One of the most overlooked ways to get better at dating is also one of the simplest: hang out with guys who have better dating lives than you.
Why will this help me, you might ask. After all, what I want is to have better women in my life, and unless they’re introducing me to girls, my friends aren’t going to make that happen.
It’s important to hang out with social beasts their mindsets and behaviors will rub off on you.
How does this work?
We naturally absorb the attitudes, thoughts, and actions of the people around us. It’s a subconscious process that psychologists call “convergence.” At Inner Confidence, we use the term “osmosis.”
Osmosis improves your social skills both directly and indirectly. The most valuable thing about mentors isn’t the direct advice they give, it’s the ways they indirectly make you better.
When you hang out with guys who are more socially successful than you, they provide indirect feedback when they respond to you. You get feedback on whether or not your jokes are funny. You get feedback on how interesting your conversations are. You even get subconscious feedback on your body language.
If you make a lame joke or tell a boring story in front of a guy who sucks with women, he might think it’s funny and laugh. He might laugh to avoid hurting your feelings. On the other hand, social beasts hold themselves accountable for the people in their lives. They won’t laugh if your jokes aren’t funny.
In fact, they will probably clown you by responding like this:
Repeat enough small interactions like this, and the feedback adds up to improve your sense of humor.
If your conversation is boring, a social beast will realize it and redirect the conversation to an interesting topic. If your friends are boring, you can bet they’re not doing that.
Conversing with good conversationalists makes you more interesting without even realizing it.
You also absorb better body language through osmosis. Ever notice how groups of friends often look alike? Part of it is their clothing style. But the other part is that they share similar body language! Humans are extremely social creatures. This plays out is in how our body language is shaped by our peers.
All social behavior is contagious.
Women judge you based on the people you choose to surround yourself with. Yes, the people who are in your life are there as a result of your choices. For better or worse, women will assume that you share the same personality traits as your friends.
If the guys you hang out with are cool, you are automatically cool by default. Maybe it’s like being in high school all over again. Maybe it goes back to the way our chimpanzee ancestors sized each other up. Either way, it’s a psychology principle you can understand and use to your advantage.
Dating is about having the right mental models.
Social beasts have been in so many situations with women that they’re able to recognize the right things to say and the right moves to make. They’ve done the wrong things enough times that they know what to avoid. Their social pattern recognition is highly developed.
These mental models are contagious.
Using osmosis to your advantage cuts your learning curve in half. The quickest way to improve your dating life is by surrounding yourself with social beasts who are achieving the goals you wish to achieve.
Consider the types of guys you want to be like, and integrate yourself into their communities by finding shared activities that men bond over. If you want to be more outgoing and funny, hang out with guys who do improv or standup comedy. If you want to improve your career, hang out with startup guys. If you want to be more dominant and assertive, hang out with guys who train MMA. If you hang around guys who are well-rounded and successful in all domains of their life, you’ll passively improve in your dating life through their indirect feedback.
“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future!” – a smart quote someone awesome said.
Everyone has a way of viewing the world that they take for granted.
You develop it through the influence of your family of origin, your friends, your workplace, the media- you name it. Any experience or encounter in life has the potential to subtly change the way you think the world works.
All these influences are something you choose, either consciously or unconsciously, to allow into your life.
The concept of a world view is crucial to designing your life. It’s “a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world.”
If all your friends are losers with poor social skills, that will rub off onto you. If all your friends are beasts with women and life, and business, that will also rub off onto you. Everyone’s heard the Jim Rohn quote: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” And everyone thinks they know what it means: “Yeah, it means surround yourself with positive successful people and your life will improve blah blah.” No, it means you ARE those people. You surround yourself with people and you fucking become them.
One dynamic behind the osmosis effect is that you slowly absorb the world views of the people around you. You learn things that you didn’t think were possible.
People in our current society tend to impose ceilings on themselves. It’s usually not external barriers that hold people back from reaching their potential, but the limits they set themselves through their beliefs about what is possible. They put limits on the things they can achieve, only because it doesn’t exist in their world view.
- Most guys today don’t think it’s possible to travel the world and work remotely with no permanent home.
- They don’t think it’s possible to consistently go out and have hot women dying to talk to them.
- They don’t think it’s possible to hit on women during the day.
- They don’t think it’s possible to always express themselves, and be honest and open with their personalities.
- They don’t think it’s possible to live the lives that they desire, rather than what their parents expect.
Through the Leverage Program, you learn that none of these things are true, and that you don’t have to accept anyone else’s world view. These are all limits, ceilings if you will, that are part of a standard world view. The most powerful way we teach this is by throwing you in with other guys who’s world views are radically different from yours, especially in how the view and achieve success.
You should constantly be challenging every element of your world view, the same way a scientist constantly rethinks everything he assumes he knows. Are your beliefs in place because you’ve experienced them and tested them for yourselves? Or are they there because you learned them by osmosis from society and never bothered to examine them.
Any limits you believe you have are a part of your world view. They can be tested. They can be challenged. They can be pushed through osmosis.
