#Interview: A Hot Biopsychologist Discusses Social Dynamics

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Pablo Martinez/ Jordan Harbinger

Thu-Anh (affectionately known as “T”) met AJ and Jordan while attending the University of Michigan in 2006, after finishing her degree in Biopsychology and Cognitive Sciences. In 2008, she started working with The Art of Charm to leverage this degree and help provide a female perspective on social dynamics.

Pablo: So what’s the biggest mistake that men make when trying to get the girl?

Thu-Anh: In general, I see men making most of their mistakes in the first couple minutes of a conversation – during the all-important “first impression”.  Personally, I believe that the worst of these mistakes is giving off a “creepy” vibe

Pablo: A lot of girls say that guys are “creepy”, what exactly do they mean by that?

Thu-Anh: I believe that “creepy” really is in the eye of the beholder.  In my opinion, most women use the word to describe an unwanted or awkward advance from a man. Often times, the creepiness comes before the guy even opens his mouth and doesn’t really have much to do with the words he is saying. 

If you ask most women that question, they might not have the same answer— they’ll simply tell you that they got a “bad vibe” from a guy – that it’s a “gut" instinct.  Now, when most people say they have a “gut” instinct, what they are really saying is that they are reading a situation from their subconscious.  You see, 90% of our perception comes from our subconscious, so often, when a woman has a strong initial reaction to something, it’s her subconscious mind making a snap judgment on the situation.  Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal coined a term for this that they called “thin-slicing”, and that’s a great example for what’s going on here.  Women are constantly “thin-slicing” men, and that’s why they get these instant reads. 

Pablo: “Thin-slicing”…very interesting, didn’t Malcolm Gladwell write a book about that? 

Thu-Anh: He did, Gladwell’s Blink is a great overview of the process of “thin-slicing”. 

Pablo: Can you give us an overview of “thin-slicing”?

Thu-Anh: Sure.  Human beings have evolved over the past 100,000 or so years, and along the way our subconscious brain learned to recognize subtle patterns in our environment to help us make quick decisions.  This would have been extremely helpful 50,000 years ago when early man was forced to react quickly to a chaotic landscape where he had to deal with lots of complicated and potentially dangerous information. 

Our unconscious thin-slices the world around and our brains rely on those split-second decisions to form opinions on people, places and things that we have just encountered.  And the most amazing thing about thin slicing is that we don’t even realize we are doing it!  These impressions take place purely in the subconscious and often occur within a fraction of a second.

Pablo: So how exactly does “thin-slicing” apply to a man’s first introduction to a woman?

Thu-Anh: Well, it’s important to realize that a woman’s social instinct is generally much stronger than a man’s.  She is much better at reading subtle cues of body language, voice tonality, eye contact and the like.  And since she has the job of sifting through potential mates quickly, she is much more likely to “thin-slice” you.  So based on the theory of “thin-slicing” there definitely is some truth to the old urban legend that “a woman knows if she will sleep with a man within 10 seconds of meeting him”.  Actually, a more accurate description would be that “a woman knows if she WON’T sleep with a man within 10 seconds of meeting him.

Pablo: So what’s the key to make sure that she “thin-slices” you in a good way?

Thu-Anh: In a nutshell:  Body language.

Pablo: So it’s all about body language?

Thu-Anh: Absolutely.  A lot of guys worry about what they should say when they first meet a women.  But the truth is that how you act is far more important than what you say.  There is an old study from UCLA that says that 93% of communication is non-verbal.  Now, this study is often misunderstood, so while that number might not be 93%, it’s still safe to say that your non-verbal communications – body language and voice tonality – are still an extremely important part of the attraction process.  And this is especially true when it comes to first impressions – as she has already made a judgment about you before you’ve had the chance to say anything.

Pablo: Interesting, what are some important fundamentals of body language?

Thu-Anh: Well, at The Art of Charm, we focus heavily on body language – not only for the first impression, but also during conversations with women.  But for now, here are some easy tips to make a good first impression.  

1. The first fundamental is smiling – this is an easy one...always remember to smile

2. The next is having high energy – I’m oversimplifying here, but the gist is to be upbeat, positive and happy when you’re out

3. Third, we have eye contact – Don‘t be scared of making eye contact; feel comfortable doing it and know when to take it away.

4. Fourth, have good posture and walk with purpose –keeping your back straight and your chin up.

5. Fifth is to have a confident mindset.  We have a saying “lead the mind and the body will follow”.  So if you have a confident mindset, that will “bleed” through to having confident body language.

For more tips on body language, check this out!

Pablo: Great, any other thoughts or tips?

Thu-Anh: Absolutely, we have a great (and free) meetup group in Los Angeles that deals with all of this stuff, go to www.afterhello.com to check it out

#nerdsunite

#Question: Would Your Fifteen Year Old Self Love the Women You are With?

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Jordan Harbinger

Imagine if you will, that you could go back in time and be fifteen years old again.

Now, what if you had a crystal ball and could see into the future. And in doing so, what if you could see yourself as you are today?

How would the fifteen-year-old version of you react? What would he want to say to you?  Whether you are now 18, 25, 35, 45, 70 or anywhere in between, my question to you is a simple one: Would the fifteen year old version approve?

Well, depending on who your were at age fifteen, the answer to that question could vary wildly. What’s more, who you are TODAY would no doubt affect that answer even more dramatically.  Let’s face it. All of us have certain hopes and dreams at age fifteen that we’d love for the adult version of our respective selves to make good on.

Here are some areas that your fifteen year old self might key in on were he to steal a glimpse into the future:
1) Job
So did that exciting career happen for you? Do you wake up in the morning excited to take on the world or are you living for the weekend from paycheck to paycheck? Are you changing the world with what you do or are you chasing greed? Do you have ambition or are you devoid of a passionate mission that stirs your soul?
 

2) Knowledge and Wisdom
Did you get the education you always hoped for? Do you have the skills necessary to be amazing at what you do? Have you absorbed from life’s experiences what you should have in order to make solid, well-informed, and wise decisions?
 

3) Lifestyle
Are you living the life that you always thought the freedom of adulthood would afford you? Did you buy the plane tickets and boldly see the wide world with your own eyes as you always dreamed of doing? Are you fearlessly pursuing the hobbies and accomplishments therein that you always swore you’d partake of once you got out from under your parents’ roof? Or are you STILL under your parent’s roof?

4) Health/Fitness
Did you maintain your athletic physical shape? If you were overweight or underdeveloped in school, did you transform yourself as you matured into the man you always wanted to be physically? Is your state of health directly attributable to the lifestyle you’ve lived? If so, is that a good thing?

5) Interests
Okay, be honest with yourself. When you were fifteen and immersed in youth culture, you probably knew what cool was, even if you weren’t exactly there just yet. Do you still? Now that you make your own decisions as an adult, are your interests, well, interesting? Granted, your fifteen year old self may not have been evolved enough to understand how cool it is at age 30 to know wine (and notwithstanding Gary Vaynerchuk, who did)? Nonetheless, your fifteen year old self has his finger on the pulse of whether you got “old” prematurely or not, doesn’t he?
 

6) Stuff
If you had posters of Audi Quattro rally cars on your wall as a teenager, did you make good on parking an RS4 in your driveway as an adult yet? Did you win the trophies, earn the certificates, and collect the gadgets?

7) Friends

Who are you hanging out with these days? Would the fifteen year old version of you just as soon run and hide as be associated with them or would he think you have kick-ass friends?

 Women
Okay, this one really is the linchpin, the real “kicker,” isn’t it? What kind of women are in your life? Would you blow the mind of the fifteen year old version of you, or would he instead start cherishing the time he spent with his little sophomore girlfriend because he fears she’s the cutest thing he’s ever going to have the chance to associate with?

So what’s the verdict? Is your fifteen year old self giving you high fives and hand pounds or have you humiliated him?  Only you can answer that question. But here’s why this is so blasted important to consider, even beyond the motivational aspect of it all.

Ready?

My firmly held belief is that high-quality women are evaluating you very much with the same yardstick that the fifteen-year-old version of you would.

Seriously.

Sure, those great women aren’t exactly fifteen years old. But women–creatures of passion, idealism, boundless energy, and a quest for fun such that they are, desire a man who understands ambition, leadership, wisdom and adventure.  Rifle through the checklist, and you’ll see that your fifteen year old self’s aspirations and those of a great woman for you are strikingly similar.

So do your fifteen-year-old self proud and attract great women in return. Both are depending on you for greatness.

To learn more about how to meet & attract women, check out the Toolbox over at the Pick Up Podcast!

#nerdsunite

#Fact: Approach That Attractive Stranger and Meet Her. She is Just a Person.

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Jordan Harbinger

Have you ever seen a woman when you’re standing in a bar, or standing in Whole Foods, or a coffee shop? It doesn’t really matter where you are, but then your mind takes over  the fantasy part of your mind and you start manufacturing an entire story about her? You start putting her up on this pedestal.  And women do the same exact thing: they will see a guy and they won’t smile at him because they think, maybe he’s the one! Oh man, I like him.

How do you like somebody that you’ve never spoken to before?  That’s the most ridiculous concept in the entire world, and it’s something that everybody needs to get over. You like somebody? You like the way they look?  Let’s break it down into what it really is.

You see someone who is physically appealing to you, so you look at them from across the room and the first thing that triggers in your mind, the only thing that should trigger in your mind is that you like the way they look. That’s it.

You don’t like them; you don’t even know what they’re about. The woman or man that you’re looking at could have a big huge piece of broccoli between their teeth, a booger hanging out of their nose, or breath that would absolutely rival your dog’s on his worst day.

Yet you’ve built them up as this incredible fantasy before you even talk to them. You build them up as something; maybe they are the person who is going to rescue you from your single hell. You hope that this is the last person that you ever need to talk to again, because you are just so sick and tired of being single.

But the bottom line is that the stranger that you’re looking at is just that: a stranger, the physical image of who they are. It might as well be just a photograph. If you start manufacturing this entire fantasy about who they are, you’re not even noticing anything about what they might be doing.  You’re not noticing what they are doing, you’re not noticing their body language, and you’re not noticing any emotions that may be on their face. You’re noticing absolutely nothing. Nothing. Because you’re lost in fantasyland, in la la land, and you’re creating this whole fantasy.

So now everybody in fantasyland starts thinking about what to say. What do I say to this incredible person that I like and want to meet so badly? You don’t like them! You like the way they look!

So what you need to do is realize that until you speak to a person, you have no idea what they are about. If you think about it, 90% of people that you have spoken to in your life you have had no chemistry with. That’s right, nine out of ten people that you don’t really have much chemistry with. And that’s fine.  At least you went over there and talked to them.

The only way to figure out if you like them is to go over and talk to them. Talk to them like they are a person, which is exactly what they are. Don’t treat them any differently, talk to them exactly how they are.  Last night, we were in a bar and we were all out. I looked at my client and I said to him, “there’s a woman, why don’t you just go walk over and talk to her?  ”Now?” he asked, and I responded, “no, why don’t you wait until you get hammered and shitfaced drunk? And then, when she’s sitting down at a table, you can beat yourself up because you didn’t go talk to her all night long."

“Yes, NOW!”,”But she’s cute!”, he said, and I responded, “it doesn’t matter! Walk the hell over there and find out what she’s all about!” And he did, and they talked for 20 minutes and had a great conversation. Do you know what he found out? That she was a nice woman.

That’s what you need to do. If you see someone that you are attracted to, you don’t like them. You just like the way that they look. They are physically appealing to your eyes, and that’s about it.  So your mindset needs to be whatever it might be to get you to walk over there. You can use any type of mindset tricks. You can think to yourself, man, I’m going to go over there and talk to that person and see if they have as bad of breath as I think they do. Anything to get you laughing and smiling.

Walk the hell over there and talk to them. Start a conversation based on observations and everything else. You know what? You might find out that this dream person is actually the worst nightmare in the entire world. She might be whipping out pictures of her mother and her father and her three illegitimate children running around the hills of western Kentucky.

You don’t know what the hell she’s all about. So go talk to her, and stay out of fantasyland. Stay in reality.

#kthxbye

Qualification: The #Art of Asking Questions

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Jordan Harbinger

Next that brings us to the essence of qualification or essentially the art of qualifying others beyond simply time wasting. For that let’s look at one of my heroes. Bill Gates. I slept with his daughter once. Ok it wasn’t THE Bill Gates daughter but still it makes a good story.

Anyway if you were ever to meet good old Bill, how likely do you think it would be for him to spend his time telling you how much money he made this morning? Or just how amazing his business was going? Incredibly unlikely right? That’s because he’s so comfortable with who he is, he doesn’t need to prove to you how great he is. He has no need to qualify himself or for a better word prove himself to you. He knows he’s great, heck he knows you know who he is. Instead he would be more likely to question you, to ask you how you’re doing and more importantly what you’re up to in your life. As soon as you begin answering him you’re highly likely to find yourself qualifying yourself to him.

This is a common situation found in most social settings, those outside the situation looking in will see one person questioning the other, and the other answering, typically trying to show how good they’re doing, seeking approval form the other. Just like in an interview situation the value of each person speaks for itself. Naturally not all interactions are so one sided. You rarely meet someone of such high value, typically the rolls switch back and forth as a power struggle in the conversation moves between two different people.

Now of course what we’re interested in is how to use this to attract a girl. Well lets take the following situation. Something I call the car paradox.

We all know girls like fast expensive cars. Yet we also know a guy who shows his nice car to a girl is unlikely to get anywhere beyond being her chauffeur for a journey or two if he’s lucky. So just why does this paradox happen? Well it all comes down to qualification. Most guys with a nice car don’t simply allow the girl to find it naturally or by accident. They instead try to drop in as many hints and suggestions as to their car right off the bat. This of course is completely see through and as clear as glass. The girl can see the guy trying to impress her with his car and therefore qualifying himself to her. The power struggle we spoke about earlier is already won, and so her interest in finding a higher value male diminishes at least with regards to this poor Porsche ridden chap.

If he had instead allowed her to naturally find out he had a car after she was already attracted to him it would serve as a tool to further fuel her desire for him.

To learn more about how to meet & attract women, check out the Toolbox over at the Pick Up Podcast

#nerdsunite

#PickingUp: Using Qualification to Gauge a Situation

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Jordan Harbinger

Qualification is probably the biggest term we use yet have no real understanding of its meaning, and occasionally how it’s used. To start with, let’s look at the origin of the actual term qualification, and its uses with regards to pickup. Loosely. Qualification was a term used to describe the action of making yourself come across as smooth and Alpha and questioning the girl you’re attempting to seduce to see if she is as good as you appear to be. A danger of this is the chance of over qualifying and losing the girl as she feels she isn’t competent enough for a relationship with you.

This really does still leave a lot to the imagination. With pick up not truly being a certified science it’s up to us to begin to solidify things and see where the terms and techniques we use cross over into the realms of accepted psychology. In sales the term qualification is used readily. It is used to describe the action of using a series of questions in order to ascertain whether a prospective client is serious about purchasing your product.

Essentially you would look to create a series of set questions, routines if you will that would enable you to assess quickly and efficiently whether you where wasting your time in trying to sell your product to someone who literally has no intention, or means to purchase your wares. This can almost directly be applied to pick up in a very broad sense.

Even if we felt that qualification had no specific ability to generate attraction, those who are advocates of the “approach as many girls as you can” technique will readily see the benefit here. Simply assessing right off the bat whether a girl has any chance of sleeping with you and if not, moving on to the next one will save a lot of your time and energy for those that you can actually close.

It could even be argued that direct game is a form of qualification. You approach and state your intent in the best way possible. If the girl isn’t interested in you on the first approach you can always move on to the next one and save your time and energy. Eventually you’re going to meet one who says yes. Now there are obviously a number of things you can do to increase your chances in direct game, and with practice, and work on your aesthetic; you can significantly increase your chances. What if we wanted something with a little more precision? Does qualification provide us with the tools to do so?

To learn more about how to meet & attract women, check out the Toolbox over at the Pick Up Podcast!

#nerdsunite