Thanks David for letting me post another blog that really resonates with me. I hope all of enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.

We all have our go to excuses: for some it’s “I’m not good looking enough”, others it’s “I’ve been hurt before and now I’m just out for revenge.” For me it was always very simple:
“There’s something wrong with me.”

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I knew something was. Id’ been dumped, cheated on, and couldn’t find a job that I didn’t hate. Not only that it seemed like the women who dumped me and cheated on me ended up in more emotional pain than I was in. I was so rotten that even the act of getting rid of me hurt people. It seemed to me that the more someone got to know me the worse I became. And I could twist anything into making about why something was wrong with me.

If I met an attractive girl I’d tell myself that I wasn’t nearly good looking enough to talk to her. If she turned out to be smart she was way too smart to put up with me and if she was funny, I wasn’t nearly funny enough to be with her. I was NEVER good enough because there was something wrong with me.

Even when things were going well I always had it in the back of my mind… there’s something wrong with me and something bad is going to happen. Something I just didn’t see coming. It’s going to hurt and I’m going to feel like an idiot because I didn’t see it coming.

These excuses…they were my story. I was the tragic hero, fighting against the sad reality of my situation… that I could never be good enough for happiness… but I was sure as hell going to fight for happiness until I had breathed my last.

I’ll tell you all a deep dark secret… I liked my excuses, my story, my tragic heroism. It was romantic. It made me feel… special. It made me feel like I was unique. I wasn’t one of the shiny happy people but I also wasn’t one of those guys who had just given up and wrote sad poetry to try and impress girls. I had a quiet courage in the face of certain death. I was a Spartan at Thermopylae or a soldier at the Alamo. I embraced my excuses because the more I excuses had the more epic my struggle became.

Except, as much as I loved this story I had made myself the hero of… I didn’t love myself. My life seemed to be going nowhere. I had nothing. One day, it dawned on me that if I wanted to love myself and my life I’d have to get rid of my most beloved possession: My excuses. I had to drop the story I’d written for myself and honestly look at who I was. It was terrifying and I hated what I found. I was a miserable person. I wanted so bad to still be the doomed hero. I was safe there. But I refused to go back. I discovered that when you get rid of excuses you can create whatever life you want for yourself. You can be the REAL hero in your own story and save yourself.

So, if you have excuses, and we all do, drop them. Take a hard look at yourself and do all the hard work that needs to be done in order to be the person you want to be.

For anyone who doesn’t know what a “kegger” is, let me give you the quick description. A kegger is when a bunch of high school kids sit around drinking beer out of a keg, get drunk and act like idiots.

I remember that all the hot girls were going to be at that party, and how badly I wanted to go. Despite this, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get myself to go. I had so much fear and anxiety about it, and I couldn’t figure out why.

When my buddy John called me around 7:00 pm to let me know he would be picking me up in an hour to go to that party, I told him I couldn’t go. I didn’t tell him that I had too much fear and anxiety to go. I told him the excuse that I had spent the entire day thinking about and creating, that my Mom wasn’t feeling well so I had to stay home to take care of my sister and brother.

I told him how much it sucked that I couldn’t go. I really sold it, and John believed me. I remember getting off the phone and thinking what a great job I did selling that excuse.

How many times have you sold excuses? You get invited to something, but you create an excuse not to go because of your lack of self-confidence, your lack of social confidence and your mindset.

How many times have you spent the entire day working up the perfect excuse to blow off a social event to which you were invited? What is funny is that when you do this, you will always check in the next day with your friends to see what you missed.

Then, because the mind is very funny in the way it works and tricks itself, you think “Oh man, I could’ve gone to that party. I should have gone. Next time I’m going to do it.”

The truth is that the next time you are going to come up with another excuse. The same thing will happen the time after that.

We make excuses in life because it’s too hard to face our fears. As human beings, we love to make excuses. Facing our fears means we have to leave our comfort zone.

When you get out of your comfort zone, it by definition means that you are going to be uncomfortable. As human beings, we always want to be comfortable.

That is why television is so popular. Watching television allows you to escape into a different world.

The Internet is another great escape. If you ever read comments people post on Internet sites, people are as ballsy as can be because they can be their own “alter ego” and say what they would never have the guts to say in real life.

In order to overcome your fears and excuses, you must go out and do something that takes you out of your comfort zone. There is no way around it.

For some of you, that might mean approaching ten women a day. For others of you, that might mean going out on a date with someone you’ve always wanted to ask out on a date but never have.

if you don’t do something every single day that gets you out of your comfort zone, you’re just going to remain comfortably numb (as Pink Floyd so aptly put it) for the remainder of your life. Let me tell you, time goes by really fast.

That was 31 years ago I made that excuse to my friend John to avoid going to that high school party. While I have obviously gotten over those fears, there are times in my life that I will still bail out of things with some other stupid excuse.

I want you to write down on a piece of paper the answer to this question: What is your biggest enemy?

When it comes to meeting women, a lot of guys are under the impression that their biggest enemy is timing. They will say that they haven’t met women because they haven’t been invited to the right parties or something similar to that.

This kind of thing is surface stuff, and it is not your biggest enemy. Your biggest enemy is that eight pound thing you carry between your shoulders called your head.

Your head is your biggest enemy because it is what does not allow you to accomplish about 90% of the things in life you want to accomplish. I’m not just talking about meeting women.

When it comes to meeting women, your success comes down to your belief. You must truly believe that you are amazing and are a gift. You must truly believe that any woman who meets you would benefit from your amazing tenderness, your amazing personality, your character traits and everything else about you.

If you don’t truly believe all of this, then it doesn’t matter what you do or what you memorize because you head is disconnected from your heart. When your head is disconnected from your heart, it’s all over.

Have you been in an argument with someone in which your head thinks and over-thinks things so much that you can’t get back into your heart? That will stop whatever constructive dialog you’re having at that point. Your heart and head need to both be involved at all times.

Your head can over-rationalize things. Your head can over-think things.

This is what is going on every time you can’t get yourself to approach a woman. All you are thinking about are the fears and excuses in your head.

What does your heart want to do in this situation though? Your heart wants to go and experience another person. We’re all about experiencing other people – their feelings and emotions. The problem is that our head can play tricks on us.

This does not just happen in the area of meeting women. This happens in relationships and it happens at work.

How many of you had an intent to start the new year really kicking ass at work. Then you get your first rejection and, all of a sudden, you are right back in the same mindset you were in before the new year.

You must get you head aligned. The old saying “get your head on straight” is really important and true. Probably about 90% of the people in the world are walking around with their head on backwards or sideways.

Can you imagine if your head actually could rotate all the way around and how that would feel? You would be walking down the street and would be passing some people with their head facing backwards while others would have their head tilted to the side.

Nobody would walk around with their head on straight except those who truly believe in themselves, and who don’t care about what others think and feel.

I’m not talking about being cold, because of course we all care how others feel. Deep down, however, we all need to maintain a great sense of self. When you’re true to yourself, you’ll be able to do anything you want.

I have a special offer for all of my loyal blog readers. Do you want to meet me in person in March?

Then Jeff started telling me about a woman who works as one of the “meet and greeters” at Wells Fargo (the people who welcome you when you walk in the door). Jeff spent some time talking to her, but he wondered how he can ask this woman out without being noticed by everyone at the bank.

I’m sure this is a scenario to which many guys reading this blog can relate. How do you stay “under the radar” in front of a lot of people? Wrong question!

You have to adopt the mindset that everyone around you couldn’t care less about you or what you’re doing. So, really, it doesn’t matter what other people will say or think even if you get rejected in front of them.

Even if you ask someone out and they reject you in front of a room full of people, no one is going to go home and say, “Oh man, you wouldn’t believe what happened today. I was in Wells Fargo today, and there was this guy who asked out the “meet and greet” girl and got turned down.”

That just isn’t going to happen. People simply aren’t paying that much attention to you.

So you’ve got to put that out of your head. You’ve got to get that mindset out of your head completely, because that mindset is just an excuse that allows you to not go over and ask someone out. It’s just a different form of an excuse.

So once you’ve identified that you have no excuse for not asking this person out, how do you do it in this setting? It all comes down to what you know about her.

Have you talked to her a few times? Do you know what she likes and what she likes to do for fun?

If not, then you need to find out all these things. Then next time you see her, you can say something like, “Hey, did you get a chance to see that movie you were talking about the other day?”

If she says she never got a chance to see it, then it’s very easy from there. You can say something like, “You know what? Why don’t you and I catch that flick next weekend. Let me take you. That way you don’t have any excuses not to go see the movie.”

That’s how you do it. This is how you always ask out people like this (I call them “common area people”). You always ask them out based on things you already know about them. You already have a rapport with them, so they are a warm (and not a cold) lead.

So this skill of getting to know things about people before you ask them out is important. The mindset component and getting rid of this excuse, however, is what you need to get first.

Then he started listing some of the reasons why things aren’t working for him in his dating life. What every one of his “reasons” had in common, were that they were all excuses.

Worse yet, in his mind he perceives each of these to be unchangeable facts of life instead seeing them for what they really are: excuses he’s created so he doesn’t have to face his dating difficulties. So many people make these kind of excuses in order to feel justified in not putting themselves “out there” in the dating world, or to avoid having to face that they need to work on their confidence or conversation skills.

In this article, I am going to go through five of the biggest and most common excuses people make. All five of these excuses have one thing in common: They are all manifested inside your mind so you can justify not having to try, and to allow you to feel better about your unsatisfying dating life.

What all of you excuse-makers need to realize is that an amazing dating life is not just going to magically happen to you. Just with anything else you want to achieve in life, you’ve got to put work and effort into meeting people. Let me assure you that your doorbell is not going to ring one day and when you open the door your perfect mate will be standing there with a bottle of wine and takeout saying “I’ve been driving around the neighborhood for the last 15 years looking for your house and now I’ve finally found you!”

Here are five of the biggest and most common excuses people make about their dating lives, along with proactive ways to overcome those excuses so you will never allow yourself to buy into them again.

1. I Am A Victim Of Geography: I hear it every day from clients and readers, “David, there are no good men (or women) to meet where I live – and everyone I hang out with agrees with me.” Let me tell you, I hear this “and everyone I know agrees with me” validation for people’s excuses more than anything else. The old saying that ‘misery loves company’ has never been more apropos. People love to complain, and love even more to find others who will agree with their complaints. You need to go out there with a better attitude. The fact is that where you live has nothing to do with you remaining single. It’s your mindset and your belief system that are the problem, because there are great people to meet everywhere. I’ve worked with people all over the world and no matter where my clients reside I have always been able to show them how to meet great people where they live. It’s your mindset that is dictating your ability to meet someone where you live. If you truly believe that there is nobody great to meet where you live, there you’re 100% right and you will not find anyone great to meet where you live. So you need to develop a better attitude.

2. I Attract All The Wrong People: Another excuse I constantly hear from people is “David, the only people I seem to attract are the wrong people, and I can’t seem to do anything about it.” The truth is that you have the power to do something about it. The reason why you’re attracting the wrong people comes down to the way you go out there and meet people. Look at your life a little more deeply. Are you going to same places over and over again and always meeting the same type of people? Well that could be one of the reasons. Are you not making yourself available so it’s too much of a challenge for people to meet you? That could be another reason. When you go out on dates, do you tend to talk more about negative things than positive things? This can also bring the wrong people into your life. The list of questions like these can go on and on, but what’s important is that you stop thinking about the people that you are meeting and start thinking about how you’re meeting them. Start thinking about how you can change your life. In order to meet different people than you’ve been meeting, you need to change your life immediately.

3. I Don’t Have Time: If you don’t have time to meet someone, then you’re not going to meet someone. If you truly want to meet someone, you need to make time to do it. It’s really that simple. As I mentioned above, your perfect person is not just going to show up on your doorstep one day. You need to be willing to put some effort into meeting people. In fact, you need to put time into it every day if you want that to actually happen. This is something I tell all my clients all the time. Fifteen minutes a day devoted to going out there and meeting new people is all you need. Try setting goals for yourself if that helps you. Tell yourself “I’m going to talk to four new people today” or something like that. Whatever your goal is, though, you need to make yourself reach it every day. People aren’t just going to start coming over and approaching you. You’ve got to make it happen. You’ve got to make the time. If you’re not willing to make the time to meet someone, then you’re right when you say you will not meet someone. I know you’re busy. We’re all busy. Just remember that this is YOUR life, and only you can make your life happen for you.

4. I Can’t Meet Anyone Until … : Some people’s excuses, while phrased less negatively than others, are just as bad in terms of preventing them from facing their dating issues. My favorite one of these is the “as soon as” person. These people are everywhere. You’ve heard them, and I certainly have heard them. “David, as soon as I lose weight I’ll go out and talk to people.” There are a million other phrases that could be filled in after the “as soon as” part of that sentence: as soon as I get back in the gym … as soon as I finish this big project at work … as soon as I go on this new diet … as soon as my kids get older … I could go on and on for days with examples, but you get the idea. When you start using “as soon as” excuses, you become the person who truly believes that life is going to change the second you accomplish other things. You’ve got to start doing this now, because life is all about being in the moment and living in the now. You need to totally get rid of the mindset that you will somehow be magically ready to meet someone “as soon as” you accomplish some other thing. Life is not about scheduling things like this and putting them on a timetable. Once again this all about your attitude and mindset. You’ve got to be open to meeting someone all the time.

5. Only Losers Do Online Dating: I hear many people who have never tried online dating tell me “I don’t want to do online dating. Online dating is for losers.” This is a ridiculous statement. There are millions upon millions of people dating online. A client of mine once said to me “David, I don’t want to put my picture on my online dating profile because someone I know might see it and then they’ll know I’m doing online dating.” Let’s put aside the fact that if someone sees your online profile, it likely means they themselves are doing online dating. Here again, there is an attitude problem at work. You need to change the way you see things. If someone has seen you online, then if they see you in real life they can walk over to you and say “Did I see you on Yahoo! Personals the other day? I didn’t know you were single.” You’ve got to tell people you’re single and, more importantly, you need to stop feeling like there is something wrong with being single. Going online is making an announcement to the world that “Yes, I’m single, I’m open and I want to meet someone.” You can’t just stay in your house and do absolutely nothing. While online dating may not be for everyone, you need to stay open and take action to improve your dating life.

In order to meet great people, you’ve got to decide to be proactive and do all these things. So get rid of the excuses, get rid of the fears, and start meeting great people.

If you have another excuse that I haven’t mentioned here, email it to me because I want to hear it. That way, the next time I write an article about excuses I can be sure to address it.

There are a few different types of people in this world. For starters, there are the people who don’t give a fuck about anybody but themselves. They don’t talk to anybody, and you can feel that attitude from them the second you meet them. It’s a very angry disposition.

Secondly, there are the people that give EVERYTHING to other people and lose a sense of themselves. When they ask you, “How are you?” you get the sense that they really care about your answer – possibly more than they care about themselves.

And then there’s the type of people that just doesn’t want to deal with conversations. They don’t think it’s fun to talk to someone about the bracelet that someone is wearing. They dread those little conversations – even though they can lead to bigger conversations – because they take so much energy.

But it takes so much energy from you to muster up the willingness to have those conversations. It’s not because it’s below you, it’s just exhausting when you know that you have to do it. You know you have to do it all day long to finally connect with the right person.

And then there is me. I go out and realize that life is fun and beautiful. Not to sound like Roberto Benigni, but life IS beautiful. Every day is an amazing gift. Every interaction I have, I can learn about somebody and leave behind a piece of me – yet always remain true to myself.

I’m never giving myself to somebody and then losing my energy; nor am I ever dreading my interactions with other people.

When I go over and ask someone how they are doing, I care about how they are, but I’m not losing myself in the process. Most people expend so much effort asking the person how they are and they just lose themselves in the process.

When I’m going and talking to people, I’m engaging them, I’m having fun, and I’m enjoying it. I’m giving a piece of me but I’m retaining all of my own energy. Nobody can take my energy from me. I don’t dread interactions with other people. I don’t leave them feeling drained or tired.

In fact, I’m being energized by my interactions with others because I know that it’s worth it. Deepak Chopra said that if you can just perform random acts of kindness to strangers all day long without losing yourself then you’ve had an amazing day.

Look at how animals do it. Daphne didn’t even know you, and I told you to take her downstairs, and you did. I did that on purpose. She sat with you, and she hung out with you. She’s a good dog. Dogs can give their energy to someone yet still remain intact, ready for the next thing.

Dogs have endless energy to do things for humans. Human beings get tired from interactions with others. Humans lose a little bit of themselves during each interaction, and they have trouble recharging. Interacting becomes exhausting.

I’ve observed this in so many bootcamps that I’ve conducted: after two days, the guys are totally exhausted. After the weekend, I’m tired; but I’m certainly not exhausted. I feel good.

When I coached all of the bootcamps by myself – and I don’t do the whole thing by myself anymore, my coaches are phenomenal and give my clients an amazing two of the three days – I would go literally from 9 in the morning with the guys until 2 a.m. And I was still invigorated by all of the interactions!

Most people are exhausted because they don’t retain who they are throughout the entire experience. If somebody is boring me or draining my energy, I dismiss them immediately. I just go on automatic pilot.

When I’m on automatic pilot, I realize that there is nothing I can do to change their life or their perspective. They aren’t going to take or breath in any part of me. I might be there physically, but I’m not really there. They think I am – but I’m only as present as they actually are.

Most people will let themselves get drained by that other person. I just walk away and shake the experience off as quickly as I can – because I never actually let them in. Most people let them in.

Do you know how some people just drain you? Some people invigorate you, some people drain you, and some don’t affect you either way. But those energy-suckers can really drain you. They can do this in very small doses throughout the day.

This happens throughout the day so that by the time they leave work or their world, they just can’t shake it off. They’ve been completely drained.

I know that there are times that people can do it to me throughout the day. I work with a woman, who I love, and she’s great, but there are times that she will just suck me dry.

So what do I do? I don’t answer her or I avoid her emails for 24 hours until I can gain back my strong sense of self and my perspective.

It’s really important to do that – otherwise, you’ll just allow people to get into you nonstop.

Are you following this?

Client: I’m trying. This is a new concept for me.

David: I know. It’s a deep concept, and it’s not something that I could understand at 23. At 23, I was running around in circles.

Client: Are you saying that there are some people who you have to avoid in some way?

David: Yeah. There will be people today that we’ll talk to who will just drain you. What you will do in that situation is try to make it work – you’ll think it’s YOU. You’ll think, why can’t I connect with this person? What did I do wrong?

But you really should just look at this person as a total mental drain.

Client: Is it a flaw in that person’s character?

David: It’s just who they are. This person is just an exhausting individual. They are not somebody that you will ever connect with – nor should you.

You know that in life you’re not going to connect with every single person. It’s impossible to connect with every soul.

A lot of guys will sit there, beat themselves up and think to themselves, ‘What did I do wrong here? What could I have done to get this person to respond to me?’

Some people will do this consciously and others will do it subconsciously. And throughout the day, these interactions will take place. The more that they occur, the more drained you become.

When you become drained like that, you lose a sense of reality and a sense of yourself. Then when you go home, you don’t know exactly what is bugging you, but you have this feeling that you’ve hit up against a wall somewhere. There is something wrong, and you hit a wall.

You don’t have anything left for yourself, and you certainly don’t have anything left for the people in your life who you care about – your family, your friends, whomever. It takes the whole night to recover from something that you really should have protected yourself from throughout the day.

This happens to so many people. They hit these emotional walls because people are basically stealing parts of your soul throughout the day.

Client: So there are ways of talking with tons of people and not being drained?

David: I don’t lose myself. Some people lose themselves. I don’t take it personally. If someone doesn’t respond to me, I say to myself, so they didn’t respond to me. That has nothing to do with me. It has to do with them, with their social skills, and the way that they look at the world.

I was not put on this earth to please people. I was put on this earth to please myself. And through doing that, I’ll make the world a better place. People are attracted to me because of my energy and who I am as a person.

Client: That’s definitely a paradigm shift!

David: Yeah, it’s huge! And it’s something that is so important to learn. This is a lesson where you give yourself to people because you enjoy it. But you walk away on your own two legs and leave it behind.

You leave a piece of yourself with everyone you connect with, but you leave completely whole. It’s the Law of Attraction, and it’s the reason that people are attracted to you in the first place.

The minute people start sucking energy from me I check out. It’s not me; it’s them! And I don’t owe them anything.