Step By step Guide to How to Pick Up a Girl

The 10 Common Mistakes Men Make Trying to Pick Up Girls

1. They go to the wrong places. When most men think of picking up a girl, they think of big loud nightclubs. But big loud nightclubs are a stretch for many men out there – for many guys, it’d be a lot easier to strike up a conversation with a girl in a bookstore or on the street. You can do the club scene, and it can be a lot of fun, but do keep in mind there are a lot more places to meet women than big rooms with pulsing music and strobing lights.

2. They focus on the wrong things. Doing well with women isn’t about having good “pick up lines” or dressing flashy. It’s your presence – how you are, including your posture, your body language, your eye contact, your voice tone – and what you say after you first say hello that matters most. Those are the things that get women attracted and cause them to want to move forward with you. But most guys focus on the wrong things, and are left scratching their heads when their pick up attempts fall flat.

3. They don’t emulate winners. Ever have anyone say the phrase “Just be yourself” to you? Well, there is a kernel of truth in it – but it’s no good until you’ve spent enough time trying to emulate others that you know what parts of yourself are good as-is and what parts need tweaking. When you’re meeting new women, who are you trying to be like?

   If it isn’t a guy you already know does better with women than you do, you’re probably missing out on implementing a lot of the more effective things he does. In business, we call it benchmarking. In sports and in the arts, they call it having an “influence.” Whatever you want to call it, the people who do best don’t figure it all out on their own. They learn from those better than themselves and go from there.

4. They don’t know how to target. I’m either going to do a post on this or maybe even put an entire program out on it at some point, but being able to target the right women to meet is so very key to succeeding. It’s why men who are very experienced will at times go out and talk to one woman, and that’s the woman they take home later.

   It does require you to spend some time learning how to do it, but once you’ve developed the ability to discern which women are open to meeting someone new – pay special attention to body language and eye contact – is she focused on her friends, or does she seem distracted – it all gets so much easier you’ll find it difficult to believe you ever got by without looking for these signs she’s interested before.

   Oh, and, while I know they seem like the bright shiny objects of a bar or nightclub, don’t chase after the girls partying hard on the dance floor, because they’re not in a “meeting a cute guy” kind of mode. Instead, wait until they take a break and stop dancing, or find a girl who’s relaxing by the bar already. I guarantee you it’ll go over better than trying to get to know her while she’s bouncing up and down.

5. They miss escalation windows. Of all the ten mistakes listed here, this one’s the most painful. Missing an escalation window is what happens when a girl wants a guy to move things forward, and signals for him to move things forward… and he just doesn’t. And then she gives up.

   Argh.

   This happens to lots of guys early on. It used to happen to me a lot. It happens because either a guy doesn’t realize she’s signaling him to move things forward, or because he’s moving too tentatively and doesn’t capitalize on the signals he gets.

6. They’re too much fun. Fun kills the mood; it messes things up. At least, the kind of fun that most guys try to pull off. Being sexy and a bit fun is great; being goofy, silly, slapstick-y, or just platonically fun is, on the other hand, terribly counterproductive. It communicates to women that a man is more a fun friend than he is a sexual option. No good.

7. They never go beyond the surface. How many times does a guy have to have an average go-nowhere conversation with women before he realizes go-nowhere conversations don’t take him anywhere? Most guys never get past the surface with women in their conversations, and never really get to know the girls they’re talking to. Because of that, they never end up feeling connected to the women they’re meeting – and the women they’re meeting never end up feeling connected to them, either.

8. They don’t move women. The #1 way to get a girl committed to talking to you early on, and the #1 way to see if she’s serious about you, are one and the same: you ask her to move with you. But most guys are so scared she’ll say no that they don’t ask; or else, they just plain don’t think of it. So, she never commits to the interaction, and it starts feeling awkward. And then she leaves. And guys then guys are even more cautious the next time and wait even longer before asking a girl to go sit with them or accompany them to another part of the store or coffee shop or bar or lounge. Egad.

9. They don’t invite women home. Goes without saying a guy won’t do too well picking a girl up if he never asks her home. Yet all the time, men go out to meet women with the hopes of finding a new girl to take home that night, and still never ask any women they meet to go home with them. Make sense to you? No, me neither.

10. They come ready to lose. How many of the above wouldn’t even be an issue if men came playing to win and kept that mentality the entire time? Probably at least half of them. But most guys are so ready for failure that they miss the signs that are there that women want things to move forward, and they fail to take actions they need to take to make the night a success.

    Being ready to lose is different from having nothing to lose; the guy who has nothing to lose does whatever he wants because he has no fear of losing. The guy who’s ready to lose doesn’t even try, because he’s confident he’s going to fail no matter what he does. It ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and, just as he expected, he ends up going nowhere fast with the women he meets.

Those are your 10 most common mistakes men make trying to pick up a girl. Maybe reading through you see some mistakes you make; those are all mistakes I made when I was new, and I see guys making them every day (or, at least, every day I’m not holed up in a cave in some third world country writing articles like this or doing business stuff like I am right now).

How to Pick Up a Girl

• Choose your locations wisely. If you like party girls, you ought to be hitting up parties and nightclubs. However, if you like more sensual, seductive women, you’ll fare better in lounges and house music venues. And if you like intellectuals and educated girls, your best bet is going to be the bookstore… or the street. And if you’re not sure, check out my free ebook Finding Your Niche; that’ll help you narrow down where to begin.

• Ditch the pick up lines. Some cheesy line isn’t going to win a girl’s heart over. But if you open strongly and confidently with a direct opener, you just might speed the process up quite a bit. If that seems a bit much to start out with, you can always lean on the trusty indirect direct style of opening to get the ball rolling.

• Move girls fast. I can’t stress enough how important it is to be moving women. Moving a woman forces her to commit to an interaction with you – or bow out of it entirely if they have no intentions of doing so. Asking a girl to move is the moment of truth for an interaction – the girls who are genuinely interested in you will go with you (although you might have to ask / insist a few times); the ones who are just being social won’t. To minimize time spent on girls who are just being social and maximize time getting girls invested, move women you meet five to ten minutes into talking to them – or faster. And say goodbye to the ones who won’t accompany you – trust me on that one.

• Actually get to know women. As in beyond the surface layer. Use deep diving and your prowess as a conversationalist to get to the core of her person. In other words, don’t just find out where she moved from, but find out why she moved and how she came to that decision and whethershe’d make the same move again if she had to do it all over. That’s how you really get to know a girl in a hurry.

• Move faster in general. Not just in physically moving girls but in all aspects of your interaction and seduction. The longer you take, the more time you’re allowing yourself to make mistakes, the more time you’re allowing outside factors to coming in and influence the progress of your interaction (like some random drunk guy or your girl’s overprotective best friend), and the more time you’re allowing that initial excitement she had upon first meeting you to cool off. Waste not, want not; if you want to pick up girls, don’t forget to pick up the pace.

• Invite women home and get physical. This is the endgame in a pick up, the part that differentiates a cool conversation you had with a girl from an actual pick up, where you took a girl home with you (or went back to her place, or to some other convenient location where the two of you could be alone together). You went out specifically to meet a girl to get together with, yeah? Well, asking her home and getting physical is the final piece of the puzzle in accomplishing what you set out to accomplish.

• In bars and nightclubs, look for girls who seem a bit distracted, are looking around a lot, or aren’t paying as much attention to their friends. Something else is on their minds, and much of the time that’s finding a new guy.

• On the street, keep your eyes peeled for girls who stare at you hard; they’re the ones you most want to stop and say hello to.

• When you’re getting to know a girl, make sure you’re keeping the focus of the conversation on getting to know more about her – her hopes, her dreams, her past experiences, what she wants for her future – and less about yourself.

• Touching is good and important and you should be doing it often in the beginning. Start touching women the moment you meet them – particularly as a beginner, it’s one of the main ways you’ll differentiate yourself from the platonic guys who’ll only ever end up being just friends with those women.

• Be looking constantly for ways to get investment. When you’re deep diving, you’ll be getting women investing nearly continuously in the conversation, because they’ll constantly be thinking about how to answer your questions and they’ll be doing most of the talking and most of the impressing – and that’s very good. Look for other ways to get compliance throughout your interactions as well – getting investment is how you get women more and more accustomed to following your lead, which is necessary for moving things forward at critical junctures.