My objectives for pick-up over the next two months

So Scottish Greg and I have put together our SMART objectives for pick-up, after he was influenced to do it from his review at work. The acronym SMART in SMART objectives stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timed

So to go back to my current challenges from my original post:

• Number close more frequently
  
• Find and open hotter girls
  
• Seductive conversation
  
• Kiss close
  
• Flying solo

Here are my SMART objectives, valid until 31 July 2008.

• By the end of June I will have number closed 5 times
  
• By the end of July I will have number closed 15 times, 5 times with girls who are 7 or above
  
• By the end of July I will have been to ten new venues for sarging, and have put together a list of venues for each day of the week that has the hottest girls
  
• By the end of July I will have opened ten girls hotter than a 7.
  
• By the end of June I will have researched and implemented how to turn my conversation seductive, and used it five times.
  
• By the end of July I will have kiss closed ten girls.
  
• By the end of June I will have gone sarging solo twice.
  
• By the end of July I will have gone sarging solo five times.

I’ll be updating you all on how well I meet them on this blog!

Trouble in the Message Centre

So a while ago I bought into a programme run by Simpleology that was called “The Guide to Blogging for Fun and Profit.” I had ignored it as I wasn’t writing a blog just then, but now that I am I thought I would revise it.

Four lessons in and I was waiting for it to tell me something I didn’t know. The fifth lesson however did.

It covered how to write effectively on blogs. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules but some things can help depending on your aims. Anyway for your benefit here is what I learned:
1. Know your audience (this should be easy)
2. Provide value
3. Keep it short and simple (probably haven’t been doing this much!)
4. Make the titles interesting
5. Use keywords
6. Use links
7. Be entertaining
8. Value the comments (go ahead, you know you want to!)
9. Post regularly

For all 17 of you that have regularly been reading this blog, you may have been wondering what was going on with the titles. Well there has been a connecting theme, if anyone can guess what it is I will give them a prize! But from now onwards I’m going to have to revert to a more standard approach if this is going to help anyone.

So there will be a bit of a change in my posts after this one. Keep a look out!

Rise to the Challenge

So now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks I’ve noticed my challenges have now changed and developed. My initial concern was to open regularly and get that sorted. I believe that has now happened, both with my “hair” opener, but also with the opener challenge that I shared with Jake. Plus Scottish Greg and I developed our new “guy’s plunging v-neck” opener which is a classic though mainly only suitable for use in Shoreditch or other places where people are tragically fashionable.

I’ve also been able to cover off my second challenge, which was to open and then continue further than the opener, i.e. to engage in a conversation with a girl for more than say three minutes.

I was out in the pays touristiques of Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden today with Andre, and we opened a bunch of sets, mainly tourists but hey, and they all went well. Looks like day / street game is going well. Andre was kind enough to say that I had good conversational skills and made me realise that I have that part down now as well.

And in a funny way I always knew I did. I am now old enough to have had some interesting life experiences and therefore a bunch of things to talk about. Becoming more aware of what these are and then using them in this context is something that has really strengthened over these last few weeks.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that before I go out, I get totally enveloped with the Fear. It’s like a really heavy weight of foreboding and dread that kind of sits over me. Which is really strange as I don’t tend to experience it at all when I’m talking to girls. It’s like my approach anxiety has moved back in time from just before the initial approach to about an hour earlier, and increased in mass! Very strange. But I’ve managed to ignore it and so far it’s never been proved right apart from once, so hopefully it will decrease over time!

I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I’m in the field, my motivation to open decreases. Partly because I know that I can open easily now, and partly because there aren’t that many truly hot girls around, so I don’t have the desire to. This will be less of a problem when I find the better venues to go out to, but it’s something I need to focus on.

So now that I’ve covered my first two challenges, there are a couple more that I need to move on to. After the opener and the initial conversation I need to focus on number closing more frequently. I also need to kiss close on the first meet, which is something I’ve only done a handful of times in the past and not yet done since focussing on this again properly. I also need to try flying solo – going out and sarging on my own. That’s still sounds like a scary idea to me! And one other thing that Andre reminded me of was to make my conversation more seductive after a while, to escalate things further. So with the easiest first, my current challenges are:

• Number close more frequently
  
• Find and open hotter girls
  
• Seductive conversation
  
• Kiss close
  
• Flying solo

And the accompanying affirmations: I frequently and consistently number close. I always successfully open the hottest girls I see. I smoothly and easily make my conversations more and more seductive. I easily kiss girls when I first meet them. I happily go out on my own to meet new women and end up having sex with them. Powerful stuff!

In other news I’m off to Cyprus for a few days next week for some sun! Nice.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

So, a couple of nights of sarging. On Thursday met up with new guy Andre who is the coolest Tamil Sri Lankan I’ve met (out of a total of two!) and definitely has the whole confident body language thing down. He’s also probably the person with the most experience that I’ve met so far, and is keen to teach which is gold and something worthy of admiration. I also meet up with Przemec who is a crazy Polish dude who looks like my ex-MD, and his flatmate Kirk. Trev also joins us. We spend a bit of time walking around the centre of town looking for places to go without much luck, and open a few people on the streets to warm up as we go.

As ever the problem is finding somewhere to go on a Thursday. Eventually we end up at the Roadhouse in Covent Garden which is fairly busy and a good place to hang. We open a few sets and get in the flow. I open a table of four Brazilian girls and end up having a good chat with one of them about the differences between London and Rio de Janeiro. This is great because I’m not just doing the opener and then ejecting.

I feel now that after a couple of warm ups I can open very easily, with pretty much any subject (though my trusty hair opener is one I often rely on). The Brazilians were in the middle of a big conversation but I confidently and commandingly went up to the table and in a loud voice I asked my question. They were immediately focussed on me and didn’t go back to their conversation until I had focussed on the one girl. Even when I left they actually asked me what I was going to do with my hair - they really wanted to know!

So my target after that has been to carry on the conversation, and Thursday was the first time in a while that this has happened really well. Once I had exhausted the cultural differences thread I ejected, about 15 minutes later. Przemec asked me why I left, when it seemed I was doing pretty well. It was a good question and in retrospect I could have easily gone for a number.

After that the band started playing and we joined the crowd and partied along to the band. I hung out with a couple of groups of girls and just had a laugh with them, including one girl who kept on backing her ass into me! I teased her that she couldn’t keep away from me and thought my ass was hot! Good times.

Friday was with Greg who had a great new haircut, Canadian Liam, crazy Jordan looking good in a Justin Timberlake hat, and Peter and Scottish Greg (or Greig) who I hadn’t met before. Jordan was sucked away by his addiction to the dancefloor at On Anon, and despite our best intentions to draw him away he chose his own adventure. We hit up Jrink again which wasn’t as busy as last time but still had a few cool girls in there.

I noticed a short but perky Aussie girl standing next to us that I opened with “Are you here for the birthday party?” as there seems to be a lot of birthday parties at this venue. She wasn’t so we just chatted about random stuff. I asked her which part of Australia she was from, and she said, “How did you know I was Australian?” This was hilarious as she had an Australian accent and had the classic Australian girl’s face where the eyes are a bit too close together (don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, or is it just me? Nicole Kidman has this a bit!) Anyway it turns out she’s been in London for 9 years and thought she had lost her accent, and both her parents are Italian so there’s no reason why she should look Australian. Bizarre!

But she was very open and friendly, and we teased a joked around for a good while. She was originally from Adelaide so I teased her about that (“The most interesting city in Australia!” – gold!) and we had a good time. I was coming close to running out of things to say, so I laid out my Classic Number Close™: “What’s your number?” and she put it in my phone. Ding ding ding! This is the first time I've had a number close since starting to do the game concertedly. So a gold star for me. As 60 says - always go for the number close!

To be honest I’m not sure if she’s worth a day two but I’ll give it a shot for practice anyway. I’ll call her on Sunday and hopefully the number will work. Also later that night I saw her dancing with another guy so who knows! Still worth the practice though I think.

We then went to Zebranos on Frith Street which was as shit as On Anon (in my eyes). Fat Asian girls drinking champagne – no thanks. Apparently it was better last week but these things happen I guess. After a while there everyone except Greig quit, while new guy Ryan arrived, starting off his night at 11.30! We were hawked into a shit bar (Bar Soho on Frith Street) – lesson learned there I fear – and then on to Leicester Square which isn’t my favourite place at the best of times. We ended up at some random bar which was a bit quiter and had a few drinks, and shared our stories of the dirtier end of sexual experience which was a good laugh. Though both the guys had more experience that me which is something that can get me down if I don’t keep my emotions in check, and constantly remind myself that I can only judge myself on my own development, which is doing pretty well all things considered.

After a fair chin wag I was starting to feel hungry and tired and we all called it a night. When I got home I suddenly had a rash urge to write down the following drunken ramblings in my notebook, here in it's unadulterated glory to be taken at face value:

“All my self conceptions are shattering.

“How many times have I been out with new guys and they’ve told me – “You know, I like all these guys but you’re the cool one, “ or “You’re really sociable,” or whatever.

“You [sic] have all this bullshit that’s been built up over the years and time and time again what I once considered to be hard wired parts of my personality or rather life, are actually illusions! It blows my mind. Everything is up for grabs now. I feel like I’m starting to turn a corner.”

Battle

“Do you guys actually like each other?”

It was a question I wanted to know the answer to, as all I’d seen is these two mates rip the shit out of each other for the last half an hour. You see, here was I fresh out of school, meeting new people at university, but I was still to some extent the socially inept, shy, introverted person I’d been for most of my life. And I didn’t understand what was going on. Here were two new friends of mine, who professed to being friends with each other and even shared a room, but all they did was insult each other. And not just insult. Really insult. The kinds of insults that would make anyone that subscribes to the “politically correct” ideas of communication have a heart attack. I mean, no topic was out of bounds. In particular race (one guy was Indian) and nationality (the other was half French, poor thing).

It was a moment of realisation. Teasing had for me been a negative experience. It was a way of putting someone else down and making yourself feel superior in the tribal laws of the school playground. But here they were teasing each other, and although they were putting each other down, that wasn’t the main point. The point was that it was a challenge, a social battle. It was really about seeing how far you had to go to really get a reaction. If they were upset at the first insult, it wouldn’t have gone any further, but because they were aware enough to know that it wasn’t meant heartlessly, it was then fun to see how far they could take it.

They weren’t taking it personally.

So why am I bringing this up now? Well obviously teasing is a key factor in flirting with women, and I’ve started to notice that I’m doing it more and more, and sooner after first meeting people as I get better at flirting. As I was saying to Trev the other day, I’m being generally more “cocky and funny” with people in general nowadays. I was at two barbeques on Saturday (I was “barbecurious” as someone put it). The first one was with the girl I used to sit next to at work, who I always used to banter with. So there was a bit of banter there, and with some of the other guests.

Then I went to the other barbeque, and there were a bunch of Kiwis that were up for some banter as well. They were really good, really pushing the boundaries. But they didn’t know who they were messing with, haha! It’s funny, because the less you care, and the more inventive you are with your responses, the further you can go. What I also find is that you have to gauge the point at which someone will not be able to respond – at which you take it too far for them. It’s important because if you’re not sensitive to this you’ll end up looking like a heartless dick. If you reach this point, a simple “only joking” and a pat on the back usually resolves it.

There was one girl who was very good at this, and she had a cynical, “I’m superior” vibe about her. Well, someone had to deal with that, right? Funny thing was, I didn’t say anything bad, just that she hadn’t had anyone beat her, so when I kept coming back with stuff, she eventually stopped, and became quite shy. I patted her on the back and made sure she was OK.

Another interesting part was that there was one hot girl there, actually my flatmate, who was getting teased by all the guys. We were all winding her up and stuff, and then halfway through she goes “Why are you all picking on me?” in a fake-upset kind of tone (trying to use her good looks to get some sympathy – an unconscious dominance test of sorts). To which I replied “You love it really!” – and she admitted that she did! She was being the centre of attention.

There’s a lesson in that for us all.