How NOT to be a cold approach weirdo

Please raise your hand. How many guys out there have made a cold approach and had it not go well? Be honest. I’ve made bad cold approaches. Anyone who’s serious about meeting people has. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to make social peccadilloes sometimes. But it’s not okay to be weird. I’ve seen too many guys be weird. There was the guy who was palm reading girls’ hands. “Did you see that girl?’ he says to me. “She was under a trance.”

“Uh, sure,” I say, while thinking to myself that the only thing that girl was under was an urgent need to get away from him.

First rule of meeting girls - don’t be delusional. You’re not putting anyone in a trance with your language patterns. Not happ-en-ing.

Another guy touches girls on the arm he just walked up to on the street. He thinks he’s introducing KINO. Wrong. He’s making girls uncomfortable.

Another guy teases a girl about her nose. He thinks he’s generating attraction. “I was talking to her like she’s my little sister,” he claims. Uh, no. She doesn’t know you. You’re not her big brother. Talking to her that way makes you seem strange and uncalibrated.

I told a story once at my Super Talk about a girl I approached. She was acting, in my opinion, inappropriately mean. So I told her, “You’re pretty smart… for a retarded person.” Ha ha. But a guy who was there went around after for a month opening conversations with girls by calling them ‘retarded’. I eventually heard about this and put a stop to it. “Noooooo, my friend. That’s out of context.”

I see guys jump in front of girls on the street with their hands out and yelling, “Stop!” This is some sort of pick up technique, I guess. It probably worked for a guy once and now there are a million men around the globe jumping in front of girls. Sure she will stop and talk to a guy - for a minute, because she’s terrified he’s the immigration police. And, as soon as she realizes he’s hitting on her, she might offer up a phone number to throw a dog a bone. But she screens her calls to block weirdos. So this may actually be a waste of time.

Girls will ask a guy what he does for a living and he will say, “I’m an ass model.” This was never funny. Cocky and Funny should be renamed ‘Stupid and Weird’.

Guy will talk about a girl to her friend instead of addressing her directly. “Is she the sassy one in the group then?” He says. OMG! This is  embarrassing behavior. Please, please, talk to the people you’re addressing directly. This is NOT charming. You’re not ‘freezing’ anyone out. You’re acting weird.

BTW, want to know how to spot a pick up artist wannabe? He’s over there with that group of guys - all different races and ages that have one thing in common - they’re all overdressed for the occasion.

It’s not surprising that these guys do weird things. They’re making cold-approach after cold-approach. There’s nothing in the world to make you feel like an outsider more than cold-approaching. You lose touch with the way normal people communicate. You stop being able to see the difference between enjoyment of your company and revulsion at your interaction skills. You stop trusting and developing your social instincts and instead rely on ‘theories of attraction’ and multi-step methods to guide your interactions.

Pay attention. Is the girl you’re talking with smiling at the points you’re making or is her smile frozen on her face? If the latter, she wants to get away from you. Far away.

Are her feet welded to the floor? That’s because she’s afraid of you, it’s not that you’re stunning her with your ‘tight game’.

Is she asking you about your job or where you live? That’s because she’s trying to move the focus on to YOU to get you to stop interrogating HER.

Did you pick her up, spin her around and kiss her before she knew what happened? I hope for your sake that her guy friends didn’t see that move.

So why are you cold approaching anyway?

A client at my Conversation Camp this last weekend had an insight. He said, “I’ve been doing a lot of cold approaching mostly because my conversation skills are still not what they should be.” Bingo. What a smart guy. I gave him a pat on the shoulder.

Rule: CONVERSATION SKILLS WILL GET YOU LAID MORE OFTEN AND WITH MORE ATTRACTIVE WOMEN THAN COLD APPROACH SKILLS.

Another Rule: IF YOU’RE RUNNING AROUND MAKING A BUNCH OF COLD APPROACHES ON ATTRACTIVE WOMEN IN A SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT YOU’RE SEEN AS A WEIRDO.

The way to meet attractive women and have them not think you’re a weirdo is through a warm, social approach that utilizes effective conversation skills. That’s because people trust relationships and they trust other people.

I’ll give you a few examples.

I don’t know what time you go out to the bar. Well, I like to go early - 5 P.M. is great. That’s when I walked into Spitzers, a bar/restaurant in New York City one day on a Wednesday. I sat at the bar in the back. There might have been one other customer in the room. The bar tender was a tattooed woman who I was NOT attracted to. But we talked. And as we talked, I charmed her with my conversation skills. We talked about our lives and desires, all the time laughing.

Two weeks later…

It was Friday night. I go out for a walk. I was not intending to meet anyone but my wandering-way took me to Spitzers. Through the glass I saw my bar tender friend. I went in and sat at her bar where she was working. Next to me sat two pretty girls. The bar tender was busy but she and I exchanged pleasantries. As I was talking to her, one of the girls sitting next to me was obviously reacting to our conversation so I included her and her friend in the talk. This was a warm approach facilitated by the obvious relationship I had with the bar tender.

The bar filled up behind me as the girls and I talked for half an hour. The girls decided to move on to head to a night club. They asked me to join but I declined. But before they left I turned to see who was behind me. There was a couple waiting for their chance to order drinks. She was mid twenties, attractive and he was obviously her boyfriend. I said to them, “These girls are about to leave. Perhaps you’d like to grab their seats.”

They sat down. I asked my bar tender friend to take their drink orders and the three of us talked. I confirmed that I was out alone that night. I also mentioned recently breaking up with the girl I had been dating for three months. It was a cool conversation.

Then the boyfriend, who was taller and more muscular than me, left to go outside to smoke a cigarette. His girlfriend continued chatting with me. At one point she leaned across and put her hand on my thigh. Her boyfriend chose that moment to walk back in. I was pretty sure that was unfortunate timing.

After a time, I stood up and slipped my jacket on. “I’m heading home. Nice to meet you two,” I said.

Outside I paused on the sidewalk. That’s when the girlfriend came out behind me. We talked about France. A few minutes later, the boyfriend walks out and sees me talking to his girlfriend. He calls me over to the side. I thought he might be planning to punch me. Instead he says, “My girlfriend is too shy to tell you this but she’d like to have sex with you.”

She walked over, “What do you think?” she said.

All that and no cold approach. Not one. A chain of warm approaches.

Another story…

I became friends with my yoga teachers. They are husband and wife and own the yoga studio together. The wife is quite famous actually.

One day I’m out to lunch with the husband. I tell him about the type of girls I like which are thin, young and fashionable.

The next day I get a text from him asking me to come to his office. I walk over and take the elevator up. I find his office and sit in the chair in front of his desk. He smiles, turns the laptop computer on his desk around so that I can view the screen. “You know my wife was a Ford model for many years?” he says. “So we know a lot of beautiful women. Many of them are on my Facebook. I can’t date them obviously. But you can. Why don’t you go through and pick a few out and I’ll arrange it?”

This is a good friend. A friend whom I made through conversation skills. Conversation skills are more important than cold approach skills.

Another example: The other day I was teaching a client. We were standing in the Neiman Marcus store in Hollywood. “I think it would be helpful to talk to that woman right there,” I said, pointing out a girl who worked at the jewelry counter. I could tell by his expression, he didn’t think that would be productive. He wanted to cold-approach hotties and this girl was well-dressed but overweight. I took him over there anyway. This was not a cold approach of course. She opened us. That’s her job. Approaching someone working is easy. They have to be nice. But making the conversation personal is hard. That takes conversation skills. So we talked and made her laugh - genuinely laugh. NOT laugh nervously.

A minute later another girl from another department stops by to join us. I think she’s hot. I crank up the charm. I focus the conversation on her and me. It’s her birthday. “Wow, it’s my mom’s birthday today too. So that makes you a Scorpio. Cool. I like scorpios. I’m a Sagittarius. I don’t know what that means other than I think I like shiny things. I like that ring you’re wearing. So how old are you anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Twenty three.”

“That’s a good age. I like people who are twenty three. Twenty two and twenty four no way, but twenty three yes way.”

She laughed. We talked a bit about her relationship. Boyfriend is acting kinda lame. Blah blah blah.

When we walked away my client says, “Wow, you’re smooth.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I AM a professional at this. But you can do the same thing if you want.”

A couple hours later the hot girl from the store happened to be walking by us as we were out and about. She waved to get my attention.

I turned to my client. Now imagine what I could do with that sort of relationship if I was single. I might not hook up with her. Maybe I would make her a friend and you know what? She likes me enough that she’d help me hook up with her hot friends.

“Yeah," he said, “Hot girls have hot friends.”

“Yep. I wonder if she likes girls too.”

KEEP IN MIND, THERE WAS NO COLD APPROACH. Zilch.

Another example. An attractive girl sitting by herself at lunchtime at Starbucks in London reading a magazine and sending off ‘don’t talk to me’ vibes. I walk up and talk to the mom and daughter next to her. This is an easy approach. They were open. 50 year old moms are easy to talk to. I joke around with them. The hot girl next to them grins at something I say. She was now sending ‘talk to me’ vibes. “Yeah,’ I said to her, “you know what I mean.”

She smiled.

“You have really nice teeth.”

“Thanks.”

We talked some more. She laughed. I laughed. I asked to join her for five minutes of conversation. She was happy with that. I sat and we talked for twenty minutes until she had to return to work at a nearby shop. She had chosen to spend her precious break talking with me. I think that’s cool. At the end she made me promise I would come come see her at her job.

A social approach will get you laid more often and with more attractive girls, or help you find the ‘one’. A social approach is what it means to think wholesale, not just retail.

A local waiter used to text me whenever beautiful women walked into his restaurant. Note that this was his idea. I was just cool with him. I made him understand that I liked him, I was fun and I didn’t do socially embarrassing things.

Think about it this way. If you’re trying to master cold approaches you have to begin anew every single time. You don’t build lasting value. But if you master social approaches you can start to build a network of people who will help you.

Next time you walk into a bar or a coffee shop spend sometime talking with the barista. Make him like you. That can be helpful. When you go to the bar, talk to people you would normally ignore.

I was with a client in the W hotel here in Los Angeles recently. I joked around with the cocktail waitress and made her like me a lot. I didn’t hit on her. I made her a friend. Afterward I turned to my client. “How would I approach those girls sitting over there?”

“You would walk over and make a remark about what they are drinking.”

“Sure,” I said. “I could. Or I could have Wendy, my new cocktail waitress friend go over and say nice things about me. Maybe I would send over a glass of water or something funny. In any case, Wendy likes me so she will make me look good.”

One day Dan Tena and I were in London and we were just coming back from dinner. There at the bar were three attractive girls. One of whom was hot. I waved Rodrigo the bar tender over. “Hi Rodrigo, can you do me a favor? Can you go give this to those girls down there as a gift from me and act like it is a big deal?” I pulled out a mint from my pocket - the sort restaurants give you after dinner and handed to him.

Rodrigo walked over to them and placed the mint on the bar in front of the girls dramatically. He spread his hands wide to add to the gesture then said, “From the gentlemen at the end of the bar.”

Everyone laughed at that and when Dan and I walked down there it was all good. Later Dan was gracious enough to talk to the other girls so I could sit on the couch and canoodle with the hot one. Fun night. And no cold-approaching. Warm stuff. Like laughter on a summer day, like warm chocolate cake. So much better.

I can give you countless more examples from my own and other people’s lives.

The great secret to not being a Cold Approach Weirdo is to avoid cold approaches when you can do warm, social approaches.

You can do this. Start to see people as investments. Make friends with gatekeepers. When I met Erika I knew I wanted her so I didn’t miss an opportunity to talk with everyone around her: the coworkers, the boss, the busboy, customers, everyone. I think they were as much into the idea of her going out with me as I was.

Ask yourself, can you charm the barista? Can you make people like you? Can you make people want to go out of their way to help you? Do you know how to carry on a conversation with anyone?

If any of those answers are no then I suggest you stop the Cold Approach Weirdness and get yourself to my Conversation Camp. Become a great conversationalist, charm people and leverage that relationship to get them to help you on your quest. Get to know what life is like as an insider.