I once reached out to a man who I admired for how expressive and animated he was and asked for tips on how I can also be more expressive. Rather than just give me some tips, he dug to find out about my real goals.
I told him I wanted to improve in dating, and that I’ve been told by a coach that I need to be a lot more expressive and less monotone. He told me it’s not effective to focus on changing your external behaviors if your inner world and inner talk are still messed up because that’s like walking around with a ski mask on all the time and you have to chip away at the ski mask first. He accurately sensed that there was room for me to improve in that area.
This man turned out to be a life coach on the side, and he offered to help me dig deeper. This wasn’t my first time investing in someone to teach me, and while I was on a budget, something told me this guy would be different. He wasn’t a typical dating or pick up artist coach. Instead, he was a regular guy with a regular job, doing very well in life. Despite my hesitancy if it would work and my budget, I took a chance on him since I wanted a fresh perspective and I had a good feeling about him.
After I joined, he had me journal all my internal dialogue that I had when talking to, seeing, or approaching women. If you asked me what I thought the dialogue would be, I would guess I was alright, neutral, maybe slightly negative. But after writing down the real thoughts, I realized it was negative, overly critical, always analyzing, often worrying, and often bringing up why I might not be liked or fit in and how to adjust to be welcomed. (To be fair, a lot of these thoughts came up during tougher than normal situations, like talking to girls out at night. When I’m in my daily routine, I’m generally content and not thinking.)
The PUAs used to have a term for this area of self improvement, relevantly called one’s “inner game.” As you could guess, this includes being aware of the way you understand the world, women, yourself, and the interaction between each, your emotions and how you feel about/see yourself, and what mindsets hurt or serve you.
However, the most popular and modern dating advice these days has shifted towards focusing solely on outer game: more on tactics and external behaviors than your inner world. Previous coaches tell me to focus on the external tactics, such as what I say in a conversation, what are the next steps, how to get their contact information, what to say to get to know someone on a deeper level, how to lead a woman, how to be more funny, how to be more expressive, how to be more verbally fluent, all the behaviors. One coach did touch briefly on inner child self-love meditation, but clearly it didn’t stick. It wasn’t enough to fix all the negative inner dialogue I still had. And I probably should’ve done it on a recurring basis rather than just a few sessions.
This journaling exercise proved to be insightful and helpful. I started to become aware of my inner dialogue and how that’s screwing things up. It was an area that wasn’t addressed before. He taught me how every human sees the world through rose-colored glasses, and how we mix reality with our thoughts, opinions, perceptions, and ideas about the world. He kept emphasizing the difference between reality and my inner world muddying things up. Reality is anything physical, like a table or chair. Reality is the facts of what happened when I interacted with a girl. For instance, we walked through a real example of how the reality was that I talked to a girl, they didn’t want to talk anymore, and then I walked away. But in my head, I added all these things that aren’t facts but things I put in there, such as “they don’t like people like me because of (insert reason: ethnicity/age/my nerdy look).” or “I feel weird doing this.” or “I don’t belong in this venue.” or “I don’t think they’ll like me.”
He then had me journal how living like this was affecting my life, and I came to many revelations about how I’m putting a lot of junk in my brain that is hindering or discouraging me from proceeding. I’m making up a lot of reasons that may not actually be true about how the world is and what a woman likes or doesn’t like. It also reminded me why I avoid some Asian American male dating communities online because they often add to this junk in my head. Even though they try to help support Asian men, there’s also a lot of men whining or painting stories about why their ethnicity makes things harder.
As I continued to work with him, he had me go through more exercises that proved useful. Our identity and how we believe the world works are often influenced by our parents, childhood, and culture. He had me think through and journal all the details of key memories of my life associated with those areas and reflect on how they affected me. These are exercises that even counselors and therapists I have talked to failed to do.
I feel much better about where I am now, how I see the world, and how I can conduct myself in the world. I have better tools for being aware and dealing with negative thoughts that hinder my success. Not everyone may need to examine their inner self-talk like I did. Many regular guys don’t have as much baggage, so that’s why a lot of the tactical tips from dating experts about external behavior work for them. But some of us have gone through tougher lives, and that’s why it may be a harder, but more rewarding journey. These are the folks who are having a tougher time seeing progress even after following all the tactical tips given and can benefit from really looking into their inner world and working through it. Will fixing your inner world solve everything? Not everything. It’ll autocorrect a lot of unattractive subcommunication. But some external things still obviously help. It helps to be muscular versus skinny. It helps to be funny and expressive versus not. It helps to have money in the bank versus not. But it sure is helpful to improve.
Self talk is your inner OST and the writer and the director. Once you unveal them you can start making them Guy Richie if you wish ;)
Thank you for this valable article Will.
Glad it was helpful! Well said. Agreed! your inner talk is the jailer, sentencer, director of how you see the world.