Love Systems Insider

Date: November 2008

Soul on Value
Seems like the world can’t get enough of Soul. While he’s always super busy teaching programs
around the world, he’s still been active on the Love Systems Lounge (a free private online
community for Love Systems instructors and former bootcamp and seminar students). There are
some pretty important thoughts in there, so I’m reproducing it in full:

As you get better at dating and social interactions, you should continually ask yourself the
question, “How can I achieve more with less?”

I have some wonderful things in my life right now because of the hard work I have put in for the
last few years, but I am always pushing to achieve more. I want platforms and methods that
bring me the success I have now with minimal effort so I can concentrate my larger efforts on
growth goals.

Part of this search for new methods stems from that fact that I am an introvert by nature and not
a narcissist: I am not someone who naturally likes talking a lot about himself. And yet in the last
few years I learned that it was important to be able to demonstrate your value to others – it was
unavoidable that many of these demonstrations would involve mentioning certain achievements
or trappings I currently had in life.

So I asked myself the question, “How can I achieve greater value demonstrations with less
talking about myself?”

In Magic Bullets, Savoy talks about the three major methods of demonstrating value to a
woman: having her observe it (e.g. watch you talking to other attractive woman in the room),
having her learn it from someone else (e.g. her best friend telling her that you used to date
another attractive woman she knows), and embedded storytelling (e.g. telling a story that
involves another attractive woman and you).

The strongest method is always going to be the observed demonstration of value. You can talk
up everything you want (or have others talk you up), but nothing is quite so powerful as showing
someone what you are capable of. No matter how well my friends know me and hear about my
Day Game adventures, they always watch with interest whenever I do approaches in front of
them – seeing it for yourself is just a different kettle of fish than hearing about it.

But observed demonstrations are not always practical and further, if used too early, could be
construed as trying too hard to show your value. So, what can we do that is still powerful but
gives away less information about ourselves?

I discovered the answer as I was talking to a young woman after the recent Super-Conference.
She had seen me and another awesome Day Game instructor based in Los Angeles speaking in a
seminar room, and asked us afterwards about what we were doing. I never give people too many
answers to their questions unless I feel like they deserve it; high value people don’t open up to
just anyone – they need to see that their audience is worth opening up to. Would you tell the
average man on the street the intricacies of your successful business? No – you would wait until
you saw some equivalent value in him before you opened up.

So, as this beautiful young woman fired a million questions at me, I fired a few back at her and
never said too much about what I was doing. I would either give short, perfunctory answers or
ignore her questions completely, until I could determine whether she was worth talking to some
more.

After some time, the other instructor had been talking to her friend and both women started to
open up. The woman I was talking to started talking about guys in her life and how they were so
boring – she claimed she had never been dumped and had always dumped guys herself.

Ah, a pretentious one! My favorite. I started telling her that the problem was finding high
quality people to date (and that I had the same problem with women); I went on to mention a
few of the reasons why most guys fail to attract her and why she always ends up dating guys
who were boring to her.

After a few minutes of talking, she turned to me and said, “There is something SO attractive
about talking to you! You are one of the most interesting guys I have ever met!”

I replied, “Do you know why? It is because unlike most guys you meet, I am not trying to
impress you. You are very physically attractive, but my criteria for women that I enjoy being
with extends to non-physical areas as well.”
I realized afterwards that what I had done was demonstrate completely AUTHORITY over a
topic without actually talking about my achievements within it.

Demonstrating authority over a topic allows you to talk loosely about things and shows people
that you understand something completely, without giving away all the precious details about
how you come to understand it. It is the hallmark of successful people everywhere. Consider a
successful businessman at a party with other lesser businessman: is he going to tell all the other
people about each and every one of his achievements? No. But chances are he would talk
loosely but knowledgeably about numerous topics that his business revolves around, thereby
demonstrating his superior value.

Consider another example. I travel a lot. I could tell people that I meet, “I travel a lot for my
job,” which is okay. Or, I could wait until we got into a conversation about travelling and jet lag
and say, “The trick with jet lag, especially on long haul flights, is to never allow yourself to nap
when you touch down. You need to force yourself to go to bed on the new country’s time
schedule.”

The former is giving away the details of my value upfront (potentially to an audience that hasn’t
earned it) whereas the latter saves the details for later but alludes to the value you have. Doing
authority value demonstrations in this way also saves me talking too much about myself which I
hate doing (I prefer to listen to others rather than talk about myself).

A final spin on this technique is to frame the authority demonstration as offering value: help
them to understand something or teach the other people something they are not familiar with but
is useful to them. Doing so shows that you have value without having to scream about your
achievements.

A simple example of offering value is recommending books or websites to people. Whenever I

meet people who talk about wanting to live a freer lifestyle and travel more, I recommend 4-
Hour Work Week to them. Another one I use a lot is asking people about their dating lives and
then, using the benefit of my Love Systems training, helping them to clarify exactly what it is
they want from their romantic and sexual relationships.

So the next time you have something cool to tell other people about yourself, try NOT telling
them but instead allow your authority on the topic to come out incidentally in a conversation.
Don’t give away all the details about yourself upfront; women do like to know that you could be
the sort of man they could date but like to discover the details in time.
Cheers,
Soul

Learn more from Soul:

• Soul's background
• See his NEW video on YouTube
• The Life With Soul blog

http://www.lovesystems.com/newsletters/11-08-soul-on-value