Daygame Coaching (8-Feb)
Preface
This the third time I had cold-approached with D, but it the first time where I felt like I at least had some idea of what I was doing.
During the first two times, I had this unsolved fundamental problem of “What do I say?”. The first time, I basically tried to talk to girls using a pre-planned script. This didn’t work for obvious reasons. The second time, I had tried asking a question immediately after grabbing their attention. But then the girls would usually just object to the interaction and leave. My numbers were only from the biggest of “yes-girls”. The girls who were immediately attracted to me for whatever reason.
I was told to make observations and assumptions at the start of an interaction before the girl decides to engage in the conversation. Through experimentation, I eventually figured out enough things I could observe about any one women to keep the interaction going until either she engages, or she gave me an objection that I couldn’t overcome. I came up with my own quote (well, a derivation of another) that I drilled into my head:
If you think you have nothing to talk about, then you aren’t paying attention.
Once I started paying attention, I was finally having interactions long enough to interest girls. And throughout December last year, I was finally starting to get consistent dates from cold approach.
I mostly stopped approaching after Christmas due to the weather and other various things. But last week I saw everyone was approaching again, and was excited to start up again.
But unfortunately I was anxious, had weak approaches, and forgot what to say to the common objections. It seems the break killed my progress, and I felt like I was back at near-zero. So I decided it was time to ask D for his help re-evaluating my fundamentals.
Catching up with D
I only had 10 minutes to warm up with Rob, a new friend from Austen’s circle. We were discussing strategies to respond to typical objections. I only did 2 approaches in that time, both being blowouts from my nervous energy. Not a great start. You can talk strategy all day, but strategy does nothing for you if you aren’t taking action.
At our usual spot, Rob gets his first taste of D’s personality as he suddenly appears behind us: “It’s always so easy to find you, you glowing white boy. I can spot you from a mile away”. I introduced Rob and mentioned how he had been seeing success with through his consistent approaches. And how he was going on his first ever cold-approach date later tonight.
D followed-up by asking how I had been. I explained my situation and he said yes, you need consistent action to internalize your mindset before you take a break, otherwise you regress. I nodded - I had already come to that realization. In his usual D style, he unexpectedly pushes me into a girl mid-conversation:
“Excuse me, you caught my eye back there.”
“Oh…” She walks off. The third blowout of the day, and one of many others over the past couple weeks. I saunter back to D.
D: “Why were you scared?”
Me: “You pushed me…”
D: “Of course! You’re a white guy and she’s brown! Why wouldn’t I?”
Rob is starting to get a taste of D’s personality. I tell D he should observe an interaction from Rob as well. D spots a girl, and Rob goes off. She is receptive to Rob’s approach right away.
D gives me a look: “Wow, of course I found your boyfriend a yes-girl for his first interaction.”
I laugh. “Yeah, watch us only run into yes-girls for the rest of the night and learn nothing.”
But Rob quickly returns. “What happened?” D asks. “She had a boyfriend” he says.
D: “And your answer was…?”
Rob and I were just talking about this. My argument was that the “I have a boyfriend” objection basically meant “Not interested” (hard objection) so I never persist, unlike the “I have to be somewhere” objection (soft rejections). Rob’s answer was: “Well, I’m not interested in your boyfriend, I’m interested in you.” I’m not sure where he got this line- Austen does something like “Well, that’s okay I have a girlfriend”.
D explained that Rob’s line was too direct and logical. He says get the woman in an emotional state with something funny:
“Oh you have a boyfriend? That’s okay, I’m taking side piece applications”
Then change the topic, persist in keeping her in an emotional state, and she’ll forget about the boyfriend.
D: “But yeah Rob, she was into you. But remember: she can just open her phone and have hundreds of other guys into her as well. So if you don’t create an emotional connection, she’s going to forget about you.”
We move to grab a coffee. D pushes me towards another girl - I run up feeling a bit less anxious this time. I get her attention and open, but she walks off and it ends up being blowout #4 / 4 for the day.
D catches up to me: “Cuck”
My nose wrinkles - an unconscious sign of embarrassment.
D: “At least the stop was assertive. You caught her attention, she saw you were attractive, and she gave you an opportunity to hear what you had to say.”
Well at least I hadn’t forgotten how to do stops, I thought to myself. But I must still sound too loud and too hyper from my pent-up anxiety.
“But your voice was so low, pussy! She couldn’t hear you. I could barely hear you!”
Too low? I think to myself. That’s the opposite of what I thought had happened! I had always associated quiet voice = calm, loud voice = anxious. In fact, in an effort to appear more calm, I had willfully been making my voice quieter these past couple of weeks when approaching.
D mocks me in a quiet, mickey-mouse squeaky voice: “Eeexcuse me! I, uhh, just wanted to talk to you if you’re not busy”
I realized my mistake: You must have a commanding voice to get these wayward girls to stop. And in these noisy streets, a commanding voice needs to be both calm and loud. A calm and quiet voice is only authoritative if the attention is already on you. IE, later into an interaction or on a date. Basically, your tone/volume/pitch needs to be appropriate for the environment of the interaction.
D drives the point home: “When she sees that you’re just another quiet dickless guy, what does she do?”
“She walks away”
“Exactly”
Crap. This felt like the reason behind all my horrible blowouts over the couple of weeks. I was modulating my voice down; I should have been modulating it up. I could have gone home right then and there and would have been satisfied with this one revelation.
We walk to get ghetto coffee at 7/11. In the store D laments about his recent Equinox dilemma, then explains that he has not been seeing any masculine and sexual energy in my conversations.
We step outside and immediately, in typical D fashion, I feel a hand on my back as I am shoved into the middle of the sidewalk and find myself face-to-face with another wayward girl.
The Friendly Girl and Rob’s Lesson
“Excuse me. I was just stepping out of the Seven Eleven and you caught my eye, so I wanted to say Hi” My voice is loud and authoritative.
She was a cute girl, between a 7.5 and 8 /10. She smiles and in a very feminine tone gives an enthusiastic “Hi!”
Finally, an approach gone right.
Was an adjustment to volume of my voice all that it took? I scan her outfit and say the first point of connection I can think of. We have a short conversation about a couple of my observations, but she seems to be losing interest. I’ve been pulling; I find something to push:
“But your shirt, a Budweiser logo? That’s a bit of a red flag.”
“Is it? I work for Budweiser in marketing.”
“Wow, you must really like your job if you’re wearing a Budweiser shirt in the streets.”
“Well, I’m going to a company happy hour and I kind of needed to represent, you know?”
She asks me why I had thought it was a red flag. I said that this is Manhattan, and we do cocktails here. Beer is more a Jersey thing, where I grew up. Then she says that she worked in Jersey for Budweiser as well and is moving into the city, so we talk about his. The Budweiser thing is a unique topic that I stick to. We joke about a happy hour for a alcohol company, the temptation of drinking on the job, being a girl and working for a beer that you would likely see in a frat house, etc…
She eventually hooks by asking me what I do and where I live now. I never worry about these questions because I have high-status answers. So when those threads died, I got her number before letting her go off to her work social.
My past experience tells me I would have gotten a date based on this encounter, but I was out of commission for the next few days so I couldn’t follow-up with any numbers. But getting dates isn’t my primary motivation for cold-approach. I have a well-received online profile and could have gotten a date with a girl like this from the comfort of my apartment. Why I cold approach is for all of the self-development aspects that come from it: building social confidence, a consistent personality, projecting a masculine frame, carrying around sexual energy, developing emotional intelligence.
The problem with this interaction was that having a friendly conversation with a receptive girl on the street is part of my comfort zone. This runs contrary to my goal of self-development. Self-development does not occur inside your comfort zone - by definition it’s an expansion of your comfort zone. You need to step outside your comfort zone to expand it.
I stroll over to D to review, but already knew what the feedback was going to be. This entire encounter could be summarized as “I modulated my opener based on D’s feedback, and then I didn’t leave my comfort zone”. I only tried to “push” into a more combative talk with the red flag topic, but it was diffused. D looks at me and rolls his eyes.
“How was your trip to Mr. Rogers neighborhood?”
I laugh. “It’s hard! What am I going to do? Be a dick to someone who’s being nice?”
“Yeah, I get it, but you have no sexual energy. If it wasn’t your first real interaction I would have jumped in with this: ‘So what type of guys are you into? You like white guys who look like they just stepped outside of Brooklyn for the first time?’”
Damn, he delivers that line in a seductive way that makes it seem like a playful challenge rather than a dickish comment. I realize one strategy to break out of platonic conversation is to deliver challenging lines using a playful and seductive tone and energy. The way he said it, it didn’t sound like he’s being a dick.
D continues “If a girl’s not pushing back, I wasn’t sexualizing. Remember that”
Wow, I guess I can use that as a sign that I communicate an appropriate amount of sexual intent. I notice Rob is in an interaction, and D notices me noticing.
D: “Of course I pushed your boyfriend into another yes-girl”
We observe their interaction. It’s a very attractive girl clearly enamored by Rob giving him doe eyes. When it’s over they debrief.
D: “How’d that go?”
Rob: “Pretty good I’d say”
D: “Pretty good?? She was a hyper yes girl! You could have taken her home her right then and there man! She was literally touching all over you! She gave you so many signs she was ready to go!”
Rob: “Yeah, I’ve tried but I just can’t sexualize.” We have the same problem, I think to myself.
D: “Almost no one can. You’re have ‘just be yourself’ energy, and you’re getting numbers because you’re charming. But you’re missing so much of what she’s communicating to you because of it. She was practically begging you to pull her. But because you missed the cues, and didn’t escalate, you instead showed her you’re not a guy who can’t fuck”
They talk about the interaction a bit more as we continue on as well as the trap of running volume looking for yes-girls. I realize that I had been doing that, praising myself for getting dates from yes-girls but missing the bigger picture of self-development.
To me, D explains that my goal from here on should be to fight the platonic talk. No more Mr friendly white guy.
The second most attractive girl I’ve ever seen in this city briefly makes eye contact with me as we pass. I look at D. He nods, and I run off and catch her in the middle of a crowd.
The 10
“Excuse me, I think we had a moment back there.”
If you asked me to name something unattractive about her, I couldn’t. Looks-wise, she was physical perfection. While I normally do feel more anxiety approaching a more attractive girl, thankfully for some reason, I don’t really get phased by a girl’s looks when I’m actually in an interaction.
“Huh?” She says.
“I like your green jacket. It’s quite a statement”
“Are you from here or are you a tourist?” She has this stilted ESL-kind of way of speaking. It gives me the impression that she’s a tourist herself.
I snicker. “A tourist? No i’m from here. Do I look like a tourist?”
“Because men from the US, they like to…”
I had no idea what she was on about so I just interjected: “Well I came up to you because you were giving me the look back there. Where are you from?”
D steps in. During the first two times I was with him, I was extremely inexperienced and couldn’t hold an interaction, so this is the first time he engaged a girl with me.
D: “Aww, you two already fell in love? I saw you looking at my friend and said I would kick his ass if he didn’t go talk to you. And now we have this love blossoming on the streets of New York. So romantic! And in front of a dirty food cart, too, it’s just the perfect intimate spot for this to happen, don’t you think?”
Damn, he’s so imaginative and fun with it. Compared to my “Your green jacket is such a statement” line, it’s like I was reading a line from a work email and he’s reading a stand-up transcript. I learned how to make observations (ie, started paying attention), now I need to learn how to the make observations fun. I remembered an older pre-NYC lesson I learned: People will mirror you in all aspects of your communication: If you’re giving short lines, other people will give you short lines back. If you’re not not fun to other people, other people aren’t going to be fun to you.
“So where are you from?” I say.
“Ukraine. But I’ve lived here for 3 months.” she replies.
D sees that she’s interested in me. He’s not needed, so he slips away.
“Oh, so you’re working in marketing?” I didn’t know what a girl this attractive would do in the city.
“No, I’m a computer programmer“
At this point, I take the conversation in the same direction as the Budweiser girl. Stereotypes about being a girl working in a male-dominated field, about the guys working with her trying to get with her. She hooks and asks me about what I do. Then she says she’s late, and because she engaged, I say I will grab her number.
I walk back to D.
“D, that was the hottest girl I’ve ever gotten a number from.” This is the first girl where I would say I honestly wouldn’t be able to match with on an app.
“Your new look is doing you good. Good job with that interaction, but you still gotta sexualize.”
“Well I talked about tech bros slobbering over her looks…”
“That’s not sexualizing. You’re going to get girls interested in you just because of your looks, but you’re doing nothing for yourself if you’re not sexualizing.”
I guess then I really didn’t know how to sexualize in a cold approach. For me, sexualizing on a date means getting myself to feel that “smirking, post-coitus smugness” feeling while: talking about sexual preferences, talking about the experience of sex in general, getting my face close to hers then pulling away, rubbing her and abruptly ending with a quick peck, telling her about sexual activities I think we “might find enjoyable” and other sex gambits. But these would all be so strange to me to do within 2 minutes of meeting a girl.
So D explains what he means by “sexualizing” to Rob and I and he has us demonstrate. My takeaway is that sexualizing during cold-approach is as simple as communicating intent or getting close to a girl while holding intense eye contact and maintaining a calm, seductive energy. Most of the “routines” I would do on a date are too much. On the street, less words are better. It’s more important how you say it.
We continue.
The Friend Battles Begin
In the next 5 minutes, I have a 2 interactions with yes-girls back-to-back that result in me getting their numbers.
The first girl is being friendly, and throughout this interaction, it’s on the top of my mind that I need to push back on this. But I just can’t find it in me- I was being killed by kindness. She asks for my instagram, I at least am able to counter and get her phone number.
I explain my dilemma to D. He says that when the girl is friendly, you can directly call it out: “Why are you being so friendly? Don’t you have any spice to you?” This really resonates with me - unlike many aspects of D’s style, this is something I could actually see myself saying (maybe not the word “spice” though). D explains that it’s my responsibility to lead the interaction from “casual” to “fun”. I keep this idea in mind for my next interaction.
A blonde girl wearing all white in a sea of black. I introduce myself and comment on her standout outfit while gently tapping it. She says it’s a “Scandinavian” style. I see this as opening to move into a more fun interaction, where I would call her out for being too nationalistic. But she says she’s not from Scandinavia and instead from another country. But this twist was a different opportunity for me to make the interaction more fun - I made fun of her for being a fake Scandinavian, for being obsessed with Scandinavia. She says I’m funny and asks for my number because she has to go. I tell her to slow down and ask her what she’s rushing off to. She says she’s eating with family. I say that’s fair, but we’ll have to continue this conversation later so I can get to know her better. As she leaves I tell her not to eat too much salmon.
D overheard it all and congratulates me for taking his advice of making this interaction more “fun”. But he cautions me - her action of saying I was “funny” and then asking for my number was dismissive. He says telling her to “slow down” was good, but it would have been better to address her more directly: “Okay, but are you actually going to respond, or you just want to get me out of your face?” This also resonated with me somewhat - I would have accepted any excuse because I was scared to be confrontational any further.
D points across the street. I see The 10 from before. “Looks like you messed up. Your 10 saw you chatting up that girl”.
Lol, I definitely would have been mad if I could have followed up with her.
The Maybe
The next girl is an eclectic-looking Indian girl with a bit of an attitude. D later called her a “maybe” - it was the perfect opportunity for me to practice battling.
“You look very dolled-up right now. Where are you headed?”
Her: “I was actually working at fashion week.”
I branched out of this topic and teased her a little, but her attitude was showing. I actually can’t remember much of this interaction even though it should have been memorable because it was the only girl who gave me attitude (as I’m writing this, I am reminded of just how strong my positivity filter is to make me forget this interaction). But I do remember that I tried to get her number before she invested, so she asked for my Instagram instead. I gave my usual “McQueen” rebuttal: “Instagram, so you’re playing hard to get, huh?” which beings her attitude come out in force:
She squints “What’s your name?”
My logic brain lights up. Why is she asking me this? I pause for a little bit and just answer. “Dedifferentiate”
“Why did you need to pause? Were you going to give me a fake name?”
My logic brain kicks into overdrive. Why would I give a fake name? Isn’t that something a girl would do? Is she implying that…” this train of thought continues until I snap out of it:
“It was real, but I was thinking about it. You were kind of giving me a weird vibe.”
We exchange a brief few more lines before parting without exchanging contacts - her refusing the number and me refusing the instagram.
In retrospect, it was obvious what happened:
I was distracted/put-off by her attitude, that I tried to ease my discomfort by ending the interaction early by asking for her number before she was engaged
She responded to my McQueen line by asking for my name because I hadn’t build enough comfort/value in the interaction (she didn’t engage)
Interacting with a combative girl was too far out of my comfort zone for me to be able to understand this meta-interaction in the moment, so I needed to pause to think when she fake-engaged by asking for my name.
She calls out the fact that I was in my own head, which caused me to be in my own head even more. This is the opposite of giving comfort/value, which was needed to get her to engage.
D says I completely failed the battle. She has “female social-media ego syndrome”, and I needed to destroy her unearned confidence to overcome her attitude and get her in her feminine. Some of D’s ideas for battling her ego:
“You think you’re special for being in a fashion show? I used to bang models in my mom’s basement.”
“Let me see that!” Grab the agenda out of her hand “This is what you were bragging to me about??? Not impressed.” (But don’t do this - D warns. I’m not Him yet)
“Oh my god, did you dye your hair for tonight too?”
(Name challenge) “You got me. I have a lot of fake names. It’s only real if I like you”
(Instagram) “Instagram? I’m not interested in being another one of your cuck orbiters. Why don’t you give me your number like an adult”
I realize I am so completely blinded by my “rainbow positivity abundance” filter that I am completely missing some of these dynamics. And when I do recognize them, I slip into a logical headspace of “why did she say this?” and “what did she mean?”
Additional Lessons
The volume starts to dry up, and I have a few more short-lived interactions.
I run after a girl but crash into a trashcan before opening. My energy is off, and she quickly exits. D explains that I should have used the situation to open “I came to talk to you, but that trashcan was almost the end of me”. Own the approach, own the situation, and use them to start the conversation - an older lesson from D that I had yet to internalize before it was lost during my break.
I approach another girl but immediately receive the “I have a boyfriend” objection and I exit. And I have another approach of a girl who I can’t convince to not cross the street.
D explains that if you’re not being masculine + authoritative enough, they’re not going to stop. I need to approach my interactions thinking of myself as an authority of women. Our interaction is (probably) more important that whatever she was doing, and this needs to be made clear.
He says to be masculine means going after what you want despite challenges and to lead women to a better place. If she’s not a “yes”, I haven’t been persisting because I have abundance. With my abundance mindset, I had been inadvertently filtering for “yes”s and preventing further growth.
D explains how to persist in a calibrated way:
“Oh, you’re late? This is the City babe, everyone’s late. I’m late. You can wait here for two minutes with me we’ll be late together.” Then get in close to create some sexual tension to make the interaction more interesting.
The “get in close” idea was new to me for cold approach. I always see D being close during his interactions with girls. I always assumed this was just the position he ends in due to his aggressive stops. But it makes sense - getting your face close to a girl’s face definitely creates sexual tension on a date. No reason it wouldn’t also in the street.
I have a few more approaches that go nowhere but with a couple more lessons. There’s another approach but I can’t escape the friendly conversation despite trying to tease her multiple times. A couple minutes in I hear D scream: “Cuck” in the background. I roll my eyes - if I knew how to beat this conversation, I would. I eject. D explains that if you’re having friendly conversations, and not getting tested, you’re not seen as sex-worthy.
D has to go, so we head to a bench to debrief (below).
As I step back into my apartment later that night, I’m in my own head reflecting on my successes and learnings of the night. The elevator opens up and two drunk girls stumble out. Neither were as attractive as The 10, but both were more attractive than all the other girls I approached. They both look at me as they walk past. As I step into the elevator I hear: “This is my friend, she’s single and looking for a boyfriend”.
Damn it; I was totally caught off-guard.
I peek back and see the drunken friend looking at her friend then looking back at me. My logic mind is racing - Do I want to engage? Didn’t I talk to enough girls already? What am I going to say? If I spent more time at bars I’d know what to do here. Does it look desperate to even engage?
The elevator door closes and whatever opportunity was there is missed due to my indecisiveness.
“Welp,” I think to myself “I guess that was exactly the reason I went out today.” The only way to be ready for the unexpected is to completely internalize these philosophies- where your actions and reactions flow from your core, unfiltered, and you’re ready to go whenever you’re awake.
I stepped into my apartment, mixed myself a cocktail, started writing down the specifics of the day, and then fell asleep.
Takeaways
I needed D’s help to get over my anxiety and to see why my stops weren’t working over the past couple of weeks. It was quickly pointed out to me that the problem was simply the volume/tone of my voice. With that fixed, I got 4 numbers in less than 15 minutes. And based on previous experience I suspect 2-3 of them would have converted to a date. This was a personal record for me - compared to my peak in December, it usually took 1-2 hours of approaching to get a date.
With that issue out of the way, the theme of the day quickly became apparent: I had become too used to having “comfort interactions” with “yes-girls”. Many led to dates, so I would never bother to persist with “maybe”s. D recognized this, and pushed me to leave this comfort zone by persisting with “maybe”s, and also to try to introduce tension into a comfort interaction. But it became quickly apparent that I had almost no ability to deal with the attitude and testiness of a “maybe”, and I no idea how to break out of a comfort interaction.
Inadvertently, I had been filtering my interactions to only the girls who posed no challenge, so I rarely left my comfort zone of a having a friendly interaction during a cold approach. This meant I had basically no opportunity for self-development.
I believe my inadvertent filtering for “comfort interactions” dates back to when I began my self-development journey mid-last year. I came back from Barcelona with an always-on rainbow energy and began an online dating binge. I had an abundance of options and ended up looking for girls with a reciprocal energy.
But expectedly, a lot of these dates ended up cuck. To maintain this rainbow energy, I was filtering out negativity by just walking away. I became almost completely non-confrontational. I had this mindset of “You do you. I’ll do me. There are always other fish in the sea”.
But with my limited success from this strategy, I quickly realized this was becoming a “toxic positivity” mindset. This toxic positivity made me think: “well at least the date was fun even if I didn’t close”. But eventually the frustration started getting to me. I started to reevaluate my mindset, and realized that this toxic positivity had the potential to turn me into a literal cuck. Thinking things like “Well if my girl is happy fucking another dude, then it’s good that she’s doing what makes her happy” is the natural conclusion of toxic positivity.
It sounds extreme, but this way of thinking is the natural conclusion to drinking too much of the rainbow Kool-aid. When you stand for nothing, you end up with no boundaries. Unsurprisingly most of my dates post-Barcelona were cuck. I was realizing that rainbow energy is not seen by girls as sex-worthy (except for girls who think they’re so beneath you). And in sympathy to the girls - rightfully so.
So much as a positive outlook was important to me, and had contributed to my life success up until this point, I cared more much more about getting results than being seen as friendly. I adjusted my dating approach by being more disagreeable and bold. I started to made my sexual intent clear: if I’m not in her- she’s out. With this adjustment, I had begun to see much more dating success.
But clearly, I had not thought to also introduce this boldness into cold approach. It was apparent that masculine qualities such as boldness, persistence, polarization, sexualization, etc… were just routines I had been deliberately and consciously performing during dates. These qualities have not been internalized, as I was completely at a loss as how to implement them on the fly in the field. And they will never be internalized unless I take action to deliberately push the boundaries of my comfort with them.