You can’t control your environment, you can only control your reaction to it. Let’s talk about this today, and let’s break it down into some simple principles.

Say you’re driving behind someone you absolutely can’t stand. You don’t know them, but you absolutely can’t stand them because they are driving way slower than the speed limit.

What do you do? You start honking your horn and yelling at them, “Wake up! I’m sick of being stuck behind you.”

The problem is that guy in front of you has no idea why you’re honking at him. He’s just enjoying his day.

He’s thinking about the great meeting he just had, or about how he can’t wait to get home so he can have sex with his wife. He can’t figure out why there is a maniac behind him honking his horn.

Here’s the bottom line: You can’t control him.

Say you are wanting to approach a woman you see in the supermarket. A lot of you get too much in your head and think to yourself, “Oh man, I have to say the right thing. If I say the right thing, she is going to be so turned on by me that she will want to go out with me. So I have to think of the exact right thing to say so I can get the reaction I want.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that you can’t control her reaction. All you can do is control how you are in that situation.

If you walk over to her as a confident, powerful man — a man who believes in himself and who he is as a person and who believes he is a gift — then that is all you do in that situation.

That’s all you can control. Once you walk over to her, her reaction will be based on what you did — not based on what you want her to do.

Say you’re going out on a third date with a woman, and all you can think about is how badly you want to have sex with her that night. So you plan out the entire night carefully.

You cook her dinner at your house. After dinner, you put on some David Gray music on the stereo. You open up a bottle of wine. You’ve even put an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, because you are so sure she is going to spend the night with you.

At the end of the night, you’re making out with her. Things seem to be going perfectly, then she looks at you and says “I’ve got to get home. I have an early meeting tomorrow, but let’s pick this up another night.”

Most guys will immediately go into “I want to control her reaction” mode. They will go into salesman mode, and try to sell her on staying over by saying something like “Please stay. I want to be with you.”

The truth is, though, that you don’t know what is really behind her leaving. She might be in the middle of her period, and doesn’t want her first time having sex with you to be while she’s on her period.

She might, just as she said, have an early meeting. She might be thinking that if she stays over, that she’ll be banging you all night long.

What you need to do at that moment is look at her and say, “I totally get it. How about Friday night we pick up where we left off.” That is what a real man does.

A real man will lead. She will respond and say, “Absolutely!” You’ve gotten her right at the moment she is hottest for you and is feeling you the most.

So remember that you can’t control people’s reactions. You can, however, lead them down a path.

I want you to remember the first sentence of this blog the next time you think you’re not getting what you want in a situation. If you stay true to yourself, you’ll not only get what you want, but you’ll get it back tenfold.