How to Pick Up Girls: The Success Factor, Part III

Note from Chase: this is Part III of V in our series on How to Pick Up Girls: The Success Factor. Be sure to read How to Pick Up Girls: The Success Factor, Part I and How to Pick Up Girls: The Success Factor, Part II first before reading this post, if you haven't already.

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We last discussed how if you want to be able to pick up girls CONSISTENTLY, you've got to have INTERNAL state control... we can't just leave something as important as the way we FEEL to chance.

Since we cannot influence our emotional brain directly and just will ourselves into feeling an emotion, we need to create the emotions we want through the other two parts of our brain… our logical and physical brains will be our detour.

We can control the neocortex by changing our focus… and we can control our reptile brain by controlling our physiology. If we do both, our mammalian brain, i.e. our emotions, will align with the other two.

1. Let’s talk about the latter first and have a look at a few examples of a change in physiology creating an emotion.

   Let’s say you’re walking down the dark street in a seedy part of town and there is a shady looking character on the other side of the street. You know that criminals prefer easy, defenseless victims, so you decide to adjust your posture and your pace to project an aura of confidence.

   You put on an aggressive facial expression and walk as if you were ready and willing to fight. You furrow your brows and start breathing more heavily. Your pace becomes stronger and you clench your jaws. Chances are you will start to actually FEEL aggression, anger and a willingness to fight the guy in case he should try to mug you.

This works for most emotional states we want to create. We can make ourselves depressed by breathing shallow and sitting down with a slumped posture, and we can make ourselves feel happy by putting a big smile on our face, taking deep breaths and standing up straight.

One of the most fundamental teachings of Tony Robbins is that we can make ourselves feel certainty by moving our body in a way as if we already possessed absolute certainty.

Here's the other mechanism you can use - for changing your focus:

2. A simple process in your mind can also trigger emotions. When you’re watching a movie, you might feel certain feelings, even though there is nothing actually happening in YOUR life to warrant that.

   The movie has no impact on you physiologically; it doesn’t change anything about your body or your posture. It also doesn’t have a direct impact on your mammalian brain – emotions are biochemical processes, and the TV set isn’t injecting you with any chemicals at all.

   But a movie DOES impact your mind, and your thoughts – your neocortex. And from this impact alone, all kinds of emotions can arise. People watch horror movies and get scared, they watch romantic movies and experience the emotion of love, and they watch dramas and are touched to tears.

   Not that events in the real world are actually more emotionally real than events on the big screen – in the end of the day, ALL emotions get processed INTERNALLY – even the ones that are triggered by real, external events.

   And THAT is the big breakthrough!

   That is what we have to work with.

 

Choosing Your Emotions

I started reading personal growth books and self help material back when I was a teenager, and I often came across the adage that “happiness is a daily choice.” And while that somehow seemed to make sense, I’ve never seen a book yet that really explained how exactly to go about choosing happiness… or any other emotion, really.

But with the process of influencing our mammalian brain through the other two brains, you can actually CHOOSE how you feel!

And that is AMAZING news. Because everything in life that we chase, we only chase because we want a feeling. You might want to win the lottery, but what you really care about isn’t the paper money, it’s the emotions you would be able to feel if you did win the lottery.

Or you might want to date a certain type of girl – but why? Because it would make you feel good.

What if you were to just GIVE yourself that feeling?

 

Winning the Lottery

Brian Tracy has a great example of how one can influence his own emotions by changing one’s focus, simply by thinking different thoughts. Consider the following three scenarios:

1. You’re having a really rough day because you’re completely broke.

   You’re worried about the future… life seems like such a drag.

   You’ve already sent out more than two hundred CVs, but nobody is hiring you.

   You’re already in debt, but with every day that passes, your debt increases, because you have bills to pay.

   How would you feel in this situation? If you’re like most people I’ve asked this question, you would probably feel stressed out, worried and down… maybe even anxious or depressed.

2. Now imagine that while you’re still in this state of mind, you receive a phone call from one of your family members, who tells you: “Cheer up! None of that even matters, because we won the lottery, and each of us is going to get 5.6 million dollars!”

   How would you feel NOW? Again, if you’re like almost everybody else I’ve described this scenario to, you will probably tell me that you’d feel relief first… and then, an incredible sense of joy and elation.

   You are FREE!

   Not only will you be able to pay off your debt and take care of all your bills for the rest of your life – you won’t even HAVE to look for a job anymore.

   You can do whatever you want with the rest of your life.

   You feel an immense sense of happiness and joy.

3. The third and most important question is this: What if it was all a lie? What if your family member had only told you about the lottery win to cheer you up, but in reality, there had never been any money?

   You would then have to ask yourself this essential question: Were the happy feelings you had been experiencing real? And the answer is, yes, the emotions were absolutely real.

   The second conclusion you will come to is that the joy, elation and happiness you had felt did not come from the money… because there had never been any money to begin with.

   The emotions came from YOURSELF… and they were triggered by a thought.

   This PROVES that you can choose how you feel… by choosing what you think.

   And instead of triggering the emotion you would feel if you were incredibly rich by asking yourself how you would feel if you won the lottery, you can also create emotions in yourself that will help your ability to pick up girls instead.

   Ask yourself – how would you feel if you were so incredibly handsome that you could have any woman you want? How would you feel if you were the best pick up artist in the world?

 

Inauthentic Emotions?

Now, you may ask me – but isn’t that inauthentic? Aren’t we simply deceiving ourselves… by being happy about things that aren’t real?

Well, the first point is that you don’t need to create emotions by thinking about things that aren’t real. The lottery winnings simply make for a great example that prove – emotions ARE real, even if the apparent cause of the emotion is not real… which also goes to show that what REALLY caused the emotion was not, after all, the external event – but rather, a thought.

But, instead of creating fake images in your mind, you can also trigger positive emotions by vividly remembering something awesome that happened in the past… or some inspiring goal that you are working towards.

In fact, all visualization should be done in this way… vivid and real enough to trigger an emotion. Only then will it pass your critical factor and go right into your subconscious mind, where it can do some good!

However, consider this: when a real thing happens to you that you deem to be positive, it's STILL not that thing that triggers the emotion… it's STILL the thought you have about that thing.

You also may want to ask yourself if you really want to depend on the real things that happen to you for positive states. I know that works great when good things happen and everything is going well… but, you know, shit happens!

And when shit happens, do you want to be in a shit state, just to be authentic?

Or would it be better to create an inauthentic positive emotion, which will then allow you to be more resourceful to deal with the problem… and turn it around?

In either case, as described above, you can always use positive memories or expected positive goals to create positive emotions without fooling yourself and being inauthentic if that is a concern for you.

 

You Only Own It as a Habit

You can throw all of the old conditioning out, all the ideas of chasing things, events and people to attain emotional states. Just decide to create any emotion you want internally, by controlling what you think about, and by controlling your physiology.

This will require constant and diligent practice, but it is absolutely worth it… because you will start to be so happy that you’ll think you’re on drugs. We talked about this in "How to Overcome Depression" - beating back the negative thoughts and replacing them with good ones.

And this does not only work for happiness – you can also make yourself feel motivated and excited to get something done when you need to be productive, or confident when you want to approach a girl, or enthusiastic when you need to make a sale!

The idea is to practice the beneficial states so much, so often and so long that they end up becoming your default state… the state you automatically go into if you don’t do anything to alter your state. In other words, the state you wake up with in the morning.

Make it a HABIT to feel great.

In NLP, they say the purpose of the mind is to seek out new behaviors to automate. Anything we have done over and over again for a sufficiently long time gets taken over by the autonomous nervous system, becomes a habit and starts happening automatically.

This is a habit to get into… because you only truly own a skill when you not only understand it, but also do it… and when you not only do it, but when you do it automatically.

When you’ve gone to what is called unconscious competence – you’re doing the right thing without even having to think about it.

 

Your Mind is on Autopilot!

The biggest challenge in creating a new THOUGHT habit is that your thoughts are ALREADY very habitual as it is. Researchers are now saying that 98% of the thoughts we have today are the same thoughts we had yesterday… and the day before.

If you’ve ever taken up a meditation practice, you know that we have a lot less control over our thoughts than we’d like to think. If you haven’t, try this experiment right now. Sit down for 10 minutes and focus on your breath and nothing else.

You will undoubtedly find that your mind is going to be dragged off every couple of seconds. Random thoughts of all sorts pop into your head – what you had for dinner last night, what you need to get done tomorrow, or an argument you had with someone.

You just keep bringing your mind back to your breath… again and again.

This is why meditating a lot is very helpful in taking control of our own emotional state: once the mind is off autopilot, or at least a lot less automatic than it would otherwise be, it becomes a lot easier to steer your thoughts and focus them on ideas conducive to the emotional state you want to experience.

Read that sentence again… it’s important.

Thoughts are really the dumbbells of the mind.

Meditation will also help to CLEAR your mind first, before you even start putting the thoughts you want in there. First cut out the negative stuff that doesn’t help you… then replace it with the positive thought impulses that will create the desired emotions.

And just like with meditation, you will have to bring your mind back to the thoughts you want… again and again.

The discipline required may seem like a big feat… but that’s not really the case because you start gaining momentum once you get started, and over time, you are building this all-important habit.

That’s why I liken thoughts to the dumbbells of the mind. Yes, dumbbells require discipline… but over time, all they do is make you strong.

Your mind is the root cause of all your problems… how you decide to think and feel about things. And just like you can whip your body in shape with dumbbells, you can start whipping your mind in shape with the right thoughts.

You can decide to look at any situation in any way, in order to change how you feel about the situation. As a result thereof, you will take different actions, which will in turn impact your results.

In the next part of this series, I go into learning how to apply this technique of controlling your thoughts into conquering approach anxiety; how to increase the power of your mental control; and more ways you can train your brain to turn you into a pick up machine.

Tune in next time.

Onward and upward,

Ricardus

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The series continues in How to Pick Up Girls, Part IV.