February Pep Talk

It’s been a while since I devoted any significant time to skirt. In 2013 I probably stopped a total of 20 girls and one of them became my current girlfriend, Jolia.

There is absolutely no reason for this pic to be here, I just really like it.
There is no reason for this pic to be here, I just really like it.

After a long lay-off, I’ve been retracing my pickup knowledge to some extent these past few weekends. The training ground has been my closest ‘home city’ of Manchester.

Winter weather in Manchester is simply not conducive of street pickup. It’s like playing a video game on ‘assassin’ setting. It’s all the odds against you, wind, cold and rain and all the sane people staying at home.

Despite these factors my stats seem OK so far – My 30 approaches, only hot girls, have returned 5 numbers and one instant date. An instant date is as far as I will take it, believe me, Jolia is not only someone I would never cheat or risk losing, other girls just pale in comparison. Who wants to drive a BMW when they have a Lamborghini at home? The gulf is that far.

I do think the instant date girl would not have been too difficult to take in that direction though to be honest. She was in town for a week, on her own and very bored. I felt a bit guilty for opening her up and giving her the emotional spike knowing full well I wouldn’t deliver. You’ve heard of the prick tease, well I’m the clit tease.

The guys I am taking with me off the forums seem to like what I do. I go direct, I stay in set a good while, I do get what appear to be ‘results’. Bear in mind a lot of these guys open by asking the direction to Top Man and just get blown out all day.

Here’s the two massively unattractive things you’re telling the girl when you open with ‘do you know where Top Man is’.

1) I’m too scared to hit on you.

2) I shop at Top Man.

Who’d wear that shit? Might as well write VIRGIN on your forehead.

They see me stopping with a direct opener and accusing girls of shoplifting and then getting them laughing and crossing their legs, blushing, playing with their hair and it seems like a world apart.

Fair play to these Manchester lads, they’re pretty open about their game and they just laugh it off, ‘we just get blown out all day long, been doing it six months now, haven’t been laid once’.

I think Manchester is currently wide open for someone who can actually pick up to step in a take the local community by storm. Now that ain’t going to be me. There is no way I’m spending much more of my time hunting the streets of Manchester. My whole reason for getting out of bed is to make enough money to get out of this country, not stay in it. I just mention it because ten years ago there was no one doing pickup in Manchester. Now, there are green shoots of activity. There’s a community growing up here. I’ll be interested to see who it turns out.

Now to the point of my post:

As I say, I’m coming off a long lay-off so I’m not on top of my form by any stretch, which is fine; I knew it would be the case. When I taught pickup, I learned quickly that the most effective way to teach I could find was not necessarily to teach kids what to do, but to watch them do a few sets and tell them what to stop doing.

There’s no point delivering a 4 hour lecture openers and hook points, then going into the street and realizing he’s already got all that in his arsenal and it’s in fact his body language that is stopping him getting traction.

This is why recording your sets is so important, you can review what happened and you see what you don’t see in the moment – all the bad shit.

So if you’re anything other than a top table pick up artist, get yourself some equipment to record your work and watch over it when you get home.

So I am going to list 4 ‘bad’ sets I did this last month which included common mistakes I used to see in my trainer years. Just to table some learning points.

Polish blonde, high 8.

This was my second weekend. Saw her on Spring Gardens with my wing JoeP. Well, actually, JoeP saw her and alerted me. She was a full on Jimmy girl. As soon as I saw her my little legs were carrying me off in her direction. I love those sets; the one’s where you don’t even have to weigh it up. It’s like an elastic band pulls you in. The minimum I expect from myself is that I stop these girls and give it crack, no matter what.

She was just under six foot, typical polish body, slim, blonde hair from a bottle, looked like she was off the pages of FHM. Bang up skirt.

My problem was that I didn’t get in front of her. I was too keen to get going when I stopped her. I stopped her verbally, but not physically. She stopped walking when I spoke, but I didn’t own her, I didn’t command her visuals, I didn’t take up her path and own her world. I never gave myself the chance to get to the ‘Kaa’ moment. If you remember Kaa from the Jungle book, he needs to get in your face and own your movement before he can take over your world with his hypnotic technique

Capture

She physically stopped and I did a fairly stock ‘here’s what I notice about you’ routine, but she didn’t mentally stop. I was off to the side, literally a side dish; the main course was still the focal point.

She told me she had a husband and politely walked off.

Maybe she did, maybe didn’t who knows, who cares? It served as a reminder to me to not get lazy with the stop.

Second skirt – English blonde low 8.

What I liked about this girl is that she had a 1960s Twiggy vibe. In her dress sense, in her manner. It was all a bit yesteryear.

I stopped her with exactly that remark. She was into it to some degree, but over the set there was absolutely no attraction vibe. She liked my stop, she wanted to talk, we talked about the Beatles, I trotted out a few gentle DHVs and tried to rope her into doing most of the talking, but it wasn’t ever on. The best I got was that she was on the fence.

After 5 minutes she mentioned she was 17. I was very surprised. I had her at early 20s. So I fairly quickly let it wrap up after she told me this and I said good bye.

Out of my target age range or not there is still a learning point. Let’s just pretend she was 23. Now I checked my recording later and man, I was speaking too quickly. I wasn’t slowly teasing her into my frame. I wasn’t Kaa. It was this simple, I was an interesting guy who had successfully got her attention, but she had no romantic interest and was unlikely to invest much time to explore any because he was excitable and rabbiting on.

Pickup 101 – speak slowly and steadily, take your time.

Third Skirt – English brunette 9.

I only include this example because she was the hottest girl I’ve ever stopped in Manchester in the street. Our conversation lasted 1 minute. It was seconds after I’d left Twiggy and I simply repeated exactly the same mistake and it was so obvious when I played the set back.

It was a real shame because this was high quality English skirt and that is something which is so very, very rare. She was only half a point off my current girlfriend. She was hot, well spoken, well dressed and still a mere 23. This was a proper, secure, knows her value, piece of ass. She demands the best and that weren’t me this time. 100% polite, 100% classy and a firm no.

Jabbering like a fucking lunatic is one of those behaviours to iron out. Ever heard that hidden track at the end of Sgt. Peppers?

‘Never could see any other way, never could see any other way, never could see any other way’.

I reckon I’d have got further with this chick if I’d  serenaded her with an a capella version of that shit.

Fourth Skirt – English blonde 8.

This was brilliant. This one I am actually truly sore about. When I reviewed it, I was tearing up with laughter. I threw this set away with bad, bad form. I’m almost ashamed to blog about it, but I have to be honest and it’s so funny, it’s a story that has to be told.

I’d ironed out the rapid talk, I’d stopped being lazy with the stop. I saw this one and I wanted to get into this girl’s head and I wanted to leave the set knowing I’d played a blinder. I wanted this girl into me.

I was close, but no cigar and here’s why.

The stop was great. I just laid it out there; she had great style, but silly shoes. She loved it; she crossed her legs and blushed as she stared bashfully, to the side and into a middle distance. This girl was fucking lovely, I couldn’t have painted a more excruciatingly sexy reaction. If I did not have Jolia, this set would have been a priority for me.

Mistake 1: She told me she was from a town called Stoke and she started to tell me something else, but I just couldn’t resist, I had to show off. I cut her off from speaking and I launched into banter.

‘Ah Stoke… so… your hobbies are… shoplifting or… grafitti?’

Now there is nothing wrong with this at all. It’s a cool thing to say, and oh she loved it. She laughed and bit her lip and stared at me in the eyes. A bit more of this and I’d be ready to start hassling her to qualify herself.

What I should have recognised here is that I’d done my job. She started to speak again and I needed to just let her qualify.

I cut her off again, but this time, I didn’t have the cannons to justify it. I drifted into some bullshit ramble about how I bet she was a psychology student; it’s where all the lazy people gravitate. She laughed, but not as much now. It wasn’t cocky cool now; it was drifting into one liner banter machine.

Think about what I am saying. ‘I like you and I want to find out more about you’. Now, if I can’t get her talking then it’s my job to stack, search for hooks, DHV myself and persuade her into talking. If she wants to talk, then not letting her is contrary to my claim I want to get to know her. It’s not congruent.

We chatted about her studies for a minute or so, but it was really flatting out, it was not where the conversation was supposed to head. We’d got into boring everyday talk about what she does.

The conversation petered out and this time, I had no cannons to wade back in. I’d wasted them when I didn’t actually need to and this time, she wasn’t trying to fill that silent gap.

I could have had her doing the work, giving me hooks to work with, giving me time to work out where her head was at and I could have saved the cannons, the witty Stoke quip, for later on.

There was a weighty pause and I had fuck all more to offer. So I grasped wildly.

‘So. You are… walking… oh…  err… where are you going?’

Anything would have been better than that. If I’d said ‘hey watch this dipshit’ and farted the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ in Japanese, it would have been a classier move.

‘Meeting some friends’.

There was another long quiet pause and I was admonishing myself in my head, I could see what I had done, I’d killed the vibe. We were destined to genuinely vibe and I’d cut it all up.

‘I should get going’, she said.

Still she was giving me chance to recover. Don’t fuck this up JJ for God’s sake, she wants to stay.

‘Sure, I was just wondering though’

‘Yes?’

Now are you ready for this? Are you ready for what the Oracle del Jimmy came out with. It was fucking unbelievable. Where it came from I do not know. It was 100% total ass.

‘How tall is your friend?’

‘I don’t know, same as me why?’

‘I have a light bulb needs changing’

Capture
Where did it all go wrong?

As I left the set I must have looked like Wilde E Coyote when he’s been blown up. My wing JackP said ‘What happened there, she looked like she was loving you for the first few minutes, what happened?’

So learning points. Pickup basics kids.

1) Don’t get lazy with the stop, no matter how competent you feel you are. You’re a man of charm and style, you do the little things right.

2) How many times I have moaned at my student for talking too quickly. It’s one of the single most common mistakes I saw guys making. Speak slowly and evenly at first while you rope her into your bubble.

Just those two things will vastly improve your results.

3) You’re trying to get a girl into a conversation she likes, not just a conversation where your blasting out tonnes of self amused material. (Self-amused is great. The banjo is great but I don’t play my banjo if I’m listening to Rubber Soul). If she is talking, let her do it, let her contribute. You guide the path of the conversation, you lead the subject matter, but if you can get her talking you’re halfway there.

Doing pickup is exciting but when we see it starting to ‘work’, we get carried away; we lose sight of the goal, which is to actually get the girls. We start focusing on clever DHVs or trying to say the most outrageous thing in set as possible so we can brag to our wings later on ‘Haha, I told her she looked like Mrs. Doubtfire in an aeroplane flying upside down with a pancake on her head, then I farted and span on my head and I STILL got the number’.

One comment

  1. Very enlightening: a good pickup is just about not making basic mistakes. Pickup itself is very simple, that’s why the best pickup infield videos look so unassuming. In that light your teaching method “mistakes: spot them and correct them” is just gold.

    I would appreciate more of this stuff, thanks a lot.

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