3 steps to being more attractive
There are several factors that contribute towards how attractive you are, or more precisely, how attractive people perceive you to be. The two overriding factors though are your internal beliefs and your conveyed personality.
Internal beliefs are generally formed through life experience, from infancy onwards. If you receive sincere positive messages and attention from others, you will generally have more self-belief and confidence by default than if you rarely receive validation of that sort.
Conveyed personality is an extension of that inner confidence and is basically how we come across to other people, including first impressions and social skills.
Internal beliefs and conveyed personality are closely related, with each one directly affecting the other. This means that by improving one aspect of these attraction variables, you proportionally improve the other.
This article will focus on the latter of these two variables, with the goal being that by paying attention to certain aspects of your personality, you can increase how attractive other people perceive you to be. This will in turn improve several internal beliefs.
Note that this article is not implying that you change your core personality, more that it is suggesting ways to convey your personality in the best way. Also remember that attraction doesn’t stop when you get into a relationship. Presumably you want to remain attractive throughout your relationships too!
Without further ado, here are three steps to being more attractive…
1.) Being unreactive
Every single example of social human interaction is either a bid for connection or an attempt to get a reaction out of the recipient. If someone tells a joke, they are intending to get laughter in response, and if someone is being threatening, they are intending to get fear and cooperation as a response.
It is easy to misconstrue exactly what being unreactive means in the context of being more attractive. Being unreactive is not about being an emotionless robot, void of being able to make a genuine emotional connection. It simply means that if someone tries to get a reaction out of you, you are in complete, conscious control of how you react to it.
If someone is making a mutual and positive bid for rapport then the whole concept of being unreactive becomes redundant. It is when someone is making a measured attempt to test your confidence and self-belief, something that almost everyone does subconsciously, that this concept really becomes useful.
A recent article that discusses some of the practical aspects to being unreactive is called Connecting in a relationship and interacting using frame theory. The important thing to remember is that negative emotions are created internally. It is an advanced skill to develop but no one can actually MAKE you feel a negative emotion! Learn to stay positive, calm and happy regardless of what anyone says to you and you will have the basis for attracting even the most testing and high value men and women.
2.) Being playful
This step is primarily for the nice guys and their female counterparts who don’t know the best way to act around the opposite sex when it comes to attraction. The general strategy of a nice guy is to play it safe and ask boring, rapport-seeking questions immediately after meeting a woman. Although this can occasionally work depending on the individual woman and the context of the interaction, it deprives a woman of the essence of what attraction is meant to be.
The concept of being playful comes under many guises such as flirting or teasing but what it essentially is, is being fun!
If you are interacting with a man or woman that you are attracted to, you want to be making them smile and you want to be conveying your interest in a way that isn’t disrespectful or seedy. People without much dating experience tend to hide their intentions and interest altogether!
The way I ultimately sum up being playful and being good at flirting is:
“Saying something mean in a nice way.”
This is always with the express intention of making someone feel good. If no one is smiling or responding to your playfulness positively, then you are doing it wrong.
I have literally hundreds of examples and practical ways to be more playful, but what is important here is that during the attraction phases of developing a relationship, playful and fun is far better than safe and serious.
Learning to be more playful and speak the subtle language of flirting was what essentially turned me from being a nice guy… into being an attractive, desirable nice guy!
3.) Leading
Both men and women can benefit from being more decisive, direct and leading. The roles of men and women in society suggest that it is the male who must take the initiative regarding relationship progression. Regardless of gender, the important thing is that any specific interaction is actually progressing in whatever way is mutually desired.
A romantic relationship is only going to develop if someone is leading the escalation of both emotional and physical intimacy. Aside from this fact, from a woman’s perspective, being a dominant, self-assured and leading man is inherently attractive!
There are obviously many more factors and intricacies involved in attraction, but the three listed above are what I believe to be the three core components in attracting and progressing relationships.
A lot of the success is in calibrating how and when to balance these three concepts and that will only come with experience. Remember not to hide your true personality but equally, try not to let negative internal beliefs determine what that true personality is! 🙂
Much love,
Samuel
Hey man
I like to think Im pretty attractive, well the second 2 points you make and am fairly successful with women. Its the first point about being unreactive that I reckon I have the most trouble with and was wondering if you could give some examples of how to do this so I can understand it fully?
I used to be so much worse, getting angry if a girl or even my girlfriend was rude to me but now I just walk away before I can get angry.
Apreciating your work dude
J
Hey Jon,
As with most behaviours, being reactive is something we generally learn whilst growing up and from how ‘hard done by’ we feel in life. Being unreactive is basically a technical way of saying “being at complete ease with yourself and your life”.
As I said in the article, most interactions are an attempt to get a reaction of some sort but there are two that are particularly noteworthy and practical in this instance. The first is when first approaching or meeting someone attractive of the opposite sex and the second is whilst in a long-term relationship, concerning negative interactions such as arguments.
With both scenarios, the first point is to never take criticism or rudeness personally. Usually it is an outward projection of how the other person is feeling at that particular moment in time and is not as vindictive as it may seem. Fighting fire with fire is never the best solution to arguments, contempt or rudeness.
An example of this in action is when meeting physically attractive women of the clubbing generation. Having been approached, sleazed and pined over hundreds of times in their lives, they often resort to making subconscious judgements about you before you’ve properly spoken to them, let alone connected with them. The irony is that these women are often the sweetest and friendliest women you’ll meet once you get to know them. Remaining unreactive, in control and content in the first place is the only way of communicating that their initial judgement about you is wrong. Of course, once you start naturally doing this, you won’t have to consciously think about it at all!
The point is that walking away from someone is not being unreactive at all… It is simply suppressing the emotions externally but still communicating exactly the same things. Considering your good success with women and your overall attractiveness, if you bear in mind some of these points during your interactions, it won’t be long before you adopt that natural mind-shift. 🙂
Thanks for your comment and question,
Sam
I don’t have anything to add to this but wanted to say this topic was great for me, cheers. It’s definately the more playful and leading friends of mine that always seem to get the women so I like these things being broken down for me, cheers.
Hey Dean,
I’m glad you enjoyed this article! 🙂
Friends and other men who are successful with women are actually the best people to learn from. They often won’t be able to verbalise what works as they are naturally doing these things but you can learn a lot by simply observing them. 🙂
Thanks for your comment,
Sam
Yes being playful, flirty and being able to make a woman smile is definitely more attractive than the ‘nice guy’ persona! Great article Sam, thanks again for a fascinating read.
It would be great to have an article specifically aimed at women at some point 🙂
Keep up the good work!
Eva x
Hi Eva, it’s great to hear from you! 🙂
The paradox is that most women ultimately want a ‘nice guy’ who treats them well… but those men just aren’t exciting or attractive in the first place and therefore easily pass undetected into the friend zone!
From the hundreds of men that I’ve coached over the years, the men that become utterly desirable are usually the ‘nice guys’ that learn how to convey more attractive sides of their personality. The antithesis (‘jerks’ who try to be more nice) often find it a lot harder to rid the undesirable aspects of their personality.
These generalisations can be useful for women to use when looking for the traits of a man for a long-term, fulfilling relationship.
As for specific advice for women, unfortunately modern society is to blame for putting men in the role of the pursuer with regards to dating. There obviously are specific things women can do to find what they are looking for but the basic advice revolves around the way a woman presents herself and how clearly she communicates her intentions. This comes under the ‘leading’ section of the above article. Most men are not as savvy at picking up female sub-communications as women would like and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a man who has been offended by a woman stating intent or making calibrated advances of her own.
I always try to make my articles as accessible and unisex as possible but I endeavour to write an article specifically for females in the future, knowing there is demand for me to do so. 🙂
Thanks for writing,
Sam
That’s so true Sam. I found the quote about “no one can make you feel an actual negative emotion”. I know that many have been burned in the past and haven’t moved on from being hurt and aren’t in a positive frame of mind to meet new people. It’s also good to remember that flirting is a fun way to break the ice. Furthermore, you are spot on about a relationship only advancing if one of the people is advancing the escalation of intimacy. This is a great post which reminds people to keep things simple in the dating world and that dating should start out carefree.
Hi Elena, hope you’re well. 🙂
That’s a valid point about keeping things simple when dating. The tricky part as you say is dealing with the internal aspects and ‘self-belief’ rather than any practical or logistical elements.
Confidence (which is the basis for utilising the above three points correctly) is gained from positive experience, so if someone has been wounded in the past, it probably will be a slow process to fully get that desired level of confidence. For those people, I suggest trying out just one or two examples that apply to the three steps to being more attractive, whenever they can, and see (and experience) the kind of responses they get. 🙂
Thanks for commenting,
Sam
I loved this article and the one about connecting, I feel they were spot on and I have learned alot from both thanks you Sam now I am going to try to use what i have learned. Seems to that it has alot to do with letting things roll off your shoulders and that people will not always say what you want to hear and that doesnt matter! Great articles Keep writing!
Hey Brad,
Thanks a lot; I’m glad you enjoyed the articles! 🙂
I completely agree with you… it’s a great social skill to be able to let things roll off your shoulders with ease, although it is still worth taking calm and conscious note of what was said. The feedback we get from others, be it from strangers or from the people close to us, is usually (although not always) a direct result of how we have come across in a certain situation. The important thing, like you say, is to not take things to heart or let anything affect our self-esteem.
Thanks a lot for commenting. 🙂
The next article should be up sometime tomorrow so please check back then if you can.
Sam
Hi Sam
I liked your article – lots of interesting material. I do find it hard to know how to act around Men quite often and I feel that I am too serious for example I ask questions and I think I try to be “nice”, so I suppose I act in an affectionate way. I don’t have trouble relating to people or maintaining romantic relationships once I am in them, but as I am single at the moment I am finding it hard to get through that first stage. Therefore I found your advice on being more playful illuminating. I will try to bear in mind some of the points you make and see if I can elicit a different response.
Clare
Hi Clare,
Being nice, affectionate and asking questions is actually a great basis for attraction. It shows that you can connect with people.
Using those conversational skills as a means for attraction is simply a case of attaching a more fun, playful vibe to any interactions like you say. This can be done in loads of different ways, such as twisting generic questions into statements, teasing or playing games to get to know each other in a more unique way. Body language is also something that can be used to create a more fun and flirtatious context to an interaction.
Having said that, the thing that really differentiates a meaningful and a meaningless conversation is enthusiasm. If you can convey a balanced level of interest (from social to romantic to sexual interest where relevant), then it doesn’t matter how many questions you ask or how nice you are.
Thanks for your comment, 🙂
Sam