The Suit Of Armor Concept
The Truth is that no one can make you feel anything without your permission. What someone says about you is not always true. We almost always react to what people say as if their accusations and arguments are valid, as if they could be true. This is the suit of armor concept.
As you improve with the techniques and strategies you will learn, you will feel your self-esteem rise, and this will fuel your progress as you continue.
Think of it this way: If a woman called you uptight, you’d get a bit angry, even defensive.
“I beg your pardon! I am no such thing! Why … I …”
The Suit Of Armor Concepts:
1. Protests and arguments follow. It’s an attack on your castle. Quick, justify yourself!
What if a woman used the same serious tone and called you a green-blooded Vulcan? You’d look at her and laugh hysterically. Why? Because you know it’s not true. It doesn’t even vaguely describe you. No attack on your castle. It doesn’t even warrant a justification.
2. So what’s the difference between these two situations? Even if the first accusation (you’re uptight) is just as false as the second one (you’re a green-blooded Vulcan), you secretly fear that she sees something – that she might be right. You believe that because it could be true, it really might be true.
The Truth is that we only feel a bit hurt or aggravated because of ourselves, not by what a woman says to you. Those are just words coming out of her mouth, and they might just as well be in Swahili. We are all defensive by nature, and we are always a bit afraid someone will spot the rust or chinks in our armor.
3. Have you looked over your armor?
Your armor is the completeness and security of your sense of self. When you have high self-esteem, your self-confidence is obvious. Your armor is polished, with no gaps or missing parts. You don’t feel as though everyone is jabbing you with swords when they talk, and when they do, they never penetrate your armor. You carry yourself like someone who knows they are well protected and don’t have to interpret other’s words as attacks. A relationship is nothing more than the place where two people’s self-esteem meet. The bristly areas of one will irritate the other where they are weak. You need to inspect your armor so you know where your vulnerabilities lie.
Sticks and stones won’t break your bones, because you know those names can never really hurt you.
There are several parts to self-discipline, which is really just the other side of the coin with Self-Confidence. The two are actually very closely linked.
The first part of self-discipline is your willingness to pay a price, to do what you need to in order to reach your goal. Will you lose a few pounds? Will you get at least a little in-shape? Will you curb your need to fart in public? Will you take the time and energy to go out on Friday to a ballroom dance class instead of watching wrestling?
Another part of this price is your persistence. Can you keep doing the right things long enough to see them pay off? Are you the kind of person who will throw a flowerpot of soil out when you don’t see the leaves growing right away, or can you wait and have faith that if you keep watering it, you will get flowers?
You’ll hear a lot from LoserBoy when you first start making these changes in your life. He really wants you to fear change, and old habits of thinking are very easy to fall back into.
Here’s a very important Truth you need to know:
If you consistently do the things that winners do, you will get the same results.
If you start eating right and exercising the way an athlete does, you’ll get those results. If you start approaching women the way I will explain, you will get more dates and more women in your life. If you start to take control of your thoughts and plan for your goals, you’ll get them.
The flip side is that if you do the things that LoserBoys do, you will get those results, too. If you eat donuts like Chris Farley did, you’re going to end up looking like him … or even ending like him.
The other part of self-discipline is keeping a level of control over your thoughts and actions when you’re with a woman. There are certain behaviors and patterns that are easy to fall into if you aren’t trained to recognize them, and before you know it, your game will be over before the quarter is flipped.
Reacting to a woman’s actions or words is the biggest of these mistakes. When you react, you go straight from Stimulus (something she said or did) to Response (freaking out, yelling, inappropriate comment). As human beings, we’re gifted with the ability to do something that animals are not capable of: We can insert a pause between the stimulus and response. In that pause, you also have the ability to think.
When you can demonstrate the ability to stop and reason, you not only make better decisions for yourself, you show a consistency and rationality that women find attractive. This pause will also give you the chance to avoid her testing you and evoking your anger. From time to time, a woman will do things to get you to react. It’s a control mechanism, and once you fall prey to it, she will know how to manipulate your anger if she wants to. Your ability to avoid this reaction is a challenge to women, and it increases their attraction.
The key here is to NOT react to her disposition or behavior. Act independent of it. If she snaps at you as if she has no time for your antics, smile at her and wink, saying, “You know how to charm a guy, I’ll give you that.” If she persists in bitchiness, you walk away, with a polite, “Gotta go. Have a better night.”
Some women hold up a cold exterior to see how you’ll react to it. It’s a test. It’s intimidating, and they KNOW it. It establishes early on if you’re the type who needs a woman’s approval to be comfortable. It’s a subtly coercive maneuver that many men fall into reacting to rather than acting independent from.
The ability to make a woman laugh is probably your number one asset. I’ve gotten girlfriends – and laid – more just by using this one simple trait alone, and it’s amazing just how far you can go with it. We all want to laugh, and stable, sane women love to laugh.
If you don’t have a well-developed funny bone, now is the time to work on it. Consider this: Not very many people are funny. I’ve gone to stand-up routines where I sat there feeling horribly embarrassed for this guy and his feeble attempt at comedy. I realized that true comedy, on the level of Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams, is pretty rare. So don’t feel bad at all if you don’t think you’re a one-man laugh machine. You don’t have to be a great comedian to get women to laugh. The interesting thing is that most women will laugh with you out of sheer nervousness; all they need is a gentle poke in the ribs.
Humor conveys many different things. It shows a certain level of self-confidence all its own. You can’t demonstrate a sense of humor without displaying a little confidence at the same time. It also shows you don’t take life too seriously, and that you’re not so intense that you can’t crack a joke about the silly parts of life around you. It lets a woman know she can breathe a little and not be so intense and on-stage.
The best kind of humor to use is teasing. You have to be judicious about its use, but a good tease gets a woman’s attraction started, and it also demonstrates a great deal of challenge to her. Teasing can be done as lighthearted fun, or used as what some refer to as a “negative hit.” Here’s an example of a light tease:
Women have been conditioned since they were little girls to respond to the male challenge, and we helped with the conditioning. Name calling in the sandbox (“Sandy-Pandy, eats the dirty candy!”), running away from their “cooties,” making them “It”. We were flirting maniacs in our youth. The problem began when we stopped using this skill and started to get wimpy, sending flowers and love poems. Women like the use of humor and teasing together, as long as it’s not mean spirited. Teasing says you’re not intimidated.
And if a woman doesn’t respond to humor, yours or others’ – if she’s really dry and unwilling to laugh – get the hell away from her. Can you imagine the next two hours, much less a life with someone like that? Please, shoot me now.
Women don’t need to be idolized or otherwise put on a pedestal. In fact, the ones that believe they ought to be are the ones that need to be knocked down the most. Underneath their bravado, in fact, the best looking women are the most insecure, knowing that they are appreciated mostly for their looks. Beautiful women often have the most fragile of egos, and they are most susceptible to doubts and challenge. These women believe in their power over men and respond most to men that they cannot easily conquer, the same way you respond to unavailable women. You have to realize, gorgeous women are fawned over and salivated on all day long. They’re used to it. And every man that gives the same dull compliments as the last guy is dismissed as quickly. To get through to the attraction mechanisms of the pretty girls, you have to do something that will show them challenge, and give them an opportunity to prove themselves. That’s what Jake did with Helena, and that kind of playful jabbing works. Beautiful women respond most to the withdrawal of attention, since it puts their fragile image most into turmoil. These are some things about the suit of armor concept.