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Approach Course 1, Lesson 3: Changing How You View Yourself
By The First 10 Minutes Team
The Better Deal is a system designed to help men to understand that the world of women is not as black and white as we are led to believe. Now that you are changing your way of thinking it is time to understand that at times you may be influenced by role models that may or may not have your best interest at heart.
Let’s start by talking about family. Time and time again you are told by your family what to do and how to act. You watch and model the interactions of your parents; how they interact with one another, with other people, and if you are like me you may even have watched them interact in their dating lives after they were divorced. Regardless of your scenario, your family taught you by example how you should interact with women.
Maybe your mother taught you to always be nice to women or perhaps there are hundreds of other ways she taught you how to treat women, but what she never told you was that she was teaching you from her unique perspective. My mother for instance was very independent, therefore she taught me through example that women should take care of themselves, that they are in control of what is going on around them and that the men in their lives had better work from a place of niceties and courtesies. Great advice if you are married, but not such good advice if you want to avoid suffering from nice-guy-itis (take a look at those courses, they are an eye opener). Was she wrong or just trying to stop me from enjoying women? Not at all, she was trying to help me by telling me that women like nice guys, she didn’t explain to me what it meant to be a “nice guy” and that is the issue.
Your father and brothers may have taught you an entirely different set of rules. Unfortunately the set of rules they are working from are generally a hand me down version of the set of rules that their male influences taught them and with time this model may become slightly antiquated. And with the rising number of older singles, meaning men ages 50 to 70 who are experiencing horrid realizations that what worked in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s isn’t even applicable in today’s social jungle, it is clear that the methodologies and examples earlier generations have set for you may not be the best choice to imitate.
Remember this is not an assault against your family–they were taught in the same fashion as you–and the simple fact is that the society we live in is a moving target, we are exposed today to more information than ever before and women are not interested in the 50’s model of approach and dating. They need a man that offers a much bigger picture.
Now let’s move on to the Media. This is simple, sex sells. Therefore, Movies, TV, Videos, and commercials are built around beautiful, sexy people that are going to entice us to watch or buy. The personas that are created for these roles are idealistic and throughout our lives we are brain washed into believing that if we have the right looks, the right body, and enough money or stuff, things are going to be great! What they fail to tell us about are the thousands and thousands of just as attractive want to be actors and actresses that never even get into commercials. If appearances are truly the heart and soul of happiness, why aren’t all those people “famous?” You see ads on billboards everyday of beautiful people with glamorous smiles wearing or driving amazing goods and we say to ourselves, if I had that look, that car, that smile, I would have the girl I want. So we then sell ourselves short. We convince ourselves that we are flawed in some way and our self esteem and self value is punished. We compare our entire lives, all of our flaws to an air brushed photograph of a guy that doesn’t even own the goods we envy. We compare our skill sets to films and commercials, but we choose to ignore the fact that they had the opportunity to film, retake, and edit every second of their actions; that the star of those shows were chosen out of thousands of individuals to get just the right look and attitude.
All of this is to say that the influences around you and the beliefs that you have are the result of conditioning. You have chosen to believe your value based on outdated points of view or unrealistic and imaginary personas. There are more than 6 billion people on the planet; actors and famous individuals make up such a miniscule percentage of that number it is ridiculous that they are our basis of comparison.
Now, the fact of the matter is that women are influenced in the same way by their role models and societal influences, but the good news is that if you learn to present yourself in a manner that you stand out from the rest of the pack, the pack that follows the wave of influence, you are going to get noticed; you are going to be the guy that she is going to want to know. The other important fact about this influence is that women suffer to an extreme the same self doubts and self esteem issues that we do. Next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the magazine rack. Take a mental note of all of the magazine covers obviously targeted towards women and helping them to improve their looks and personal lives, to invigorate their boring sex lives or to attract the man of their dreams. Compare that to the number of men’s magazines and you will find a huge difference in the number of women’s to men’s self-improvement publications.
Can you say soap operas?
Mindset change four: women suffer from the same amount of self doubt as men, regardless of how they look.
This is what the Better Deal and this entire website is about, as you continue through the courses you will learn how to change the way you look at yourself so that all of the past and present influences that have not served you as well as you may have hoped are no longer the models you are trying to emulate.
Time to move on.
As you continue to grow and learn our methods you are going to discover that we can teach you far more than what to say and do in particular situations. The most important information we are going to give you is how you can change the way you look at yourself. I promise you that if you believe that you are genuinely bringing a Better Deal to the table than the deal that the woman you are interested in currently has, your success ratio with women is going to explode. Regardless of what opening lines or approaches you know.
The mindset change that you have to make is not too complicated to accomplish this task. First thing you have to genuinely accept is that who you were even just five minutes ago is not who you are now. We talk about this more in the confidence building areas of the site, but it is very fitting here as well. So many guys are stuck in the belief that who they were in the past is who they are now. This is reinforced when we choose to hang out with people who remind us of what we used to be or how we used to act, or worse, what we have failed at in the past. It is not an easy thing to convince yourself that you are not who you were, but we have a tough exercise for you to do to help you.
Change the way you look at yourself exercise:
This is a tough exercise because it takes some time and discipline.
Step one: Choose an area of your life that you want to be different. For example, you no longer want to be a couch potato; from today on you want to be the guy who goes to the gym 5 times a week.
Step two: Wake up each day and choose, “Today I am the guy who goes to the gym 5 times a week.”
Step three: Have the discipline to go to the gym 5 times a week.
Step four: Repeat steps 2 and 3 every day.
Now you may be sitting there rolling your eyes and wondering what kind of drugs I am on, but this is the formula to changing anything in your life that you want. The decision to no longer be the guy that you were is this simple. Now the decision is simple but it also requires a lot of self-discipline. For the first 30 days or so it will be a challenge to maintain such bold decisions for your life but after that you will look at your behavior from a completely different point of view. You will still have to choose each day to be “the you” that you want, but it will come more easily and seem like less of difficulty.
There are another couple of elements that make this exercise a difficult one. First, if you have any setbacks and revert to your old habits or behaviors it is going to be very easy for you to abandon the change. If you have a setback the only way to get over it is to decide to forgive yourself and more importantly decide again the next day to be the guy you want. Second, you are going to need to have the support of your friends. If your friends will not address you as the new person you are being and continue to insist that you are who you were before, then you must seriously evaluate the value of that particular friend.
Mindset change five: you are not who you were; you are not sentenced to a life of being what you were even just five minutes ago. You are who you create starting today.
This is particularly true as it applies to approaching women. Women only know “the you” standing in front of them. The high school you is not a reality to them. They are only going to be influenced by “the you” that they know and that you is “the you” that you choose to be.
This mindset change is what will help you to overcome your fear of talking to women; it will help you to stop that broken record replaying in your head over and over about how she probably won’t be interested in you anyway, or that she probably has a boyfriend, or worse of all that she is too good for you. With those kinds of thoughts rattling around in your head there is no wonder that you are nervous to approach women and, as you have already learned, no wonder that she picks up signals from you that repel her or make her question your intentions.
From today forward, you are no longer the guy who is a failure with women; you are the guy who is doing what it takes to be a success; you are changing your mindset about women and you understand that they are not the grantor of wishes. In fact, they are being granted a gift themselves, a gift in the form of a great guy who knows and understands how to interact with women.
As you continue to work on the Better Deal Components and the other areas of this website, you are going to create a new you. In reality, you are simply enhancing and emphasizing the positive qualities that you already have and learning to camouflage the areas of your life that may not be the most appealing. (We know that you are going to be working on those areas as well, but for now it is to your advantage to emphasize the positives and put the negatives out of the spotlight.) We call this “new you” a Unique Appealing Persona. The only way to help this Unique Appealing Persona (UAP) to be a success is that you have to change the way you look at yourself, you have to decide that the old you, the unsuccessful you, is a thing of the past and that today and each day going forward you are the you that you create.
Let’s move on to the next lesson and talk briefly about the Unique Appealing Persona (UAP)
