Should I do a pua course?
That's a question that was posed to me recently by a client.
He wanted to know if pua, or pick up artist, courses are worth all the money they charge?
I mean some of them run for up to a week and can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
And they’ll make promises to “Give You The Skills, Experience, And Confidence To Become IMMEDIATELY Successful With Women”.
And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll master the art of “relationship attunement” and “non-duality” (I have no idea what those last two things are.)
So that’s what they literally promise.
But in reality, how realistic are their claims?
Now, just a quick warning to anyone who’s reading this blog expecting me to jump on the anti-pick up artist bandwagon and start bashing these dudes (and dudettes) for being creepy, deceptive peddlers of snake oil. You might as well go read something else.
I’m just not going to do that. And I’m certainly not influenced by some half baked BBC “documentary” trying to sway my opinion with their thinly veiled, propaganda hit piece.
The producers of that feminist agenda-ed pile of shit should be disgusted with themselves.
Now, with that being said, perhaps the coaches featured in that BBC bowel movement weren’t the greatest examples of positive pick-up culture, but it’s important to know that not all pua courses are created the same.
Yes, there are some real dodgy ones out there. These are ones that focus the majority of the course simply teaching guys a bunch of tips and tactics that they can use to manipulate women into sleeping with them.
They don’t bother with educating them on the fundamentals of WHY these strategies work on women. I think that’s what most people observed in the documentary and just assumed all PUA courses are like that.
But there are plenty of courses out there that focus on guiding you on your journey of self development, and the seduction and pickup side of things is secondary.
The good courses that are worth your time and hard earned money focus on setting you up for long term, long lasting success by working with you to overcome demons from your past and limiting beliefs that may be blocking you from achieving what you really want out of life.
In these courses, the pick up side of things, where you actually go and cold approach women on the street, that’s used more like an analogy for your inner confidence, rather than as a means to simply get laid that night.
Regardless of what they say in their marketing fluff, the coaches are more than aware of the low rates of success that come with cold approaching. I mean, even the best pick up artists have a close rate hovering around the 3% mark. And what I mean by that is that they need to cold approach 100 women to get 3 to sleep with them.
But that’s not the true point of the cold approach exercise. The coaches use the fear you feel when cold approaching women to demonstrate the tricks your mind plays on you through things like fear of rejection. And that constant practise and taking action can mitigate these fears.
And the other thing it teaches you is that success only comes through repetition.
Another thing that quality pick up coaches teach is an exercise called “social freedom”.
This exercise has absolutely nothing to do with picking up and seducing women. In this exercise, the coaches will get their clients to either go up to random strangers, men and women, and ask them something completely absurd like “I’m in love with you, will you marry me?”.
Or alternatively, they’ll march you out into the middle of a town square and get you to act like your favourite animal in front of the hundreds of passers by.
And, while these exercises may seem completely banal on the surface of things, the idea behind them certainly isn’t. The coaches are trying to break down your social inhibitions.
They’re trying to help you overcome your anxiety around what complete strangers think of you. That, even while you’re clucking like a chicken and making a complete dickhead of yourself in public, you are still completely safe.
Look, I’ve done a couple of these pua courses myself, I’m not going to lie, and I found this particular exercise to be one of the most profound of all. And when you master these skills and embody the mindset behind these skills, that will indirectly increase your success with women. And then you won’t need to use the tips and manipulation tactics that some other dodgier coaches preach.
For example, I’ll give you a quick story. I met a girl for a coffee and while I was paying for the coffees I accidentally dropped my credit card, and it slipped between the table the till was sitting on and the wall of the bar.
So in order to retrieve my card the staff had to basically dismantle the bar in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing because there were a bunch of people waiting around for their coffees but everything's kind of stopped while the staff try to fish my credit card out from the tiny little gap between the table and the bar.
So this has taken around 10 mins and people around me are starting to get a bit annoyed, and my date, who I’d met literally an hour ago is starting to get a bit embarrassed. I mean, you could feel the social pressure. But, I stayed calm and said to her, “don’t worry, it’s no big deal”.
Anyway, the staff fished my card out, they got a round of applause from the patrons and I apologised and thanked the staff and everyone around for being cool and we went on our way.
So I ended up hooking up with that girl a couple of days later and while we were chatting in bed she mentioned that credit card fiasco. And she said she was really impressed with how calm I was able to stay, and because I’d been able to stay calm it made her feel calm.
You can read more about how social freedom helps you not only with women but with life in general in my book, Here Be Dragons but suffice to say, if I hadn’t done those pua courses, I probably wouldn’t have bothered giving up my old career as an accountant and finance broker, which was as boring as it sounds, and backing myself in this new coaching career.
In the end, the courses I did really weren’t about picking up women. They were about learning how to be your own best friend and creating a life that would just naturally be attractive to women.
Which brings us to the last point I want to make about PUA coaches.
This stuff that they teach will only work for you if you continually put it into practice.
If you come home after completing your $15K week-long seduction mastery course in Budapest and then go straight back to your old ways, well you’ve pretty much wasted your time and money.
The main problem I see with these courses, and this really isn’t the fault of the course organisers, is that the majority of the attendees of these courses, they’ll pay the admittedly steep prices of these courses, do the course, and then go back to their old habits expecting their life to have magically changed somehow.
And when it doesn’t, they bitch and moan that the course was shit.
What I’m trying to say is, these courses, while I think the good ones are very handy and helpful, they are only the start of your journey of self development. Not the end.
Self improvement of any kind, whether it’s physical training or mental and emotional self improvement, is a long, difficult, lonely, boring, painful process.
Creating long lasting change in your life is incredibly hard, and the vast majority of people who attempt it will fail.
Now, I know that the self improvement and personal training industry is all about getting the fastest result for their clients with the least amount of effort. And I guess I’m undermining the entire industry, and my own coaching business in some way by telling you all this.
The cold hard truth is that for most people, pua and self development courses will be a total waste of time and money. It‘s a shitty thing to say but I’m not going to blow smoke up your arse here.
The entire self development and personal training industry is built on hope. And hope just aint enough to get long lasting results.
However, if you are the rare person who can figure out how to motivate and inspire yourself internally, and commit to doing the work constantly and consistently until you embody the learnings to the point they become second nature, then self development and pua will be the greatest investment you’ll ever make in you’re entire life.
I really mean that.