From PUA Magnus. A must-read article before acting towards becoming a Pick Up Artist.
(or: Why the Community is BULLS**T!)
Naturals have few or no negative beliefs about women. They just understand the way women are and accept them like that. Frustrated guys have many negative beliefs around women and themselves.
When we start learning Pick-Up and Seduction, we start layering positive beliefs on top of our negative ones. This might turn someone into a Pick-Up Artist, but it will never turn them into a Natural.
A PUA has a bunch of positive beliefs and tactics and techniques ON TOP of their negative beliefs and self image. When the negative beliefs eventually disappear, they no longer need the techniques, and they become a natural. This hasn’t happened for most community guys.
It’s pretty much happened to me. Everything is so internalised now I don’t think about what I’m doing. I don’t even try to get girls these days. I meet women, if I feel like it, and I either get together with them or I don’t. I get enough interest this way that I no longer really feel the need to put more effort into it. At some point, I do feel like I might take another bootcamp or something, and spend some time getting really sick at pick-up. But it will be on a whim, for fun, not because I need it to feel better about myself.
Before I slag off the community too much, I should make it clear that it literally changed my life. Probably, it literally SAVED my life. Google ‘Magnus St Valentines Masochism’ if you don’t believe me. Before I found the community I had slept with one girl, when I was 22, and was basically desperate for any sort of female attention. By this summer, I’d slept with 15 girls through learning pick-up. Some of them are really awesome girls too.
However, I was already starting to realise that the techniques and stuff was really just a way to bring out my natural personality. If you have a fear of talking to women, there is enough technology in it all to make you feel secure enough to do it. If you don’t build attraction through your natural behaviour, it teaches you new behaviours. But you have to think about it. It takes effort, and it’s hard to be congruent with it all the way down. Every time I pulled a hot girl I’d be thinking “why is she with me?” “what do I do next?” “what is she thinking?”. It was really fucking hard work.
I realised that the girls I really liked were the ones who I could relax and be myself with. I realised that I’d probably have gotten with those girls anyway, given a few hours for them to get to know me, and a little bit more basic confidence. The community materials had only given me the ability to introduce myself to them and fake confidence long enough to feel it for real.
This summer, I basically finished tapping away all my negative beliefs and feelings around women, and around myself. Suddenly I’m meeting exactly the right sort of girls, in copious quantities, and getting together with them effortlessly. I have basically become – or am becoming – a natural.
BELIEF vs UNDERSTANDING
A belief is a thought that we are emotionally attached to. Beliefs are fears and anxieties. They may only be minor fears and anxieties, but they are basically the same psychologically.
Thought + Negative Emotion = Belief
it’s a survival mechanism. When we have a belief, we feel the associated negative emotion whenever we experience contradictory thoughts or experiences. This is why people get angry defending for example, their religious beliefs (ha ha or their allegience to one pick-up guru over another).
Beliefs are hard to change. You can change a thought easily. Just think something different. For example, I have a painting of a boat above my wall. Actually it’s a car. Actually, I just moved in, I didn’t put anything up yet. See how you thought one thing, and then another, with no effort?
Now think about how much effort it takes to get Billy wbAFC to change his belief that no girl will ever fuck him.
He feels bad about that belief, and that emotion is a label to the mind that says “Do not change this thought, or you will experience pain”. That pain is the pain with which he learned that belief in the first place. Years of rejection and frustration have repeatedly taught him that girls don’t like him. So he has that belief. When evidence appears to the contrary, he ignores it, because it doesn’t fit his reality, and he knows if he acknowledges the new evidence he will experience the same pain again. When someone tries to convince him otherwise, he will not be moved.
The theory of cognitive dissonance says that all stress or negative emotion arises when the world in your head clashes with reality. You can google this if you want to understand it further, but probably see this intuitively. You feel bad when you fight with reality. When you accept reality negative feelings disappear.
So a thought becomes a belief when negative emotion becomes attached to it. But that negative emotion is a sign that the belief isn’t true.
So if you believe something, you can be pretty sure that it isn’t true. If you only think it, it’s probably ok. This is the difference between belief and understanding.
Do you believe in the chair you’re sitting on? No. You just understand that you can sit on it. It doesn’t take any effort to believe that.
Sometimes beliefs are sort of true. I believe that if I turn the key in my car ignition the engine will start and the car will move forwards. However maybe one day the engine won’t start. That day, that belief will cause me stress – unless I also have the understanding of how the car works so I can lift the bonnet and fix it.
Getting rid of all your beliefs is also known as Zen. Or being Born Again. You start to see the world as it really is, and yourself as you really are.
Naturals see and accept women as they really are. When you are this way, nothing a girl does can surprise you or make you feel bad.
BECOMING A NATURAL
Don’t learn a bunch of new beliefs. Get rid of the old ones, it’s those that are causing you problems.
You might think that you change your negative beliefs into positive ones. It doesn’t work like that. We can hold contradictory positive and negative beliefs in our heads at the same time. Literally. You can believe one thing, and also believe the opposite of it. This causes you to become immobile and makes you stressed, but you are probably this way about a whole bunch of things and you don’t even realise it.
For every thought you have about a girl – look at the quality of the thought. How does it make you feel? If it makes you feel bad, it’s almost certainly false. Does it take effort to think it? It’s a belief, not a thought. Is that thought based on what you learned from a bad experience? Or is it something you realised in an insightful moment, something you understand, something you can just see or know, and that makes you feel calm and connected?
Ad: There are many ways to get rid of your negative beliefs, Tapping is the easiest that I have found.
UNHELPFUL COMMUNITY BELIEFS
I was working with an advanced student a few months ago, who has great game, but who was complaining that he wasn’t pulling the sorts of girls he wanted – the 9s and 10s. I asked him why he thought that was, and he said “Well, I’m always hanging out with community guys who fuck up my sets, and we don’t go to the sorts of places where 9s and 10s go”. So we tapped away the belief that he should hang out with community guys all the time. Then we talked about when he did actually see a 9 or a 10, what stopped him being comfortable around her? “Well, I feel like I need more practice”. So we tapped away the idea that he needed to practice.
What are the two main things you are told when you join the community? You need to hang out only with community guys and practice, practice, practice.
Practice is ultimately an unhelpful frame. The only reason we go out for ‘practice’ is to protect our egos if we are rejected. But that sandbox can clearly hold you back too, it certainly makes you less outcome dependent, but if you aren’t focussing on the right goal you’ll never reach it. If you let go of the ego then you don’t need to ‘practice’, you can just go out and meet people, and as you do so you gain ‘experience’ – which is what you really need.
But the biggest unhelpful belief guys pick up, and it’s not really even taught anywhere, is that you need the routines and techniques to make you more attractive. Most trainers actually preach against this, but still most students start to believe it.
The community creates change basically through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Changing the behaviour to drop the inner negative beliefs. This is fine, but it’s very slow compared to just dropping the negative beliefs in the first place.
The message here, is that you already have everything you need to attract women. You just also have a bunch of bullshit baggage that holds you back. The solution is to get rid of that, not to learn a whole load of new stuff. The new stuff is fun, but understand it is just a learning tool, and a tool for personal growth.
I hope this clarifies what you’ve heard before – all you need to do is Be Yourself.