Attracting the right sexual partner can be a daunting task. Especially if you are not a natural flirt.  But how do you get good at flirting & game? You need a system that continuously motivates and guides you to practice your skills. This blog post explains how to build such a system in 5 steps and how the NoGame app can help you with this.

Step 1: Conceive

The first step to getting better at game is to view it as a skill – something one can learn and get better at. Many people would disagree with this view. They believe in the romantic notion that dating and sexuality are too magical and complex to be learned or understood. But even just a brief look at the scientific literature or at the business world should convince you of the opposite: Biology, psychology and neuroscience offer huge insights into the process of human sexual selection¹ and online dating companies are making billions of dollars by aiding (or hijacking?) that process. When you understand that process for yourself, you can derive behavior changes that will lead to new outcomes. Just like you can grow muscles by understanding your body and working out at the gym, you can attract better matches on the dating market by understanding social dynamics and working on your mind.

Step 2: Take Action

When you start educating yourself about dating and sex, it is easy to fall into the content trap. There is an abundance of exciting YouTube videos, books and coaches waiting for the opportunity to get you enrolled in their never-ending self-improvement programs. This can create the illusion that you are improving while in fact you are spending even more time isolated and lonely in front of your computer. If you read all the books in the world about weight lifting but never actually hit the gym, you certainly won’t see a lot of changes in your body. Likewise, you will not get better at flirting just by understanding all its nuances intellectually.

Approaching and flirting with strangers is extremely hard, because it triggers insecurities and fears, especially the deeply rooted fear of rejection. Only by going out and actually getting rejected over and over again, can you teach your brain that it is not a problem at all to get rejected. By proving to your brain that there is nothing to be afraid of, you build a new, more confident identity. As James Clear put it succinctly:

Changing your beliefs isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. There are two steps.

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.

2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

HTTPS://JAMESCLEAR.COM/IDENTITY-BASED-HABITS

So make sure you go out and approach regularly. When you see a woman (or man for that matter) that you feel irresistibly attracted to, make it a habit to start an interaction. Make sure you have enough opportunities in your everyday life to create such interactions. If you find yourself making up excuses, find others to hold each other accountable. Set a number of approaches you commit to doing each week. Let your wing group know if you accomplished that goal and If you did, celebrate it because that is a small win and a sure step towards your new identity.

Step 3: Measure

Unfortunately, merely taking action does not suffice to get you to the dating life of your dreams. You also need a system to monitor, direct and recalibrate your efforts. Professional athletes constantly measure their performance and experiment with ways to improve those metrics. This allows them to find out which techniques work and which don’t. Every human is different and it always takes some experimentation to find out what works for you. Without some kind of measurement, you cannot perform such experiments because in the end you don’t know whether you improved or not.

Moreover, even if you are already on the right path, progress usually only happens slowly. Without some record, this progress will be hard to perceive and you cannot be sure that your hard work is actually paying off. This can easily get you frustrated and exhausted. Therefore it is important to make small successes clearly visible. The feeling one gets, when one sees clear evidence of self-improvement – even if it is just a tiny step forward – is one of the most joyous and motivating there is.

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This brings us to an important question: What should we measure? Which ‚performance metric‘ reflects success in our love lives? For athletes it is very clear what to measure: Distances, speeds, weights, goals. The rules of dating are more complicated. I am still trying to figure this out and cannot claim to have the definite answer.² But what I learned from my own experience and the first experiments with NoGame is this: When you are at the beginning of your journey, the vast majority of one’s approaches fail. So measuring the outcomes of those approaches is usually frustrating. Instead of focusing on how many numbers and dates you get or how often you end up getting laid, at this early stage, it is better to just focus on the number of approaches you do. Your job is not to make people like you. It is just to go out and practice expressing yourself. So when you manage to go out and approach, you were already successful. Try to reach your weekly goal of approaches and be content when that metric shows up green.³ Again, in the words of James Clear:

Proving your identity to yourself is far more important than getting amazing results. This is especially true at first.

HTTPS://JAMESCLEAR.COM/IDENTITY-BASED-HABITS

Step 4: Reflect

Once you have broken through the initial inertia and started seeing evidence of progress, you will experience a boost of motivation. Nevertheless, every now and then you will hit a plateau and feel stuck. When that happens it is time to pause, reflect, and adjust: See if you can find patterns in your results. Write notes or even longer field reports to make sure you learn your lessons. Try to find out why your interactions fail and what challenges show up most often. Once you know what your main sticking point is, go and find specific material or seek support from others to improve that aspect of your game.

This is a great moment to turn to the community or coaches for help. When you connect with other people who are on this journey, you will quickly realize that you are in one of the most communicative and helpful communities on earth. People are happy to share their experiences and point you towards the things that helped them when they were in a similar situation.

Step 5: Share

This brings us to the last step of learning game. Once you have learned something, try to get on the other side of the exchange and share that knowledge with the community. Respond to questions others are having in your local chat group or publish a field report. Go out with less experienced people and give them feedback or start a wing group to go out together. Just like runners who pass and greet each other on a cold, rainy morning, people in this community respect each other because they know how arduous and profound the process is that they are going through. Many of them are also the smartest and most driven people you can find. Reaching out and helping them will strengthen your own understanding and it will win you friends for life.

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Spiral up

Some of the experiences that are waiting for you on this path will be so frustrating that you will be likely to give up and go back to tinder. You need a strong support system to keep you motivated through the dark episodes that are inevitable to come. Luckily there is a vast body of knowledge, a strong community and now even emerging technology to support you on this quest. And of course, all that effort pays off in the long run. Because ultimately, you get to spend your life with adventures and people you truly love and feel inspired by.

The 5 steps outlined above are not intended as an ascending ladder with the fifth step being the final destination. Rather you should think of it as a cyclical process or an upward spiral: Even as an absolute beginner you can cycle through all steps in just one day: You go out in the afternoon, measure your performance while you are in the field, reflect in the evening when you come back home and then share a field report with your wing group at night. And a few days later, you do it all over again. Your stories might not be too exciting yet and your insights might not be very original, but people who are at your level will still find them valuable. For them they are much more relatable than a random post on the internet. They know you personally, can ask you for more details and can picture the situations vividly. As you cycle through these steps your level increases and you get to a place where your practice yields more beautiful interactions and your insights are more profound.

The NoGame app is available for free on iOS and Android.

Footnotes

1. Probably best summarized in David Buss‘ Evolution of Desire.
2. Of course, this will also depend a lot on what you personally consider a ‚win‘ in dating. Some want to have a deep & lasting relationship, others want to explore passionate sex with numerous partners.
3. I would still advise people to record the outcomes of approaches and the number and quality of dates that resulted from them. But those measures are harder to interpret and should only play a role later in the process.
4. Amazing mountain photos by Giacomo Berardi