I'm not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot of.
No, what I had was non-neediness and non-reactivity, combined with empathy and intelligent conversation. My inner game actually sucked. I was non-needy and non-reactive because that was my response to fear of rejection. I believed no woman would ever really love me, so there was no point in pining over what I couldn't have.
You could say I was following "The Tao of Steve", as in "Be desireless, be excellent, be gone"... but not because I had reached some sort of true inner peace.
But let us suppose, for a moment, that you're a guy who doesn't start off naturally confident, and doesn't live in the pjeby Shangri-La of abundant, sexually aggressive, confident, intelligent, high self-esteem women who always chase and want to date you.
I never said those women wanted to date me. A few did, most just wanted to get off or fulfill a fantasy. (To be clear, I didn't sleep with these women or have intercourse with them; I almost exclusively saved "standard" sex for my LTRs or FWBs, not the girls who just wanted to experiment.)
Another thing is to completely throw your dignity out of the window and pay for sex.
If you look down on people who pay for sex (and by implication, on sex workers), this is part of your attitude problem. You believe you have no value, so you take paying as evidence to support this belief, while ignoring the fact that rock stars also pay for sex... as Charlie Sheen I believe put it, "you're paying them to leave".
So it's not the act of paying for sex that throws out the dignity that you're afraid you lack in the first place.
Getting into game with a healthy attitude is better, I think. This means realizing that some of the time, some girls want to be manipulated, and that if you don't go out and take what you want, you won't get it. But this doesn't mean being an asshole - it just means realizing that you have to play the game.
You seem to be ignoring the part where manipulating doesn't equal lying, and that being tactful, cool, and fun does not equal "manipulating".... unless you view them through a frame where YOU are low-value!
Yes, eventually you'll pick up so much confidence that you'll be able to go natural and then yes, girls will pick up on this and start chasing you. But until that point, it will help to have some tactics under your belt.
You don't even need confidence; I certainly never had it. Non-neediness and non-reactivity are plenty enough.
This is like saying "any man can be a millionaire by having $ 1million in his bank account". But it's really really hard to change from believing that you are low value to believing that you are high value.
You don't need a trick -- you just need to cultivate something of genuine value. What do you really have to offer women? In my case, it was conversation, understanding, and a certain class of sexual experiences. You might offer excitement and adventure. Another guy might be an artist or musician. Per the Tao of Steve, what are you "excellent" at? What could you be excellent at? Value is just being excellent at something, that offers a woman an experience.
People (not just women) want emotional experiences. They are bored and afraid and dissatisfied, for the most part. What can you give them?
Not as a trade, not as a "look at me I'm awesome", but... what is part of your world that someone else would want to find out more about, or be a part of? I never flaunted my "fantasy fulfillment services"; I simply mentioned them in passing and never tried to talk anyone into making use of them. They had to ask me, and I was pretty tight-lipped about it, simply because I genuinely didn't want to push it on anyone. I'd answer questions briefly, then return to whatever non-sexual topic we were on.
Then, later... sometimes much later... someone I mentioned it to would come back and make a more serious inquiry, at which point I'd tell them about my NLP theory of how you can create fantasy experiences for someone by interpreting one of their existing fantasies, and we were off to the races.
This worked for me precisely because it was not a technique. I really didn't care. I hadn't seen "The Tao Of Steve", but I was desireless, I was excellent, I was gone.
This was not "inner game" or belief in my own value. It was just nonreactivity. Women don't really care about confidence so much as they care about you NOT being creepy or needy... as long as you also have some sort of "excellence" to enjoy.
If it were easy, if you could just think "ah, I'm going to change the counter in my mind that represents self-value from low to high", then a million dollar seduction industry wouldn't exist.
Nor the self-help industry. The catch is that there's more than one "counter", and as I always say, the brain has no "view source" button to let you list them all. (Technically, they're frames, not counters.)
By the way, I'm always looking for new and better ways to improve my inner game, so if you have any tips on how you got there, do share them with us.
My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you're afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?
Low self-esteem, and especially the sort of compensating ideals you're promoting, are usually based in fears of low-value qualities. But if you know what you're afraid of and admit to it, you'll have the chance to do something about it -- either decide that it's not really true of you, or that it is true, but you can change it.
Also, for whatever it's worth, I seem to recall that the period in my life where women were most abundant and I was at my most non-reactive/confident, was when I was doing daily Zen meditation of at least 20 minutes, and doing an extended session once a week at the local Zen center.
My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you're afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?
To be honest, nothing in particular. I genuinely thought hard about that question. I suppose in the past, when I was less mature, there were things.
Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me. And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You're just doing it in a more natural...
(This article expands upon my response to a question posed by pjeby here)
I've seen a few back-and-forths lately debating the instrumental use of epistemic irrationality -- to put the matter in very broad strokes, you'll have one commenter claiming that a particular trick for enhancing your effectiveness, your productivity, your attractiveness, demands that you embrace some belief unsupported by the evidence, while another claims that such a compromise is unacceptable, since a true art should use all available true information. As Eliezer put it:
And with this I agree -- the idea that a fully developed rational art of anything would involving pumping yourself with false data seems absurd.
Still, let us say that I am entering a club, in which I would like to pick up an attractive woman. Many people will tell me that I must believe myself to be the most attractive, interesting, desirable man in the room. An outside-view examination of my life thus far, and my success with women in particular, tells me that I most certainly am not. What shall I do?
Well, the question is, why am I being asked to hold these odd beliefs? Is it because I'm going to be performing conscious calculations of expected utility, and will be more likely to select the optimal actions if I plug incorrect probabilities into the calculation? Well, no, not exactly. More likely, it's because the blind idiot god has already done the calculation for me.
Evolution's goals are not my own, and neither are evolution's utility calculations. Most saliently, other men are no longer allowed to hit me with mastodon bones if I approach women they might have liked to pursue. The trouble is, evolution has already done the calculation, using this now-faulty assumption, with the result that, if I do not see myself as dominant, my motor cortex directs the movement of my body and the inflection of my voice in a way which clearly signals this fact, thus avoiding a conflict. And, of course, any woman I may be pursuing can read this signal just as clearly. I cannot redo this calculation, any more than I can perform a fourier analysis to decide how I should form my vowels. It seems the best I can do is to fight an error with an error, and imagine that I am an attractive, virile, alpha male.
So the question is, is this self-deception? I think it is not.
In high school, I spent four happy years as a novice initiate of the Bardic Conspiracy. And of all the roles I played, my favorite by far was Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello. We were performing at a competition, and as the day went by, I would look at the people I passed, and tell myself that if I wanted, I could control any of them, that I could find the secrets to their minds, and in just a few words, utterly own any one of them. And as I thought this, completely unbidden, my whole body language changed. My gaze became cold and penetrating, my smile grew thin and predatory, the way I held my body was altered in a thousand tiny ways that I would never have known to order consciously.
And, judging by the reactions, both of my (slightly alarmed) classmates, and of the judges, it worked.
But if a researcher with a clipboard had suddenly shown up and asked my honest opinion of my ability as a manipulator of humans, I would have dropped the act, and given a reasonably well-calibrated, modest answer.
Perhaps we could call this soft self-deception. I didn't so much change my explicit conscious beliefs as... rehearse beliefs I knew to be false, and allow them to seep into my unconscious.
In An Actor Prepares, Bardic Master Stanislavski describes this as the use of if:
Is this dangerous? Is this a short step down the path to the dark side?
If so, there must be a parting of ways between the Cartographers and the Bards, and I know not which way I shall go.