This new Foundations pickup series is here by popular demand based on my previous contentions that the basics of pickup are the most important and the most overlooked. It is modeled around Brian Tracy’s “The Psychology of Achievement” 1982 audio program, which I believe to be the finest work every created for personal development. Indirectly it also happens to be the very best “general instruction manual” you could ever have for what people often call your “inner game.” I encourage everyone to order it or find it somewhere if it’s still in print - it’s the one outside product I will stake my reputation on and always stand behind as I have for the past 18 years.
This series will draw heavily from the principles in Brian Tracy’s powerful program and show how to successfully apply them to pickup and seduction. It will without a doubt be the most important and helpful series of posts in this blog to date, even if the topics may look unsexy. Make no mistake, this is where the big power lies. This is the bedrock that underpins all the rest of the stuff I’ve ever written about.
First of all, I want to point out that pickup is about positive, healthy sexual and emotional expression. I don’t believe pickup is ultimately worthwhile if it leads you toward less health and less positivity, and does the same to others. Always making other people feel more positive and be more healthy is where it’s at.
Why do I keep mentioning the word “health”? That bland word that conjures up textbook admonitions to eat three balanced meals every day, get a good night’s sleep, do your aerobics and eat your veggies!? No, it’s much more exciting than that, because I don’t just mean “healthy” in the normal sense, but in every sense. A positive outlook, high energy, self-discipline, unbridled sexual lust, peace of mind, lack of insecurities, and all other aspects of physical and mental well-being. Is this not why we have sex? Is this not the gift we want to give to the women we encounter?
If you aren’t doing pickup to become happier and make others happier — and I’d say the best measure of happiness is health as I’ve defined it above — then why do pickup?
This isn’t just something I’m saying you should care about, but something that will actually affect your performance in the field and in bed more than any other single factor.
So let’s go back to the Pickup Success Pyramid and look at how we can build the very most basic, most important part of that pyramid. This is the very bottom line on the bottom slap of the pyramid, reading “Self-esteem/confidence (general) + lack of grudges and other emotional baggage.” Today we’ll cover only the self-esteem part of that, as high self-esteem and a healthy personality are really part and parcel of each other.
REPOST OF THIS DIAGRAM FROM EARLIER POST (note that it’s like the Food Guide Pyramid, where the foundation is most important and the tip is least important):
The famous achievement psychologist and success coach Brian Tracy gave an easy test for how healthy your personality is. He said a person “has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have a propensity to look for the good in every situation.” He went on to say, “Those with the healthiest personality can naturally and without effort get along with the greatest number of different kinds of people.”
This is an honest, reliable, objective yardstick for measuring how healthy your personality is. So here’s the question: “How often do you naturally tend to look for the good in situations?” And if you’d like another measure, “How many people can you naturally get along with without having to make an effort?” Don’t think about this now if you don’t want to…you’ll naturally remember it sometime after you read this, when a relevant situation arises. At that time it will show it’s truth and relevance.
This measure is so effective that you can literally go back over the course of your life and graph how healthy your personality was at different times in your life. All you have to do is remember that time in your life and ask yourself how you were responding to neutral things.
For example, when you see a new ice cream flavor in Japan - salt and milk flavor - are you more likely to think, “Why does all ice cream have to have such insipid flavors?” (accompanied by a slight negative sensation) or would you tend to get a little laugh out of it? (slight positive sensation). It’s really pretty simple: it’s whether you focus more on the positive or more on the negative aspects of things. Or, do you get along with people without having to make much effort? What kinds of people don’t you get along with? Do you find yourself being able to get along with fewer and fewer people recently? Or more and more?
The natural wear-and-tear of life and of pickup will drain you bit by bit. As Tracy says, the mind is like a garden, in which weeds or flowers can grow. But weeds grow automatically, without any encouragement, fertilizer or anything. So if we do not consciously and deliberately plant flowers, weeds will automatically tend to crop up, and - if left untended - will start to take hold and eventually choke out everything else.
The weeds are negative habit patterns, negative thought patterns, cynical beliefs, grudges against people, insecurities, etc., and they lead to every kind of unhealthiness in your personality.
A mental garden with as few weeds as possible is the very bedrock of healthy, successful pickup in every possible sense.
Even an experienced pickup master, who has had a very healthy personality in the past, can get taken over by these unwanted pests over time and before they’re aware of it. So a “weeding” is necessary from time to time, for everyone, no matter who you are. And I’ll tell you right now that 99.99% of people would benefit handsomely from this weeding process if they stopped everything and did it right now. But we’ll cover that next time.
For today I’d like to talk about self-esteem. Self-esteem is the very core of personality. It’s a measure of how much you like and respect yourself. It’s exactly what determines how healthy your personality is, and by extension it precedes and paramaterizes every element of your pickup performance.
Some people confuse high self-esteem with arrogance, conceit or vanity. This is a confusion, and in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Arrogance, vanity and conceit are actually the result of low self-esteem. The truly high self-esteem person does not have the insecurity that would lead him or her to hold others in contempt or have the need to prove themselves as better than others, or even to think about or care if they are better than others.
They are 100% secure in themselves. And that is why, as Tracy points out, people with high self-esteem ONLY manifest it in positive, healthy interactions with other people. And that includes pickup and sexual interactions.
And self-esteem is even more connected to pickup than that. It not only is the very heart of the self-confidence (including sexual confidence!) that forms the foundation for pickup confidence, it also determines how much you are able to like or love another person. To again quote Tracy, “It is impossible to like or love another person any more than we like or love ourselves.” In other words, a low-self-esteem person is really incapable of giving much love or liking. They are too insecure in themselves to do so, and when they get into relationships they may fall deeply in infatuation, but that’s not love as much as it is the need for security.
There are plenty of folks out there who just HAVE to be in a relationship, and that is - I think - the reason why they often have trouble staying in relationships. They are coming from a place of emptiness and need to fill that loneliness with something. They have low self-esteem, so they are not capable of giving so much — only taking, so the relationship becomes fragile. Most commonly, they “wet blanket” the other person a little too much and then either get in fights or simply repulse their partner in some way. This only drives their self-esteem lower, and it can be a vicious cycle.
Make every effort to engage in activities on a regular basis that raise your own self-esteem. Any activity, in which you seriously engage, that moves you closer to a goal you consider truly important and worthwhile will build your self-esteem. One person’s activities might be: hanglider piloting lessons, steps toward career advancement, study of something relevant to his personal or career goals, practicing giving speeches, working out, meeting with an important contact, fixing bad habits, building new good habits, learning new sexual techniques, eating cleaner food, or even just giving more effort in the things he already does. Spend time focused on what is relevant for YOU and your own goals based on what you value in life.
Another important thing is that it’s impossible to build someone else’s self-esteem up without building yours to the same degree, and impossible to tear someone else’s self-esteem down without tearing your own down just as much. I know it doesn’t seem this way at first: it can feel “good” in a way to shoot someone off their high horse. But really…how do you feel at those times? I mean really, really deep down. The answer has to be that the only reason you would feel “good” about tearing someone down is that you perceived them as a threat, and that is based in insecurity deep down. Of course if you see an injustice and you right that injustice (such as stopping someone from doing evil to someone else), you can feel good about that, but feeling “good” about hurting anyone is always bad, even if that person you hurt was a bad person.
I know I’m speaking in idealistic terms as if we’re all saints here, and I myself am no 100% healthy personality and I have plenty of negative habits and things that can plague me sometimes. The point is not to say that you have to be perfect, but that knowing what you’re aiming for and doing your best to get there is going to be the very best thing for your seduction and life with women.
So now we’ve seen that self-esteem is the core of your personality, of your interactions with women, and it regulates how much you can even truly like or love someone! In fact, to quote Tracy again, when your self-esteem goes up, “your ability to perform in every single area of your life goes up simultaneously.”
Everyone can always use more self-esteem. Some people challenge me on that, but that is because they are misinterpreting self-esteem for arrogance or self-conceit. Arrogance is, again, merely an expression of insecurity, rooted in low self-esteem. It’s not the same as liking yourself at all, and this is an absolutely critical distinction to grasp. A super-high self-esteem guy will not be arrogant at all. Such people are pretty hard to find, but they do seem to exist.
And notice that the rest of the bottom - most important - slab of the Pickup Success Pyramid is also underpinned by self-esteem. Self-esteem gives you self-discipline, motivation, and even sexual confidence. Experience of course helps, but to prove for example that high self-esteem helps with sexual confidence is just simple logic: Tendency to look for the good in everything leads to the majority of one’s thoughts being positive. They are continually in a positive state. Well, horniness is a positive state; it’s fundamentally a feeling of sexual optimism if you really notice how you feel when you’re horny. You betcha that helps keep you hard when you need it! After all, the No. 1 cause of erectile dysfunction is insecurity, and high self-esteem simply doesn’t allow those irrational insecurities to crop up.
To get a bit technical, there are actually mini-self-concepts for every area in your life that you consider important. You have a self-concept of how good you are at playing piano (if you play and it’s important to you), how good of a driver you are, how good a dresser, and - germane to this blog - how good you are at pickup, sex, and relationship management. How much do you like yourself as a seducer? As a storyteller? As a giver of squirting orgasms and oral sex? All of these mini-self-concepts are fed into by your overall self-esteem, and they all feed back into your overall self-esteem at the same time.
So if you improve in an important area of your life, you’ll draw more self-esteem from that as the days and weeks go by. Naturally, because now you can like and respect yourself more, now that you’ve made a leap forward in something you consider to be important. You feel more like a winner in that area that is important to you, so you feel more like a winner in life in general.
And likewise, that spills over to every other area of life. It is that natural, hard-to-pin-down concept of “overall confidence.” The man who approaches everything in life with more gusto, more confidence that he’ll eventually get it right, more flexibility, more enjoyment of the process and no worry about failure. It’s that unquantifiable phenomenon of how when you sometimes just feel confident, you inexplicably do better at everything you try. You speak better at a foreign language you’re studying, play sports better, massage better, tell a story better, have better sex, etc. Ever wondered what that mysterious force was and how to maximize it? This is it.
So anyway the big question is, how do we get more of it? How do we get higher self-esteem? By engaging in activities that we consider to be sincerely worthwhile and valuable - those activities that move us toward our major goals and give us a sense of purpose and mission.
Even if we improve in areas that are not pickup-related, if they are important aspects of life for us, we gain general self-esteem and it spills over to give us extra confidence in pickup as well - to the exact degree to which we feel that skill area we improved in is important. That’s why you always want to have things going on in your life besides pickup. You know, take pride in your job even if you’re stuck in it. And if you really want out, take definite steps to get another one. Work on your other goals. Moving toward any goal you consider worthwhile is guaranteed to boost your self-esteem. The more worthwhile you consider it, the greater the boost.
So it comes down to this: How much time and energy do you devote each day to moving toward your goals, and how much time do you waste? Ample recreation and relaxation is fine, of course, but ideally each day you want to be making substantive steps toward some of your major life goals.
And because pickup is about interactions with people, your interpersonal goals are especially relevant. For example, one of my big goals for the next few months is to be more friendly to random people I encounter, like shop staff, to make everyone feel happier even from a brief interaction with me. Knowing I’m making the world a happier place makes me feel good. And this isn’t just a touchy-feely thing, because knowing I’m making people happier makes me like and respect myself more = higher self-esteem. And it ALSO makes me like and respect myself more as a person who makes others happy, which adds a turbocharge to my pickup because I know now - deep down - that every new woman I encounter is now more likely to benefit from being with me. Because I know I’m committed to making people’s lives happier, whether by giving shop staff a little lift with a warm smile or by giving a hot J-girl the time of her life in an environment where she is sure not to get attached to me but just to enjoy some great times and feel better about herself and sexier as she moves through the rest of her life.
So determine what you value in life and set long- and short-term goals based on those top values. And make a habit of looking for the good in situations, staying healthy in all aspects of your being, and building the self-esteem of other people as well, because that will raise your self esteem to the same degree every time.
This self-esteem and “inner game” stuff may not look all that sexy, but more and more I realize it truly has been that hidden element that has driven my success from the beginning. When I would teach other guys and they still couldn’t always do what I could do, I realized that this inner aspect - so obvious and integral to me that I’d previously overlooked it - had been the missing link.
So I say unto the community, a pickup artist does not have to be like what you imagine he has to be, or like you read in books, see in movies, or hear on the Top 40. He can - and I believe is obligated by his position of power to be - a force for good and for making the world a more peaceful and happy place. After all, like a president of a nation, the fate of many rests in your hands and you’ll be touching a lot of lives. Make sure you’re making a big positive difference. If you don’t believe a seducer can be a force for good, if you believe seduction is about selfishly taking advantage of women for your own sexual pleasure, I don’t think you’re gonna be happy in this lifestyle. Being evil and using people is never good, and there is no exception just because it’s this amazing and unconventional art of seduction.
Said another way, the reason I became good at this stuff is because I was determined - when I discovered that such powerful tools existed to win the hearts and sexual drives of women - to find a way to use them for good and not for selfish aims. I wrestled and wrestled with the concepts in my mind and I was unwilling to become a seducer if it would be mean I was going to be hurting people in the end, or even if it would preclude me from giving women tons of pleasure - as that is the whole point of this endeavor.
After much study, I did find a way. Much to my surprise, I found it was possible to have wild sex with many women and also “leave them better than you found them.” And later I would learn that, in fact, if I ever started not leaving them better than I found them the whole thing would grind to a halt and of course I would become unhappy myself, as I could no longer like and respect myself, because I would no longer be making people happier.
So, dear reader, please stay with me as I cover from the ground up, everything you need to know to create a healthy, positive, happy lifestyle with wonderful women you really enjoy and who really enjoy you.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will cover how to clear your mind garden of weeds - harking back to the Release Your Brakes post I made back in the Spring.
Until then, I wish best success to all of you.
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