This Brilliant Line Got Me to Call Instead of Text (Matthew Hussey, Get The Guy)

There's a comment that I often read on social media. The comment is, why do we need all these techniques? Ladies, you don't need these techniques. You just need to be yourself. Or, ladies, if you're just confident, you don't need to know this stuff. It's all about you just being the confident version of you. You don't need all of these ideas and techniques. The problem I have with this is it's a huge oversimplification, the truth, which is that in life, there are two things that we must have in any area. Dating is no exception. We have to have confidence. We also need to have competence. These are two sides of the same coin. If you have confidence without competence, then you're someone who may have the courage, the ability to act, but you don't necessarily know what to do. You don't know the right things to do. You could be confident at riding a motorcycle. If you're not competent at riding a motorcycle, you're still going to crash. Competence is extraordinarily important in our love life. And I get tired of hearing about how our love life is somehow different to every other part of our life. When we go and get a job, we learn how to do that job. If you've been doing a job for 10 years, no one could say that you don't know more about doing that job now than you did when you first started. So that's not just about confidence. And interestingly, the fact that you've done that job so long and become competent at it is likely to mean that confidence has resulted. In other words, you getting good at that thing has made you more confident in that arena. But you see, confidence is area specific. Just because you have confidence in one part of your life, it doesn't just entitle you to confidence somewhere else. By the way, this is why it gets very confusing. Because you can have a woman who seems to be very confident in her work, but when it comes to her love life, none of that confidence is there. If you ask her to go and hold a business conference or to speak to her, to her execs, she could do that all day long. But if you say to her, go and approach a guy tonight and flirt with him or seduce him, she goes to pieces. The idea of that is horrifying to her. She would never be able to do it because confidence is area specific. I'll give you an example of an area that highlights this. Women often come to me and say, how do I get a guy to call instead of text the guys that I'M speaking to all of them. All they ever seem to want to do is text. They never seem to actually pick up the phone. Who could say that answering that question is a confidence issue, not competence issue? Who could say in response to that, well, you just need to be more confident. The answer to her question comes down to competence. It comes down to understanding how to actually communicate with men in a way that gets you the result that you want, and that's a skill that you build. So in our example, I actually had a woman once who I was texting after us. Texting, I think, for a couple of weeks. I found a missed call on my phone from her, and when I called her back, I said, hey, how are you? She said, I'm great. I said, it's good to hear your voice. And she said to me, yeah. She said, we're like pen pals. I said, pen pals. Now, this immediately stuck in my mind as something negative. I didn't want to be this woman's pen pal. And for the first time, I associated really negatively with just texting her. Before texting her felt like the easy option for me. Like, oh, well, I'm just texting her and seeing where it goes. When she called me her pen pal and she said, yeah, we're like pen pals, I was like, screw that, pen pals. I don't want to be your pen pal. That's not sexy. No guy wants to be your pen pal. That is not a sexy image. That's like a super platonic, almost childish image. And he doesn't want to have that image with you. He wants to be the sexy guy. So two things have already happened in this that show massive competence, whether she knew it or not. The first is she left me a call. She tried calling me. Now, ladies, if you want a guy to call you more, actually just reaching out and calling him, even if he doesn't answer or you just get his voicemail, will send a very clear message that it's okay and not weird for him to call you. For a lot of guys, we're a little nervous about calling you. Believe it or not. When she called me and I saw a missed call on my phone from her, my brain went, ah, I should call her back. It's normal to call her. So crazy and stupid as that sounds, it gave me a license to do what she wanted me to do. The second thing she did right, she immediately got me to associate negatively with texting. We had a great conversation, 10, 15 minutes, and then we got off the phone short and Sweet. After the phone call, about five minutes later, I get a text message. It's from her, and it reads, why is it that hearing your voice can leave me flustered even after we've hung up? And it was the third thing that went. That she did really, really well because now she's given me a license to call. By calling me first, she got me to associate negatively with texting her by saying, we're like pen pals, right? Ugh, horrible image for a guy to have. And then third, after we'd hung up, she said something that made me feel desirable when I was on the phone. So now I'm associating positively with. With the idea of calling her. Because now I go, God, when I call her, I leave her flustered just by speaking to her. So negativity associated with texting, positivity associated with the phone call. I never had problems calling this woman again. She was a woman that I would always call wherever possible. I would still text her, but I would also call her in a way that I would never call other people. This is someone not just with confidence. This is someone with competence. Even if you just take the pen pal part of it, that's a. That's like a very valuable script. The part where she said, why is it that just hearing your voice can leave me flustered even after we've hung up? That's a really valuable script. And anyone who says, you don't need to learn all of these techniques, what you need to learn is just to be confident. It is the height of arrogance. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine went to a wedding. He was telling me a story of how the people that were giving speeches, the guys that were giving speeches, were all very cocky and confident before their speeches. When he asked them, you know, have you spent some time preparing? Have you read through your speech? Have you memorized it? Each one of them said the same thing. Nah. Said, I'm just going to do it. It's going to be great. I'm going to do it. I don't need to memorize it or rehearse it. No, I'm just going to get up there and do my thing. He's. He said it was really, in its own way, refreshing to see just how untrue that was, because each one of them got on stage, tried to give a speech, which turned into a rambling mess. And as a result, they just looked like they weren't prepared. And these people who were super cocky and confident going in, didn't feel so cocky and confident on the way out. Actually, they could have got away without confidence if they'd have had more competence in getting up there and knowing what they were doing. When you think of a politician or a president who has, for a five minute speech, even a casual one, a speechwriter, they have people looking at what they're gonna wear. They have people looking at the inflections in their voice, what words they should and shouldn't use. They have all sorts of surveys that poll what people respond to and what they should say and what subjects they should steer clear from. They have a whole team of people just to make sure that what looks like a casual speech goes really well. So how is it that a politician who's had 30 years of experience needs that whole team and someone giving a wedding speech thinks that they can just give a five minute impromptu speech like that? If you really want to do well in an area, you have to get competent at that thing. You have to have structure. You have to know what you're doing. That's what allows you to get the result you every single time. Confidence is great, but you need the competence that actually goes with it. That's what's really important. So, and here's the interesting thing. If you're competent at something, if you're rehearsed, if you have structure, you're then free to be spontaneous. The best comedians, the best public speakers, the people who have the greatest stories, are not the spontaneous people. They're the people that are the best rehearsed, so that when they're on stage, they're running on autopilot, they're so rehearsed and they know so well what they're going to do, that then if they want to go off on a random tangent or deal with a heckler in the audience, they can be spontaneous in that moment because they always have their structure to return to. I saw Anthony Bourdain in one of the episodes of Parts Unknown, and one of the chefs he was talking to said, I have worked very hard at being a great dinner guest. And Anthony Bourdain kind of looked at him funny and said, you practiced at being a great dinner guest? And the guy said, absolutely. He said, well, how do you practice? He said, I have stories prepared, things that I want to say, interesting things that have happened to me that week, books I've read, facts I've learned so that he can go and deliver on really bringing value to the dinner table, not as the host, but as the guest. That was very inspiring to me and very telling. Because the reality is the people that show up to the dinner table, who are great, who are fascinating, who we all want to invite back to dinner, the people who go on a date, who we want to bring back on a date, who we want to go on date two and date three and date four with, the people who give a great speech, the comedians who tell a great joke. All of these people have rehearsed to get to a level of competence, which means now they can almost run on autopilot. It's only when you don't know what you're doing that you're not free to have fun. Because when you have no idea what you're doing and when you feel nervous about what to say and what you should and shouldn't say, and you don't have great stories prepared, and you don't know how to show the best parts of yourself, and you don't know how to communicate to a guy that you didn't. That you don't like something he just did or that something he just said disrespected you or fell beneath your standard. When you don't know how to do those things, you're so busy in your own head analyzing and trying to work everything out in real time that you can't actually be spontaneous and enjoy the moment. That's the crazy thing. Structure allows for spontaneity. Competence allows for you to go out there and have fun. And communication is a huge, huge subject. It's my passion. Two things have served me massively in my life. One, hard work. There's no substitute for that. Hard work. The second is actually knowing how to communicate. That skill has brought me more opportunities than anything else in my life. And anytime that my hard work has given me an opportunity, which is what hard work does, right? If you keep working hard, opportunities will come your way. But what's allowed me to capitalize on those opportunities is knowing how to communicate, knowing how to influence, knowing how to get the desired result. And if you really want success in your love life, you better be competent and not just confident. Because I meet plenty of confident people all the time who have no idea what they're doing. And, ladies, I know you know what I'm talking about here, because you meet plenty of guys who are confident and not competent, and those are not the guys that you go for. You can have a guy who walks up to you, tons of confidence, and he comes across as arrogant, obnoxious, and sleazy, and you don't even want to speak to him for another minute. And by the way, ladies, if you want to put yourself in control if you actually want to have power, personal power, in your day. I'm not talking about power over men because I don't believe in that. I'm talking about personal power, where you know how to influence and you know how to get what you need out of a situation. The way to get your power back is to know how to influence a guy. It's to know how to talk to him. It's to know how to be competent. The woman that I expressed to you in my example, that woman who knew consciously or unconsciously, I don't know if it came naturally to her or if she knew exactly what she was doing. I suspect the latter. But that woman, because she was competent, was able to turn me into the guy that enjoyed calling her instead of the guy who just texted her. And the crazy part about being competent is that the guys who act the wrong way around other women will often act the right way around the woman who knows what she's doing. It's crazy, but it's true. Which is why people who are competent often can't understand the problems that everyone else goes through. Because to them, it's like, I don't even have that problem. Guys not calling me and just texting. I don't even have that problem. And of course, I've given you one scenario, but there are a thousand scenarios with men that I know that you would probably like to be more competent in. What's cool is, I get tweets every day, Facebook messages, people telling me that they've used a line or that they've used a text that I've given them, and that it's actually paid off. It's actually worked. Over the years, I've come to really appreciate the value of giving people very specific things that they can say and do, because then they can run on autopilot. Then they feel free and very empowered. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's been. This is a subject that I've always known about and always been interested in, and it's always driven my work, but never quite to the extent that it has in the past few months. I've been very caught up in this. And I have something next week that I'm about to make an announcement about that I can't talk any more about today, but I'm very, very excited about it. I will say this now on next Sunday's Video Watch, right to the end of the video. There's going to be announcement there. I'm going to tell you exactly what it is. Until then, have an early bird list that you can get on if you want to be amongst the first to hear about this. So if you want to be on the early bird list for this announcement, I'm going to put it up on the video now and I'm link up under the video as well. Just click through. All you need to do is put in your email address. I know some of you have done this in the past when I've had big announcements. You've put yourself on the early bird list and you know the value of doing that. Many people in the past when they haven't joined an early bird list for me have missed out. So go and join that list now. If this video has been something that has sparked a curiosity for you, if it's been something that has has touched a nerve because you know that you need to be more competent in this area of your life, then join that early bird list now. And next week I'll see you for the announcement. Never forget that if you want more confidence, one route to confidence is to become more competent. Competence creates confidence. We're going to keep going on this road to competence. I'm very, very excited about the ideas I'm going to share with you next week. So I'll see you then. Have a great week. In the meantime, take.