self help
How to get a good woman: Cultivating Friendships (Part 3)
Looking for the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with? Tired of being alone? Obviously, I can’t guarantee or promise anything… but I can tell you what mindsets you need to adjust in order to find a good woman.
Too often, our relationships are doomed with the wrong goal. We start pursuing relationships with women from the perspective that they will want to date us, marry us, sleep with us. We start with romance in mind.
If you want to “get a good woman,” what you are chasing is a long term committed relationship with the right woman. Not to oversimplify or sound too judgmental, but let’s call it that marriage. (It seems strange that we have to offer a disclaimer about marriage in this day and age. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I fear our culture is abandoning some very important values when it comes to long term relationships in regards to marriage. That is another topic for another day.)
If all of your energies are focused on building that romance from the start, what you build is a relationship built on attraction and emotion – and those are pretty weak foundation blocks for a lifelong commitment.
Don’t start by asking her out. Start by getting to know her. Invite a group of friends, coupled and un-coupled out for dinner, or a hike, or over to play board games. Be friends first. Build that friendship, and the rest may follow. If it doesn’t, you can keep trying, or you can move on! Moving on is tricky though – if you’ve already walked down the aisle with her in your heart. Take it slower. Don’t try to inject that into your friendship, and keep those emotions and imaginations under control.
Take it slow may look different from case to case. When I met my wife, our collective groups of friends hung out at college all the time for about a month or so, and then I just knew that I should pursue taking that friendship to a romantic level. We were married nine months later. For some, it may appear “fast” or “quick” and I’m not averse to a quick relationship….
But it does need to start out with friendship. We spent a lot of time with friends talking, laughing, goofing off, eating meals, going to concerts, watching movies together. We had conversations, and grew to trust each other, and knew each other quite well, surprisingly, before progressing to romance.
Too often, this step is skipped.
And if a friendship is not built well and carefully, it might not survive the “Hey, you want to go on a date?” question.
It doesn’t have to be awkward afterward. It only is awkward if you’re all puppy-dogged and weepy about it. Keep those emotions in check, and if she isn’t interested in you, then keep the friendship and work toward building another romance with someone else – unless you think you can try again later.
The problems come when we gunk all this up with sexual tension, unrealistic attachments, and unbridled emotion.
Keep your wits about you, young man.
Justin Willoughby – #mancrushmonday
Every Monday At Manlihood.com – we celebrate men of courage, valor, creativity, innovation, and honor. We celebrate men who have accomplished great things, that have set good examples, and then have made the world a better place. This is #mancrushmonday
Justin Willoughby is one of my best friends. I hate to overdo my “mancrush” on Justin – but he really is an inspiration to me.
I first met Justin at Wal-mart. He was about 600 pounds at that point. He had already lost almost 200 pounds, but I didn’t know that. I just remember seeing this massive kid struggling to push a shopping cart around the store with an oxygen tank. And I saw him eating a Snickers Bar. My first initial thought was a bit judgmental, “Who is this fat kid, and why is he eating a candy bar?”
(I found out later that he had just spent hours walking around Wal-mart as exercise – and that candy bar was his first in months. It was his reward for his consistent hard work!)
I later met Justin again at church – and by this point, he had lost another 200 pounds. He was still big, but by this point, this young man had literally hacked his way out of a prison of fat.
He continued to work hard to lose the weight, and now he is 600 pounds lighter. He has dedicated his life to helping other people achieve their goals, in weight loss and life.
Check out his website here.
Check out his interview on the TODAY SHOW
Whose fault is it anyway? Take back your life with a simple mind hack.
For more thoughts on this, check out these posts about being a victor, rather than a victim.
How to Get a Good Woman: Confidence (Part 2)
Looking for the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with? Tired of being alone? Obviously, I can’t guarantee or promise anything… but I can tell you what mindsets you need to adjust in order to find a good woman.
I feel strongly that if you do what we talked about last week, and improve your self, you’ll naturally be more confident.
But women are looking for confidence. They are looking for a man who knows himself, and who is confident with who he is.
They can smell bravado a mile a way, though. Whatever you do – don’t fake it. If you project confidence when you don’t have it, you look like that little kid on the playground who lies about what his dad does for a living.
Here are the steps you need to take to become more confident,
1. Change your mind. (Change your thoughts)
Confidence is birthed out of a mindset. That mindset has to be cultivated. Your mind is a garden. You’ve got to plant seeds of confidence if you want confidence to grow and produce fruit.
You can’t choose to be confident in the moment when you’re on your first date. You have to choose to be confident now! Make the choice, and work toward cleaning up your thought patterns – taking negative thoughts captive, and replacing them with confidence.
2. Set Goals (and then acheive them)
The biggest way to boost confidence naturally is to set a goal, and make it happen.
I watched my son, who took the driver’s license test a few times before passing, set a goal to pass it, then practice his parallel parking. When he passed his test – he was beaming with confidence. In fact, this young man who is normally shy around the ladies started immediately chatting up another young lady who successfully passed her test.
Your goal may be losing weight, learning french, getting a job, finishing a project, buying a car – or any other number of goals that will give you the feeling of accomplishment you need.
- Build our tribe (and evaluate who is in it)
I’m never a fan of kicking people out of your life – but you may want to take inventory of the people that you allow to speak into your life. Are they building you up? Or cutting you down?
Spend time with the people that build you up, and limit your contact with those that don’t. You don’t have to tell them you are limiting their contact. Be cordial to them – but just allow yourself to pull away from the influences in your life that bring you down.
Note: Sometimes a good friend may talk tough to you – this does not always equate to cutting you down. Keep your skin thick, but be open to friends who really do want to see you improve who share the hard truth with you. A real friend tells you if there is a booger on your face.
4. Mirror Talk
The idea of pep-talking to yourself in the mirror is a bit of a cultural trope… but maybe there’s a little something to it. Maybe looking yourself in the eye and speaking positive truths to yourself actually does build you up.
Sometimes I think the words that we use are a bit magical. There are power in your words. So use them wisely to build yourself. The power of saying. “I can do this!” is quite possible the most mystical experience there is.
I know most of these things seem to focus on the internal more than the focus on the relationships with women directly. The truth is – what a woman wants has more to do with what’s behind the scenes, ANYWAY.
Henry Ford – #mancrushmonday
Every Monday At Manlihood.com – we celebrate men of courage, valor, creativity, innovation, and honor. We celebrate men who have accomplished great things, that have set good examples, and then have made the world a better place. This is #mancrushmonday
Henry Ford pioneered not only the automotive industry, but the manufacturing industry, and really, the employment industry.
He took risks, broke all the rules with the way things were done, and developed a great product that ultimately changed the world.
He wasn’t the guy that invented the automobile – but he certainly set the standard for how they should be made.
According to Wikipedia:
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
Although Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly line,[1] he developed and manufactured the first automobile that many middle class Americans could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would profoundly impact the landscape of the 20th Century. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. As the owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with “Fordism“: mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to systematically lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put dealerships throughout most of North America and in major cities on six continents. Ford left most of his vast wealth to the Ford Foundation and arranged for his family to control the company permanently.
Check out these quotes about business, leadership, and innovation from Henry Ford:
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
Don’t find fault, find a remedy.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.
Vision without execution is just hallucination.
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.