When I start teaching my Pickup Artist students, I divide them into two categories. self validation vs. External validation. Those who validate themselves have a very short course in learning the lessons of the social arts and how to be more attractive. Those who go through difficult times are externally validating themselves, that is, they look for other people to like them and show it.
External validation is a dangerous compass to have. It makes the budding social artist put their self-esteem and value in the hands of other people. When that’s the case, he’s giving his rightful power to other people, and it’s one of the most powerful things he can give to others.
If you seek external validation, you feel that you are only worth something or that you have value if a woman decides to be with you, or if people tell you that they like you. The danger of this is that you will never be completely satisfied… no one can 100% validate another person. No one can like EVERYTHING about you. Despite having positive/high value women in their lives, they will only listen to or focus on the things they say that are negative about them. Even though you don’t like very few things about the person, those are the things the person listens to and focuses all of their attention on.
For example, I had a student go fishing one night and he wrote a field report. In that field report, she mentioned opening 5 sets, getting 3 phone numbers, closing a kiss, and being taken away by a woman. Guess what 3/4 of his field report was about? How it was a flop and he couldn’t get over the fact that he was busted. Instead of focusing on the overall success of his evening and how he got 3 numbers and a kiss (something only 1% of men can usually achieve), he felt like a failure and a terrible person not liked by anyone. women. because one opened unsuccessfully. He was so focused on external validation that he only focused on his faults. He was looking for 100% validity of his openings and the opposite was a failure. Not only was a bad opening a failure… anything less than 100% success was considered a failure. A person with this compass can become depressed very quickly, and they are usually the ones who stop receiving instruction in 6 months or less.
Many men starting out in dating have this compass of validity-seeking behavior. It is one of the reasons why they are so in need of women. They look for that validation and sometimes beg or give too much of themselves to people to get that validation. They buy drinks. They offer cars and money to women they don’t even know. They tell exotic dancers, “I’ll get you out of all this. You won’t have to strip anymore.” They live and breathe every word of the women they try to speak to, and internalize every NEGATIVE statement as if it were the written word of God. That’s way too much courage to give to a woman you haven’t even met yet (and haven’t even had sex with yet!)
I can tell they are looking for validation when I ask them why they want to learn picking. “Have sex with 100 women.” I ask why they need exactly 100. They say: “to prove that I am a master pickup artist.” Then I ask the deeper questions. “What does it mean to you to be a Master Pickup Artist?” They answer many times: “Then that would prove that I can have any woman I want and that women really want me.”
Having 100 women you’ve had sex with means absolutely nothing. It just means what she does on the surface. You’ve had sex with 100 women. What a thing. Being self-validating and never having sex actually has a lot more to it than any number with being a Master Pickup Artist and an alpha male. A man who is not reactive and who does not try to get the approval of others at all is much more attractive than a man whose self-esteem depends on getting an exact number or a large number of women. A man who has a woman who adds to his self-validation is much more stable than the frail man who will become anxious and nervous, or feel like a failure, if he doesn’t get phone numbers, kisses, or dates in one night.
Self-validation is the ability to use yourself as the compass of your success. “I opened 5 games, got 3 numbers and 1 kiss!” versus “I opened five sets and failed when one didn’t open” shows what a big difference the framework is to a man when self-validating vs external validation.
I recently read a quote from Carlos Xuma on Facebook. “The man who gets along best with women is the man who gets along best without them.” Simply put, men who validate themselves are more successful with women in a pure sense. For starters, those who “need” them for validation try really hard.
I had a wingman who is technically one of THE BEST PUAs out there. 177 f closes out his claim to fame and some of the best field reporting on The Attraction Forums. However, he had never gotten over the validation-seeking behavior of him. So when he thought he had found “The One” after going through 177 women, he realized too late that he had chosen a woman who validated him better instead of a woman who was better for him. When they moved in together, she refused to help around the home, earn money, or continue her career, and her validation was gone. She used the validation she provided as a means to improve financial health rather than truly validate you. She learned the minimal amount of work that was needed in the relationship to stay financially afloat as opposed to entering a mutually beneficial relationship where both people validated each other so much that being together multiplied it exponentially.
He eventually broke up with his girlfriend and got mad at the game. He gave up. He was jaded. After 177 successes, he still couldn’t find a suitable woman. But his basis for finding valuable people in his life was still sick of his need for validation.
People who seek external validation are also easy to hurt. As a wingman, he is instructed to be brutally honest with his wing to help his game. You tell him his breath stinks, when he has body odor, when he looks weak and needed on the field to help his game and success. These guys are the hardest to dodge at times because they lose status and are quick to grieve when it comes to real-time constructive criticism. Again, instead of making adjustments, they make judgments about how good of a friend you really are.
Leaving your self-esteem at the mercy of other people is putting their opinion above yours on an issue that is truly yours… your life. When men put beautiful women on a pedestal, they are letting much of their own personal worth depend on people who haven’t even tested their worth. They give more value to the opinions of these people than to the opinions of their own relatives. Would you put the value of your life in someone else’s hands before your mother’s opinion of your life? Those who seek external validation do so every day.
Some people become so dependent on these opinions that they become narcissistic. Of course, narcissists are supposed to be those people who are so internally focused that they fall in love with themselves. However, narcissists really are so externally validated that they will lie to keep their self-esteem inflated and only keep the people around them validating their lies. This extreme form of external validation is so twisted that it distorts what they believe to be their personal opinion of themselves and makes it difficult for them to search for the truth in themselves. People who encounter narcissists find their loyalty constantly questioned, finding that the narcissist misrepresents actual truths and facts so that anyone who does not externally validate them is wrong or an idiot or a liar even when telling the truth. (This is why being in a relationship with a narcissist is so doomed from the start and why the divorce rate for people with this personality disorder is estimated to be high.)
So with my social art students, I use NLP and reframing to illustrate this validation seeking framework that many men have when they start the game and teach them how to reverse this right away. Without this reframing, they can end up technically good, but ALWAYS WITH THE WRONG WOMEN and never satisfied with a beautiful woman who is the one. If you have the ability to meet a lot of women, then you should have the ability to find several that match the characteristics you want. But if you’re externally validating, all they have to do is say the right things for a few weeks and they’ll fool you into thinking you’ve found “The One” who you want to be in a long-term relationship with.
Do you want to be a PUA that has hundreds of women you’ve slept with who are all the same woman and are never right for you, or do you want to be a PUA that ONLY goes out and looks for positive women with the most important characteristics? Do you search for them and find them consistently? If you want the coach, instruction from a coach like me taking you to the best women is not for you. You’d better learn to play for the same night every night.
For more lessons on removing validation search behavior, please visit my website listed below in my signature.