The age-old debate: should men “fake it til they make it”, or should their outward behavior be congruent with their thoughts and beliefs?
There are generally three schools of thought on this topic:
- The fake it school preaches cocky and confident behavior no matter how insecure you’re feeling, and if you’re a good enough actor it will pay off (some even argue that women are terrible at spotting fakers). “When it comes to being attractive to women,” writes A. Anton in The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give it to Them, “internal insurance is unnecessary as women do not care why men are confident. They only care about the external appearance of certainty.”[1]
- The fake-it-til-you-make-it school teaches that it’s okay if your thoughts lag behind your actions, but the aim should ultimately be to make it. “You have to fake it and then work hard to make it,” writes Rian Stone in FUCCFILES. “Actions drive mindset, mindset doesn’t drive your actions.”[2] As Heartiest argues, “hold the mask up long enough and like Jim Carey’s movie character it fuses with your soul.”[3]
- Finally, the make it (aka “congruence”) school teaches that you shouldn’t even bother with the fakery: women can smell a fake from a mile away. Work on your inner mindset. As Pook writes, “ANYONE can memorize ‘techniques’, but FEW can change HOW they think. Women will be able to sniff out the former….Prince Charming is not the producer of the confident thought; to the contrary, the confident thought is the producer of the Prince Charming.”[4]
Allow me to offer a both / and approach: fake it and make it. Fake it in the bars and clubs, but make it in your private time when nobody is watching. As Rian Stone says, make it “behind the scenes”.
Let’s begin with the fakery. Why must you fake it in, say, a nightclub? The first reason is that nobody knows who you are, so what you present externally is what will form their entire impression of you. Things like posture and eye contact always matter, but they matter even more in a venue where little else is on display. It’s for this reason that you should definitely fake your outer demeanor to ensure no cracks appear. Your marketing window is minimal, so any signs of weakness or insecurity could be construed as being fundamental to your personality.
The second reason is that extreme confidence is attractive in the early stages of seduction. An extremely confident swagger will set you apart from other men, and women will wonder what it is you have that affords you such self-assurance. Obviously there’s an art to this—overdo it and you’ll look like a buffoon. The point, however, is that there’s a large element of fakery and false advertising, and that’s okay. Just as women apply makeup to appear more attractive, men alter their behavior.
But then, of course, there comes a time when you really should rise above all the bullshit and work on being the best man that you can be—to be congruent, to “make it”. Not only do you need congruence for a long-term relationship, when all your foibles will eventually see the light of day, but congruence is also important to how you measure yourself as a man. The less congruent you are (i.e. the bigger the gap between how you think and how you behave) the more brittle your self-esteem will be, and that’s an important thing to look after totally irrespective of women.
So when do you practice congruence, or “making it”? I believe all the best work occurs when nobody is watching, since those are precisely the moments when you’re likely to slack off and cut corners. It’s easy to be the hero when you have an audience, but what about when your alarm goes off in the morning and all you want to do is be lazy and scroll social media? If you can somehow be that guy who consistently gets up early, makes his bed, drinks water, and even does a few push-ups before going about his day, that, my friend, is making it.
“What we do behind closed doors, when the spotlight is not on us, matters the most,” writes former British Royal Marines Commando Gareth Timmins in Becoming the 0.1%:
If you can harness the self-discipline to do the less desirable tasks in life well, with purpose and attention to detail, then the enjoyable, effortless things in life get done to a higher standard. Quite frankly, you develop a Subtle Edge to how you conduct life, which is (a) immeasurable in its nature and (b) unattainable by those who do not practice it.[5]
The lesson here is that you should rise to each small challenge in life, doing the uncomfortable things day in, day out, and slowly but surely you’ll start making it as a man. But understand: this will not get you laid. Nor will your jiu-jitsu black belt. What gets you laid is marketing, pure and simple. And unless you’re willing to fake some of that, you’ll likely lose out to other men who are.
[1] Anton, W. The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give It to Them
[2] Stone, R. FUCCFILES: Lessons from a decade of women
[3] Heartiste, Heartiste on Game – Volume 2
[4] Pook, The Book of Pook
[5] Timmins, G. Becoming the 0.1%: Thirty-four lessons from the diary of a Royal Marines Commando Recruit
Inner Game Seduction 