Juggler Method wins the award for being the most like the movie Inception

Last night Erika and I had a new friend visit our apartment. She is twenty years old and full of conversation. She was sitting on our white couch next to Erika telling us about her world. I was lying on our white rug, next to our white table, drinking a glass of red wine - that’s how I live dangerously these days. The girl was talking about how guys try to hit on her in various ways and with various degrees of success.

I interrupted her. “When I met you at the coffee shop, was I hitting on you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure I wasn’t hitting on you?”

“No. Of course not. You’re married.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

I looked at her and remembered that scene in the movie Inception when Leonardo Dicaprio’s character turns to Ellen Page and says, “So… how did we end up at this restaurant?”

“We came here from…” she starts and then trails off confused.

“How did we get here? Where are we?” He presses.

She tries to recall but can’t remember. “Oh my God,” she says, “We’re dreaming.”

It felt the same way last night. “Think about it. How did you end up here on our couch?”

A few years ago I gave a talk in Boston. Afterward, a few of us hit the town. We were standing in a lounge there when an attractive girl walked by. She looked at me. I noticed this, and I smiled, nodded at her. Later we ended up discussing the porn she likes and then making out behind the grand piano. Then we got into a discussion that turned heated.

“I was the one who approached you,” she said.

I moved her out to arm’s reach. “No, you didn’t. It just seemed that way. It was an illusion created by the moment.”

She got that look on her face. The same look you can see on Ellen Page’s face in that scene from Inception. I’ve had thrifty minute chats in bookstores and the woman can’t remember how it all started. It just seemed to happen. Or they remember their first words to me but not the fact that I initiated the interaction.

This all comes out of being reactive to actions. People just can not recall exactly where it started. We teach this sort of reactivity at Charisma Arts.

I guess the question is whether this fuzzy inception-moment is good or bad. Neither really I think. It just is. Something to be understood and balanced against with your statement of interest. I remember when I first came around Erika where she worked. No one there quite knew if and who I was hitting on. That worked to my advantage at first but began working against me later on. It took several purposeful statements of my interest to make her realize what I wanted. “I think you’re beautiful in that dress, I think you move gracefully like a ballet dancer, I want to see you - Let’s call it a date…” I almost had to hit her on the head with a rubber mallet.

So now we have a pretty girl who has no idea I’ve been hitting on her. We can talk about sex and hook ups and threesomes all day. But she has no idea what I want until I say the words, “I want…” That’s how Juggler Method is different from that movie Inception. In the end we don’t want to be sneaky. We aren’t trying to plant ideas or ambush kiss anyone. We want to speak our desire, turn people on and have them build something together with us.