Written by Wayne Elise on November 3, 2009 · 5 Comments
By Wayne Elise
Most of us listen so poorly to others because we don’t want to hear what they have to say. We want them to be different from who they truly are. We push them to be pawns of our desire so frantically we put words in their mouths:
“How you doing, alright?”
“Did you have a good time at the circus?”
“Oh, you work as a nurse. That’s a noble profession. You’re a good person.”
Those lines are bad. They are representative of our biases and our nervous need to push the conversation. We want a conversational partner so badly we can’t relax and wait for the truth. That’s not sexy. It also causes a disconnect from the other person. When we try to move the relationship forward he or she freaks out. “You don’t really know me. Why do you want to spend time with me alone? You are thinking I’m different than what I am. You are trying to force me to be other than what I am. You are intimating that I have led you on – that I am that person. Apparently I have deceived you or you have deceived yourself. I feel trapped but I guess a little more deception can’t hurt. I’ll just make up a lie to get out of this. I will flake on you. Tell you at the last minute that my cousin is in town and I have to show her around, yeah, that’s a good one. Goodbye.”
Sexy people are never bothered by hearing another person’s truth, good, bad or otherwise.
“How was your night?”
“Are you wanting to go right now? I don’t want to keep you.”
“I want to see you but you can say no.”
“Does that make sense or am I crazy? I might be crazy. There’s no shame in being crazy.”
Subtly, these [...]
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 invited me to a [...]