more messages from tacitus - divers sources
Things I’ve learned on the way
when I was younger I only had ONE perspective… my big fat EGO… how sad is that ? With age and infirmity comes, hopefully, the appreciation to see relationships, personal interactions, communities, as the coming together of many perspectives… some you can easily understand and appreciate, some you can’t… now I try to see the moment from each participant’s probable perspective (excuse the alliteration)… I will never know in absolute detail how each sees reality so it is a best guess thing… if a sexy girl shows me some interest I still ask myself as many questions as I can think of about her, who is she ?, what does she want ?, what are her fears ? what do I mean to her ? what else is going on in her life ? does she want to be rescued from a bad relationship ? does she need a sperm donor so she can have her baby ? a green card perhaps ? a wise old savior figure ? a sugar daddy ? someone to show her how she can piece her life togehter ? how deep is she ?, can she hold my interest with more than her appearance ? is she rigidly defined by some external image or is she capable of growth ? does she welcome the chance to grow or does will she only motivate herself to grow and change as a last resort ? Does she have a quick spontaneous wit or does she repeat a list of cliches ? Is she highly adaptable or does she only function in a pre-defined environment, her “comfort zone”, does she have good taste in clothes, people, ideas, beliefs or is she crude ? Can she offer insightful constructive criticism or does she just get pissed off and say needless things ? does she have any idea how to make a good relationship work ? Is she empathetic ? I really, really, really like to get tot the bottom or halfway to the bottom of such questions before becoming all tangled up THEN finding out…
Face it, a lot of guys, probably the majority of guys, are poorly attuned to minimal cues and what they might imply. So they have a memorized routine… be cocky and funny be cocky and funny be cocky and funny… and they pour more of this on at every turn, and the woman is thinking “what is wrong with this doofus he isn’t listening to me ?” or more like “this pompous jerk is so into his shallow self there’s no room for me in this conversation”… or “this guy is hiding behind such an blatantly bad act” that they feel dumped on, overloaded with stuff they don’t care about, or they could see better on the Lifetime Channel… from experience with many combinations of -mones the best connections are built from simple, uncomplicated, organic interchange, underacted, underplayed, kind of minimal and rich at the same time… because I think at the root of it, all of us want to be “felt”, understood, gotten, acknowledged as a person, valued for what we are… good verb, to value.. the pheromone may create that opening where it is okay to express something more intimate and personal in the middle of an impersonal world, you know in a world full of cell phones and gadgets blinking shit, ring tones, poses, celebrity cribs, and in the middle of all that crap a moment opens up and somebody snaps to what you’re about… that’s cool, that’s mystical… if you can get yourself in that place, and you have the -mones as your trusty allies that will then put demands on your skills… -mones are funny that way because they open up so many more possibilities that you might not have been prepared for, how many people have written “she was agitated/flustered/aroused whatever and I didn’t know what to do next” ?
“it” is Awareness, take it for granted that most people are half asleep 90% of the…
time.
There are those who love and cling to their Comfort Zone and there are those who step to the edge, in an intelligent way (very often, in our media culture, “edgy” means taking unnecessary risks or acting out in childish, demanding, offensive ways… like in the 60s we had the same delusions about being “creative”… as in any useless, self indulgent crap was justified as long as you were being “creative”… man we saw some awful bad self expression as a result…phew!)… so, a guy whose joined up with the Special Forces may have pushed his edge in one way, a guy who’se gone through the Defense Language School and mastered Pashto, then joined a Buddhist monestary and lived there for five years… that guy has seriously pushed his edge where one push means grasping a perspective 180 degrees out of phase with his first one… it’s deeper that switching out one look for another look, you have to figure out ways of living that open up your head to the complexities and ambiguities of life… 'cause too many life situations are narrow and mentally narrowing… and fashion and lifestyles and things like that are marketed as pseudo freedoms from all these ghettos our heads can become frozen in… unltimately what distinguishes you is having something to say that is real, personal, specific, and valuable that you and you alone could have learned and mastered from living.
Out there in the real world you need social skills like never before
If you’re Donald Trump you can have a free pass on the oversized ego and still have people happy to call you MISTER Trump and even he’s a lot mellower and politically savvy behind the scenes… the man is, however, seriously determined to achieve his goals. Time Magazine recently had an article on what it took to succeed. The one quality that stood out above all others was tenacity, the power to motivate yourself and stick to a project. If you have a huge ego and no tenacity, you’re a massive jerk waiting to be blown off. Develop abilities, learn to cook, (something, anything… have about 6 things you can do as well as any restaurant), ballroom dancing is excellent, you have to learn to sense fine changes in your partner and flow as a unit (is there any wonder that once upon a time this art was considered essential to social development ? ) ,live overseas and experience people who aren’t exisiting in your political groove, join a Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade improv group and flex your comedic skills… anything… multiple anythings, get out of your rut as many ways as you possibly can before it is dug so deep there’s no way to see over the top.
it’s your blind spots that knock you into the ditch
there are soooo many times when I’ve personally seen someone who had most of the ingredients for success in business, with women or men, socially, any interpersonal area, blown clean out of the water by some tendency or quirk that they can’t see or refuse to see. There was a sexy girl who had the worst, most obnoxious, piercing laugh that she would squawk out every 30 seconds, it was like she was unconsciously trying to piss everbody off, which she did an excellent job of, or a guy I remember from a corporate setting who was constantly licking his lips in the weirdest way, like he was expressing a forbidden fantasy nonstop, everybody just ran from this guy… or in character acting classes where someone changes place with me and I with him, I take on his persona and he takes on mine, it was really shocking to see myself the first time this way, good and bad, warts and all… I instantly got why others would respond to me the way they did, straighened my ass up real quick… dayummmm, I was coming off like THAT ! Ahem… cough… OUCH!!!
maybe we should all read :
VITAL LIES SIMPLE TRUTHS: The Psychology of Self Deception by Daniel Goleman
there’s a great chasm between authority and intimidation
Authority comes from many things, having good judgement and being recognized for it, being a good leader, a sense of fairness, basically being seen as a quality person who has the guts to take care of things that others might shy away from, being a good negotiator, not constantly having to overcompensate for something missing by putting on a big macho act… authority is something that people sense but can’t define…
Intimidation or being overbearing is different material, it’s based on missing the capacity to feel what someone else is going through or rule through brute thuggishness.
If you have real authority you rise to the top of organizations, if all you’re riding on is a capacity to intimidate the best job you’ll get is the bouncer or doorman at a club, or the equivalent of that.
People with authority are excellent listeners, although they aren’t pushovers, they know how to analyse situations, and they aren’t easily offended, because they know the value of just criticism and the importance of hearing things that the don’t immediately agree with.
Intimidators hear criticism (or just plain accurate observations) as a personal affront, let me rephrase that, they DON’T hear criticism… they tune it out, shout it down, or banish it from their little kingdoms… they love to tell others what jerks and assholes they are, especially persons who aren’t in a position to respond directly… they eventually WILL learn one of the most basic rules of life…
Goes like this: “be nice to the people you meet on your way up, because you’ll meet them again on your way down”
no truer words were ever spoken.
hese are lightweight superficial behavioral skills
I hate to break it to you in the sense that these seduction lessons aren’t going to take you far. If you’re serious you must study with serious teachers. That means you have to take acting class with peers who intend on moving up to professional acting.
More news U can use. There isn’t one acting teacher out there who has it all. Each coach has his or her strengths. You generally have to study with three or four GOOD teachers to be well rounded.
If these self described behavior teachers are half, shoot, one quarter as good as they dream of being, they’d be working and making a rewarding living in the industry, and they’d have women slipping them their phone numbers 'cause nothing turns women (or men, depending on your game) on like real success, and real success derives from one thing, and one thing only, that is real, demonstable competence.
Are we on the same page yet ? Assuming we are, you desire to master these abilities ?
Start researching GOOD acting schools, coaches, intensive seminars, voice production, body language. First point… real teachers are looking for real students. They don’t have time for phonies, assholes, or corner cutting losers. They won’t lift a finger unless you are willing to COMMIT to their study.
Alright, there’s another side to this story. Many teachers are good, even excellent in one side of the work but may be weak or limited in another. It is normal to be incredibly frustrated and/or pissed off with a teacher who can’t or won’t break down a skill into learnable steps or hides behind a mass of overblown acting spiel.
You have to get off your can and find the teacher(s) who know what you need to know and work hard to learn it. Forget all the labels, stanislavski, meisner, adler, bla bla bla… those are just designer tags.
I heard teacher after teacher slinging poo about “listening” and how important it was to know how to “listen” but nobody could explain what they were talking about, although everybody agreed that “listening” was the core skill that divided good, great, mediocre, and terrible actors (you might be mentally extending this to success with women, and you’d be right to think that). Eventually I found myself sufficiently disgusted with the Nth acting teacher using hollow language about “THE WORK” and “being present in the moment” and observing them throw their acting coach tantarums when the student didn’t get it, so I called and called and asked and poked around until I found a teacher who, VOILA!, listened (for real, not faking it to enroll yet another sucker in their glorious academy) and could CONSISTENTLY demonstrate high level listening skills, and was interested enough to work with the student to teach listening skills…
Not as easy as it looks, as this is demanding of the teacher, takes genuine interest and feeling (most high volume schools have teachers phoning it in, but they’re good enough actors that they make it appear that they’re involved… and you wonder why you have a hard time “getting it”… surprise, it’s because they’re not feeling it… now you know, OK?) and YOU have to be willing to listen and learn…
You might try vocal training
I know I have talked myself blue in the face about the value of actor’s training in ANY social interaction. Every one of these how to get women books and courses is essentially a subset of actor’s training.
Here are two suggestions. If you have the motivation, time, and spare funds, take a class in comedy improvisation. Humor taks a lot of chops to do right, meaning to say that you’re not desperately struggling to be funny or pull weak laughs out with dull tongs, rather that you have the intuition to be spontaneously funny. Humor is about the greatest social asset one could have. Make people laugh and they’ll overlook almost anyth ing else… well, up to a point.
Second suggestion, highly important for a young man or woman who wants to get places in life, DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR VOICE, DUDE…
The ironic thing is that we have mirrors everywhere and we preen ourselves constantly, shoot, put a mirror in a cage of chimpanzees and they will be fully absorbed with the mirror.
A miniscule minority of civilian people, those not directly working in media or entertainment, listen to their own voices on a regular basis. We don’t have too many “voice mirrors” around us to clue us in on how we come off to others when we speak.
TOO MANY physically attractive young men and women have MEDIOCRE voices, some have horrible voices. You need , at minimum, a good recorder and a good microphone so you can replay your voice, and voice study materials, and then you have to work hard at it so you sound natural. If you have the opportunity, get a voice coach and take lessons for a couple of months. A good coach will identify your weaknesses and provide you with lessons to correct them.
A good voice is NOT an artifical “deepened” or macho basso or try to come off like a heavy dude voice, it DOES have a balance of fundamental and overtones, smooth rhythm, sinuousness, musicality. Women hear a great voice and they’ll go DIHL without a drop of pheromones.
I did have the chance to observe why some men had repeatedly better results with women. Those with compelling voices could be somewhat less physically attractive, even a bit dicey in their general comportment, however their voice quality would break through the deflector shield more than what they were specifically saying.
suggest you find a real voice teacher
Home study programs may be good as supplemental training. Voice teachers come in two flavors There are the spoken voice teachers, who are closer to speech pathologists, often they specialize in accent elimination. Remember the great BRITISH actor, Cary Grant, whose real name was Archie Leach and grew up a poor working class Brit… yeah, Archie had good voice teachers. He learned how to speak American, moved to California…
Then there are singing teachers, who should teach you two things, voice production AND ear training… I mean, HOW are you going to know what to do if you can’t distinguish between tones ?
A good teacher must have a good ear. He or she will find YOUR “center tone” and then play it on a keyboard or piano.
You’ll learn to hum your center tone, not as easy as it seems , to make a good pure hmmmmmmmmmmm tone, then the teacher starts moving around the keyboard, finding the limit of you natural range, then gradually moves you above it and below it, you slowly learn HOW to gracefully make micro-pitch changes with your voice.
Now, friends, I will tell you, gratis, one of the all time most powerful vocal seduction tools… one that those “how to” courses probably don’t have a clue about…
It is hard to do UNLESS you have a good teacher who can gradually teach you how.
Here it is… a sexless voice, the never get laid voice, lacks controlled micro pitch variation, a voice that takes you places, connects with people on an emotional level, is rich in micro tonal variation. What this means is fine, but meaningfully controlled larynx modulations that give a voice musicality. When women have that in their voices, guys melt when they hear it. When women hear it they feel a powerful unconscious tug “YES!!! GIVE ME YOUR SEED!!!”…
I think this is due to an evolutionary fact that a loose, flexible , strong voice apparatus somehow indicates superior health and superior genetics whereras a flat dry voice gives of a tattered plumage signal…
For that reason you should be cautious about depending on one size fits all voice courses on the internet.
that all depends on a multitude of factors
I guess this first thing is that you learn what causes a voice to communicate an emotional “tone”. A good teacher understands how the larynx operates as a coordinated set of muscles. The average person doesn’t know which throat muscles do what or how. When you have become educated about muscle use you could leave off your training and regardless you would know what parts of your voice mechanism have become weak, what you would need to do to get it back. Typically, one doesn’t know about the coordinations that make good voices sound the way that they do.
It is important, actually it is essential, to find a teacher you like personally and enjoy working with. If there isn’t a good rapport you won’t get the interest level you need to make progress.
In another way, I think you’ll find that good (read: socially productive, fortune enhancing) behaviors are self encouraging. If you begin to do something well, and maybe you were never aware of how your life was being controlled by this skill or lack of it, your life starts to change so you receive major positive feedback to do more of what is bringing you luck. Quick example: I went to the store today to buy some winter clothes. The customer in front of me was being a flaming prick. The cashier was in a vile mood when I stepped up to the register. I started talking to her lightly about the labels, nothing of any profound depth. I could watch her relax and get back into her positive groove so she was pretty OK by the time we were done. If I had been in my old tone she may have been more bent out of shape and I would have been walking around thinking how was it that so many people are perpetually bent out of shape, when they were reacting to my unconsciousness about my tone. It is finally dawning on me why I had a hard time connecting with girls when I was younger, I sounded like a perpetually irate, narrow minded, white trash hick and nobody wanted to know from my sensitive inner self Powerful stuff you’re working with here. Do not underestimate. Will it be the blue pill or will it be the red pill ?
Now you positively gotta check this one out
there is a behavioral consulting company in New York City called First Impressions. Among their services they have a dating simulation. A psychologist meets with you in a public area, a restaurant or something, and you have a pretend date for two or three hours. Then the psychologist prepares you a detailed report of your communication styles, strengths, weaknesses and which specific behaviors, attitudes, personal approaches are hindering the way other potential (mates, girl/boyfriends, hookups, business associates, and so on) will perceive you IN SPITE OF how you believe you are perceived. I read their book where they detail the long list of behaviors we have that we think are sending positive or neutral signals that are in fact turning people off, shutting down communication, running the interaction into the ground… I guess the take home message is that the great majority of us don’t have high quality feedback that will let us fine tune our presentation, and that many of us suffer life long “social underachievement” as a direct result… and that’s a horrifying thought…
here ya go :
looks as if the choice is between getting old in an interesting way and getting old in a crusty way. One thing that pheromones do for me is they allow for better communication with people half my age who normally shut you out as the old alien. Having a wide range of people open up to you and share their inner lives is a good youth tonic. Too may people are age range bound. They can only communicate with others in their narrow age group. Thats the beginning of social isolation which is a damaging psychological condition. Pheromones and prohormones when used wisely, in moderation are a way to feel like you still belong to the human race. I did happen to link up with a beautiful young woman with an astronomical I.Q. who like to do interesting life things with me. Man, talk about the odd couple. Guys could not believe what they were seeing. Young bucks were trying to get her attention, old men were sneaking glances right and left. I have to admit that I felt self conscious as all hell. You hear jokes about the old man gets the young bombshell but to experience the reality of it is another story. It can become a little weird. Other people are seriously contemplating, what does that middle age guy have that I don’t ? It doesn’t fit the public expectation. You quickly realize how much more energy a 25 yeal old has. You have to work your butt off to keep up with them. They can stay up all night and eat greasy crap without ill effect. They want to go see stupid movies they think are profound. I started to get a renewed respect for maturity and the wisdom of age, too.
then you have to clean up your messy life
older guys who have lived to tell the tale know this basic fact of life… it is easier to get yourself into sticky situations than it is to get yourself out of them..there are those people out there who transform into new beings as soon as you’ve had sex with them… sometimes that can be really cool and there are situations where that can be scarily uncool. That’s the real reason everybody isn’t jumping into the sack ten minutes after the first tempting glance… another lesson from the old farmhands…when you feel like a mysterious force is holding you back that can be a good thing, a deep message from your unconscious mind that this hook up might not be in your best interest.
it sounds like a healthy start
pay close attention to the critical detail in what I wrote above… micro tonal variation. The other factors you spoke of in the course, resonance, tempo are important. They are like the exterior structure of your voice, you have to work on them too.
Micro-tonality is the interior structure of your voice. You do have to put the exterior pieces in place before you can focus in on micro tone.
I appreciate that it is hard to do unless you practice one of the voice arts, from singing to commercial voice over… a beautiful woman I know was a professional singer who wanted to restart her career. Told me that she allowed herself TWO YEARS of practice before she was back “in voice” and ready to perform.
Assuming you want to connect with women instead of becoming a singer you don’t need that much training. You will need some. I would make a concerted effort within your budget, buy a full fledged home study voice course, a book or two, maybe ten hours of voice coaching if there’s a teacher in the area.
You’ll know you have found “it” when other people show increased interest when you talk… I am convinced that there is an “auditory pheromone” that is fundamentally hypnotic. When most people hear it they enter into an alpha state. One woman told me that she had a hard time being around me as whenever I spoke she found herself entering a light hypnotic trance. Now I kid her by using my Mickey Mouse voice when I’m around her.
Imagine what happens when you mix this with a good phero hit
08-22-2004, 10:30 AM
now in my second month of hard ass vocal training
obviously, this is not an interest or an option for everyone. It is part of my semi-professional life (face it, theater arts are not known for their income producing reliability, enjoyable as they may be for other reasons, if you score big, more power to you, if you don’t, well, don’t quit your day job)
My teacher has been recording my voice with each training session, where we work with microphones as one would in a soundbooth. After two months of committed work, I literally cannot recognize my own voice. The bass registers and the overtone structures have opened up to the point where it makes my old “naive” voice sound thin and wimpy, and frankly,
none too sexual.
This is the functional equivalent of major plastic surgery in the realm of voice production. The beauty of it is that it is healthy, increasing lung capacity and breath coordination, lower cost by far, and works so well that it is damned scary.
People just want to hang around me and listen to me talk regardless of the value of what I am saying. Women seem to relax and go into a light daze. Even macho black guys check it out… like, where you comin’ from, man ?
There is a strange feeling of responsibility I have, in a way I am radically more self conscious of how my voice affects people, a slight change in inflection can create a positive feeling and lift another person up, a totally unintentional tonal shift can really wound someone, I honestly never had this communicative power, and I feel like an uncoordinated teenager having to relearn how to interact socially. I must now stop myself before I speak and think about how this thing I am about to say will be interpreted. I know that if I say something even slightly stupid or thoughless, its stupidity will be magnified tenfold.
As you may be thinking, when you change your “social power” you must take responsibility for chaning your whole self, you values, your ethics, the meanings behind what you say. Being socially invisible, being a nonentity, lets you get away with a lot of mediocrity, and the bad habits accumulate.
I honestly can say that I never dreamed of this outcome, both how liberating it would turn out to be, or the new demands it would impose. Such is life.
You want to study Improvisation (often called Improv). This is a class exercise where the group suggests a dramatic moment of some form, say, you are both walking your dog and happen to have identical breeds and bump into each other and then you have to invent the conversation for a minute of two. Improv isn’t scripted. There is no memorizing lines. You take the situation as it is given to you and invent the dramatic interaction. You’ll learn a huge amount about how to socially improvise on your feet. If the teacher is good, he or she will give you feedback on what you need to work on, where to focus you attention, how to get unstuck from a dead spot in the scene, how to change rythms, what an emotional beat is. It’s super basic nuts and bolts work on how to be social in an effective way. Imagine that you have to do a scene where you try to pick up a beautiful girl in front of a class of twenty people. Think you’re self conscious now ? Then those twenty people tell you in detail what your strengths and weaknesses are. You can’t get better instruction than that. Actors are paid on the basis of how well they can communicate emotion. They work hard to master it. If you’re exceptionally good you make 20 million dollars to do it in front of a camera. The actors that are paid millions have gone to their share of classes. How many of your friends would you pay money to watch them try and hook up with a girl, that it would be that compelling a performance ?