Transcription
Some people are good seducers. They're very calm. They know how to tell a good story. They have charisma. They have energy.
But there are people who do the opposite. They just think they're being natural and they offend a lot of people. Act like a king to be treated like a king. Recreate yourself. Your appearances is what people are judging you by. You have to keep people on their heels. They can't know everything about you. So, you have to create mystery.
If you become an astute observer, the game will be much easier to manage. Everything people do is a sign. If they're showing up late or they're not returning your phone calls, they're telling you something about themselves indirectly. So, you may not realize it, but you sense that something is wrong about this person that you've just met. Sometimes, if people are clever, you're not going to realize it. Like if people are really good at the manipulation game, you won't realize it until it's too late and you're not necessarily understanding because you're a good person.
When bad things happen to you in life, you have two choices you can do. You know how some people are are good seducers. And it could be not just for sex, it could be socially or politically. They're very calm. They know how to tell a good story. They have charisma. They have energy. They their face lights up. They know how to say the right things and they attract you, right? So, a seductive person is self-aware. They're self-aware of their body language, you know, the clothes that they wear, of how they talk. Okay?
But there are people who do the opposite. They say the wrong things. They do the wrong things. They dress the wrong way. They take you to the wrong places. They repel you. They are anti- seductive. Nobody wants to be around them. Right? And so what are the qualities that make a person anti-seductive? So one of them are people who talk too much, who are always bragging, who always have a story to tell. People who moralize, who tell you, "You're wrong. This is what you need to do. This is what's good. This is what's bad." The anti-seductive person has no self-awareness. They enter life. They don't look in a mirror. They don't think about what they're saying. They just think they're being natural, and they offend a lot of people.
You have to keep people on their heels. They can't know everything about you. And what I said is disappear for a couple weeks. Make people talk about you. Make people wonder why is she not posting as much? Why are we not seeing what she's wearing in the morning and having for breakfast and all these other things. If they know everything about you, it's human nature that you become too familiar and they're not interested in you anymore. It's at a certain point. So, you have to create mystery. You think of doing something that's going to surprise the other person.
Now, nobody knows you completely. Your husband doesn't know every single thing about you. He didn't know you before you got married. He didn't know all your previous boyfriends and and everything. And so, if you give him a sense of you show him something that he didn't know about before, goes, "Wow, I was taking her for granted. I wasn't, you know, I think I knew everything about her. She showed me something that surprised me. Maybe the surprise isn't something good, but at least it like keeps him on his heels. It makes him think about you because in a relationship, people will take you for granted after a couple of months, right? They were so interested you in the beginning and now, huh, it's kind of dwindling. They take you for granted because they think they know everything about you. If you surprise them, if you say something different, if you take them to a place where they never thought that you would take them to, if you dress a certain way that seems a little bit out of character, not completely out of character, they go, "Wow." That you need to do that in a relationship constantly. Otherwise, it's just going to fizzle. All the energy is going to go out of it.
The most important skill that you can have is knowing how to observe people and not be so wrapped up in yourself and be outerdirected. So when you're in a situation like you've entered a job for the first time, your tendency is to be all insecure and think, did I say the wrong thing? Am I doing am I dressing correctly? Am I fitting in? And you're not observing. You're thinking about yourself, right? And the whole game is to be observing. It's like you're observing the the world, the the different games that are going on, what people are doing, what they're like, what their tastes are like, what the boss is like. There are all these levels of power going on. You want to get outside of yourself and simply observe, right? And not be thinking about yourself as much.
If you become an astute observer of the people around you, you will have this the game will be much easier to to manage, right? You will know this is a person who is insecure. I cannot offend them. I cannot say the right the wrong thing to them. This is a person who's strong and secure. I want to be with them. I want them to mentor me that they can, you know, you want to be able to take criticism from other people. In other words, be less insecure and be more kind of outer motivated and paying attention to the people around you.
Everything people do is a sign. So if they're showing up late at meetings or they're not returning your phone calls, it's not some innocent event, it means something. It's coming from some place within them. They're telling you something about themselves indirectly. If their desk is a mess, right? They can't organize their desk. It's a sign of something else going on inside them. You can sense people's tone, not just in what they say, but in how they write something, right? There's a lack. There's not this usual kind of polite tone. There's a little bit of a sharpness. There's a word or two that indicates that they're upset, they're angry. Every little thing that people do is a sign. You're not paranoid cuz it's actually a lot of fun and you're decoding what's going on because people wear masks. They smile and they say, "I love your ideas, Cody. You're brilliant. You're wonderful." But inside they're thinking something else. And you have to be able to pick up all of these signs. Non-verbal communication. And it's extremely important skill to develop. And what that means is people um can say anything they want to with words. In fact, they generally do. They never really exactly say what's on their mind. That's how it is in the social world cuz if you said what was exactly on your mind, you would be offending a lot of people, right? So we don't ever really say exactly what we feel. But our body language does not lie. It's very difficult to lie with your body language. Even the finest actors in the world find it very difficult to lie with their voice because the voice reveals people's feelings, right? It's like watching a movie and observing people and understanding them. We're very good at picking these kind of cues up.
So, you may not realize it, but you sense that something is wrong about this person that you've just met. This is something that in the I talk a lot about in the art of seduction I've dealt with with women who've written me back. They had a gut feeling that this man that they met was wrong. There was something bad about him. They got a bad feeling from it. But what happens is you don't trust that feeling. And then because you're not, as you say in our culture, it's not something that we value. And then we go on, we have a relationship, and then we find the hard way out that our original gut instinct was the correct one. So, you want to trust these feelings. They're very valuable. We are animals. We think we're all so intellectual. We've got our our frontal cortex that governs everything. But inside, we operate on emotions, on instincts, on feelings, on sensations. It's a nonverbal form of communication. And it comes out in people's gestures and how they move, how they stand. You're talking to them, but their feet are pointing in a different direction. They're not so interested in you. Their eyes reveal if they're really listening to you or not. You can understand exactly what people are thinking. But you have to to do this to be able to reach this kind of level of understanding. You have to shut off your own mind. You have to shut off all your internal chatter. And you have to observe and you have to see you know exactly what try and read and detect what that particular sign means and you won't believe how often you are very accurate with it. You can detect people's resentment, people's envy. It's just that you're not paying attention and you don't value this form because we're so verbal. We think everything has to do with words but doesn't.
Sometimes if people are clever, you're not going to realize it. Like if people are really good at the manipulation game, if they know how to seduce you, how to wrap their their words in and make you seem like they're they're just wonderful, that they're out out for your best interest. If they're really good at it, you won't realize it until it's too late. You need to identify these people before they enter your life or before you start listening to them. You need to be able to identify the manipulative types before they start charming you, before they start enchanting you, before they start wrapping you up in their dramas. Because if if you don't if you fall into that trap, it's going to probably be too late. Most people aren't such good manipulators. And you're you can sense it, right? They're very passive aggressive. They say things that that they want to get from you, but there's there's a subtext involved, right? And a lot of the bad manipulators, you can feel it. You have an intuitive sense. You can understand it. There something in their body language, something in how they speak. It doesn't seem sincere. But the main thing is to under to is to be able to sense people's character to be able to identify the types of people out there. So your task is to be able to see through these people.
Appearances matter so much in this power game. How you present yourself, how people see you, you know, act like a king to be treated like a king, right? Recreate yourself. Your appearances is what people are judging you by. So at the same time, you have to control your appearances so people see you as powerful, but you have to see like a laser through other people's masks, through other people's games that they're playing, through the appearances they're trying to create. So the great manipulators out there, right, they have signs. They're not perfect. They give little clues, little crumbs that reveal that they're trying to play this kind of game on you. Because most of the master manipulators are toxic narcissists and you have to be able to identify them before they enter your life.
The people who are really really nasty and evil at the game of power, they've been learning this from a very early age. They probably had troubled childhoods. They've been wounded in their childhood, right? And they learned from the age of six or seven or eight. This is how you get people. This is how you string people along. This is how you get attention. This is how you be dramatic. This is what you say. This is how you get mommy and daddy to pay attention to me. This is how, you know, you get the teacher to like me. They've learned this step by step at an early age. By the time they enter the work world in 22, they've been dealing doing this in high school. They've been doing it at college or wherever. They're getting better and better at it. All of the books are so sweet and sugary telling you self-help books, you know, just cooperate. This is how to be a good human being. And you enter the work world and and nobody prepared you for the slap that you have from people being so nasty and political and ego-ridden. Nobody taught me this. How do you defend yourself in a world where some people are willing to do things that you would never consider doing, right? Well, you have to become strategic and you have to understand that you don't have to do you don't have to be evil. You don't have to lower yourself to their level. You don't have to play fire to hit fire with fire. You could do different things to upset them, to be strategic, to deter them from hurting you, etc. But this the fact that there are asymmetries out there. There are people who are willing to do things that you're not willing to do is the source of a lot of problems and pain in your life and suffering and you're going to suffer throughout your life because of that. You know those toxic narcissists and so you know you're you're constantly being hit by things and you're not necessarily understanding because you're a good person. You don't necessarily register all the dark things that they're doing until it's too late.
There's a difference between narcissism and true self-love. So, if you learned at an early age, 3 or four or 5 years old, that you're actually a good person, that you're worthy of love and affection from other people, you know, that you have skills and abilities as you get older that are actually worthwhile that will contribute, right? Then you have an anchor in your life. you have a degree of love of yourself, a confidence. So every time later in life where you have blows, where people hit you with doubts, but they try and sabotage you, they try and insinuate that maybe you're not so good or they play these games that we're talking about, you're going to hit get this blow and it's going to depress you and it's going to lower you down. But what happens is if you have that level of self-love that you developed at an early age, you will rise back up. You'll start going, "No, it's not true that I'm this way. It's not true what they're trying to tell me. You know, I'm actually worthy and I know it because I've done things in my life. I've accomplished this. I've helped this other person." It raises you back up. It's like a thermostat that you have inside of yourself. Okay? So the degree that you have that love will bounce you back up and you'll be able to tell yourself at first their doubts kind of hit you cuz we're we're all human. But then you go, "No, it's crap. They're playing a game. I'm not going to fall for that." But if you were wounded very early on and you never developed that self-love and you have a lot of doubts about yourself already and you're insecure and you're riddled with like bullet holes and wounds inside of yourself where things can leak through and people tell you those things, it's going to bring you down and you're cannot rise back up. You rise back up a little bit, then another person will hit you. You keep going down and down and down. get depressed and you'll find it very difficult to rise back up. So, the way you have to handle it in life, if you're in your 20s or 30s or 40s or even in your 50s, you have to develop it. You have to go back and go, I'm beating up on myself. I have all these insecurities. They're effective. These people are effectively manipulating them because I'm allowing them to manipulate me.
So when bad things happen to you in life, you have two choices you can do, right? This is probably the most important thing I can tell everybody out there. You have two things ways you can go. You can blame other people. You can say, "Oh, that evil person out there, he's manipulating me. They're doing this, that, and the other. Oh, woe is me. I'm being the victim. Blah, blah, blah. They're evil. They're bad." Okay? you do that in life, you're never going to get anywhere, right? You're going to always be looking for things to blame, looking at external things. You're never going to grow. You're never going to develop.
The other thing is every time something bad happens, you look inside of yourself and you go, "That person manipulated me. That narcissist got into my life and did all kinds of damage. What is it about me that allowed them into my life? What is it about me that was so innocent, that was so stupid, that that believed the things that we're saying? Okay. So, if you're able to learn and grow from these events and look at yourself and go, why was I allowing them to hit me and hurt me and instill these doubts and why did they affect me? What's wrong with me? Well, maybe I don't love myself enough. Maybe I don't have enough confidence in myself. How do I build that up? Well, I have to go back to my childhood. I have to think about the things that I've actually accomplished. I have to build it up slowly, slowly, slowly. And that's how you handle things.