You Must Practice Your Dating Skills In The Real World To Improve Them

The overall point of this article isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before, but I still need to talk about it. And maybe I'll throw in an insight or two that will be new to you even if you've already encountered this type of advice.

To overcome your inexperience and be more successful with women you'll need to practice the necessary skills in the real world. It isn't enough to just read about what you need to do to get girls, you have to hone the abilities through actual experience. It's one thing to know how to charm a woman on paper, it's another thing in practice. If you're new at it you'll make mistakes. You have to get better over time. You can't truly say you know how to do something unless you can perform that task in real life. Similarly, you must judge your current skill level by what you can actually accomplish, not what you can pull off in theory.

We easily grasp the idea that it can take years of practice to become a skilled gymnast or painter . The skills are very concrete and physical and visual. You would never think that someone could learn how to be a world class gymnast just by reading about how to perform all the moves. Interpersonal skills, of which dating skills are a subtype, are much more abstract. They're locked away in your head. Physically the act of talking to someone is effortless. As a result, it's easy to mistakenly conclude there's some way to dramatically improve your communication skills all at once. The hundreds of individual behaviors that produce social savvy have to built up over time like any other skill.

Guys will erroneously believe there are social tricks they can learn that will instantly make interacting with people ten times as easy. While some methods of socializing are more effective than others, there are no cheat codes. If there were everyone would know about them. Or guys may remember a time when they were temporarily more confident, funny, or outgoing than normal and search for an insight that will switch their brain into being like that all the time. You can't call up moods like that though. They come and go and the best ones are difficult to conjure up at will. Over time you can slowly become more outgoing, but not overnight.

Desirable mental attitudes must be cultivated over time as well

Part of the skills that go into dating are about doing certain behaviors and avoiding others. The other big aspect of dating skill is having the proper mental attitude. In fact some people will claim that if you have the right outlook then the more specific behaviors aren't as important. Some common attitudes people advise you to have are:

Helpful attitudes have to be cultivated over time as well. You can't just read "Don't care what people think", logically decide that would be a good viewpoint to adopt and then instantaneously alter your thinking. If that was possible everyone on the planet would be maxed out in every desirable attitude. You have to slowly build up all these outlooks through real world experience. To not care about making mistakes you have to screw up several times and learn firsthand that you can deal with the consequences. To become truly confident you have to develop traits and skills you can legitimately feel good about, and get real world feedback that confirms those beliefs. It's the same for the other points. As unsatisfying as it may be to hear, any trait or skill you really want you'll have to work for.

Don't make the common mistake of reading advice endlessly

As I'm far from the first person to point out, many guys who want to get better with women fall into a rut of consuming tons and tons of information about the topic, but rarely, if ever, try to apply and practice what they've learned to try to get better in real life. They may also analyze the information, or discuss and debate it with other guys. Practically it all has the same effect: You feel an illusion of improvement, but all that's really progressing is the archive of theories and abstract knowledge you have stored in your head. You're no closer to improving in the real world than someone who's read a dozen books on gymnastics routines thinking that book learning will allow him to perform the movements in reality. You can talk about the concepts or repeat them back to people, but you can't actually do them. And I think I've beat that point to death enough!

Common reasons guys do read advice endlessly and not practice enough

Why do so many guys fall into this trap though? Here are some reasons I think they do, besides from the general misconception I mentioned above about confusing reading with building skill:

They're too nervous around women to try and apply the advice in the real world.

This is probably the biggest reason. They'd like to try out all the stuff they've read, but they feel anxious. At that moment, avoiding those uncomfortable physical feelings and fears takes precedence over anything else. So they retreat back to their computer to look for more advice, better advice, that hopefully will allow them to not be nervous. But that advice doesn't exist, so they're forever searching. I'd be lying if I said this never happened to me. I think it affects everyone.

They think they can learn everything ahead of time and then go out in the world and be experts

This is a more specific version of the overall 'reading = skills' mistake. Some guys put off practicing in the real world because they feel it would be optimal to learn everything first. They think that if they learn as much as they can, when they do go out in the world it will be as a seasoned pro. That's not how it ends up working out, but that's how their thought process works.

However this can all be one big rationalization for avoiding going out because you're nervous. Fear breeds self-excuses like that. It's easier to tell yourself that you're just taking a little more time to study things before you head out.

Trying to pre-load your mind with information isn't effective anyways because a) you'll forget a lot of what you read, especially with no real world context for it to slot into, b) how you imagine the information working and how it actually is in the world aren't quite the same, so you have to start from scratch in a sense anyways, and c) because, again, learning a skill through experience and learning a concept through your intellect aren't the same thing. One is about memorization and reasoning, the other about execution and thinking on your feet.

They don't have a structure in place from which to practice

I think some guys would like to get out there but they don't really have a plan for how they're going to start improving. They don't know where to start. Maybe they have tried to get going but got just ended up throwing out ideas randomly, got no results, and gave up.

Other guys may know how they want to practice but can't for logistical reasons. They don't know where to meet girls to practice on. They want to go out to the bars but have no one to go with (going alone doesn't appeal to them / it would take work to get used to), or their friends only occasionally want to go out. Or the bars they do go to aren't very lively. I got a lot better with women when I was backpacking around Australia. The main reason for this is that I was always meeting new people and went out most nights. Back home I'd often only be able to go out once or twice a week.

They want to get better, but aren't super motivated

Even though it really made no sense to slack off, there were times where even though I wanted to do better with women in theory, at the moment I could live with another few weeks of celibacy. It was probably the fear in hindsight. It was cushier to hang out in my comfortable rut than put in the hard work of growing.

Sometimes I was happy to just plop in front of my computer and pass the time reading theories about how to get women. It was light entertainment, and I had no life, so I might as well have latched on to that as a way to pass the time as anything else.


Main Article Index
www.succeedsocially.com - My other site on people skills