This is an excerpt from my recent book APPROACH HER LIKE CHAD, about the power of Stanislavsky’s ‘magic if’, an acting concept that will transform your dating life if used correctly.
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OK, here’s the deal, gentlemen – approaching an attractive woman with a view to seducing her, dating her and so on is fundamentally a performance.
That’s right. The interaction is not a ‘regular’ one, where you can ‘just be yourself’. On the contrary, it is a highly stylised dance for which you must absolutely be your best self.
This is why, in order to take a leaf out of Chad’s book and learn how to approach girls with devil-may-care nonchalance you have to get ready to behave in an actorly fashion.
It’s NOT About ‘Pretending to Be Someone Else’ – Not QUITE, Anyway
Right now I am suffering a barrage of silent criticism from guys who have read the last few sentences and are now fuming, incandescent with rage that I appear to be suggesting that they should ‘pretend to be someone else’ when chatting up girls.
The truth is that I’m not doing that – or not quite, anyway. But let’s dive in and I’ll explain what I mean. 57
For the most part the society that we live in is very big on authenticity – which you might characterise as ‘being yourself. Even over the past ten or fifteen years, during which time social media has come to dominate our lives, and all of us have the ability to create any sort of identity we might wish for ourselves online, the drive is still resolutely towards ‘being real’.
So much so that people who are discovered to be inauthentic pay a big price for it. Liars, cheats, scammers and fakes, once found out, lose respect and get excommunicated from their communities fast.
This has transcended what Lambo-flexing dropshippers are doing on Instagram and now inhabits even the very highest spheres of politics and global influence. When we look at politicians who have come to prominence and power over the past few years, particularly Donald Trump, and perhaps Nigel Farage in the UK, we see that the reason so many people like them is that they seem more ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ than those who came before them.
And people appreciate that.
So when we consider romantic relationships we imagine that the same ethos holds good. But it doesn’t. Sadly.
I’m not saying that women are attracted to fakers, or that you should lie to them. However, what you must recognise is that unalloyed vulnerability will not get you what you want in the sexual marketplace. 58
Presumably you have picked up this book because you are looking for advice and information on how better to approach women. If you were Chad already, you wouldn’t need to. You would already be confident, polished and able to meet any girl you liked, unafraid of whether or not she might reject you.
Since you are seeking information, though, we must assume this is not the case. So you are in need of a renewed strategy for meeting women.
OK then. This is where the need for actorly skill comes in. This is where the need to find a way to behave more like Chad arises.
And that is exactly what I’ll be teaching you in this chapter.
But before we get into technique, let me make it clear what I’m recommending here, because it might not be quite what you think. I’m am not saying – and nor would I ever say – that you should lie about the material details of your life in order to get a girl to like you. Not only would it be unethical, but you will probably also mess up at some point and drop the ball.
What I’m not talking about, therefore, are things like:
– Pretending you’re rich when you’re not
– Pretending that you drive three Lambos when you don’t
– Pretending to be powerful or influential
– Giving the impression that you are more important at work than is the case
And so on.
In other words, what this section is absolutely not about is trying to impress girls with false information. As I’ve said, I don’t condone that behaviour, I’ve never engaged in it myself and I don’t believe it will work very well anyway.
What this section (and the whole book) is about is learning how to approach better by taking a leaf out of Chad’s book. To that end, what I’m going to outline is:
– Behaving as if you are as confident as Chad
– Acting as if you have the abundance that Chad does
– Acting as if whatever you are doing has been rewarded by many other women in the past
– Acting as if nothing fazes you, including rejection
etc.
I hope you can see that there is an appreciable difference between the two lists. While the first concerns itself with what might be termed ‘flexing’, the second is more about aping positive characteristics.
And that doesn’t mean lying. If you act like you’re more confident, for example, what are you doing wrong? You’re not telling an untruth. In fact, you’re exercising a self-development tool that is totally valid: after all, ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ is preached by many a self-help expert.
To put it simply, this book does not require that you make up outlandish details about your life in the hope of impressing 60
girls. All you need to do is to turn up the volume on your more Chad-like characteristics so that you make a greater impression on the girls that you meet.
In other words, you need to ‘Chad up’!
How To ‘Chad Up’
Now we’re going to get into the specifics of how you can ‘Chad up’ when approaching new, beautiful girls you haven’t met before.
If you are at all interested in cinema and the work of actors like Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and even Edward Norton and Christian Bale, you have probably come across the term ‘method acting’.
Frequently, ‘method acting’ is used to refer to when actors ‘get into’ the characters they play in the most extreme ways possible. These actors live as their character both on-set and off, with all that entails. Maybe they put on weight, or lose weight. Or maybe they speak with the character’s accent for the duration of the production. Or they take on a particular mannerism or facet of disability.
Whatever form it takes, method acting is usually assumed to mean something more than ‘ordinary’ acting, since here it entails actually becoming the character rather than merely pretending to be him or her.
If you have read up on method acting at all then you may well have come across the name Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski, for Stanislavsky, who was a Russian professor of 61
acting who lived and worked in Moscow in the early twentieth century, is said to have been the inventor of method acting (and therefore a huge influence on all the great Hollywood films of the ‘golden era’ of the 1970s).
Right now I am going to introduce you to a particular tool that Stanislavsky created which I have found extremely helpful throughout my game career, and which will help you to ‘Chad Up’ in the most realistic way possible.
That tool is called ‘the magic if’
Stanislavsky’s ‘Magic If’
Stanislavsky’s ‘magic if’ is really very simple: it is the question ‘what if’ employed by an actor as he prepares himself to inhabit a new role.
What the performer must do is simply ask himself the question, time and again, ‘what if?’
– What if I was more confident?
– What if I felt good about speaking more loudly?
– What if I didn’t care at all about rejection?
– What if I just ignored those people sitting next to her and went and talked to that girl?
Hopefully you can see immediately how the ‘magic if’ can apply to areas relevant to dating and meeting girls. But what effect can you expect when you use it in your interactions? 62
Very simply, the ‘magic if’ opens up the mental space for you to see how you could do something even if it feels out of character or scary to you just now.
For example, if a man sees an intimidatingly beautiful, six-foot tall, slender blonde girl who looks like a Victoria’s Secret model it might be hard for him, off the bat, to run up and talk to her. But how about if he uses the magic if?
– What if I wasn’t fazed by her beauty?
– What if I was just the kind of cocky-funny guy who’d have no fear of chatting to a girl like that?
– What if I experienced no social anxiety whatsoever?
– What if I became more like Chad?
When you use this template, what are you doing? You are opening up the possibility for yourself to take a particular course of action without either committing to it or ruling it out either.
Once you’ve got as far as imagining ‘what if’ you were the kind of guy who’d have no fear approaching the modelesque creature before you, then you will most probably realise ‘well, if I were that kind of guy – Chad – then probably nothing terribly bad would happen to me. In fact, there’s a decent chance that it might go well.’
Then, once you’ve realised that it’s conceivable that you could make the approach without the sky falling in, it’s not that big a leap to thinking that maybe you should do it. And the great thing is that no-one’s saying you have to commit to being Chad for the rest of your life. It’s only for however long the approach takes. 63
– What if I was Chad just for this approach?
– What if I make like Chad for the next ten minutes, until I get this girl’s number?
– What if I do this approach as Chad, then if it goes wrong it’s not on ‘me’?
In fact, the very fact that acting ‘as if’ you are Chad just for the duration of whatever interaction you are in is incredibly powerful since you basically abdicate responsibility for what happens next. You don’t need to worry about whether you get rejected or whether the girls falls immediately into your arms because you were not being ‘you’ in that moment. Instead, you were acting ‘as if’ you were Chad.
Hopefully you see how this simple act of mentally distancing yourself from the action you are taking can be hugely helpful for doing things that right now you find difficult.
To read the rest grab your copy of APPROACH HER LIKE CHAD here
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