How to Banish Flakes

I absolutely love Mystery’s material. Everything he puts out is gold. Everyone knows
that I feel his book Magic Bullets is life changing, but even his free
newsletters are always jam packed with great info. This is not an exception.

How to eliminate flakes from your life

Two weeks ago, we discussed how to turn a Day 2 into a sexual relationship.
Now we’ll discuss how to make sure she shows up in the first place and doesn’t  flake

First, ask yourselves ts:

* Have you ever made plans with a woman and not have her show up?

* Have you ever gotten a phone call earlier that day telling you that she
has to work or isn’t feeling well?

* Have you ever made plans with a woman and then she told you to call to confirm

If any of that applies to you, you need to really pay attention here. This will
banish flakes forever.

First, let’s review the first four phases of the Mystery Method:

A1: Meet Her (Opening)
A2: Attract Her (Attraction)
A3: Qualify Her (Qualification)
C1: Build Comfort (Comfort)

The biggest mistake most men make in terms of Day2s is going for the phone
number as soon as she is attracted (in A2) and not pushing the relationship
forward. Then they assume that the woman will meet them again, and they
can continue where they left off. Only to get flaked. They never meet up.

Why? Let’s look at the situation from a woman’s perspective:

She goes out to a restaurant with her friends. While waiting at the bar, an
interesting man approaches her. 3-5 minutes later (about how long it should
take to get some attraction going), he asks for her number so they canhang
out sometime. At that moment, she genuinely would hang out with this
man sometime

but it doesn’t turn out that way.

See, going out sometime is different from going out Thursday night.
To see hersometime all you have to do is be more interesting than
doing nothing. Thats a pretty low standard, so of course she’ll agree to it.
And, if she has nothing else to do, she might actually see you. However,
most worthwhile women rarely have nothing else to do.

So, to see her at a specific time, you need to be more interesting than
anything else she could be doing, like friends, hobbies, work, other dates,
or relaxing at home. That’s a tough standard to meet in 3-5 minutes.
Especially since over the course of the night she met a bunch of other men
. Did you think you were the only man to notice her? She likes all of the attention
and flirting, but she doesn’t have time to go on 9 dates this week.

A woman is going to look for reasons NOT to go out with you

Remember, meeting up with strange men is scary for a woman. First, there are
issues of physical safety. If she’s not comfortable with you, she may feel the risk
of date rape or worse. Less dramatically is the hyper-developed fear that many
women have of being in awkward social situations. Women do not generally go
by themselves to interact socially with strangers. So they bring a friend.
To a man, the idea that you might not have a great time with this woman
is irrelevant. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Maybe you don’t care,
because she’s beautiful. Either way, you’ll never know if you don’t meet up.
Worst case scenario is you cut it short early and go home. Men don’t
agonize and worry over whether it will be socially awkward or not.
But many women do, and we need to take this into account.

It should be clear by now that a quick interaction leading to some basic
attraction and we should hang out sometime is rarely going to lead an
exceptionally desirable woman into seeing you again. She fears safety, she
fears social awkwardness, and who is this guy anyway? She’s busy and she only
met you for five minutes. If she’s really trying to convince herself not to
show up, she’ll wonder why you’d even call her when you only met for a few
minutes and you know so little about her (after all, you spent that time attracting
her as opposed to learning about her). Are you desperate? Or are you a player?

To fix that mistake, make sure you get into Comfort during the first meet.

I don’t care if you only have 10 minutes. You just have to play faster. You need
to qualify and get into comfort for your time bridge (seeing her again) to stick.
If you qualify and get into comfort, you minimize ALL of the objections we just discussed.

* By the way, if you don’t remember how to qualify, go back and look at OAP 4 on qualification. Or check out Magic Bullets.

* If you don’t remember how to build comfort, go back and look at OAP 5 on comfort.
Or check out Mystery’s comfort-building routines on the Video Archive Encyclopedia.

The second biggest mistake you can make is to go for the Day2 unnecessarily

There is nothing in Mystery Method or the M3 model that mandates meeting
her again at a different time (a Day2). Sure, you may have to, like if you meet
her on your lunch break and have to get back to work, but a lot of guys are used
to thinking of getting a woman’s phone number as something special. It’s not.
Phone numbers do not lead to happy social lives; relationships do.

A phone number is a tool. It’s not a goal. It’s not even an intermediate goal. Don’t ever
feel proud of yourself for getting a phone number.

In a way, a phone number is an admission of failure, even if it’s sometimes an
unavoidable failure. A phone number says I am not trying to move this
relationship forward right now. I am taking the risk that she will flake and am hoping
to continue this later. In the worst case, I lose the relationship with her. In the
best case, she meets me for the Day 2 and I’m more or less where I am now

Make sense? A phone number never gains you anything. A Day 2 never gains you
anything. All it does is give you another chance to push the relationship forward if
the logistics weren’t right to do so when you met her.

Here’s an example from the bootcamp in LA last weekend. We took the guys to a
lounge in Hollywood and one of them was deep in conversation with Suzanne,
a very fit Asian woman. Suzanne’s friends were happy for her to talk to our guy,
because he had already won them over in A2 (as per the Mystery Method). It was
about midnight. There was no time pressure. But when our student ran out of things
to say he took her phone number and rejoined us.

This was a bad decision. All the phone number was going to do was help them meet up
again to spend time together. However, they were already in the middle of spending
time together. Psychologically, he wanted to lock in what he had gained so far: her
willingness to give him her phone number. That’s a rookie mistake.

Of course, we didn’t let him leave Suzanne. We led him back to her with instructions
to escalate until rejection. When the lights came on an hour later, they left to get pizza.
And then to go home together. There was no need for a time bridge.

He made dozens of mistakes in picking up Suzanne. We were watching him the whole
time and went over them the next day. However, because he had the guts to go for it,
and because he did enough things right that he’d learned that day in our seminar, he got the girl.

Ready for the good news and the bad news?

The good news is that now that you know this, you’ll never make these two
mistakes again.

The bad news is that you’ll still need Day 2s, and you’ll still get some flakes. To banish
flakes entirely, you need to use these ADVANCED tactics:

* Have something specific to do. She should plan to help you shop for your nieces
birthday on Saturday, no thang out sometime
* Bait her into suggesting the Day 2. Let her chase you. Drop little hints (I’m going to X
or I’d love to do Y) and see if she tries to become part of those plans.
* Don’t make the day2 (or the phone number exchange) the last part of your interaction.
That feels like a pickup. Stay at least 5 minutes afterwards.
* Engage her friends. When she goes home her friends should be excited for her that
you guys are meeting up later and not wondering who that creepy guy was.
To a woman, her friends approval for the men she dates is very important.
Much more important than peer group approval is for men.
* Focus on the Day2, not the phone number. The phone should be an
afterthought (and isn’t always necessary, although you take a big risk by not getting it).
If she’s all excited to come see you at a book reading you’re going to be at the next night,
you d’t need her phone number. If she likes you, she’ll come.
* Set up callback humor. If you have a running joke during your interaction where
you have a nickname for her, and later you phone her and call her by that nickname,
it often triggers a reversal to the previous emotional state. She’ll be back in the world
of being out, having fun, and meeting men, as opposed to whatever mundane thing she
was actually doing when you called.
* If she’s drinking, address it. Tease her that she won’t remember anything because
she’s drunk. Pretend that you guys would have so much fun together, but she had to
ruin it by being drunk and making it so it would be weird when you call. Bait her into
convincing you that she’s not all that drunk, that she’s really into you, and she can’t wait
to hear from you. After she’s said that, it becomes a lot harder for her to be flaky. Warning,
don’t do this unless the girl actually IS really drunk. It will annoy her if she’s just
had a drink or two.

While you’re learning all of this stuff, you’ll still get flakes. Here’s what to do when
she calls to tell you I have to work tonight

* Don’t be upset. Don’t lecture her. She doesn’t care. All you’ll succeed in doing is
making her momentarily feel badly. She’ll feel better once the next guy gives her
attention, and she’ll associate negative feelings with you. Remember, she’s cancelling
because she’s not that into you yet. [99% of the time, this is the case. Would she be
cancelling if it were Brad Pitt?]. Making her feel badly is only going to make her less into you.

* Just in case that wasn’t clear. You planned to meet a girl at 6? You had to leave work early?
Fight traffic? Cut your workout short? Miss your favorite show? Tough. She doesn’t care.
That’s not her problem. If you tell her all of this, you just look like even more of a tool because you rearranged your life for a date with her.

* Act like a guy who has lots of women interested in him and pursuing him. If that was
you, and a girl flaked, your reaction would be OK cool because you have lots of other
girls who would love to see you and more than likely whatever it was you were going to
do was something you were going to be doing anyway with cool friends. If you
don’t think you have that attitude down properly,
try cancelling the next time you set up a first date with a random girl. Listen for her casual
reaction. It didn’t ruin her day. It shouldn’t ruin yours.

* A phrase I’ve had a lot of success with (credit Savoy) is No problem, I’ll invite
someone else. Obviously don’t use this on a third or fourth date, but when it’s still casual, it’s perfect.

Flaking sucks. I want you guys to banish it forever. Your social life will improve dramatically