@barneystin,
A big goal of mine this year is to upgrade my fundamentals(mostly in terms of looks).
Good goal to have, but...
I have bad teeth (chipped and gaps), skin isn't the smoothest and I'm fairly jacked but stand to gain a bit more muscle and improve my style. I've started working on all 4 of these and should see notable results by the end of the year. I just have these mental block now when talking to girls that it's not worth trying since my looks aren't where i want them to be. I do genuinely think i wouldn't have to put in as much work (approach as many girls for example) on a night out before i find a girl who easily invests and hooks after this transformation but I also don't want to stop gaming so I won't get rusty.
The problem with the "magic transformation" hopes is reality tends to dash them pretty quick.
You go "monk mode" for a year or more, which feels good, because you are letting yourself off the hook of the stressful thing (dealing with rejections) while telling yourself you'll only get better results in the end. Then you come out of monk mode, feeling like a brand new man, start approaching, get a few rejections, and it utterly wrecks you.
Once you're out of the field you aren't getting checked by reality anymore, so fantasy takes over. For incels, it's doom-and-gloom fantasies. But for monk mode guys, it's success fantasies. "Wow, I am getting so hot... I'm gonna get back in-field and the girls are gonna DROOL. They'll be ALL OVER ME!" As soon as reality pops that bubble it leads to some big self-doubt. Even if you do see an improvement in results, it's never as big as you were hoping for, and then all the questioning and hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing starts.
Rejection never goes away. Focus should be on building resilience:
Resilience: it’s your ability to take a hit (rejection) and keep going. The more resilient you are, the better your odds get with girls. This week I’ve talked about the beginning being the hardest part, and about the belief some (many?) men hold that women are evil, due to bad experiences with...
www.girlschase.com
Learning to ping more if you want to reduce rejection by checking for interest levels first:
Before you approach a girl, test her for interest. By doing this – using ‘pings’ – you can virtually eliminate rejection, and find many more yesses. One of difference between most smooth cold approach practitioners versus your average man on the street running up to a woman he finds attractive...
www.girlschase.com
Then just finding more ways to build positive reference experiences:
The man who excels with women is the one who possesses enough very positive reference experiences with them. These SHAPE his mind & behavior toward women! Want to know an absolutely ENORMOUS secret behind every guy who’s successful with women? The BIG secret behind guys who are ‘naturals’ who...
www.girlschase.com
When you're out of the game you are building NO reference experiences, which means you are not getting better.
The other problem with monk mode is you're not getting feedback.
I have changed a lot of things about my appearance over the years. Many of them I started off thinking, "Man, chicks are gonna love this!" but the reaction is muted or nil. Conversely, sometimes you will try something out, thinking, "This is kind of cool," and then you get a very strong reaction from a few girls, and are like, "Whoa, okay. Is this the new haircut/beard/jacket/etc.? Or is it just random good luck?" If you aren't getting feedback though you just don't know.
You need to be very careful assuming what women are going to care about. No one pays as much attention to you as you do. You might think your chipped teeth and smaller muscles are hurting you with girls, but I bet you most girls don't much care. SOME girls probably care... different women care about all kinds of different things. But if 2 out of 100 girls you meet rejects you because "Ew, his tooth is chipped" and another 3 out of 100 rejects you because "I only date guys more swoll than that", it's not nothing, and worth fixing if you want to, but taking a year off is going to lead to some BIG hopes that will be very disappointed.
Has anyone here been through something similar? I'm tired of going through the motions with multiple girls and not having much to show for it at the end of the night. I've had a couple same night lays and i've historically been good at first-date/second-date lays whenever i go on dates. I just think my stunted/slow progress in seduction is beginning to affect my self esteem/love for the game. From what an outside perspective, i'm doing pretty good in life but not being as good as i want to be in seduction makes it feel like i suck in all aspects. It's why I'm considering a break.
A lot of guys who take breaks due to "not progressing fast enough" don't come back.
When your last memory of something was "Well that didn't work as well as I thought it would" you aren't really so motivated to get back to it.
Usually the "taking a break due to slowness of progression" guys end up meeting a girl through social circle using whatever skills they developed through cold approach and get into an LTR. You talk to them years later and they all have the same story "It's okay with this girl, she's really sweet, but not the best, so I'm still thinking about going back to cold approach someday." Then they marry the girl. Which, I mean... that's fine... everyone has his life path.
If you want to make cold approach work, the solution is to figure out what's not working and tackle that first.
e.g., if girls are not hooking -- are you the kind of guy that if YOU met you randomly, you'd be like, "Fuck YEAH I wanna talk to this guy!"? For instance:
- Do you come in with GREAT, positive, infectious energy?
- Do you quickly make people feel like you 'get' them right away?
- Do you have a good sense of humor and jokes/teases people enjoy?
- Do you tell interesting stories that hook people in and get them engaging with you?
- Are you good at getting investment and getting them to move with you and start complying with you?
- Do you build social proof/preselection and take over the venue looking like Mr. Cool & Well-Connected?
Let's forget about banging girls. Are the girls you meet with boyfriends trying to be buddies with you and keep you in their networks because you're too valuable a guy to let go?
None of that has to do directly with looks. Looks serve to grease the wheels for the connection. e.g., if you come in with great energy but you're ugly as sin, she's going to be skeptical for a while longer before she lets herself get carried away with it, then may have female state control kick in later if you're not doing a good job disarming that (e.g., "This guy is so funny and sexy... wait, I can't go with a guy like this, can I?" etc.).
For context, here's data from my night out yesterday. I wasn't feeling the best health wise but I went out and approached a couple of girls because I was bored. Here's how they went(not in order):
Girl 1 - we just started building rapport when her friends dragged her away. I didn't get the vibe that she was interested but it's one of the situations that I might have turned around if I had more time
Girl 2 - We got into some fun conversation but she had a boyfriend
Girl 3 - We got into some fun conversation but she also had a boyfriend
Girl 4 - too drunk but seemed into me. She was too drunk though so it was a dead end
Girl 5 - she seemed a bit interested and we were building some rapport when her friends dragged her away
Girl 6 - ignored me on the open
Girl 7- Seemed a bit interested at first but then started ignoring me
This was one of my worse nights but my nights usually go like this except I get a couple more girls who I take things farther with (deep diving, escalation or number close if logistics are bad, the pull happens on the rare occasion that i get lucky)
I've been doing some troubleshooting to figure out what i'm doing wrong and all I can think about is my looks but those take time to develop. What can I do in the short term?
Two fun conversations, followed by two girls who were interested, and that's one of your worst nights? (Chase quietly burns all records of his most terrible nights out)
My suspicion is the "worst night" emotion comes from the last girl. Having a girl seem interested then switch to ignoring you is one of those mystifying gut-punch things. It happens when you fail to connect with her properly. It will not stop happening even if you become The Sexiest Man In the World. That will help some, but if your connection game sucks, it is going to keep happening (and then maybe you will conclude you must need even bigger muscles, or maybe a mohawk or some colorful tattoos!).
Anyway, my general rule, for me personally, has long been "It takes 12 approaches to find a girl you can pull that day/night." Sometimes you get her in approach #1 or 2, sometimes you make 15 approaches and get nothing, but on average if you target 12 approaches in an outing you've got a pretty solid chance of a very strong hook / girl you can pull. So that is my personal metric: "Not concluding this is an 'off' day/night before I've made 12 approaches." If it's anything under 12, IMO, then it's just random variation -- string of good luck or bad luck, it could be either, but nothing conclusive before #12.
Maybe the girl you would've pulled on that bad night out of yours was Girl #11 that night -- but you stopped at girl #7.
That's just how it goes with the game.
It is forever a numbers game!
Chase