What is the biggest mistake guys make when trying to improve their dating lives?

They don’t have an effective plan.

It’s one thing to know you want to date high-quality women, it’s another thing to have a step-by-step blueprint for reaching that goal.

Whenever I start working with a new coaching client, the first thing I ask is, “What are you planning to do in the next month to improve your dating life?”

Can you guess what the most common answer I get is?

It’s, “I don’t know.”

The harsh truth is this: your results are going to be about as good as your plan for getting them.

It’s not your fault if you don’t have a good plan. We live in a world that teaches us to become addicted to instant gratification and to think more about the next 12 minutes than the next 12 months.

But if you want to succeed in dating (or any area of your life), your ability to create a blueprint for your own success is absolutely key.

So, how do you make a good plan?

There are a few key elements.

Dating Advice For Men Part 1:

Make It Measurable

There’s a huge distinction between saying, “I want a girlfriend,” and saying, “I’m going to approach 20 women each week until I get a new girlfriend.”

A vague goal is going to lead to inconsistent action.

The more solid and focused your goal is, the more ‘real’ your plan will feel, it will be grounded in specific steps rather than being a fantasy.

Sure, start with something you want: A girlfriend, a string of one-night stands, or whatever else. But from there, think about the specific actions you can take to get that goal.

This isn’t an exact science; focus on something that you know will increase your chances of achieving that long-term goal.

For most guys, approaching women regularly is a great place to start.

Your plan might involve approaching a certain amount of women per week or to dedicate a particular number of hours to going out and meeting women.

Having an imperfect plan that gets you taking action is a thousand times better than having no plan and waiting for life to happen to you.

Dating Advice For Men Part 2:

Make It Realistic

When we want to accomplish something, we tend to think in terms of “How can I achieve my goal as quickly as possible?”

On the surface, this makes sense. The idea of losing 50 pounds in the next 3 months is way more appealing than the idea of taking a entire year to lose the weight.

But there’s a problem with this type of thinkingâ¦

We set goals when we are in a state of emotional excitement. We are driven by this state to create goals that we could only accomplish if we were always in that state.

Sure, your motivation will sustain you for a day or two, maybe even a few weeks. But at some point, the state you were in when you made your ambitious goal will fade.

Once this happens, you’ll start feeling stressed about this overwhelming change you’re trying to make – instead of enjoying going to the gym or making your art or meeting women, you’ll resent it. It’s something you put up with because you have to.

To change your life, you do have to get out of your comfort zone: you will have to face stress and emotional resistance head on. But if you take on too much at once, you will eventually burn out.

There’s a limit to how much discomfort we are able to lean into, and if your goal is too large, the entire process of working towards that goal will be mostly uncomfortable.

There’s a different approach, one that works far more effectively.

Hypothetically, it would be great to lose 20 pounds a month or to get 100 girl’s number this week. And yeah, if you had infinite willpower and were completely unaffected by your emotions, you could do those things.

But how often do your goals lead to lasting change? If youâre like most people, that rarely happens. Scientific research has shown that only 8% of people who set new yearâs resolutions actually accomplish them.

We tend to think we fail because we lack the motivation we need or because our genetics or life situation gets in our way.

And sure, being motivated helps, having good genetics helps too. Yet, the underlying difference between those who succeed is their ability to create realistic, sustainable goals that will move them in the right direction, and with time, completely change their lives.

If you want a better dating life, the best strategy is to take a patient approach to change. Letâs say right now, you go out and approach women a few times a week. The first step to creating a realistic goal is keeping track of your rate of progress.

To do this, you can create a Google Spreadsheet in which you track how much time you spend out approaching women, how many girls you approach, and how many girls you exchange numbers with. For a week, do your best to go out to meet women as often as you can and to take as much action as possible.

At this point, you donât have a specific goal, youâre just pushing yourself as much as possible so that you can set a baseline (if youâre focusing on online dating, you can use this same tactic for Tinder/Bumble/Etc.)

After a week, take note of your results:  how many times did you go out to meet women? How many approaches did you do? How many numbers did you get?

Once you have an idea of what you can realistically expect to accomplish in a week of approaching women, you can set a goal that is based on your actual experience rather than what you hypothetically think you should be able to accomplish.

Letâs say, for instance, you went out 3 times for an average of an hour each time, you approached a total of 15 women, and you got 3 phone numbers.Okay, now you can use that information to set a realistic goal: you could set a goal to go out 3 times each week, and to approach at least 5 women each day.

Or, maybe you were completely unable to approach a girl in the week you used to set your baseline. Thatâs okay, it just means you should start with a smaller goal. In this case, I recommend simply setting a goal to go out a certain number of times per week for at least 15 minutes each time (anything less than 3 days will result in slow progress, but 7 days per week may be unsustainable, do as much as you can based on your schedule).

Your goal here isnât to approach any women or get any phone numbers, itâs just to go out to a place where there are women you can approach and to do your best. This might sound like a pointlessly small goal, but the whole purpose of setting such a goal is that no matter your current level of experience, you can go out 3 times and walk around a venue with women in it for fifteen minutes.

Honestly, approaching women can be extremely anxiety provoking, especially if you havenât done it before. Donât expect to overcome this anxiety overnight, it may take some patience and perseverance.

If you are struggling with approach anxiety when you go out, it can help to use what psychologists call gradual exposure. Basically, youâre breaking up something challenging into smaller, manageable steps (watch this video for a complete guide on defeating approach anxiety).

Now that youâve set a baseline, your goal for the next week is to beat that baseline by as much as possible. Think of this like beating your personal record at the gym. By tracking your data, you already know youâre capable of doing based on what you did last week, beating that will be challenging, but realistic.

Then, each week, track your stats and create a new baseline to beat the next week. Whereas on the first week you may not even be able to approach a girl, on your 12th week you may approach 10 girls, get 8 numbers, and even bring a girl home with you.

I know this whole process may sound nerdy or weird, but ultimately I donât think that matters – what matters is whether a method works: keeping track of your progress and setting incrementally increasing goals is an incredibly effective strategy for reaching any goal, dating or otherwise.

One important note about setting incremental goals: itâs okay if on any given week you fail your goal. Letâs say your goal on a particular week is to go out 4 times for a total of 2 hours and to approach at least 30 girls, but you only manage to go out once for one hour and you approach only 2 girls.

Okay, you didnât fail your long-term goal, you just fell short on one week. Men often give up on the idea of learning game when they face a setback like this. Itâs easy to become frustrated when you fail and to give up on yourself.

Look, everyone has bad weeks, thatâs normal, you should expect this to happen. Just know that your ability to keep taking action after an emotional lowpoint is one of the fundamental keys to success. The simple act of deciding that you will keep going out and approaching women, (even if you screw up one week) will drastically improve your chances of long-term success.

Now, if you have one of these off-weeks, you can use your stats from that week as your new baseline to beat. This might feel like a step in the wrong direction, but remember, as long as youâre going out at all you are making progress – and making slow progress is much better than setting an unrealistic goal and completely burning out.

Peter Drucker said, âWhat gets measured, improves.â

The power of that statement cannot be exaggerated. Last year, I gained 40 lbs of fat due to overeating and an overly sedentary lifestyle.

In the last 5 months I lost all the weight I gained while also building muscle. This was made possible by two simple lifestyle changes: I started weighing myself every morning and tracking my calories with MyFitnessPal.

The simple act of tracking the absurd amount of calories I was consuming and seeing my weight gradually increase made my mistakes so clear that it was easy to change my behavior. It wasnât hard to eat fewer calories when I saw that my average was 3000 per day. It wasnât hard to start going to the gym when I saw that my weight was increasing by more than a pound per week.

Keeping track of your progress (in any area of your life) can be the one decision that changes your life forever. Rather than taking inconsistent action and relying on motivation to get anything done, you will make progress towards your goals every single week. And although your life might not change overnight, in a year, you will accomplish things that today seem unimaginable

Dating Advice For Men Part 3:

Get A Mentor

What do the best actors, writers, musicians, athletes, and the greats in any field share in common?

They went through extensive training with professional coaches.

Itâs been well established that coaching works: those who learn under professional guidance make faster progress than those who donât.

If youâre overweight, itâs perfectly normal to work with a personal trainer.

If you feel depressed or anxious, itâs perfectly normal to work with a therapist.

If your dating life sucks, and you want to start attracting high-quality women into your life, itâs definitely NOT normal to work with a dating coach.

Weâre told that relationships are something we should âjust figure outâ or that âyouâll find someone when youâre ready.â But you and I both know thatâs a fantasy: dating isnât something you should leave to luck, attracting women is a skill you can master.

Sadly, most guys who learn about âgameâ donât get the results they want. This is no different from the fact that most people who start a diet donât reach their weight-loss goals.

Wanting to make a change in your life is easy, doing the work to make that change a reality is hard.

Coaching wonât guarantee that you succeed (just like hiring a personal trainer wonât guarantee that you get ripped). You also donât need coaching to succeed at anything – you can make any goal through sheer force of will.

But coaching will help accelerate your learning curve. A good coach can help you get results that would normally take 3 years to get within 6 months.

One of my coaching clients who hadnât has sex in 9 months before we started working together recently sent me this message:

Another client who had never brought a girl home with him before we met sent me this message:

A good coach will understand whatâs holding you back from getting the results you want, and he will help you create a step-by-step strategy for making real, measurable progress immediately.

Imagine you decided you wanted to build some muscle so you started going to the gym 4 times a week.

A few months pass and youâve been lifting weights every week, but your muscles havenât grown. Why? Because you werenât consuming enough calories to build muscle.

This might sound like an obvious mistake, but itâs a common one. In fact, I made this mistake in my own life. I wasted a year lifting weights without making any real progress because I didnât understand that diet is fundamental for muscle growth.

When I started working with a personal trainer, I was instructed to start tracking my calories and to make a point to eat a lot more food. And guess what? I started building muscle, my arms went from 13 inches to 15 inches and my strength nearly doubled in the course of 6 months.

Having a coach who knew the mistakes I was making drastically improved my results.

Coaching worked for me, itâs worked for many of the most successful people in the world, and Iâm confident it can work for you, too.

If you sign up for a coaching session with me, I will identify what EXACTLY is holding you back from having the dating life you want, and weâll make a step-by-step plan for you to start making real, measurable progress towards your goal.

Sign up for your session, here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdyb3PxkUXTOn1gz3W2YJmH0UNrChDRLej18Zem7VYTynI_0w/viewform?usp=sf_link

No, coaching isnât necessary to get better at this whole âgameâ thing. But working with someone who has years of experience in this area, someone whoâs approached tens of thousands of women, whoâs gone on hundreds of dates, and who yes, has slept with quite a few beautiful girls – will help you make progress as quickly and effectively as possible.