Thoughtmagnet

This is part 2 of my picking up for beginners series.

Approach, don’t wait for women to hit on you. There are some guys out there who suggest that you don’t need to open women. That you can somehow do something that will make women open you. These people are full of $hit. I probably get opened once a night, but I sure as hell don’t wait around all day for someone to talk to me. Unless you’re particularly good looking, or a DJ or something, waiting for women to approach you is a losing strategy.

There are two main strategies you can use as you learn how to approach women, each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses.

The Direct Approach – This strategy is where you basically put your cards on the table and show you’re into a woman from the beginning. The advantage of this technique is that women give you “bonus points” for being ballsy, and done properly, with excellent body language, you can really sweep a woman off her feet with a good direct approach.

The disadvantages of the direct approach is that the girl has to decide up-front, based almost purely on your bodylanguage and looks, whether she likes you and wants to be receptive to your approach. It also can be awkward when there are friends around, and beautiful women are almost always with friends.

In practice, I usually use the Direct Approach when I think a girl already likes me. If I notice her check me out, or if a woman is just kind of lingering near me for a bit, I’ll immediately go direct and open with “You’re cute, what’s your name” or something similar. I also go direct when I’m on the dancefloor, and I’ll use it more often later in the night.

The Indirect Approach – The Indirect Approach is when you start up an “innocent” conversation with a woman, make her laugh a bit and basically act like you’re not that into her  for the first few minutes. Basically what you’re doing here is baiting her to start hitting on you.

There are a couple advantages to the indirect approach. The main one is that it gives you an opportunity to display some wit and charm before she decides whether she likes you, unlike direct game where she has to decided right away. The other big advantage is that you can win over her friends a lot easier using indirect game, and winning over her friends makes your job MUCH easier.

The easiest way to start a conversation is by asking a question about some sort of drama in your life. Women love answering questions about interpersonal relationships. Do you need to use canned openers to pick up? No, you don’t. But canned openers are really useful as a backup.

I love to open with spontaneous stuff whenever possible, but when I meet a really great girl, my mind has a bad tendancy of going blank. Seriously, the hotter the girl, the dumber the thing my brain wants to open her with. Thankfully, whenever I meet a woman of such quality that my brain turns to mush, I have a bunch of canned openers to fall back on.

Here are two examples of openers that are great for beginners.

The Jealous Girlfriend Opener

The Two Part Kiss Opener

In practice, the best way to learn how to approach women is by using the Indirect Approach early in the evening, and chatting up a bunch of different groups of people, even ones where you’re not really into the girls. This generates social proof and the other women in the bar start to notice that you seem to be mister popular (and they notice these things!), and become more attracted to you. Later on in the evening, around midnight, I start using the Direct Approach a lot more, since many of the women in the bar will have noticed me already, and Direct Approach works a lot better late in the evening when people are getting a bit more drunk and wild.

The most important part of any opener is your body language. If you’re poised, relax and smooth when you open, you can open with anything. You can check out Cajun on Keys to the VIP if you want to see what good bodylanguage looks like in action.

Also, you should check out my interview series CD on “The First Five Minutes”

There’s nothing really special about these openers – they just work. Feel free to invent your own.

Head back to How to Pick up Women for Beginners