The “Gotcha” Mindset

December 17, 2008

Over the years that I’ve been teaching this stuff, I’ve noticed trends in thinking and behavior that come up again and again in clients. Certainly, each client is an individual and has unique strengths and weaknesses, but the things that make some successful and hold others back are always of interest to me.

One of the most strikingly bad habits of thinking that I see in clients is what I call the “gotcha” mindset. Now don’t get me wrong – this is not exclusive to guys in the community. It does, however, seem to be more endemic to community guys, and is a big contributor to the “creepy” factor.

The thought loop goes something like this:

1.) This person is probably going to hurt me – either they are too high value and I can’t access it comfortably, or they are sneaky and will do something bad to me when the time is right

2.) I’m going to look for an opportunity to catch them doing something so I can call them out on it

3.) Furthermore, I’m going to try to get them back. We’ll show them what’s what.

You can see the root very clearly: defensiveness. If we believe that someone is going to hurt us, our guard pops up, and depending on how we read the other person, we might actually go on the attack. Let’s illustrate with a few examples.

I was at a few holiday parties last night, and am always happy to tell people about what I do and The Social Man (because I believe in it and I know we’re genuinely helping guys). But every now and then, I meet someone who immediately equates this to The Game or The Pickup Artist, and such was the case with a woman who we’ll call Jane. As I would learn, she was in her mid-thirties, divorced, and had been hurt by quite a few men she’d dated. She quickly closed herself off to conversation with me, and at two separate points in the evening, she interrupted conversations I was having with other girls to tell them to watch out for my “social man moves.”

She had clearly thought that she’d gotten me – seen through me and upended me at my game. Nevermind that I wasn’t “gaming” these girls. Her lack of intellectual curiousity about who I am and what I teach was enough to tell me that she was a generally defensive person.

In this case, this woman’s defensiveness was directed against one person – me – and compelled her to get, well creepy. Even the girls I was supposedly using my “moves” on apologized for this woman’s behavior. Now let’s move on and look at how this thought loop might play itself out on a broader scale.

We’ll start with a comment from our SREM video yesterday which read “wahahah love how nick’s constantly teasing her pu**y”. I edited out the last part because frankly, its not something I want on this website.

In this “secret society” world of seduction, there is a message which is understood but rarely spoken – “women have the power, and we need to work in concert to take it back.” It is a defensiveness, not just to a single person, but to a whole sex.

So there are general rounds of applause and accolades when they see a guy “seduce” a woman, or even spike her buying temperature with flirting. And on one hand, its very cool to see a guy with good social skills who is able to make women laugh. But the moment that the thought loop of “he got her” starts running, it cheapens the whole experience.

This is NOT how to love and respect women. While an awareness of the games they play is important, entering an interaction with anything resembling the “gotcha” mindset is not emotionally healthy.

And perhaps more importantly, entering any interaction with the assumption that someone else is higher value than you is a weak, weak frame. In my mind, the only people at a venue with immediately higher value than me are the doorman, the hosts, and the owners, because they can decide whether or not I’m allowed to be there. Everyone else is just a potentially cool person waiting to be met and discovered, and I’m a fun, fascinating guy who is always going to bring something great to the experience.

Posted by Christian | Filed Under Crank Your Confidence