If you haven’t had much success with attractive women so far in your life, your brain is going to make sense of this by generating seemingly logical reasons why you haven’t had the abundant dating life you’ve always wanted.

These stories tend to be disempowering, for some men these rationalizations will be about their physical appearance (I’m not tall/jacked/handsome enough), for others they will be about their status (I need to make more money, have a better car).

These rationalizations aren’t arbitrary, they reflect widely held cultural values. We are inundated with the idea (from Hollywood, advertisements, and societal stereotypes) that we need to look a certain way, have the right possessions, and be high status to get the women we want. Because of this, it’s natural to think we need those things, and thinking that way leads us to conclude that we shouldn’t waste our time and effort in a (futile) attempt to date extremely attractive women.

It gets worse, once we develop the belief that we aren’t good enough, that belief becomes self-reinforcing. Your life is going to keep giving you evidence that you don’t deserve particularly attractive women, because there isn’t going to be a point in your life where beautiful women miraculously start approaching you and begging to suck your dick. Therefore, each month that goes by in which you don’t successfully date an attractive woman, the notion that you’re not good enough is being reinforced.

This self-fulfilling prophecy becomes even more ruthless because the belief that you don’t deserve attractive women will be reflected in your behavior around those women. On the one hand, your self-defeating beliefs are going to make you uncomfortable around women you’re attracted to, which will lead you to act doubtful and anxious around those women. As a result, attractive women will feel uncomfortable around you. Then, you will notice these women are uncomfortable around you, and because your brain is looking for evidence that you’re not good enough, that’s exactly how you will interpret this feedback.

It’s a truly vicious cycle, our culture reinforces the notion that you need to be attractive, have high status, or be wealthy to attract beautiful women, so when you don’t date beautiful women, you think it must be because you lack the attributes society has taught you are necessary. Then you provide yourself with more evidence that you need money, looks, and status because these women don’t seem to like you, they seem uncomfortable around you. You assume this is because you don’t have the external attributes that society deifies, even though it’s really because of your uncomfortable behavior.

To escape this cycle, you must get evidence that you are attractive to high quality women. How? By approaching them and reflecting on what you could have done differently in a field report. By focusing on what you could have done differently in a field report, you’re empowering yourself to start to notice the aspects of interactions that are under your control. As you adjust your approach based on these observations, you will notice the responses you get start to improve. You will start to gather evidence that the most important variable for your ability to attract high quality women is not something outside of your control like your physical appearance or wealth, but your own behavior.

As you progressively push yourself further, you will gradually gather more evidence that your rationalizations are in fact, untrue, and you will free yourself of a mental prison that was created by society but then reinforced by your own mind.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Master the Game (To be release on 3/22/17)- to receive a limited 48 hr 50% discount on release date, subscribe to my blog at https://tpsychnation.com/about/ (subscribe button is on the right of page on desktop and bottom of page on mobile).