certain extent this is okay, but the deadly vise-grip of deeply internalized shame can become stifling over time and fully degenerate into a form known as toxic. Toxic shame occurs when we are exposed – either physically or emotionally – in a way that repeatedly diminishes us in the presence of others, and especially in situations where we are not prepared to experience such an exposure.

How pervasive are the effects of toxic shame?

Well, humiliation is an extreme form of toxic shame that is so awful, men will put their lives in jeopardy in order to avoid experiencing it or to avenge it.  Physical violence and murders routinely are committed due to violations of shame boundaries.  Emotionally rigid cultures like the Japanese partake in a form of ritual suicide called hara-kiri to absolve themselves of toxic shame or the so-called “loss of face”… choosing the extreme action killing oneself to restore honor to themselves and their family name — rather than continuing to live a “faceless” existence.  And most devastating of all, almost every form of addictive behavior has its roots in the desperate need of the afflicted individual to escape from an overwhelming sense of shame that he or she feels has completely consumed them.

You see, it’s when shame begins to exceed its normal function within our minds, i.e. to provide us with a sense of humility that grounds our identity somewhere between God and the lower beasts, that it begins to create problems.  Usually this happens either through some unrelenting source (i.e., constant harassment by parent or peers), or by way of an isolated or even continuous traumatic event.  Such repeated shaming events re-enforce themselves over and over and can continue to haunt us for a lifetime.

The most powerful counter force to toxic shame is Self-Compassion and Self-Awareness. Part of the dysfunction of shame is manifested in a tendency for us to be way too hard on ourselves — continuing the desire for self-punishment… taking up the mantle of past tormentors.  Just knowing about the effects of shame and becoming aware of how it might be pervasive in out lives is a powerful tool for its’ eventual destruction.  That’s because one of the great strengths of an over-inflated sense of shame has to do with it’s stealth.  The fact that you don’t comprehend how deeply it’s affecting you allows it to continue to operate unchecked within your mind, silently creating shyness or rage or depression or all manner of other emotionally addictive-type behaviors that could be ruining your life.

This is why we always seek the safe harbor self-awareness: because simply being aware of these hidden subconscious monsters and what they are doing to us drags them out into the bright light of our logical and rational consciousness… where they will often burn up under the heat of reason like vampires in the sunlight.  You can begin your own journey to freedom by doing the self-examination and inner work that will lead you to this elevated state of self-awareness.  Once you are able to “step outside yourself” and see yourself and your deepest motivations from a larger and more objective viewpoint, you will be firmly on the road to self-discovery and permanent inner healing.

Most of us men know all too well that horrible moment of quiet terror when we’re steeling ourselves to “spring the question” on some girl at work or school and ask her out on a date! Our heart races and our throat tightens as the moment approaches — and we begin desperately trying to talk ourselves out of it: “she won’t say yes, it’s impossible… she’s got a boyfriend… she’s got exams coming up, she’s way too busy, she’s out of my league…”. Sort of comical I suppose, but disturbing nonetheless.

This anxious reaction in guys facing this sort of situation is more common than you might imagine.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any easier to live through for some of us.  After all, you are preparing yourself to stand psychologically “naked” before some girl and expose your (possibly shame-bound) desires to her.  So some level of fear must be normal, you would think, right?  But THIS intense?  So terrifying that I can’t speak or even MOVE?!

So the real question is this: how do you distinguish between the common and quite rational fear of being rejected by a woman, and the more complex issue of chronic love shyness?

Here’s a little test: do you find it’s impossible to engage a woman with romantic intent even when she’s sending you “GO” signals all over the place with obvious body language cues, or unmistakable flirtatious behavior?  If she’s making it so perfectly clear that she’s NOT going to reject you, then what’s there to be afraid of?

Well, what you could be afraid of is revealing to her your very secretly shamed need for affection.  See, at some point in your life you were made to feel ashamed whenever you expressed a desire for love and affection, and it caused this very basic (and normal) human desire to become shame-bound, i.e., linked to the sensation of shame so that you could not experience one without feeling the other along with it. A shamed emotion is perceived as painful, alien and strange — and therefore must always be kept hidden from view of others!

Shame like this can become so overwhelming that it becomes known as toxic.

Now sometimes the misery of shame-induced love shyness can be temporarily suppressed with the use of drugs, food or alcohol.  This is the reason people become deeply addicted: because focus on the addictive behavior allows them distraction from the underlying pain, as well as creating some degree of freedom to experience the emotion shamelessly for awhile.  Think of how YOU act when you get too drunk or high.  Pawing every girl in sight at the bar?  That’s because the emotion we most often seek to express when uninhibited by drugs is the one which is the most tightly bound by shame when sober.

The first thing that you need to understand insofar as turning this situation around for yourself is that knowledge is power. Simply having your eyes opened to the mechanics of love shyness and how it has been adversely affecting your life can become a powerful tool for dismantling it.  Knowing and understanding that your shame-bound emotions are something that was done TO you, and is not really YOU (i.e. an permanent aspect of your personality) is an enormous revelation in itself… one that holds vast potential for jump-starting your personal growth almost immediately.

A second weapon you should have in your arsenal against love shyness is what psychologists call desensitization.  This idea makes use of the natural tenancy of the mind to adapt to anything after a while and become bored with it.  What bores us becomes psychologically invisible and eventually gets taken for granted, and when that happens the emotion in question loses its potential to generate any kind of strong response within us, either good or bad.  I mean, an event or experience that provokes no emotion is the very definition of boring, right?

So how do we turn an intense fear of rejection into something that actually bores us?  Try this experiment in personal growth (and mind-over-matter) for yourself: next time you have an opportunity to talk to an attractive woman, even in some non-romantic situation (like work or school), begin to think about asking her out on a date. Really try to do this seriously and not just as a joke in your own mind.  You’re REALLY going to ask her out in five more seconds and reveal to her your shameful need for affection by blushing like a five year old.  Yikes!

If you can do this mental exercise with the sort of intense focus that makes it real within your consciousness, you should begin to feel that familiar fear begin to swell in your chest and choke your throat closed.  Now you’re getting it!

Now here’s the important part: try to HOLD yourself in this uncomfortable state for as long as you can before you excuse yourself and slip away.  Make your retreat calm and sociable and with good humor… don’t just bolt away in panic to the nearest john and start puking! Relax, no one knows what’s going on inside your head except you.  This is the important ‘inner work’ of self-change and personal growth that you are now undertaking.

The trick now becomes to repeat these “near-shame approaches” as often as you can find the opportunity to do so in order for the desensitization to really begin to take effect.  You should push yourself a little closer to opening your mouth and actually speaking the terrifying words “…would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?…” in order to provoke those feelings of intense fear and “shy guy” paralysis that normally haunt you.  By raising the psychological bar like this one small but significant notch at a time, you are slowly making it more and more difficult for the love shyness to take over and set off all those humiliating physical anxiety reactions that you hate so much… things like sweating, nervousness, the squeaky little-kid voice, etc.

Keep this self-restructuring process up for several weeks at least — just whenever you can manage to run a mentally-simulated “approach”.  In essence what you’re doing is toying with your love shyness now… poking and teasing it by deliberately getting close to performing the frightening activity that draws the shameful feelings up out of where they hide deep within your unconscious mind, and forcing them to run their routine for you on demand.

What will happen is that the feelings of shyness will begin to exhaust themselves after a while — especially if you stay determined and keep “false-alarming” them regularly whenever possible.  Each time there will be some degree of mental discomfort to suffer through, and that’s good!  The amazing magic starts to become apparent when after a while, you find that you have to keep getting closer and closer to the edge of actually speaking the words before you can get the fear to bubble up inside your gut.

Now you’re beginning to cripple your love shyness!

Each time that you drag the fearful feelings up it’s like using mental sandpaper to scratch them down to a smaller and smaller nub.  With such frequent and repeated “sanding” your despised veneer of shyness will soon become thinner and less powerful in its grip over you.  One day you’ll find that you can actually go right through the entire routine FOR REAL and ask a girl out on a real date… and without hardly feeling any nervousness about it in the least!

I know that caught in the grip of your fears right now this may all seem impossible to conceive of even as you are reading this… but the techniques of desensitization DO work wonders.  They are commonly used by psychotherapists everywhere to cure seriously anxious people of some very strong phobias, such as a pathological fear of flying, leaving the safety of their home, driving across tall bridges, etc.  So you can surely do this with a “lightweight” phobia such as fear of rejection without much help beyond your own determination and by using the techniques that I just showed you.

Your defeated love shyness will simply give up and go away before long… too exhausted to torment you any longer.

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Copyright 2010 by Mike Pilinski

Let’s talk about what it means to be a shy person and why having this moniker hung on you can be a heavy personal burden to bear.  Shyness in general, and especially in youngsters, is a cautionary reaction designed to make you ‘freeze up’ in a sort of protective instinct that goes something like this: “If I just stand here, say nothing and remain invisible, then no harm will come to me…” Now for a kid, this might make sense.  Unfortunately, this sort of reflexive tendency to lock-up around unfamiliar people or situations can persist into adulthood as a nasty bad habit, and that’s when it becomes trouble.

For guys especially shyness can be socially devastating because it makes it virtually impossible for you to make that first ‘revealing move’ around women… the sort of action that can signal your possible romantic interest in her.  This puts you at a major disadvantage on the romantic playing field because, if you are always “turtling-up” into this ego-protective mode, then you are certainly not connecting with anyone!

That said, here are 7 key pointers about becoming more social that every shy person should thoroughly understand:

1)  While shyness can sometimes be considered “cute” in women it is absolutely deadly for men. Here’s why: because appearing or acting shy is a bright red signal flare of low male status.  It’s an indication that you have been ‘put in your place’ by the other men in your world — that they have cowered and bossed and mocked you into submission, and now it makes itself visible for all to see in your shy behavior.

Now perhaps you’ve been able to create an aura of accomplishment and respectability around yourself in your professional (non-romantic) life that gives you some shielding from the worst of your shyness — but these defenses quickly lose their power when it comes to being judged worthy of romantic possibility by women.  Females have a unique power to pierce and destroy the pretenses established at great cost and effort by men — and it’s the thought of coming face-to-face with this awesome power from which a lot of your rejection-fearing shyness probably arises in the first place.

2)  Most people actually HATE being around a shy person. Why?  Because demonstrating shyness has the effect of causing many people’s OWN latent shy feelings to come bubbling up to the surface (and everyone has a little bit of shyness lurking in them somewhere for this to play on…).  “He’s always acting so shy, he starts to make ME feel shy… I hate that!” What you are doing is (unwittingly) engaging in a subtle psychological practice called MODELING.  When we model certain actions and behaviors in front of others they tend to unconsciously pick them up and mimic them, especially if there’s a wall of formality still existing between people (i.e., total strangers) and therefore a bit of nervousness involved in their behaviors towards one another.

Test this out for yourself: next time you are face-to-face with someone and you both have drinks in front of you for instance, watch how many times you can pick up your drink, or toy with the straw or something, and the other person will almost immediately begin doing the exact same thing without even thinking about it.  That’s modeling! Now if you are aware of what you’re doing and purposeful in your actions, it’s possible to have people copying your behaviors and attitudes all over the place.  These are actually common politician’s and salesman’s tricks that you can borrow and use to your advantage if you, again, are purposeful and can practice living outside of your own head a little bit.

3)  Roll over all small embarrassments and make nothing of them. Much of your shyness has to do with being too inwardly-directed — simply meaning that you tend to dwell too much on what’s going on inside your own “thought cloud” rather than being fully engaged within your surrounding environment.  The typical shy person has a tendency to assign too much importance to every little thing that he does or every little move that he makes.  Stop this right now by getting out of your head in any way that you can manage to do so.  Focus more on modeling and controlling your “puppets” if you must!

4)  Stop obsessing over every little thing that you might feel like saying — essentially pre-editing yourself out of many good conversations before they can even begin! I used to do this all the time: pre-judging and PRE-REJECTING everything that I was about to say before the words ever made it out of me.  You feel like others are constantly judging your thoughts and ideas every second of the day, and this kind of intense scrutiny — imaginary or not — is difficult to hold up under.  It’s little wonder that you are reluctant to speak up!  I think this is why introverts find people to be more a source of stress to them rather than of comfort.  It’s also one of the major reasons why being social may feel like such a chore for you, when it can often seem like such a breeze to most everyone else.

The sad part is that the entire underlying dynamic causing this pre-rejecting response (i.e., the intense scrutiny of others) doesn’t even exist in actuality.  It’s entirely in your mind for the most part, and you are merely projecting all this garbage onto others and seeing what really isn’t there. This is a form of paranoia, but it’s also a form of arrogance as well.  Arrogance?  That’s right: after all, what makes YOU so special that everyone is always watching YOU and everything that you are doing all the time?  Why do YOU deserve such constant observation?  Well you don’t, and you aren’t getting any! This is all what’s known as ‘magical thinking’, and it’s an error in cognition that you need to address and overcome.

5)  Shyness is a distortion of our natural sense of shame — which has gone off the rails and become associated with emotions that are not inherently shameful. Shame is the master controller emotion of the entire human race and has been used as such throughout history.  It is wielded as a psychological bludgeon by societies, parents, religions (they are experts!…) and almost every other sort of collective gathering of people to steer individual behaviors towards some commonly accepted norm.  Most of us would not walk around naked in public for instance, because we would be ashamed to do so.

But do we have some sort of natural instinct that makes us feel weird and uncomfortable about walking around publicly naked?  Not necessarily, we were TAUGHT at some young age to keep our clothes on and our private parts covered around others by our parents.  This was a “rule” they imposed at some appropriate moment, and they likely had to make us feel ashamed about our nakedness at some point in our development in order to get us to comply with this rule.  Once scolded and “embarrassed” about it, our desire to be naked in public then became shame bound — that is, the feeling of shame was successfully linked to this idea of wanton exhibitionism in order to inhibit the desire.  It therefore became impossible to experience this desire without feeling ashamed about it! The two sensations became tightly linked (bound) at the deepest levels of our consciousness.

When shame becomes associated or “bound” to the wrong sorts of emotions however (like our natural human need to feel affection for instance) it can make us unable to experience these particular emotions in the absence of the shame.  And because shame is so uncomfortable to experience, we will usually seek to maneuver clear of this psychic pain by avoiding whatever stimulus threatens to trigger it off.  We “shy” away from such stimuli. Socializing with other people (and especially in a potentially romantic context) can unleash a Pandora’s Box of different emotions.  This is normal.  However, if any of these critical emotions have become shame-bound at some point along the way, then they cannot be experienced without the associated torment of shame being present as well.  Thus, we are made to suffer adult shyness in this sad and maddening way.

Shame that has gotten itself twisted around our normal emotions where it doesn’t belong is known as toxic. This is a large and complex subject that I talk about in my books and is really beyond the scope of this short article.  Suffice to say that toxic shame is the basis of almost every sort of addictive behavior that you can imagine — from alcohol to overeating, rage, sadness, hard drugs like cocaine or even obsessive work-aholism.  That’s because we have a powerful urge to escape from shame’s poisonous effects in whatever way that we can.  Certain things must therefore be made off limits to us and cannot be experienced as they should be.  Our spirit becomes strangled over time, and we seek to nullify this chronic pain with the distractions of our addictions.

6)  Discover the power of self-compassion to overcome chronic shame and self-hatred. Shy people are often so mentally tough on themselves that it’s no wonder they constantly act as though they’ve been cowered into submission.  They have been: by an internal cognitive monster called the Tyrannical Conscience.

Ask yourself this: who else do you HATE so badly that you would wish the same kind of monster to enter their brain and torture them as relentlessly as you torture yourself with thoughts of fear, uncertainty and inadequacy?  What?… you say that no one else deserves such cruel treatment?  Only you?  Well now there’s that good ol’ arrogance again… this idea that only YOU can be held to such high, God-like standards of performance to which you repeatedly fail to measure up (and therefore must be made to feel ashamed about).  Everyone else (all those lower class beings?…) get a pass I guess.  They get compassion, but not you.  Shame can create such thinking distortions known as grandiosity — what John Bradshaw in his great book “Healing The Shame That Binds You” calls the Disabled Will.

7)  Shyness in adults is learned behavior — essentially a bad habit. This is actually good because it means that it is possible to completely reverse your shyness!  Since the original fear which the shyness was designed to protect you against no longer exists, once the “back of your shyness is broken” it should not return.

Remember, it doesn’t matter that you may have to “trick” yourself into getting started down the road to defeating your shyness, all that matters is the final RESULT.  Actors and sports stars use similar mental tricks to get themselves up for a game or a performance, and no one gives them any grief about it.  So why can’t you do the same?

Your job as a recovering shy person is to first embrace this serious flaw in your thinking without fear and then move forward to correct it.  No anger or regret, just strength of purpose.  And lots of self-compassion for a change.

For all you guys out there who are having a difficult time attracting the romantic attention of women, one major reason for this could be due to your lack of a confident male display.  This is that invisible and silent “vibe” that you are always sending out about yourself to females everywhere.  If your own male ‘love beacon’ has been broadcasting a weak and unappealing signal that’s been getting you nowhere lately, then you need to boost up the strength of this Love & Romance energy field and make it shine with the light of unstoppable courage!  This is essentially the master seducer’s secret to success: quietly capturing the interest of a woman away from the men who surround her with his A+ male display, and then gradually monopolizing it until he’s got her completely hooked into him.

Well check this out… here are 5 Instant Confidence Boosters that can immediately help you begin appearing onto the romantic radar screens of women everywhere, ASAP:

1) The #1 mental gear-shift that can almost instantly improve your outlook on most everything and make you appear more confident to everyone involves creating a brand new mental Confidence Frame for yourself… and then plastering it all over your reality!

What am I talking about?  A confidence frame is a highly personalized LENS through which you view the world.  It’s a mental filter — a “coloring” that determines your perception OF (and reaction TO)  what’s going on in your presence.  Your confidence frame is more than just an academic exercise however, it tends to constrain what is or isn’t viewed as possible for you to achieve by setting limits beyond which you’ve convinced yourself that you cannot venture.  Your confidence frame operates by overlaying a veneer of assumptions across whatever it is that you’re witnessing — and it’s those personal limitations that determine the sorts of “safe” interactions that you can engage in with any particular situation or person.

You can think of this as the invisible boundaries defined by your fear.

Here’s how it works: two people standing side by side viewing the same reality will apply entirely different biases (assumptions) to what their seeing, and thus create completely different (even totally OPPOSITE) interpretations of that situation.  For instance, I see a girl standing there and I think that it’s possible for me to walk up to her and get a conversation going, and you think that this isn’t possible for YOU to do.  Neither one of us is actually right or wrong in a strict sense — and our “overlay of assumptions” may have little to do with our actual chances of making this happen anyway, since it cannot take into account the one big ‘unknown’… if she would even be remotely interested in either one of us!

What it DOES do however is position us to either take or withhold a particular sort of action based upon our applied bias to this neutral observation of a girl who’s just ’standing over there’.  This GO / NO-GO decision point (and you live through several of these each day) has the potential to change the trajectory of your life to some major or minor degree — depending upon what you actually decide do… make a move, or simply allow the moment to pass.

The built-up weight of these kinds of collective choices, in retrospect, are what determines where you are in your life right now — which is essentially a patchwork of all these decision points both big and small that you have made along the way.  Sure, some of the reality of your world may’ve been imposed upon you by the actions of others or by circumstances beyond your control, but a lot of it wasn’t.  It is mostly our own choice to be where we are today (even if the main “chooser” was our fear). People with a social anxiety phobia for instance have applied a strong negative bias to most every aspect of their reality, which thus colors their world through a prism of abject fear.  You should strive to stay out of this deadly trap of fear-based decision-making and begin coloring YOUR world through the lens of limitless possibility.

2)  Get all the people who “know” you as being sad, depressed or lonely OUT of your life. I’m serious.  Do whatever it takes (short of anything violent) to diminish the supporting effect they are having on the psychic MONSTERS that you are trying to flush out of your skull!

The people around you can often feel threatened by any sudden change in your attitude or physical state — especially if those changes are life-enabling for you. Such personal changes threaten to have you moving “out in front of them” in terms of where they imagine you to belong in their own personal pecking order (which is usually somewhere beneath you, of course).  I’m talking about work, school, and especially within your own family structure.  You need to begin casting a more critical eye upon these individuals and begin grading them for their usefulness to you.  Don’t assume that these people have your best intentions at heart, they often do not.

In my books I talk extensively about male status and becoming the “high status male” in order to begin attracting the kind of high quality women that you desire into your world.  People who can support you rather than drag you down.  Well, you cannot feel that you are high status in any sense of the word if you are constantly being put down by the people that surround you.  These individuals act as physical manifestations of the poisonous thinking that’s going on inside your head. They re-enforce your circular rotten thinking, and they need to go!

3)  Dump good old “schmootie” or “titso” forever. Or whatever other sort of cutesy, put-downish nickname that others may’ve stamped you with over the years.  Think about some of the more powerful and respected people that you know of.  Do they get these sorts of stupid nicknames hung on them?  Do people dare call them by it to their face… or are they afraid of the consequences?  Or maybe just too respectful? Again, as noted in confidence booster #2, this sort of thing represents all the external inertia present in your world which works against your making any sort of positive, uplifting changes in your life.  This is entirely toxic to the free and full expression of your existence.  Get rid of it! You have 2 choices here: face these people down or flee them.  Either method will work — although the first has the added benefit of improving your self-esteem enormously.

I realize that the number of people we could be talking about or the pervasiveness of their low regard for you may make this seem like an impossible task, as you could be vastly outnumbered by these agents of psychic doom.  Regardless, you must revolt against their endless tyranny and seek your own mental freedom!

4) Taking a major mulligan (a “do over”) on your life can be thought of as your next really big confidence booster… in the sense that you will ultimately walk away from such a fearful experience a VASTLY stronger person.  Especially if you’re in the 20 to 40 age range reading this right now, you will be thanking your lucky stars that you took up the challenge of personal self-change when you did because it only gets tougher as you get older and more set in your ways and attitudes.

I’m talking about seeking out a completely new circle of friends where you can finally get some emotional support.  This may mean having to discover entirely new social circles, changing schools, your place of employment, a spouse… or maybe even the radical decision to pack your bags and leave town.  It all depends on just how much importance you are willing to give this crazy idea that having some RESPECT from others (and also from somewhere deep inside your own head) is worth more than the safety and security of holding onto your current crummy life situation.

It means looking the risk of building a new life for yourself straight in the eye… and refusing to blink!

5)  Know and understand the critical importance of long-term MOTIVATION when mounting any sort of major challenge to your well-established routines and habits — and especially when trying to break out of calcified old thinking ruts.  Your brain has made subconscious assumptions about the limits of possibility for you.  It has spent a lifetime subtly directing your thoughts and behaviors in ways that create a supporting reality… thus “proving” everything it believes about you to be “true”.

These profound if poisonous self-created assumptions can get themselves buried in very deep — and can therefore take a very powerful commitment of motivation to reverse.  Attempting to just casually sweep these rooted-in ideas aside in the service of more positive ones will likely be regarded as a THREAT to the very existence of the subconscious itself… and so will be viciously resisted at every turn.  This is why it can be so difficult to remain motivated to stay at positive personal change until it finally begins to take hold, but this is the task that you must now shoulder.  Otherwise, this is a process that runs almost hypnotically and unconsciously unless you deliberately force it to STOP.

Finally, whether it’s something physical like losing weight or quitting smoking, or something completely psychological like changing your fundamental belief system, you’ll find that Courage and Self-Awareness are your best friends for remaining in the fight long enough to achieve the kind of boost in confidence that you are seeking.  Just stay true to yourself — and stay in the fight no matter what sort of blowback you encounter.  Remember that no one can prevent you from having anything that you truly desire in life.  Except you.

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And speaking of having more confidence…

You know that I just posted my entire Kick Ass Confidence 7 Part Audio Training Series up online as a totally FREE giveaway program, right?  So go listen to the entire 90 minute program for nuthin’… take a look and sign-up on the following page:

http://www.ka-confidence.com

Thanks!
~MP

Nothing creates a more attention-grabbing romantic signal that most women will immediately take notice of than the magnificent display of Confidence in men.  Whether it’s actually while in the act of “hitting” on her itself, or merely doing something powerfully in her presence, confidence always makes a stunning impact on women!

A dynamic display of self-confidence can have a near magical ability to influence others and get them to RESPECT you as well — and it’s especially important for women to see men as being confident because it plays into their subconscious grading system via which they sort out the (attractive) high status males from their (less desirable) low status counterparts.

Here’s an important fact that you may not be aware of: men gain most of their natural confidence not so much by interacting with women, but by competing against one another. So your seeming LACK of it will be read by a lot of these women as a measure of your submission to these other men… professionally, financially, physically, etc.  You have apparently been made into one of their bitches and now it shows through in your shyness and lack of self-confidence!

This may not be entirely fair, but you need to understand little IS fair in the game of romance and seduction — and so it’s something that you need to factor in when it comes to getting yourself seen as being out there “on the playing field”… an important appearance that you should always try to maintain.

So in light of all this, here are 7 important confidence tips that can really help you pump-up a weak and paltry male display:

1)  Realize that most people are probably just as big a bundle of doubts and insecurities as you are, probably even more so. And especially women… and DOUBLE especially if she’s a 9 or 10! This is the ‘hidden insecurity’ phenomenon that the pick up artist’s technique known as “neg hitting” attempts to exploit, (although I myself am not a practitioner of this particular fine art, charming little sweetheart that I am)…

Regardless, understand that we are ALL fighting with these same challenges and demons… merely to different degrees.  So keep soldiering on — you are not alone in your struggles!

2) People are NOT mind readers… which means that they cannot peer into your soul and know your deepest fears at a mere glance.  So if you appear to be confident around them, then who are they NOT to believe you?  “Hey, this guy seems pretty confident in himself for some reason, so I guess I’ll go along with it…” This gives us the advantage of being able to “fake it until we make it” and pad our male display with some early bluffing until our personal change becomes more genuine and deeply integrated into our core personality.

Look, you’re probably already practicing exactly the opposite process right now when you consistently keep talking the wrong sort of internal self-talk to yourself.  You are essentially hypnotizing yourself into acting in ways that support a poor and unattractive self-image.  So if you want a better self-image, then learn to fill your head with better thoughts about yourself and your value as a person than you do now. Inner game is essentially 99% of the “secret” to coming off like the confident alpha male around women!

3) Try to always remain aware of your body language and the kinds of “plus or minus” subliminal signals about yourself that you could be broadcasting to women — they have an extremely sensitive radar for this sort of thing, and especially when it comes to men.  I’m talking about things like shoulders back, head up, solid eye contact, being at ease about casually being the first to touch someone non-offensively (an assumed HSM “privilege”).

Hey, don’t be afraid to employ a few “cheap trick” confidence tips like this next one to get some early points on the board for yourself:  For instance, if you’re still too shy to meet someone’s eye directly, then stare at their nose. Seriously, it’s an old salesman’s trick… people cannot tell the different between someone staring at the bridge of their nose and someone who’s looking them straight in the eye.  Try it today and see for yourself.  (And also take note the more positive reaction that you are pulling from people as well… The power of confidence!)

4) If you see yourself as being confident in your own mind, then you will give off a confident “vibe” about yourself without even being aware of it. This has to do with the inability of the human mind to distinguish between common everyday reality and a richly-imagined fantasy.  Your imagination is the gateway to achieving feelings of deep self-worth, so learn how to use it to “fool” your subconscious mind into seeing yourself in a stronger frame. What you are looking to do is create an emotion more overwhelming than your fear.  This will allow you to begin seeing the people around you differently, while having them view YOU differently as well.

It’s from this shift in subliminal vibes that new social opportunities will soon begin to appear all around you — and your shiny new cloak of unstoppable confidence will be the power that drives it forward!

5) Never worry about having to “back up” your confidence — almost no one ever has to do this.  People see you acting confidently and that’s just the way it is, they simply accept it.  Rarely will anyone challenge you to “prove” it (prove what?).  It’s only those guys who really insist on pressing what a tough guy they are that eventually end up in fights.  This isn’t confidence, it’s bravado.  Like having a fat ‘tell’ in poker.

Look, there’s no shame in trying to change whatever poor thinking it is that’s currently holding you back from participating fully in the game of love and romance, so don’t worry about any of this high-minded BS.  These are just mental red herrings designed to keep you distracted from making serious personal change in your life.  No one can know what you are doing in the privacy of your own mind, and it’s none of their business anyway – so feel free to imagine your way straight into a better life!

6) Get good at something that makes you look cool and/or powerful and competent and show it off somehow (guitar hero anyone?… just kidding .  Seriously.  Why not strive to become skilled at some type of activity, trade, sport or even a cool hobby like rock climbing to help yourself attract women?  Start with some modest demonstration of your prowess and just keep playing it up.  Soon you’ll begin to gather a following of closer friends and maybe even a few fans as well.  (Just don’t “pied-piper” them all into the jungle one day and have them sample your specially formulated kool-aid…!)

7)  Surrender the Self-Hatred and let your spirit fly! Give up once and for all on the misguided belief that your station in life is somehow genetically or culturally imposed upon you, and that you are permanently stuck right where you are.  That’s Middle Age-going-nowhere sort of thinking.  What it really is, is self-hatred keeping you locked in its “hopeless and helpless victim” trap.  It performs this little feat by making any other alternative life-path seem impossible for you to achieve, which is utter nonsense of course.

Take a chance to prove this to yourself today by challenging your fear in some significant way.  Get mad at your fear, take it on! Don’t let these powerful ideas that I’m giving you just go in one ear and out the other… use them!

I think that confidence, to finally describe it, is nothing more than an overriding assumption that things will always go your way in the end… no matter what. But this won’t happen for you until you get out there and demonstrate to yourself that new and vastly different possibilities really can exist… for YOU. Once you achieve this absolutely critical cognitive breakthrough (called, duh… “belief and motivation”…) you’ll finally be able to take those first few baby steps towards massive personal change…

And at that point, believe it or not, the hardest part of the entire journey will already be behind you.

–

And speaking of having more confidence…

I just put my brand new Kick Ass Confidence 7 Part Audio Training Series up online as a totally FREE giveaway program.  That’s right, you can now listen to the entire 90 minute program for free.  Just sign-up on the following page:

http://www.ka-confidence.com

And you’ll get the links for each of the 7 lessons e-mailed to you at 3 day intervals.  This gives you time to listen to each one and perform the little homework assignments before the next part arrives.  It’s a more disciplined way to learn, prevents overwhelm and REALLY WORKS!  Give it a try, and I thank you for your support.  And be sure to spread the word to any of your interested friends who could use a little extra shot of self-confidence. 

~MP

This is a question and answer exchange that I just had with one of my readers. It began as a question about traveling alone and turned into a screed on the topic of self-hatred, which I have come to believe over the years to be a much bigger issue with guys seeking solutions for things like shyness and social dysfunction than many of us realize. To wit:

Hey Mike,

I’ve had some stuff twirling around in my head lately that I wanted to bounce off of you, having recently just turned 40. I’m single again, having just broke up with my girlfriend (my decision). Not easy to do as she was a great girl, but I just seem to get bored in relationships like you. Also like you, I got a late start in life on bedding women. Anyway. my question is a lifestyle type query.

I’m interested in your take on how a single guy should go about traveling and vacationing on his own.

This is becoming a real dilemma for me, being single at my age. Not a lot of unmarried, single friends left to hang around with anymore. Last year I went by myself to the Dominican Republic — not to a resort but to a town where all the girls are “pros” if you know what I mean. It was amazing what an ego boost it was… you’d of thunk that I was Brad Pitt or something! LOL…

Don’t get me wrong, I realize that I’m only desirable in that type of situation because I’m perceived as having some sort of relative wealth — a form of being an HSM I suppose. However, I seem to have a little bit of an issue with feeling like a loser doing this sort of thing… like a guy who can’t get an ordinary American woman and so ultimately has to pay for it. I know that some guys swear by this lifestyle and insist that some of these foreign women are much more sensuous and feminine than their spoiled American counterparts. I don’t know…

Are these guys on to something, or are we all just acting like misogynistic LSM’s who can’t score American chicks?

I’ve thought about learning Spanish and maybe moving to Buenos Aires. Those Argentine women are hot! Sounds adventurous I know, but I guess when I get to the bottom of it, I wonder if this isn’t me just running away from my problems of low status and my inability to score lots of women here in the good ole U.S. of A?

Do you think I should I stick it out and try to achieve what ever status I can here at home, or is it okay to try and be a bigger fish in a smaller pond? I’d love to hear your take on this idea, I know it’s not your specialty per se but I do value your perspective. Thanks again for your time!

Sincerely,
Mark

–

Hey Mark,

Good to hear from you again. About 3 years ago I went to Las Vegas for 5 days by myself and I didn’t find that NOT having a companion with me was any sort of big detriment — except maybe for going to certain sit-down type of restaurants where you might feel odd dining alone. You know how it is, certain activities you can do by yourself and others are “couple” things that will make you feel uncomfortable. That’s your only practical restriction really, and there are plenty of fast food joints where you can dine alone with a newspaper. Other than that I was fine seeing the sights, gambling, etc… all by myself.

Then again… certain activities are better done alone, WITHOUT the ‘ole girlfriend tagging along. Things such as…

Well, I visited one of the nearby legal cathouses just outside Vegas on this trip because I always wanted to see what they were like. The experience was pretty surrealistic in fact… however, a fun (but WAY too expensive…) time was had by all, especially me! And so what? Did I break some kind of sacrosanct “HSM code” by paying for sex? And who cares if I did anyway?

This is the EXACT sort of attitude shift that you too will need to achieve in order to ultimately address your own internal doubts about this issue.

I believe that we accumulate an unwieldy library of these stupid, self-created “internal rules” over the course of a lifetime that eventually bind us up in a kind of mental strait jacket. Soon we can’t even conceive of doing anything the simple way anymore without feeling guilty about it. Why?… because we “broke the rules”! The precious rules… the rules that exist only within our own thick skulls.

Well I’ve found this network of rules to actually be a form of very subtle and sly self-hatred. Don’t ask me why we do this to ourselves — but the sooner you can recognize and chuck all this crap from your head the sooner you will become free to just let go and follow your heart wherever it may want to take you. And that’s the real goal that you want to always be pursuing relentless in life, the goal of mental freedom.

Case in point about your desire to seek out women who might be vastly more easier to relate to than the typical ball-busting, judgmental American bitch… the delightful product of 50 years of feminism. Certainly not like the girls dear old dad used to marry, that’s for sure… fresh out of high school with all that good home-ec training (cooking, baking, cleaning, housework). That right, they used to TRAIN women in high school how to be good supportive wives who graded their own self-worth by how well they treated their husbands! Even suggesting that this sort of thing might be anything less than total domestic-slavery-brainwashing will get you a swift kick in the balls nowadays, you MFn’ pig!

You now desire to chuck this nasty USA scene and go looking for more “agreeable” women elsewhere, but your self-hating side quickly steps in and says: “hey forget it, that’s cheating…. you have to try and meet women in the toughest environment possible or it doesn’t count.”

See, that’s the central tenet and mode of operation of self-hatred: you must do everything the hardest way possible or it doesn’t count. Note that other (lesser human) people can choose to take the easy way out and that’s okay… but not YOU — you have to take the hardest route because you’re special… you’re superhuman. That’s the Disabled Ego at work…

…Special tough rules define the special “tough” guy.

There’s a great book to read that dives deep into this psychological phenomenon, it’s called Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair by Theodore I. Rubin. What we call “cheating” is in fact what a therapist knowledgeable in the mechanics of self hatred would call compassion.

Compassion?

For a moment, just consider that entire galaxy of nasty internal rules that hold you back — would you ever force them upon someone else? Someone you loved, like a son perhaps? No way! See how with others we feel free to express our compassion? But don’t go looking for any such free passes inside your own head for yourself. Cheater!

Another example: I grew up Catholic, but my own self-hatred forced me to become an atheist for awhile because (I now understand) that faith is a form of compassion for oneself — and of course such a thing is flat-out cheating because it violates The Big Mike Self-Hate Rule: that you can only believe what’s demonstrable scientifically no matter how much it brings you down emotionally.

Logic is king, emotions are irrelevant (only superhuman rules apply to me, remember), and bending logic to assuage emotions is a crime against nature. Only overgrown babies (SUB-human’s) run around expressing their faith you see, because they aren’t strong enough mentally (like super me!) to face the scary facts of random existence and postmortem non-existence without anything to comfort them. It doesn’t matter how you feel (emotions are irrelevant), you are a prisoner of the facts of the Universe as they reveal themselves, and trying to escape them via delusional thinking is weakness and therefore pathetic.

Cheating!

Now, this may be the sort of nonsense that we like to tell ourselves, but would we ever actually burden someone else with this same set of cold, inviolate rules — perhaps even on their death bed? Or would we instead say: “let the guy find comfort in his faith, so what if none of it’s actually proven? Who cares?” Of course this solution is never valid for you, just the other guy. We go easy on him but never on ourselves.

All this madness forms the nuts-and-bolts of self-hatred – and it manifests itself in zillions of complicated and difficult to understand ways. It’s just the way that “we are” (or so we think). But there is a hidden kernel of compassion locked away in everyone’s heart and you need to find yours. Depression, disillusionment… these are all cries from deep within to be free of the self-hating monster that we created. Read that book if you can. The entire human race should read it!

Anyway, this was a long-winded way of recommending that you dig out your own self-hating internal rules from under the mental rock where they hide and spray some compassion on them. Stop being so hard on yourself by worrying about hypothetical HSM-LSM issues etc. I recommend that you seek out your own happiness by whatever route you must take.

No one will ever ask how you got there or judge whether or not you “cheated” by failing to take the hardest road possible. Are you gonna get a medal for remaining true to your self hated? Where do they hand those baby’s out? (I would look like one of those old Soviet generals if they did

Want to know the saddest part? In the end, I discovered that self-hatred is a complete a waste of time… because when you finally DO break the grip of those murderous rules YOU WON’T CARE IN THE LEAST! You’ll see that nobody gives a damn about the exact trajectory of your life, but you. And if you won’t even give yourself a break then there’s no hope at all — because everyone else is too tied-up wrestling with their own demons to worry about “saving you”. You’re sitting in the middle of the desert waiting for that ship to come in.

And man, this is the best wisdom that I can ever pass along to you. Take care buddy.

Hey Mike,

Here’s my story…  Since about two weeks ago I’ve been dating this really great girl.  She’s in most of my classes here at uni, which could be awkward, but thus far hasn’t been.   This girl seems to really like me (there’s been a lot of casual touching, longing stares, a lot of good laughs, we’ve even had a couple of passionate make-out sessions).

But there is a problem…  every time I ask her to come over to my place for dinner or to go out somewhere, she always seems very reluctant.   I know that she has a pretty busy social life (I think…), but seeing that we supposedly “like” each other so much I don’t understand why she can’t spare me some more of her time?

I refuse to beg her — as my instincts tell me this is NOT the right move.  On the other hand, I really do want to spent more time with her, so I feel like I should be doing something else here, but what?

I have noticed that she DOES seem to respond to a forceful dominant attitude — as I have gotten her to come over to my place once by being very direct about my desire to see her — but I’m hesitant to be this pushy because it might reveal my “too strong” of a desire to be with her which could be perceived as low status, right?

So do you think I should just keep bugging her to spend more time with me as I’ve been doing, or should I wait for her to break down and come crawling to me?  She’s a really shy girl — which I fear could mean that she might decide to stop seeing me altogether!

Gary

Hi Gary,

This girl seems to me like she’s been hurt in the past and has a lot of doubts about the two of you taking your relationship deeper towards the sexual.  She’s split between whatever desire she may have for you and paying homage to some deeper fear that is holding her back and driving her to be overly cautious about things.

The basic behaviors and expressed personality of most people is often just a pattern of habits (bad or otherwise) that come into being as a response to some kind of psychic trauma that we experienced in our past, either real or imagined.  In other words, we are all a collection of not just these deep hurts but the ‘compensatory behaviors’ that we then develop to prevent them from ever happening to us again. This makes some people assume some very odd and conflicting behaviors that make their friends and family go crazy trying to figure them out!

These behaviors are complex and can be invisible even to our own self-awareness of them –  and they can often be self destructive in all sorts of creatively different ways.  Most often it involves passing up a chance to make some sort of significant positive change in our lives IF it means not having to confront certain fears that are absolutely “off limits” to us.  Our internal Prime Directive becomes one of making certain that we remain protected and assured that “THAT” (fill in the blank of past pain…) will never happen to us again! All other considerations are secondary and even unimportant.

It’s for this reason that you sense she might even choose to completely disconnect and split away from you if you choose to use a hard-to-get type ploy on her.  Her fear (whatever it is) is still far stronger than any feelings of attachment that she might have for you at this stage of the game.  See?  You can already sense this about her!

If she’s shy and cautious you can bet there’s a reason for it — unless she’s just some big time introvert by disposition (and she doesn’t sound like it since you claim she has an active social life).  The play with a girl like this I feel is to just put in the time connecting with her and slowly drawing her out of her shell, and maybe even help her get beyond these fears somewhat. As you become closer you can get her to reveal a few of those things from her past that originally drove her into a protective shell.  This could be anything from something as silly as being picked-on in grammar school to be raped by her dad.  I’m just saying — you never know what variety of worms you’ve got in the can!

But this is really the mission of our lives isn’t is?… it’s about helping each other get beyond the garbage that holds us apart from each other.

So use whatever time that you DO get to spend with her right now to do more than just party… try getting into some deeper conversations with her and connect some more. You need to find the right balance between seeming concerned / interested and being too pushy or nosey.  A tightrope to walk, I know.  Once she starts to open up and trust you a little more though I’ll bet she becomes more fascinated with you and perhaps even obsessed with you!

This can all go horribly off the rails of course and you may find out more about her personal story than you may want to know — and she could develop such a deep bond with you as a result that you might not be able to get rid of her!  Seriously.  Once some people finally DO feel comfortable enough to open up to someone else it can be like an emotional damn bursting… and you’re the one who’s standing in the valley!

So another thing you have to do is decide if you’re going to commit the time and energy into doing all this connecting work, or if it will cut too much into your studies at university or become too much of a burden on you.  Remember that there’s plenty of fish swimming around in the environment that you’re in.  I’m just sayin’.

BTW, your being forceful and dominant is in no way LSM, to the contrary it is the mark of the HSM who goes after what he desires in life and is not afraid to crash through a few barriers to get it! The alpha male assumes his right to possess anything that he chooses (until he’s challenged, but that’s another story…).  So it’s okay to press forward against her reluctance, just don’t grovel or engage in acts of self-humiliation in the process.

Because THAT’s too high a price for anything in life!

Mike,

I found your books to be very interesting and I felt that they related to my life more so than ‘The Game’ because it isn’t so fIxated on the club scene.  (I have also been reading the Layguide as well and multiple links from the Fast Seduction website).  I don’t really have anyone to discuss your books with — I have been reading up on some of your forums, reading your books.  I haven’t yet really listened the audio or the workbook yet though (I bought your package about 2 weeks ago).  In theory I understand everything you are saying and it all makes sense, but I  still have that fear of approaching women.

I have tried to figure things out and I have come up with two significant events in my life.  The first is that I am an identical twin and for the majority of my life I have always been around my brother.  I feel I have gotten so used to having him around that I am uncomfortable trying things on my own.  Also when I was younger I got into a bike crash and smashed up my teeth pretty badly.  I still haven’t got them fixed, couple are chipped and crooked.  I still remember this moment vividly in my mind and think that at times this may be making me more self conscious than I should probably be.

I am only 20 years old, so I still have plenty of time, but I want to be able to take full advantage of being in college with tons of single girls.  I have only dated or seen one girl in my life and we dated for about 2 years. I have trouble approaching complete strangers though, the thought of not knowing what they are going to say in response scares me.  I know I just need to overcome my fear of approaching and I will immediately start to see results, but I’m having trouble getting over the hump.  I am not a bad looking guy, I feel like I have been getting interest from some girls, but not really enough to be able to act upon.

I don’t know where I am going with all of this rambling, any help or insight you can provide would be great.

Thanks,
Danny

Hi Danny,

Well the identical twin thing is a bit unusual and it’s something that I don’t really have any personal experience with (nor do I know any identical twins), but it could be that you are experiencing a bit of separation anxiety or some such thing, and this is something that you’ll just have to grow out of I would think.  You’re young and as you say have plenty of time, so I wouldn’t worry.  There are still very many life changes ahead for any 20 year old! Being on your own now at college will help this process, and you should begin to gradually desensitize to this kind of anxiety over time.

The important thing is to avoid “turtling-up” and withdrawing in the face of this or any other type of fear… if you do that the fears will only grow stronger and you will waste more of your time chasing down the causes of your anxiety than doing those things (like reaching out socially to others) that will eventually make it go away naturally.

So be mindful to direct your thoughts and energies OUTWARD as much as you can, rather than obsessing inward on your own closed-off thoughts too much.  Stay involved — join some groups and organizations or study groups.  Volunteer for stuff on or off campus.  This is how you make friends.  Just don’t let yourself become isolated… because it’s a self-propelling burden that will only make you seem more weird and a bigger question mark to those around you.  This is NOT a good way to meet women, to say the least! They look for men who are into things that give them some juice… have a drive and apparent purpose or goal in life, and have a base of close friends to provide them with so-called social proof.

The way to do this is to be social and that means you must network… join some of those clubs or groups, go out for some sports.  Networking is where all your best chances to meet girls will occur.  Say ‘yes’ to every offer to party or hang out or do whatever it takes (to the extent that it doesn’t interfere with your studies, of course).

Also the thing about the missing teeth is no big deal… in Canada they call it a ‘hockey smile’ and guys wear it with pride!

You can get them fixed after college if you want.  As an adult trying to break into the working world, that’s when it may become more of an issue for you.  I wouldn’t worry about it until then.  Get busy reading and listening to my program and figure out how to apply my ideas to your own life and situation.

Remember the ultimate goal should always be to raise your status in order to ATTRACT women — rather than chase after them from a position of social weakness. Do whatever it takes to stay connected, stay involved, and take a chance here and there where it seems you have good odds of success.  Or even if you don’t and fail, so what?

Most importantly of all: Dump the Emotion And Save the Data! This means that you have to coldly and ruthlessly extract the lessons embedded in your failures and learn from them, while absolutely REFUSING to take any of these setbacks personally… because this only produces negative emotions that will ultimately hold you back in the future and could even cause you to shut down completely.  Don’t fall into the trap of letting your fears rule you!… like I did when I was your age.  Learn from my experiences — that’s why I wrote my books.

Hi Mike,

What you are doing here is amazing, you’re giving us an opportunity to grow as men!

Let me introduce myself, I’m a tall man in my early 20’s and I weigh about 225.  My problem is that I’ve never had a girlfriend and I’m still a virgin.  I’m very shy — for some reason I can’t stand the idea of being alone with a woman.  I think I have rejection phobia.  A few years ago I was in line to lose my virginity I thought, but I couldn’t get it up! I think this experience made me even more afraid of women.  I’d appreciate your help and advice.

Robert

Bob, the thing about sexual issues caused by excessive virginity is simply this: at some point it comes down to just getting the stink on you, no matter how you have to do it!

I recommend that guys like yourself who are so incredibly shy — and especially if their shyness is tied to sexual insecurity — should just go ahead and get an escort and do the deed already! Get all that nagging doubt about your sexual prowess out of your head so that you can understand “deep down” (unconscious mind) that you can perform with a woman.

Once you’ve been popped your male “vibe” will adjust itself to confirm this by making you more at ease around women, which improves your reactions FROM them and opens up opportunities to make a connection. A male virgin carries an invisible tag on him that women can pick up on it somehow. It usually provokes disinterest and makes them regard you as some kind of asexual creature — which makes the task of hooking up doubly difficult.

You are always being faced with having to take an enormous, paralyzing risk to meet anyone — and this is a really stressful way to live.

So get busy getting this issue cleared up for yourself and then take the steps necessary to get out there on the social field of play.  Go take a look at my PUA Product Review pages.  The top listing on each one are books that sit on my own personal bookshelf here at home, books that helped me overcome huge negative issues in my personality that were keeping me shy and unable to connect with women.

Mike,

I ordered the book a few months ago, but I’m still having a problem with an area.  How would a dominant male respond to a situation where another person keeps picking with them?  Like ordering me to do some work faster and faster, and then other people join in on the fun.  I get angry, but they keep picking on me even more.  Also, what is the dominant male display that attracts women?  I guess I’m just having trouble summarizing the book into a general statement of dominant behavior.  Please help this recovering “nice guy”.  Thank you so much for your book — it has changed my life for the better.

– Bill

Hi Bill,

Looks like you’ve got a situation going on that will take some courage and fortitude to correct, but you’ll be transformed by the effort and ultimately glad you did it, trust me.

For a girl to become a woman, she has to pass through the pain of childbirth.  A man has a similar passage to his life’s station, though it’s not always as obvious.  It seems to me that the people around you have flagged you as an LSM and are having fun with it.  This is how they keep themselves propped up at whatever level they happen to be at — by stepping on guys like you.  You’re going to have to stand up and challenge these pricks and force them to change how they regard you. I know it’s not easy and it can be frightening, but this is the pain that men have to suffer sometimes in order to become men who are respected… and not just by other men, but ultimately by women too.

The thing I’m going to recommend is that you get some physical fighting skills, first.  Find a martial arts place that has self-defense classes.  You don’t need to go for any belts or anything radical, just get some basic training.  This will improve your confidence.  Don’t tell anyone what you are doing, this is going to be your little surprise. When you feel you’re ready, get in the face of the next prick who tries to put you down and tell him to fuck off.  Hold solid eye contact.  He’ll be stunned because he’s used to you folding and scurrying back to your lower position on the male status ladder without question (where he’s come to feel that you belong).  But now you’re going to make his life uncomfortable by challenging him… you want HIS spot!

Watch the punk sweat… he didn’t expect this.  See how far he wants to take it.  Don’t fold, make HIM back down.  If you can do all of this in front of others (who think the same of you) all the better.  Watch how, after the situation is over, they all shut up — hell… most of them won’t even look you in the eye any more.  This is an act of submission on their part. You’re going to disrupt a lot of forgone conclusions about yourself and get people thinking some uncomfortable thoughts… and that’s the real FUN part of it!  Screwing with their heads. Many times, you don’t have to even get physical… male posturing is often just that — a test of wills.  Who backs down first? (Hint: the guy who senses that he’s going to be the one to lose, that’s who).

And don’t give a shit about losing this job or anything else either, if you have to break some dude’s nose (even if its your boss)… you can always find honest work somewhere.  Your done with that job and those group of people anyway.  Your honor and self-respect are the most important things to worry about right now. You’ll achieve great things in life from that springboard.  As a lifelong LSM, however, you’ll end up mopping floors for minimum wage and getting married to the first fat girl who actually seems to like you. (Know of any miserable bastards like this?)

You have now moved off the Male Status basement floor and are beginning your climb up the ladder of social status. I had to do this when I was in high school my freshman year.  I was just a skinny little guy… just the type these bigger pricks like to pick on.  ONE TIME I had to stand up for myself.  One time. After that, no one ever bothered me for the remaining 4 years (and I didn’t know how to fight, and actually got my ass kicked!  I should’ve got some martial arts training first…)  But that didn’t matter, bruises heal.  I was respected for my courage.  This is how men have to settle out their positions in life.  After fisticuffs, will come workplace and financial status battles later on in your life — different but all “the same” really.  Who’s gonna be on top?

You want the dominant male behavior patterns summed up in one word?  How about confidence — in your abilities, in your self-respect, in your place on the social status ladder.  And you can’t fabricate confidence by sitting in your room alone chanting affirmations at a blank wall. It can’t be faked or hypnotized into yourself.  It comes from the real actions you are willing to take in the real world.  When you hit your stride and get to know this feeling, it acts as an invisible lure to women everywhere — and it works without you even knowing it.

So buck up, get your training and steel yourself to experience some pain and discomfort.  The Boy takes his fear with him into the cocoon.  He comes out the other side a Man.

Hey Mike,

At 40 years of age I think I may have finally found the missing piece of my own personal puzzle thanks to you: toxic shame.   Damn… who would have thought!   I need to tell you my story in order to have my question answered so bear with me.

I am an above average looking man and have a higher than average IQ.  This made my shitty track record with women even more frustrating to me.   I finally decided when I was thirty that I would overcome my fear of rejection and start getting laid.   I studied speed seduction….NOT FOR ME!   Eventually I just starting approaching and flirting with women and knocked a huge dent in my problem, but still couldn’t get past the flirting stage of seduction.   It wasn’t until after I came across your material that I figured it out.

Growing up, my father was a good provider but many times he was a regular Asshole.  Note the capital A!   Yes, I made mistakes as we all do, but he would totally blow things out of proportion with a slap upside the head or a belt across the ass.  I could handle this, but the yelling, screaming, and cursing are what really hurt the most… YOU ACT SO FUCKIN STUPID, or WHY YOU GOTTA FUCK UP SO GODDAMNED MUCH!!!!   He never spoke to my sister or mother in this way, only to me.

My mother was a sweet woman and I will always cherish her memory, but she did have a shaming trick or two herself.   Her thing was to start crying and say things like “one day I’ll be dead and then maybe you’ll be happy” or “just go ahead and hurt your mother” or “I’m so embarrassed by you.”   Naturally this ain’t too good for the old self esteem!

My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 and the old man changed on a dime.  She fought the disease for 4 years with a courage uncommon… never complaining and always optimistic.   I felt badly for anything I had ever done wrong to her.   She passed away with my father and myself at her bedside crying like babies.

The night after her funeral, my father and I buried the hatchet.   He told me that he couldn’t believe the stupid bullshit that he got so bent out of shape about.   He apologized for all he had done to me, and I did as well.   We are on great terms now — he re-married and I am happy for him.

These are my questions:

Do I have to confront my father about my toxic shame in order to heal it?   Mike, if we were still at odds with each other I wouldn’t mind, but I hate to re-open those old wounds now.   John Bradshaw recommends twelve step groups like AA, but I don’t want to get into anything like that.   How did you handle it?   I am dead certain that this is the source of all my issues with women, not making enough money, etc.  Thanks for your time.

Ken

Hi Ken,

Thanks for writing, that was a very touching and heartfelt story, my belated condolences to you and your dad for the loss of your mom.   I lost my own dad back in ‘78 from bone cancer and I still wish I could talk to him every now and then.   Part of the progression of life is the collection of these sufferings along the way.

For me, it was my mom who did most of the shaming of my affection needs, which I now realize did me great damage but was clueless about while it was happening.  To this day however, I have never confronted her directly with these “charges”.   At this point I don’t believe it would do any good, and so I try to love her as best I can regardless.   I believe that just KNOWING about these hidden shame issues in your own mind robs them of most of their power without having to make a big show of it for everyone else. The important thing is that YOU can finally understand what’s been shaping your behaviors for so long, and so you can change course whenever you see the same patterns beginning to happen again.   It’s this AWARENESS that’s the key to destroying your shame by dragging it out into the light to burn up like some old vampire.   If you’ve made peace with your dad, then I would just drop it and move on.

You have to remember that our parents were from a different era where children weren’t coddled psychologically as they are today.   My parents were born in the 1920’s, which was the depression era in the USA.   Back then if you fed and put a roof over your kids’ heads you were being a fantastic parent!   Words were just bullshit — and their power to hurt and do lasting damage was mostly unrecognized.  People were just parenting the way that they themselves had been parented.   No one had access to very much training in the world outside of their own direct experience which was gleaned from the people in their families and the local community where they grew up, and that “training” could vary wildly from one person to the next.   Remember there was no TV or internet or all the other 1000-and-1 different avenues of alternative information and psycho-babble that exist today and which many of us now take completely for granted.   If you were messed up in the head, you simply suffered in silence — and you often passed all that crap on to your kids without a second thought.

Hell, my uncle was turned into a dysfunctional alcoholic from the effects of WW II.   Nowadays he would be diagnosed with “delayed stress syndrome” from his combat experiences and treated somehow.   Back then he was just shoved aside as a drunken bum and rejected and isolated and mocked.   This is how he lived out his sad and lonely life.

But now you and I know differently.   Now you can recognize where your problems have taken root and simply refuse to honor them whenever they try to mess you up again in the future.   And you can resolve NOT to pass their effects along to the next generation, to your own sons and daughters. In some ways ours is a transitional generation born of a responsibility that is presented to us by having access to this sea of information that we swim in — and it’s our job to break the chain of family misery by NOT passing on our own shame-based issues and illnesses.   That’s why I say that clubbing your dad over the head with all this shit won’t do you any good now – just go forward as best you can and resolve yourself never to BE him.

You don’t need 12 steps, just one step… self-awareness. Refuse to let your shame speak for you anymore — keep cutting it off at the knees and eventually it will lose it’s hold on you.

Hi Mike,

Your new book sounds interesting, I found the first one to be very insightful and reassuring, it definitely changed the way that I thought about women.   Your insights into toxic shame were eye-opening as I have always suffered from pretty low self esteem.   I can chat-up girls and sometimes take it a bit further if I feel inspired, but usually I don’t bother because my sense of self worth just isn’t up to it.   In social situations there’s always been this nagging feeling that I’m somewhat of a pariah.

Clearly this is a vicious circle.  I seem to have uncovered some strange ways of thinking recently and so have decided just to try and like myself more.   No, I’ve never had a proper girlfriend and that is quite embarrassing at age 20, but I keep pressing on.

Take care,
Jack

Hi Jack,

Self-esteem is just a by-product created as a result of a person’s general conquest of lifes’ challenges.  You sound like you need some kind of passion in your life to give you more of a sense of purpose which can create these challenges for you.   Being on a “mission” of sorts makes you feel like you’re a connected, integral part of the world — and this is where our sense of self-esteem arises.   When I was your age, I went down to the local airport and signed up for flying lessons… something I always wanted to do. The changes this had on me were profound.   Flight training stretched my mind because it made me suddenly aware of a reserve of skills and courage that I had no idea that I’d possessed.   My self-esteem took a major boost from this self-improvement action, and I really never looked back after that.

Elevated self-esteem projects through in your attitude in ways that are impossible to fake, and it puts you squarely on the radar screens of most women. You’re at an age now where you’re balanced between boy and man — the longer you hang onto “boy” and resist taking on the challenges of being a Man, the worse you will continue to feel about yourself.   And you will not find some woman out there to “complete” you and pull you out of this funk.   This is delusional thinking.   It’s your job.

Also not having a passion makes your life seem dull and repetitious and gives you little to talk to women about that’s of any interest to them, thus creating a difficulty to reach out and connect.  Your particular passion doesn’t have to be flying an airplane of course, but start thinking about something that you need to do to kick your ass up to the next level.   The changes that it produces in YOU will create the changes you seek in your social life without having to resort to any sort of games or trickery.  These things may work in the short term, but will leave you with a “mouthful of ashes” in the end… unfulfilled with a sense that something’s missing.

We get into trouble in our lives whenever we cling to a passing phase of life (childhood, high school, up-and-coming new guy at the company, etc.) and refuse to move forward into the next phase.   But this is just lamenting unfinished business which can never be completed on that level any more.   The trick is to seek closure in a different way in the new phase.   Like emotional sharks, if we don’t keep moving forward and grow, we will die.   Not physically of course, but a death of the soul nonetheless.   So chin up and get motivated!

Dear Mike,

Being a downtrodden LSM my whole life has adversely affected my social life, finances and even my health.  I’m 36 years old and need a complete do-over in life.  The problem is that when I get down to it I really don’t believe that I can change anything about myself.  Positive thinking isn’t going to change my underlying crummy beliefs.  I’m stuck.   Do you think this LSM stuff is genetic?   My father is a “nice guy” LSM and my mother a domineering over-protective verbal abuser.   Lucky me! What about nature vs. nurture from your point of view on this subject?   Nature already screwed me over by making me 5′5″!

My question is, how can an LSM make the transformation to HSM if you don’t BELIEVE it to be possible for you?   Can one make anything happen without belief?  Isn’t that the most important component to change?   Just knowing what to do doesn’t seem like it’s enough.

Mark

Hi Mark,

About the only aspect of being an LSM that I can imagine might be genetic is the tendency towards being introverted, as this generally ties in with shyness and tends to hold you back socially somewhat.  Your parents sound like they’ve achieved a dominance-submissive balance that both of them can live with somehow.  Your dad modeled this kind of behavior for you, and you naturally picked it up… but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.   One cannot do anything without belief as you have correctly analyzed — but it’s not your conscious mind that really needs to be doing all this believing, it’s your unconscious mind.

Your unconscious mind (UC) has a deeply imprinted image of yourself which includes an assumption of established boundaries around what it “knows” that is personally possible for you… from how much money you can make to how many women you can bed.   The only way to change this “thermostat of possibility” for yourself is by gradually exposing your UC to different REAL LIFE experiences and situations that will slowly retrain it to regard “you” in a different way.   This takes time, but (like bodybuilding) you can really make it happen for yourself if you get motivated and stick with it for awhile.   Maybe you can find a buddy to act as a wingman and you two can push each other to get motivated to go out, or whatever.   Any method that initially works to trick yourself into doing something you’ve written off as impossible can be effective.  You don’t need to create all this incredible positive belief first before attempting something — the belief will come later as your UC processes the results from reality.  It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.*

The worse place to find yourself in life is a point mentally where you feel you’ve gone as far as you can at some aspect, have hit the wall and can’t go any further.   DO NOT let yourself fall into this end-game trap, it’s all bullshit.   Your brain remains plastic enough all throughout your life to be able to change basic aspects of your nature, you just have to fight through the inertia of the old conditioning.   I like to think of these as dry-rotted neurons that need recharging.

Reality is the key — the UC learns from the reality that you present to it, not through book learning.  Use “book learning” to show your conscious mind how to create those real life situations (physical action / activity) that will eventually train your UC to have a different “opinion” of yourself.  The UC schools itself in the world of action and experience, that’s why positive thinking can only take you so far.   It’s strictly an internal process that, while useful for it’s effects on the conscious mind, doesn’t dig in deep enough into the UC to challenge and change those stubborn negative, disempowering beliefs that are currently messing you up.

So despite the fact that it “knows” everything’s all bullshit (and I used to think this way too… it might be the 5′5″ thing, otherwise known as the “little man’s disease”, use your conscious mind to place yourself into situations where reality has an opportunity to slap your unconscious mind upside it’s neurons and re-arrange it’s deep belief system and assumptions about life, love and your role in the entire scheme of things.   That’s how you make dramatic sea changes in your life.   Get busy.

* I realize that some of you guys reading this are young and maybe haven’t heard the old saw about “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”    A philosophical puzzle my dad used to like to hammer me with whenever he thought I was being too much of a smart ass know-it-all.  If you’re a believer in Creation then the answer is the chicken I suppose.  If you understand evolution however, then you know that all species of life appear gradually over enormous spans of time (which is why the process is invisible) by morphing from simpler creatures that came before them in a long, constant continuum.   Rewinding this process it takes you back to the very first animated particle of life at the dawn of Earth.   So the correct answer in this case (if you want to impress someone as a know-it-all smart ass) is “neither… what came first was an initial ‘genesis’ molecule of RNA that self-replicated a copy of itself, thus crossing the line from inanimate to animate matter”.   Now you know why I kept getting sent to my room.   But that’s okay, because that’s where this little wise guy had all his dirty magazines stashed anyway…

Hi Mike

My new girlfriend told me something the other day that just kinda pisses me off.   It’s about her ex-boyfriend — which she stayed with for a couple years — who was basically a piece of crap the way I see it.   All these stories of drama and how he made her balloon up to a huge weight and everything (she’s lost it all since then, and looks great now!).

I realize I have my faults too, but why is this abusive shit so common?  My girl is really pretty, and I ask myself how the fuck this could’ve happened?  I know her father was not a big part of her life, and her home life is kinda bananas as well sometimes.   What’s going on here do you think?

Dave

Hey Dave,

If you end up marrying this girl and ever have daughters with her, remember this …

…a girl’s FATHER becomes the working model for all her future lovers.

These girls with bum-ass dads who ignored them or are drunks or were just never there for them mess these chicks up more than you might imagine.  Women like this develop a kind of radar that allows them to spot the EXACT same kind of loser their dad was, so they can they latch right onto him.  Why?  Who knows… maybe they want a second chance to “fix” daddy and make it all better this time around?   It never works of course.  Half these parents out there don’t seem to understand that the goal of raising kids is to produce well-balanced adults twenty years in the future, not little well-behaved machines designed to fix mom and dad’s own fucked-up head problems.

Shit, there’s an idea that will fly along with the pigs once they get around to sprouting wings.

If you have a great, loving dad who builds esteem in his little girl — she becomes a rational adult who knows enough to naturally avoid these kind of jerks.  Those who catch the bad treatment spend the rest of their lives chasing ghosts.   Judging from the success that all the pricks and losers of the world have scoring hot women, there’s a great deal of damaged goods walking around just looking to be hurt again.   Sad but true.

Hey Mike,

I purchased your e-book and am in the process of reading it.  So far so good — maybe too good… sometimes it feels as if you’re speaking to me directly.  How’d you know… lol?

Anyway, I am the computer nerd that you talk about.  Actually, I’ve been addicted to video games/computers for ten years now…and basically its ruined my social life.  I’m socially retarded and totally scared of women.  The more attractive a woman is the more nervous I get and the more I stutter making her feel uncomfortable in turn.  That’s why I’ve decided to change because you’re right… the game of seduction is the most important game that we will ever be called up to play!  It involves becoming a better man and succeeding in other areas of life as well… which is where my motivation to change comes from.

I don’t know though… I am definitely an LSM who’s way behind my male counterparts.  Sometimes I think I am so far behind that I don’t even think I can ever become an HSM.  The attitude adjustment that you’re asking me to attempt can’t be done overnight, can it?  How long would it take?  I imagine this would take months if not years… depending on how fucked up you are… right?

Marty

Hi Marty,

Thanks for writing.  Ahhh yes… a computer nerd with no social life, never had one of those guys buy my book before…

Changing your primary thinking patterns is a lot like turning around a supertanker in the middle of the Atlantic… we’re talking about a very slow 5 mile turning radius.  Takes time.  The good thing is that you don’t have to achieve some kind of “Master” status at this stuff in order to make serious progress.  Most guys can move up the HSM scale by maybe 20% and see some amazing changes in their life — I suppose it all depends on how far down you start.  And most ordinary guys that do okay with women are hardly pick-up masters, right?

Just study and work the techniques until you get your first breakthrough, and then build on the confidence you gain and move on from there.  It happens for you whenever the hell it happens… don’t watch the clock, just focus on doing some little thing more today than you did yesterday.  You’ll get there.  Just try to stay out of the fucking dungeon for a while, and join us here in the land of the living every now and then, okay?