Dating Essentials for Men

by Robert Glover

  •Lack of skills. Most bad daters have never acquired the fundamental skills of dating, mating and breaking up. This is understandable. In many cultures, there is no custom of dating. Even in western society where there is some history of courtship, it has only existed for a half-century or so. The whole idea of romantic love has only existed for a couple of hundred years.

  If you lack basic dating skills, you are not alone. Most men have never learned how to banter, flirt, test, close the deal, or break up with a woman. This often results in a general lack of confidence. Consequently, BDs tend to avoid women or become a “girlfriend with a penis” with women whom they desire, hoping this will eventually lead to deeper intimacy.

  •Self-limiting beliefs. Most bad daters struggle with issues of self-acceptance and confidence. This lack of self-esteem is the result of “self-limiting beliefs” (SLBs).

  Bad Daters tend to be riddled with SLBs. They typically believe that women can tell they are “losers” just by looking at them. They are consumed with negative self-messages:

  •“I’m too fat.”

  •“I’m inexperienced.”

  •“I can’t handle rejection.”

  •“Why would a good woman want me?”

  •“I don’t have much sexual experience.”

  •“I’m boring.”

  •“All the good women are taken.”

  For bad daters, self-limiting beliefs (i.e., the lies your mind tells you) become self-perpetuating realities that keep them stuck and frustrated.

  The lessons in the MYM section of Dating Essentials will focus on uncovering and overcoming your self-limiting beliefs about yourself, women, and the world in general.

  These lessons will probably cause tremendous inner turmoil for you because they will challenge everything you believe to be true. Your mind has been telling you unsubstantiated lies about yourself, women, and the world for most of your life. We are going to challenge these lies.

  This will make you anxious because your mind believes what your mind tells you to be true. Your mind has been lying to you for years, but you’ve had no reason to be suspicious of this insidious inner deceit.

  As we uncover these lies and shine the bright light of reality on them, your mind will go into overdrive to hang onto what it “knows” to be true. As you experience this inner mental struggle, your mind will try and convince you to keep believing what you have always accepted to be true. This is normal.

  Just remember, historically your best thinking has gotten you exactly where you are right now – lonely and frustrated. When it comes to how you view yourself, women, and dating, we are going to be suspicious of everything your mind has believed to be true.

  As you do the lessons in this course, your brain will frequently shout things like:

  •“BULLSHIT.”

  •“That’s not true.”

  •“I can’t do that.”

  •“Women aren’t like that.”

  •“If I did that, I’d get slapped.”

  •“That might work for other guys, but it won’t for me.”

  Whenever you hear these voices in your head, pay attention to them and state them out loud (yes, actually say them out loud).

  This chapter will help you explore, become conscious of, and overcome the lies that prevent you from approaching women, talking to them, asking for their phone number, taking them out, getting them into bed, and creating long-term, loving relationships. The following chapters will build on this process. This information will blast your SLBs out of your mind and help you start getting what you want in love, sex, and relationships.

  “What gets us into trouble is not what don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” - Mark Twain

  Toxic Shame

  In No More Mr. Nice Guy, I discuss the effects of “Toxic Shame” as it relates to the Nice Guy Syndrome. Toxic shame is the deeply held, unconscious belief that you are bad, defective, or unlovable. It is the result of the inaccurate internalization of life events from birth on.

  When you experienced neglect, abandonment, inconsistent nurturing, smothering, or emotional, verbal or physical abuse as a child, you inaccurately internalized that you were the cause. You believed there must be something wrong with you that caused the painful things you were experiencing.

  What makes these early life experiences so debilitating is that the events and the interpretation of the events were stored up in a part of your brain that has no language or reasoning capability. The first part of your brain that developed as a child is called the Amygdala. It is often referred to as the primal brain. It is the source of the “fight-flight-freeze” mechanism. As stated above, this emotional storehouse of your mind does not have language or reasoning capability. It operates on a purely primal survival basis.

  The cortex, the reasoning and language part of your brain developed later and more slowly. It was just getting going around age four or five and didn’t fully develop until you were around age 25. That is why young men’s auto insurance rates are so high. The part of the brain responsible for making good decisions isn’t fully developed in men until their mid-twenties.

  This means that everything that happened to you in the first few years of your life was stored up in the emotional part of your brain, not the reasoning part. The internalization of early life events, along with heredity (your inherited temperament goes a long way in determining how you interpret your early life experiences), determines your emotional personality.

  The thinking part of your brain unquestioningly accepts everything recorded in the emotional centers of your brain to be one hundred percent accurate.

  These emotional beliefs are the “DOS” of your mental operating system. They are your “machine language.”

  Your thinking and reasoning rises out of and reflects your unconscious emotional paradigm. Your mind will always work to make sure your mental beliefs are consistent with the non-verbal, emotional beliefs you internalized as a young child.

  Even though toxic shame is a purely emotional experience, you attach words and thoughts to this deep, uncomfortable feeling. You might say you feel “lonely,” “isolated,” “anxious,” “fearful,” “bad” or “unloved.” You then attach personal meaning to these feelings.

  “I feel depressed because no one likes me.”

  “I’m lonely because I’m not good enough.”

  “When people find out how defective I really am, they all leave me.”

  “If I was just taller, thinner, smarter, more outgoing, richer, etc., etc., then I wouldn’t feel so lonely.”

  Since every human being grows up in an imperfect family and in an imperfect world, everyone internalizes some degree of toxic shame in childhood. As you grew into adolescence and adulthood, you continued to add evidence from life’s events that seemed to support the emotional beliefs you internalized at a young age. This is called the “paradigm effect.”

  The Paradigm Effect

  Here is how paradigms work. Information that seems to support your self-limiting beliefs will be sought out, amplified, and retained as evidence of the accuracy of your SLBs. Information that seems to contradict or challenge the validity of your SLBs will not be noticed, will be minimized, or rationalized away.

  Here is an example:

  If an attractive woman smiles at you or talks to you, you assume that she is just being polite or smiling at someone else because such behavior contradicts your SLBs.

  The cycle then repeats itself over and over again.

  Your SLBs resulting from toxic shame have their greatest impact on your personal relationships. If you believe that you are defective and unlovable, you will also assume that everyone else sees you the same way.

  Why would you ask a woman out if you are convinced you are defective and she will soon see this and reject you? Why would you let people know you deeply if they are just going to find out how imperfect you are?

  Due to toxic shame, your self-limiting beliefs convince you tha
t attractive women are not attracted to you.

  Therefore:

  Because you believe this to be true, you don’t interact with women you find attractive.

  Therefore:

  Because you don’t interact with attractive women, they tend to not notice you or interact with you.

  Therefore:

  You then use this data to reinforce the belief that attractive women aren’t interested in you which, of course, means you continue to avoid interacting with them.

  The self-limiting beliefs attached to your toxic shame are the number-one problem hindering you from getting what you want in love, sex, and relationships. Here are some of the ways your SLBs effect your dating.

  How You Think is How You Are. What you think about and believe to be true is what you will create. Your mindset will determine how you interact with women and how they respond to you.

  If you are telling yourself, “I’m a worthless piece of shit,” how do you think you will approach women (if at all?) and how do you think they will respond to you?

  If you are telling yourself, “I’m an interesting, great guy and women really like me,” how do you think you will approach women and how do you think they will respond to you?

  How Self-Limiting Beliefs Effect Dating

  SLBs Quietly Encourage You to Isolate and Avoid

  Most of the time you aren’t aware of your SLBs because they whisper in the back of your consciousness:

  •“Just stay home tonight.”

  •“Don’t talk to her, she wouldn’t be interested.”

  •“Go ahead and stay on the internet a little longer.”

  •“Don’t make eye contact; she’ll think you’re a pervert.”

  It isn’t until you consciously put yourself into a situation that challenges your self-limiting beliefs or an unexpected opportunity presents itself, that these voices shout louder in your conscious mind.

  “Are you crazy? What the hell do you think you are doing? If you talk to her, she’ll just reject you and you’ll look like a fool. Look down now. Keep on walking. Whew, that was close. You’re such a loser, you’ll never have a woman like her. Don’t even think about it.”

  When it is all over, you tell yourself, “See, attractive women never talk to me.” It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

  Self-limiting beliefs Create Negative Emotions

  Not only do SLBs get in the way of you taking action, they also create negative emotional states. If your mind keeps telling you that you have “low self-esteem,” that you aren’t attractive, or that you’re a lousy lover, you will naturally feel bad.

  In addition, because your SLBs prevent you from taking actions that would improve your life, you become even further depressed. Because it feels normal for you to feel bad, and because feeling bad reinforces your SLBs, and because your SLBs make you feel bad, a vicious cycle is perpetuated throughout your life.

  SLBs Cause You to Date Down, Settle, and Stay Too Long in Bad Relationships

  Because of your SLBs, you probably date down and settle for women whom you don’t enjoy or who don’t turn you on. Your SLBs have probably caused you to stay in bad or unfulfilling relationships way too long because you don’t think there are many good women out there. Even if there were, you don’t believe you could ever get one. You might as well stay right where you are.

  SLBs Prevent You From Seeing and Walking Through Open Doors

  Due to self-limiting beliefs, you don’t walk through open doors or take advantage of opportunities presented to you. (Raise your hand if you have had a chance to date/sleep with a woman you desired but didn’t take advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself because of your SLBs).

  Your Self-Limiting Beliefs Keep You Safe

  Jeremy had been in one my single men’s groups for several months. In his late thirties, he was smart, funny, and athletic. He had a great job and condo. He had only been in two short-term relationships in his life. Even though he came to group regularly and talked about dating, he never put any real effort into actually applying what he was learning.

  During a discussion of self-limiting beliefs, I asked Jeremy what he was afraid a woman would find out about him if she really got to know him. He listed two or three things that he was sure would cause any woman to reject him if she got to know him well enough. I asked how he knew this to be true. His response was that the two women he had dated had both broken up with him. He took that as proof that all women would find him defective and leave him.

  Jeremy’s SLBs were obviously there to keep him safe. If he didn’t risk, he wouldn’t get hurt. When I challenged the validity of his beliefs, he hung on tightly to the fact that since he was “batting a thousand” in the rejection department, there must be something wrong with him. His mind completely tuned out any possibility that these women might have been insecure or dysfunctional themselves and that an “N” of 2 wouldn’t stand up in any research study (he had a science background). Nevertheless, Jeremy continued to hang on tightly to beliefs that kept him feeling safe.

  Challenge Your Beliefs

  A belief is a thought you keep thinking. Your mind believes your beliefs are true because you have always thought them. Because your mind strives for consistency, it finds plenty of evidence to support your beliefs (and ignores information that is contradictory). Many of your beliefs about yourself, women, sex aren’t necessarily true or accurate, but your mind believes them because it has repeatedly thought them.

  For example, a client of mine lamented that he had given up hope of finding any woman who might be his Really Great Woman (RGW). He told me that he didn’t find that many women all that interesting. The few women he did find to be interesting were married or in a relationship. He stated that he had given up ever finding the kind of woman he would really want to get involved with. How do you think this belief system was playing out in his life?

  I suggested to my client that what he believed to be true, would become true. As long as his mind kept telling him that “all the good women are taken,” he would be sure and never find one. I suggested that he start repeating the following mantra to himself several times a day:

  “In the next 30 days, I am going to meet three women who have the potential to be my Really Great Woman. They are available and looking for me.”

  I told him his job was to put himself in a position to meet these women and walk through the open doors. Doing so included challenging his self-limiting beliefs, getting out of the house, talking to people, working on making himself into the kind of man a great woman would be attracted to, and not spending too much time with any women who didn’t have the potential to be his RGW.

  After just a week or two, my client told me that repeating this mantra made him more optimistic. He had started noticing and interacting with a number of really interesting women. He began approaching women whom he thought might be one of these three women because he hated to miss an opportunity. He found that was in a consistently better mood and taking better care of himself. He ended an on and off again relationship with a woman he had been involved with for a couple of years.

  Within three months of repeating this mantra regularly to himself, a mutual friend introduced him to a woman who matched every quality he had been looking for. This woman was intelligent, stable, active, attractive, and available. He reports that he knows he never would have found such a great match if he hadn’t worked on changing negative, deprivation way of thinking. He also realized that even if this relationship didn’t work out, it was still proof that great women are out there.

  Chapter 2: The Joy of Dating – Uncover and Overcome Your Self-Limiting Beliefs

  Your mind believes what your mind tells itself is true, and it is wrong more often than not.

  Dating activates your self-limiting beliefs (SLBs) like nothing else.

  This is good news. SLBs affect every part of your life and keep you stuck and unhappy. By challenging your self-limiting beliefs through the process of dating, you can clear
these mental lies out and start experiencing all kinds of great things in life.

  Think for a moment what “dating” really is. When you decide you want to date, what you are really deciding to do is present yourself to the women of the world and ask them the following question:

  “In spite of all of my visible flaws (and all the ones you can’t see yet, but which I’m painfully aware of), do you find me interesting enough to talk to me, give me a phone number, go out with me, sleep with me, and maybe become my girlfriend?”

  If this doesn’t bring up every one of your self-limiting beliefs, I don’t know what will! Dating can you trigger your inner shame and make you believe you are totally worthless like nothing else can!

  In Dating Essentials for Men, I suggest we look at dating in a whole new light. Don’t look at dating as an attempt to get women to like you, sleep with you, marry you, etc.

  Look at dating as the most effective way imaginable to clean out all the distorted mental crap you’ve been packing around inside you since birth. The bonus is that you will also get the love and sex you have been looking for.

  Here is what I personally discovered after applying the dating principles I am teaching you in this book. Not only was I going on plenty of dates and having lots of sex, but I was also experiencing amazing success in every other area of my life – work, money, friendship, etc. My business took off. I started making more money than I ever had before in my life. Personal and social opportunities presented themselves to me right and left. All of these things happened because dating helped me uncover my latent SLBs and overcome them.

  Types of Self-Limiting Beliefs

  When it comes to dating, self-limiting beliefs can take many different forms and occur in many different situations.

  There are the SLBs that lead to inactivity. Because you don’t believe you are attractive or desirable, you pretty much keep to yourself and don’t talk to women.

  Other self-limiting beliefs pop up when you are actually presented with an opportunity: “She smiled at me and said hello. Should I talk to her? What should I say? I’ll probably just say something stupid. Maybe I misinterpreted her friendliness. What if I make a fool of myself? What if everyone sees? I’m just not good at this. I’ll just get my coffee and leave.”