Building Your Social Network

Written by Dan Tena on September 3, 2009 · 7 Comments 

By Greg Building my social network was something I struggled with a lot, especially when I first moved to San Francisco from the East Coast. I have three bits of advice that I feel helped me: 1) Be the first to initiate the friendship. I’ve found that guys can be weird about becoming friends with other guys and often won’t take the initiative to hang out. When you meet a guy who you think is worth hanging out with, exchange numbers and tell him you’d like to hang out. Then (and this is something I struggled with), call him up soon and invite him out. It could be to meet girls at a club, or to grab breakfast, whatever. The most important thing, though, is take the first step to make the friendship, because often other people won’t. I learned this from a friend who was just amazing at meeting people and making friends. His trick? He would invite people out for breakfast on the weekends, or invite them to go out to the bar with him at night. He was persistent about it too. Don’t give up on someone just because they can’t come out the first time. 2) Always say yes. I don’t know about you, but I like being by myself. Despite Charisma Arts and lots of time socializing I’m still an introvert at heart. Because of that, it’s easy for me to say “no” when people invite me to do things. Maybe I’d rather play music, or hang out with some girl that I want to sleep with. At a certain point I became frustrated and told myself, “I’m going to say yes to everything, no matter how I feel at the time!” If it was 11 at night and I had to work early and someone [...]

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Commitment

Written by Dan Tena on August 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

By Harry I decided to write this post as this is something I feel my clients often do not realize the importance of. When I think about it, numerous pillars of our method revolve around the idea of commitment from both parties in an interaction. So I want to share some of my thoughts with you about why this often undervalued principle is so important. First, barring a few exceptions due to extraneous circumstances, I cannot think of an interaction that I was ‘blown out’ of when I was fully committed to beginning a conversation. The times when I have been unsuccessful in my endeavors have been when I was in my head, and betrayed this self-consciousness through  non-verbal behavior. In other words, I was not thinking about the other person and my genuine interest in engaging them, but instead I was thinking of myself, and how to get something from them. I feel that this is a negative mindset to be in, as it prevents you from being in the moment and focused on finding out about this unique person that fate has placed across your path. Take a moment to think about how you would like to be approached by someone. Would you like them to sidle up, ask you for your opinion on something they did not really care about, all the while talking over their shoulder in an attempt to somehow show that they are not really interested in you as a person? Or would you rather they approached you as a curious, confident, yet vulnerable individual, committed to finding out about you, not in an intrusive manner, but simply as one person to another? The latter shows an attitude to a potential partner which is not only more caring, but also braver in my opinion. [...]

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