One of the things that amazed me when I started becoming more successful with women, was realizing that many women don’t know what to say to a man when they first meet him. Previously, I thought that it was just me who sucked at conversation, but it quickly became clear to me that women were also struggling to think of things to say to keep a conversation going and keep it interesting.

As I became more and more confident around women, I started to experiment with something…

After the woman and I had said a few things to each other to get the conversation started and keep it going for about a minute or so, I would just stop. I’d pause and wait to see how the girl would react. If I was at a bar for example, I would casually have a sip of my drink and look around the bar in a relaxed, confident way, not worrying about the pause in conversation. What would happen? In most cases, the women would quickly try to think of something to say and would blurt out a lame, classic line, such as:

  • Ummm…so, what do you do?
  • Ummm…so, where are you from?
  • Ummm…so, do you come here often?

I was very surprised when I saw women reacting in this way. I would then respond with a smile and say, “Oh, how’s that for a cheesy line? Where’d you get that from? The internet or something?” and we would all have a laugh.

Seeing women react like that taught me that my previous perceptions of women were wrong. When I was a nervous, self-doubting guy, I would usually perceive women as being better at socializing than me, as being more confident than me and being “cooler” than me. I viewed any pauses in conversation as being my fault and as meaning that I was hopeless at socializing. I believed that women saw me as a loser because I sometimes didn’t know what to say during a conversation, when in fact a lot of women don’t actually know what to say as well.

When I realized that most women weren’t expert conversationalists and would actually worry about pauses and silences in conversation, it helped me to feel more relaxed and confident about the idea of walking up to talk to women. I stopped putting the blame solely on myself by thinking, “I’m stuffing this up because I don’t know what to say!!” and began thinking, “Okay, just relax and let this conversation happen naturally, even if that means it happens a bit slower than normal and with a few more pauses.” When women noticed that I wasn’t panicking during a pause in conversation, they felt more attraction for me because I was displaying confidence, which is the most attractive trait a man can display around women.

Getting a Shy Women to Open Up

To get a shy woman to open up to you during conversation, you need to do is help her feel more comfortable about sharing her emotions and opinions. The way to do that is not by asking her a lot of questions, but by leading the way by giving some information about yourself (i.e your feelings, your opinions) followed by a question.

For example: Imagine that you’re talking to a shy girl in a bar. Instead of asking her, “Do you come here often?”, “What are you drinking there?” or “What do you do for a living?” lead the way by sharing some of your feelings and opinions and then asking her what she thinks and feels.

“Y’know…I haven’t been to this bar in a couple of months or so. I really like this place because you come in here and the volume of the music is just right; you can have a chat…there always seems to be a good vibe in here, with lots of people having fun. A friend of mine had a party here about 5 months ago…that was cool. I like this place, it has a good vibe to it. How about you? What do you think of this place? What are your favorite bars in town?”

She will then share her feelings about the bar or about other bars in your city. You can then explore her feelings and opinions more, joke around with some of the things she says, flirt with her or relate to what she is saying. If you’d like to learn more about keeping conversations going and keeping them interesting, we provide examples of how to respond to women in different ways in our program, The Ultimate Guide to Conversation.