We’re sitting in Egoscue, and I’m working on my back….by the way, it’s feeling much
better. Anyway, she was describing her date from the other night. She
went out with this guy-now listen up, okay, because this is going to
blow you away. This guy was fascinating, interesting, ex-lawyer, a
big-time movie guy. He had a degree in economics, traveled the world,
and studied with monks—one of the most fascinating men in the entire
world. Spoke four languages—daughter was a valedictorian at Yale. I
mean everything was perfect. He talked, and talked, and talked, and
bragged, and talked, and bragged, and talked, and impressed, and then
talked. He was entertaining as can be, but he was what we call the “B”
for bragger.

Granted, she was fascinated by him, but after three and a half hours,
she wanted to go home, crawl into a ball, and go to sleep because she
was so exhausted by him. Only once during the whole three-and-a-half
hour marathon bragging session did he ask her one question about
herself. He said, “So tell me, why did you get divorced?” That was it.
Nothing else about it.

Gentlemen, learn from this experience. Bragging about your
accomplishments, bragging about what you have, bragging about your
kids, bragging about your children’s accomplishments, bragging about
everything about you and not being interested in her is basically
going to send you home to another night at staring at the ceiling,
whittling your own thumbs, and tickling your own nut case. You
basically are a “B” for bragger. “B” guys that basically just brag
about all their accomplishments, and think women are going to be
impressed by it. But in reality, they’re bored by it.

They want to be engaged. That’s not the way to go out on a date. A
date is 50-50. Fifty percent of the time you talk. Fifty percent of
the time they listen. You learn about them half the time, and they
learn about you the other half. It’s not 100 percent bragging about
who you are.

To top it off, this guy was so impressed with what he’s done that he
brought along a documentary about himself, so she could go home and
watch. Isn’t that wonderful? And he’s probably one of those guys that
thinks he had a fantastic date, one of the best dates he’s had in a
long time. Wake up gentlemen. It’s a date.

So you went out with somebody, you had a great time, maybe you slept together, maybe you didn’t, but now you’ve determined that this person just isn’t for you. Now when it comes to dating and relationships, most of us are complete chicken shit because there are a lot of feelings and emotions involved, and it’s a really intimate thing.

Most of us are not going to take a stand and break up with somebody properly who don’t really know that well. So instead, what we do is we perform the fade away.

What exactly is the fade away? You hung out with somebody maybe for a week, maybe a few weeks, maybe you had some sex, maybe you didn’t. Basically by now you’ve determined you are not really into anything serious with this person, or that person is just not for you. But instead of saying that to them, you just fade away.

Fade aways are usually paired up with one of two really bad excuses. One: you’re going out of town to visit family for a week, or you’re going away on business for a week, and you’ll call when you get back! Two: Hey, things are just really hectic over the next 10 days, you’ve got some deadlines at work, you’ve got some friends in town, you’re moving into a new apartment, whatever.

That’s when the fade away process slowly begins. Then, over the course of the next 10 days, you start fading away and hope you’re becoming a distant memory. Of course you never call him or her again, and you never intended to, but you start the fade away by saying that you will keep them in mind, that you’ll be in touch soon.

The Fade Away

You start the fade away with an excuse you pulled from your life so they don’t expect to hear from you for a short while. Then, after that time passes, they start scratching their head wondering if you are ever going to call them again.

Here’s the question: why is it so difficult to just be honest with each other? Instead of doing things like the fade away tactic, why can’t we look at each other and say, “Hey, you know, I really enjoyed hanging out with you, sleeping with you, whatever. It was great fun, I’m glad we met, but I just don’t see this going anywhere. I just don’t have that feeling, and I’m looking for something else. But I enjoyed the time we spent together, the few weeks we spent together, however long it might be.”

We’ve all had somebody perform the fade away on us. And the next time you’re thinking about doing a fade away yourself, it really comes down to thinking about how you felt the last time a person you were dating faded away on you? How did the fade away make you feel in that situation?

Practicing honesty and being up-front with people who you’re dating is an amazing thing to practice. When dealing with people in life, you have to think long term. Because when you see that person again, months or years later down the road, they will respect you a lot more if you’re completely honest with them, even if you hurt their feelings temporarily. But when you perform the fade away, that person doesn’t really want to see you, doesn’t want to waste their time having to deal with you either personally or professionally, and you become that asshole who only cared about himself or herself and faded away hoping you wouldn’t notice.

Everyone I know suffers from a very curable disease called To Good To Be True Syndrome!

You will not find the cure while watching TV.

You will not find the cure in any magazine.

Your friends are powerless to help you.

Your parents have no clue but they are the first people who actually transmitted this powerful disease to you.

Are you intrigued?

If so, click and listen this podcast, it is a must for all men and women who read this blog.

One last thing be a good friend and pass this onto anyone you care about!

To Download Today’s Podcast Click Here!

The phone is ringing, and all of a sudden you hear “Hi. This is Jane. Please leave a message . . .” Your heart starts beating really fast.

The next thing you know, you start blabbering. “Oh, hey Jane. It’s Mike. Okay, that’s . . . yeah, it was great meeting you the other day. Give me a call, if you really want to. I know you don’t know me, but if you want call me. Yeah, call me. Here’s my number. It’s, um, 310-iamuputight.”

That might as well be your number since it could not be more clear how uptight you are. What you want to do instead when you leave a voicemail message, is to set the stage to start the relationship.

Think about how exciting it is when you get a good voicemail message. Compare the above voicemail message to something like this: “Hey Jane. It’s Mike. How are you doing? It was great meeting you the other day at Whole Foods. I checked out your YouTube videos that you were telling me about. They were hilarious! Call me. I have to share something with you about that.”

Do you see how the person receiving that message would feel very differently after hearing it than the feeling they would have after getting the first message? This second message was upbeat. It was exciting.

The second message makes the person want to call you back. You’ve established the relationship. You’re actually the guy who they want to call back, as opposed to the “ah” and “um” guy who stumbles through the message or hangs up without leaving any message at all.

Virtually everyone has Caller ID nowadays. Don’t ever hang up. They will see that you called. Leaving no message will make them not want to call you back just as much as leaving a bad voicemail message.

Click here to hear me talk more about how to know exactly what to say to a woman when you’re leaving a voicemail message and in any situation.

So, what are you going to do? Are you going to do the “same old same old” first date of going out to dinner where you watch each other chew across the table, swap resumes and then end the night wondering whether you should kiss her?

To me, dates are about exploring each other. I like to keep the first date very simple — a cup of coffee and some good conversation. Then I see where it goes from there.

I like to see how I feel after the first date. When I was dating, I always knew I had a great date if on the drive home I smiled when I thought about things she said, or if I woke up the next morning smiling about something she said.

When that happened, I’d always follow up the next day with her and express that same thought. I’d either text her or call and say, “You know, I was thinking more about what you said about the economy, and I really look forward to talking to you again. P.S. Had a great time last night.”

Talk about whatever really interested you about her. Bring that back up, because it shows that you actually listened, bonded with her and was interested in her.

It’s really all about getting to know somebody. So why add the pressure of a dinner date? If you don’t like each other after the first twenty minutes and the service is slow in the restaurant, you’re going to have to painfully sit there and stare at each other.

That’s not worth it. Have a quick meeting – a cup of coffee or tea – so that you can find out if you have any chemistry at all before paying through the roof for dinner for no reason.

So keep your first dates really simple. Then on your second date, be more creative.

Whatever you learned about her on the first date — whether it’s that she likes Thai food, that she hasn’t bowled in a long time or really enjoys art galleries — make the second date something related to something you learned about her on the first date. Do the same thing for the third date (creating it from something you learned on the second date).

Dating is about building momentum. Dating is about creating memories.

Nothing means more to me in my heart than my first three months with Sonja. I can remember every moment, every conversation and everything we did like it was yesterday.

It’s amazing, because you’re creating something that may last a lifetime. So by learning about each other, and by actually giving some extra thought to your dates, you may be able to look back with that person and say, “God, our first three months were so amazing!”

There is nothing more powerful than new love. Make it special with everybody you date, because that one amazing person is going to come through your life at some point and you better get good at dating and listening before they do!

Don’t ever again dread that first date. CLICK HERE to find out how to start really enjoying those first dates!

In those first two blogs, I went through some mindset stuff and about how exactly to go about asking out a woman who works at a bank (or someplace like that). I went through and analyzed, and showed how to get rid of, all of Jeff’s excuses for why he couldn’t ask that woman out.

This brings us to the third installment of this blog. So Jeff came over my house the other day and told me he finally asked out this woman. He said, “I asked her out in front of the entire bank, and it worked!”

I asked him what was really important about that. What was really important about that was not even so much that he asked this particular woman out. It was that he finally got out of his comfort zone, one he has been in for a very long time.

Sometimes in life you need to force yourself to get out of your own comfort zone. You have to stop thinking about things, and you must force yourself to do them.

It doesn’t matter what happens. In Jeff’s case, it wouldn’t have mattered whether that woman said yes or no.

A lot of guys spend so much time wondering (and worrying) what a woman will say, or what the outcome will be of something they are thinking about doing. They will think, “Will she say yes? I hope she says yes.”

The real lesson here is that it doesn’t matter what she says. The real lesson is that you decided to do it, and you did it. The real lesson is that you won simply because you did something that you normally wouldn’t do, and you actually trusted and believed in it.

So many guys spend so much time not trusting or believing the things that I tell them to do. It’s human nature.

When someone gives you a vision of the way your life should be, you immediately start getting negative and fearful because it’s different than your life has been. So you don’t trust that vision.

The reason you don’t trust that vision, though, is because you have to want that vision. You have to believe in that vision, and you have to find it for yourself.

After we worked through some of the fears and blockages, Jeff finally decided that he was just going to do it. That’s the key lesson here — that he did it.

He happened to get lucky that the first time he did it, the woman said yes. A lot of times, though, the first time you do something you won’t get the result for which you hope. You won’t get the yes.

If you keep your new vision and do things over and over and over again, though, you will no longer have anxiety and fear about doing it. When that happens, you start to actually believe you can do it. You won’t have to “make yourself” do it anymore.

Once you believe you can do something, you can do it any day, any place, anytime. There is no limit to what a person can do, except the things your own mind keeps you from doing.

Think about that today. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and do something that you’ve never done before.

Don’t worry and don’t care about the outcome. It’s not about you going out with a woman. That’s just an added benefit.

The outcome that’s important is that you finally did something you wouldn’t normally do. The outcome that’s important is that you overcame a fear and an anxiety, and you did something about it.

For those of you who know me personally, I’m going through something right now that is getting me to push myself further than I have in my entire life. It involves something I never thought I would do, something I never thought I wanted and something I never thought I would have.

I’m pushing myself way far out of my comfort zone. It gets easier and easier, because I am realizing the vision that other people are showing me and gaining the belief that I can do this. I’m starting to believe it, and that is the power of being the most incredible, powerful vision of you.

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.

Here you are. You just met a girl (or a guy) you like, and now you’re babbling away on their voicemail.

“God, it was SO great to meet you. I really had a good time. I love that pink sweater you were wearing, it was fantastic! Boy did I like that sandwich you were eating. You know, I ordered the roast beef myself because I wasn’t quite sure if the turkey was good today. Oh, and did I tell you that I really like roast beef?”

Have you ever babbled like this on someone’s voicemail, and then the moment you finish you think “Wow, that was an awful message!” You are about to hit the “#” key as this thought crosses your mind.

Then you hear this woman with a chemical-sounding voice that sounds like she’s been drinking or smoking too much pot come on and say, “If you’re satisfied with your message, press 1. If you’re not and want to re-record, press 2. If you want to delete and start over, press 3.”

It was funny. I remember one time when I didn’t press 3 as I intended. I pressed 1 by mistake and a message sent (that I really did not want to be sent!).
When that happened, I remember sweating it out thinking “What am I going to do? That voicemail was terrible!”

So what do you do if that happens to you, or if a voicemail system doesn’t give you the option to erase a voicemail you’ve left? You’ve got to sweat it out. You have no other choice.

The lesson to be learned from this, in a nutshell, is this: When you’re leaving a voicemail message, make it short, sweet and to the point. That way, you’re not babbling.

Just say “Hey, it’s David. It was great meeting you the other day. Call me.” or “I really enjoyed talking to you the other day about [this or that]. Call me. I have something interesting to share with you.” That’s it.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re satisfied with this message press 1 . . .

She wines when she speaks, has the worst posture I’ve ever seen, and looks like she has neither showered nor washed her hair in months. She looks like she would smell.

So how she got a movie about love, I’ll never figure out. Of course she doesn’t know what love is (which is the basic premise of the movie), since the way she dresses and carries herself makes her reak of insecurity.

What a complete and utter waste of time. The worst part of the movie was that we brought a picnic to eat during it and never got to eat it because of the “Men In Black.” No it wasn’t Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones . . . but two men who stood in black suits at each side of the theater for the entire movie staring at the people in the seats. Their suits looked like those ones you can buy three for $149.00.

Then, at the end of the movie, they just left. I’ve never been to a movie where there were security guards wearing black suits.

Why were they there? Did they know the movie was this bad, and worried that we might attack the movie screen? Were they there to wake us up when we fell asleep during this awful movie . . . or was this just another oddity about living in La La Land. I’ll never know the answer since the “Men In Black” disappeared before we could find out who they were.

Enough about bad movies, Men In Black and picnics that can’t be eaten. On to today’s main event . . .

So, what do you do when the conversation stalls with someone?

You have to think to yourself, what do I know about this person? What have I learned about this person?

A conversation should never stall. There might be no chemistry, and you might not have “it” with that person, but you can always reignite a conversation and give it another shot. How? Well, what have you already learned about them?

So she’s from Japan – you’ve learned that. You’re currently in Seattle studying. If the conversation stalls, you can just look at her and say, “so what do you miss the most about Japan? Is there one thing that you really miss about home?”

Get her to talk more emotionally; get her to talk about her feelings and about what is going on. In this way you can re-engage her and she can answer, “you know what I miss the most about Japan? I miss the food; I miss the culture…” whatever it is.

“What is it about the food you miss?” Ask her like you’re talking to a child. When you look at any kid and you ask, “what’s bugging you today?” They always answer, “nothing,” and you have to prod them a bit. You say, “alright, come on and tell me what’s bothering you.” Then the kid will say, “well, I didn’t like dinner.” You ask, “alright, what didn’t you like about dinner?” – do you see how you are paraphrasing the child’s words to get them to open up a little bit?

Sometimes talking to women is like talking to a five-year-old. You have to paraphrase her a little bit – but don’t talk in that same little kid voice! But you do have to get her to open up a little bit.

Another reason that was a fantastic example is that you opened up what I consider to be the hardest culture of women to open. Japanese women – oh man. Chinese women are tough, Filipino women are very shy and hard to open up, but Japanese women are just about the most difficult to open – because of their culture.

What is Japanese culture like? If you ever go to Honolulu, the men are walking and the women they are with are like five or ten feet behind them. The younger Japanese women still have that as their parental example even if they are a lot more modern, progressive and hipper than their parents.

The culture is different now, but still, Japanese women are tough to open. But once you open them up, they start laughing and smiling. So that interaction all together was really fantastic.

To get the conversation back on track, instead of thinking to yourself, oh my god, what do I do here? How do I save this conversation? Think to yourself: what do I know about her? I can ask her a question based on something we’ve already talked about and I can take the conversation deeper.