The Power of Rituals. How to Get In the Zone.

I’ve been preparing this post for a few days now, first understanding the depth of this knowledge, digesting it myself, and then preparing the layout of the post for it to be as clear as I possibly can make it.

This, and the killer week I’ve had at school is the reason why I have not posted in so long. Hope this helps you, and the wait is worth it.

Introduction: Why are Rituals Important?

Subconscious: getting in touch with the deeper part of your personality

The principle that I want to talk about today is related with preparing yourself for the night out. Some MPUAs, as mystery did for example, suggest that getting “in the zone” or getting ready to go out and ‘sarge’, is as simple as just going to the club and doing a few warm up sets.

I believe doing warm up sets is key for a good night out, and even though I recommend you to do them, there is something else you can do, before even going out: use the power of rituals to get in touch with your subconscious, connect with your deeper side so your personality as a hole is in touch with your current reality: going out.

Many people won’t know why the fuck would you need to get in the zone to go out, but I’m an environmental engineering student, and for those like me, getting out of what I call the “numbers based mind” to the “socially intelligent mind” is not that easy. For those of us with killer weeks, any help with the “mind shift” is greatly appreciated.

First let me give you a little theory.

Our mind has many levels of depth.

The mind has what can be understood as stages, or levels. You experience this daily: are you consciously aware of everything your body is doing right now? You are breathing, processing food, using up energy, making your heart beat, etc., and all this is being done with no conscious desition being made by you at any point.

The brain has three stages, with an established hierarchy.

The first one is the instincts based brain. It’s the oldest and most powerful part of our mind. It governs all the others. It dictates the most primal aspects of your behavior, such as you eating when you are hungry, or the urge to have sex. You cannot consciously control this part of yourself, as it’s the oldest and most basic one, and it’s the one that keeps your body working.

This is why you cannot die from asphyxia just by deciding to stop breathing. When your body is out of air, it will make you breath, even against your will.

The second part of your brain is the one that governs feelings. It’s very important to

understand this part of the post, because many people deal with problems with this lconstantly. Feelings are evolutionarily developed before conscious decision making. Therefore, feelings are subjects to the instincts, but your rational mind is subjected to your feelings. This is why you will never win a battle between your feelings and your rational mind. Feelings will get stronger and will ultimately win. The only way to overcome this is to reframe your problem. That’s subject for another talk, so bear with me and I promise I’ll post about that later on.

The third part is the rational mind. The one that we humans like to think makes us different from animals. The rational mind is the weakest one, and it’s incredibly powerful so imagine how powerful the other two are. This part of your mind is the only one you have conscious power over. Were our ‘will’ rules.

Just as a side note, this is one way of understanding the workings of the brain that has helped me and I think will be valuable for you too. I’m not sure how scientifically accurate this is. Some people refear to it as the reptilian, limbic and neo-cortex brains, in that order.

So what has this to do with getting in the zone?

Connecting with ourselves as our ancestors did, and the power of ancient knowledge

To be fully in the moment, it’s important for you to be one with all those aspects of your mind I just briefly talked about.

That being said, communicating with the deeper aspects of your brain is not as simple as communicating with your rational self. By this I mean it’s easy to tell yourself that you are going out, but it’s a little harder to feel like doing so.

Your deeper self may be well off as it is hanging back, safely in your home after a hard day’s work, but you want to go out, so your will, your rational mind, has to be able to communicate with your deeper self.

This deeper self, is what psychologist call the subconscious, and communicating with the subconscious is very different from communicating to your rational mind. The subconscious works with repetition, routines and association. Think of it as the animal part of yourself. Train it as you would train a dog. This is where the power of rituals comes into play.

Reading human history, one has to ask oneself about rituals: ancient people practiced them a lot, and today organizations use them all the time. From the free masons to church to fraternities in colleges, rituals have a power that is almost mystical and we cannot understand its workings rationally, we can only learn how to use them to our benefit.

If the frats use them to create a sense of belonging, we will use them to get ready to rock the shit out of this night.

From theory to practice:

Let me give you an example, so all this can be grounded down to earth. This is my routine/ritual for going out. I’ll let you come to know a side of myself very few people know, so appreciate this because most of my closest friends don’t even know this.

The hat:

I recommend you choose an object, a piece of clothing or something, and every time you are about to go out, use this object. I personally use a Jason mraz’ style hat, therefore my nickname actually. The good thing about the hat is its not only unique, it’s on the edge of what’s socially acceptable to wear in my social circle, it makes me stand out, and most important of all, it gives me something to play with, with the girls, and in the dance floor. It also says I’m cocky and I don’t give a shit what you think, I use it because I like it and go fuck yourself with your social norms.

Also, it’s something I never wear in my day to day style, so it’s a subconscious message to my mind: you are not about to go to school, you are about to go out.

You are getting out of your ‘work self’

See the power in this?

The senses:

To communicate even better with your subconscious, I recommend you take advantage of every single one of your senses. Here’s a list of the things I do:

	What I do:
sight	I dress nice. Use my best clothes, groom up, fix my hair, go to the gym, use accessories like a watch or a necklace, and of course the hat.
hearing	This one is the most important one for me. I listen to upbeat music, I have a playlist with music from Avicii, David Getta, stuff dj’s play in the club. Invest some fucking time in your playlists, prepare a few of them. I have one for going out, one for getting out of class, etc. also, make them have like 5 hours worth of songs each, so you can listen to it without listening to the same 10 songs every time, I find it really annoying to listen to the same song over and over. Like you burn off the songs that way and after like 10 times listening to that playlist you have to throw them away and make a whole new playlist from scratch. This is why I recommend you invest a few hours in developing a good set of 5 hour music playlists. (a cheat is to download stuff like Avicii’s concert at Tomorrowland 2011, or whatever your style is) I listen to it as I’m getting ready and in the car too.
touch	Pockets are key here. I bring a pack of condoms, my wallet, my cellphone, some gum, my iPod and my car keys. Having all this with me tells me I’m about to go out big time.
smell	The key with smell is feeling clean and smelling nice. Also, using the same cologne every night you go out makes your brain associate the smell of the cologne with partying. You have probably experienced this principle before, have you ever found yourself saying this place smells like airport or this restaurant smells like Buenos Aires?
taste	Brush your teeth, feel clean and have that minty taste in your mouth. Also drinking is the most common thing to prepare yourself to go out. The taste of beer makes me remember many great nights. Gum on the other hand makes me remember those girls that had a piece of gum in their mouths when we hooked up. Fucking awesome memories.

Just as a quick conclusion:

Think about it, girls use this principle every time, why do you think they take so long to get ready? It’s fucking powerful and they know it, preparing yourself to go out is very useful.

Also as I said earlier, this is what I do. If you are just starting out you can copy it, but if you are advanced of you have been doing my ritual for a while, personalize it. Use the principles here to make it your own and it will become even more powerful.

Note that its nothing crazy, it’s just preparing yourself as normal people do. Probably the only thing that people don’t do is the hat thing, which is really an advantage for you.

I hope this helps you bro, thanks for reading.

Jason.

How to Stop Being Just Another Guy

A lot of PUAs talk about investment as the ultimate way to get attraction, and it absolutely is.

Even after this, there's not much written about the subject, so this article will be about the power of investment, and after the explanation i will provide a few routines, tips and examples of good ways to trigger investment.

Why is investment important?
As the title of the article suggests, when a girl invests in you, you stop being just a random guy she met, and as the investment levels start to rise, it will take you all the way from a stranger to her lover.

The best example is always to look at yourself. As we will see soon, thinking about someone when they are not around is one of the best ways of investment. Think about it, we all had that one girl we think about more than the rest, and hooking up with her seems more exiting than hooking up with a random girl at the club. That girl thats a harder catch, and that makes her so much more attractive.

This is because you have invested feelings and time in that girl. For girls this principle is exponentially more powerful, as they are much more concerned with the quality and quantity of guys they choose to hook up with.

So, how does an investment free interaction look like?
 Interview mode is a great example: you find yourself investing your time and effort on making small talk with a girl and she is just not giving back. Well, that 'giving back' is what we call investment.

An extreme example would be a girl that's crazy about Justin Bieber. She will spend money, time and emotions on that person to the point of making that guy into an idea instead of a person. Investment is so powerful that you can actually say less in an interaction, an as the other person is investing in you, attractive traits will be assumed for you, working in a fashion similar to pre-selection. this is why listening is so important (more on that later).

Types of Investment.
Time is our only true currency, and this is true for investing in people too.

The three main types of investment are:

-Time investment
-Emotional investment
-Physical investment

Time investment.
When a girl thinks about you, when she looks throw your Facebook page, when she sees something that reminds her of you, or when she prepares for an hour to get pretty for your date, to go to the club she knows you will be at, this is time investment. It's the most common type and God, it's so powerful.

Emotional investment.
When a girl allows herself to feel something for you, we call that emotional investment. I personally suggest good feelings over negative ones, but emotional roller-coasters are awesome and girls love them, they make life exiting for us all, so sometimes feeling like she can loose you is good. But be careful, later I will explain, to pull this off correctly, you need to be a truly solid man or you might end up hurting girls feelings instead.

Physical Investment
Physical Investment is all about the feelings she gets as you start to have more intimate experiences together. The level of investment each physical experience has depends on the girl and her age. If you, the reader, are just a teen, maybe even holding hands or hugging can be considered physical investment. Kissing is a bit higher on the investment scale, and it's value really depends on the girl. Some girls hook up with many guys, some are really picky about who hey kiss. I had a friend in her 20's that could recall the name of every single guy she'd ever kissed and had made a big deal about her 25th first kiss and didn't wanna hook up with a guy she kind of liked because she wanted her 25th to be special. I have also hooked up with girls that didn't ask for my name ever.
Sex is the universal physical investment, and usually after sex things never go back to what they were before.

so,

How to become an investment friendly guy?

Let's make an analogy with foreign investment. How does a foreign country become more <<foreign investment friendly>>? It has to stabilize, have a solid foundation and provide security for the investor. It has to be trust worthy. Sometimes it has to give the investor a sense of security by compromising too. So, let's apply that to us.

The Solid Man
We as men have to become more very solid individuals. Let me explain, I use this metaphor on my self regularly: Imagine a wooden post solidly planted on the ground, and around it a stormy ocean. The wooden post is your core, and the stormy ocean is the feelings and problems people and life throw at you. You have to be able to let big waves hit the post, without letting it be taken from its place, let the waves hit the post without altering it, let that post be planted as firmly on the ground as it possibly can, don't let the flow of life throw you around. Specially, don't let the post float on that ocean, don't let the problems and feelings people
throw at you swing you around.

This kind of guy is someone that girls can actually trust with their feelings. This kind of guy is not predictable though, and is not always nice. In fact he is never nice. He is kind, but not nice. Elliot Hulse, an awesome vlogger in youtube talks about that difference 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPDPtt-eCn0
I great guy, you should take a look at his videos.

Investing to get invested on.
Have you ever heard Mystery talk about the "you have taken up my mind" routines? one of the key things to get a girl to invest in you, is that you invest on her. Make her feel wanted, make her feel like you really like her, so she can safely let herself feel stuff for you, emotionally invest in you. I absolutely love and have used Mystery's pomegranate routine successfully, so I'm going to share it with you. Use it with care, don't use it to fuck a girl and then leave her. Taking advantage of emotional investment is fucking wrong mate, it hurts. If you want a one night stand just use time investment techniques.

The Pomegranate Routine by Mystery.

PUA:you suck
HER:what? why??
PUA: the other day i was in the supermarket and i passed in front of the fruit counter, and there was a pomegranate section, and i used to do this thing with my sister were my mom would buy us pomegranates and we would fight over them and stuff all the time, and we used to make this dessert, like pomegranates are awesome by them selves, but we used to peal it and take each seed out and place them all on a bowl, dude that takes a lot of work like you just wanna eat the damn thing but you know this way its going to be much better so from time to time we did this, you take each seed and put them on a bowl, and then put honey over it, its a fucking amazing dessert, so one day my mom brought home 2 pomegranates, one for me and one for my sister, and my sister wasn't there so i decided instead of fighting over them i would do something nice and prepare the dessert for her and for me.

I eat mine and left hers on the fridge, and when she got home she thought I had eaten hers and started hitting me (she was older than me she would kick my ass) and I was like wait wait, I actually prepared that for you, I already ate mine!

That was the last time we fought actually

But the point of the story is, I saw the pomegranate on the counter and wanted to make that dessert for you, but I don't even know if you like pomegranates! see you suck!

End of routine. Adapt it to your life, I don't have a sister so I told it using my brother instead and it worked very well. See how this conveys 'I think about you'? and its a DHV story too Mystery is a fucking genius. It's a protector of loved ones (POLO) text book DHV story. It's light too, and playful, and the best part is she will be scared you are telling her she actually sucks and then you are not, so the emotional roller-coaster is like heroin to girls.

Also a very important way to get emotional investment:

Teasing

Done in good measure and intelligently, it will make the girls fell a weird mix of shame and pleasure that makes them tick. you will know if you are doing it right when she giggles as you do it. if she doesn't just change the subject and don't try it again for a while, but don't freak out about it, we all make bad jokes. practice this skill a lot, teasing the right way is very powerful.

Ok this has gotten extremely long, I'm just going to close here.

Below i will attach a few links to great examples,

Tips and routines that use the principle of investment.

The f close at her please routine by Adam Lyons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6TGBKaR76c (minute 1:46:00)

The neckless close by style

Couldn't find it its on The Game by Neil Strauss

The call me voicemail principle by simple pickup

http://www.simplepickup.com/how-to/the-best-voicemails-to-leave-on-a-girls-phone/


Hope this helps bro.

Jason

How to Gain Confidence and Self Belief

Confidence and Self Belief are a very important quality to an attractive guy (or person for that matter), and are two things people struggle with a lot. This is how I found I can influence my state of confidence and self belief.

First: the What

First of all, in any given problem, I ask my self, what is it that I want.

In this case we are talking about confidence, so lets define it.

In my opinion, being confident is our "default state" or normal, balanced state. Being unconfident, on the other side, is being in an unbalanced state. Feeling unease, being discomforted.

Imagine a heavy sphere hanging from a string. It's still, unless someone or something moves it, unless it's put out of balance. To put it out of balance, we would have to apply a force to it. So then the heavier the sphere is, the stronger the force has to be to push our sphere around.

That sphere is our confidence, and that force is the situations that take our confidence away.

This is why there's something people call the comfort zone: the maximum force your confidence can resist before it gets pushed around.

Also, our sphere hanging from a string may swing backwards making us feel unconfident, but also and forwards, making us feel overconfident, and this two illusions will not help us, as they are two sides to the same problem: the unbalanced nature of our center: our confidence.

So let's now set the objective:

Second: the Objective.

Let our objective be to make that sphere as solid and heavy as possible, so its harder to push it arround, and it stays centered and balanced.

Let's set our objective to be at ease with ourself, and interact with the outside world freely, keeping our confidence centered and balanced despite all the forces that interact with it.

Third: the How

Thinking about this for a long time, I started to observe my confidence levels, and started to identify what made them vary. This was in part thanks to a part of Manhore's speech at the 21 convention, where he states that having your shit together is the key to confidence.

My technique is very simple:

it consists of two principles:
1- Responsibility
2- Accept-fulness

1) Knowing that you are supposed to do something, of setting yourself to do something and not doing it, or even delaying stuff for later.
Personal examples I found are important for myself:

a) Studying or doing homework
b) Cleaning your room and/or house
c) Being on time when i say i will
d) Being consistent with my promises

2) Accepting how you feel when you get unconfident feelings and owning it.

Personal example: the other day a professor at my college was examining and questioning the experiment that we were doing at the lab, and I was clumsy and dropped something, and the professor asked me why I was so clumsy, rudely. i answered -because I got nervous.

He couldn't say anything and I felt good for owning how i felt, not asking for forgiveness for what I felt, even though I was supposed to feel threatened or stupid even, by his comment.

It's like yeah, I feel this way, so what?

It gets you entitlement to feel how you feel and that solidifies and hardens your sphere.


This is it. This will probably evolve with time, and with you guys feedback, so please feel free to comment sharing your experiences and methods of fighting with lack of confidence.

hope this helps,

Jason

My Journey.

This is a personal blog, in wich im going to share my journey twords a better man. the lessons i learn in the way, and the hard times and challenges i find myself involved at.

also, as english is not my first languaje, because im an Argentine living in Buenos Aires, stuff may sound wierd at times, just saying. haha.

the first entry will be about something that i've been thinking a lot about: Confidence.

I always knew what confidence ment. growing up i had glimpses of what confidence, being yourself and all of those cliches ment, but as life progressed, what myself was started to get some complicated and harder to define, as well as confidence started to loose its obviousness.

changes in my enviroment, moving arround and that kind of stuff challenged me to adapt to my new enviroment when my identity was not well established yet in myself, and this lead to the belief that changing who i was to fit in my enviroment was the way to happiness. this belief lasted most of my childhood, and remainings of this idea still appear in my behaviour even today, as a lesson learned as a child is one of the hardest things to get rid of.

There were many moments were i challenged this belief growing up, and found myself in the absolute oposit side of the spectrum: being the person people did not want me to be.

that was even worse, because not only i was not being myself, i was still defined by others, and also, people didnt even like me.

my journey has been defined by this extremes: trying to find myself in the way people saw me, and this was and still is a little today, my biggest challenge. not trying to make people like me, and in doing so, not trying to disconnect myself from their view of me either.

this challenge brought many lessons to be, the first will be shared with you next: how to gain and improve confidence and self belief.