Inner Game


From the original article on April 18, 2008. Author: Chateau Heartiste.

I have a friend who is very self-critical. When we go out to meet girls he will handicap his game by being too hard on himself. When he isn’t weaseling out of approaching girls with every excuse in the book he is projecting an overly attentive vibe when he does manage to enter a set. In the field, I’d often hear him say:

“I wonder if she got my jokes?”

“I hope I didn’t come off as too needy.”

“She’s probably looking for a different type of guy.”

Poor inner game — what is known by other jargon as your state of mind or your self confidence — is inwardly directed. Good inner game is outwardly directed. It’s the difference between berating yourself for not winning over others and berating others for not winning over you. The men who are naturally good with women live outside their minds — they are externally focused. The downside is that they are usually not very introspective, but who cares about that shit when you’re getting pussy? Introspection is for dainty young women in sundresses picking buttercups in meadows.

If my friend had good inner game what he would have said is:

“She loses points for not having a good sense of humor.”

“She’s the kind of girl who hides her insecurity behind aloofness.”

“I’ll chat with her to see if she’s the type of girl I want in my life.”

I hear a lot of talk about how Game routines are going stale, and chicks see right through them. In fact, the problem isn’t typically with the routines, it’s with the confidence and congruence in which they are delivered. If your inner game isn’t solid then what you present to the outside world won’t match what you are feeling inside. Your inner game is reflected through your body language and voice tone, so however clever your routines they will strike a false note if you don’t internalize the confidence you are trying to portray. You will betray yourself with negative thinking.

Fake it till you make it means faking that internal confidence as well as the external behavior. This is not as hard as it sounds. Every time you feel self-doubt and talk yourself into inaction, yell “Stop!” out loud, and your brain will reboot. You then consciously reframe your thought processes to put the burden of approval seeking on those around you. With good inner game you can say just about any ridiculous routine and the girl will be intrigued.

The most important change in thinking you can make:

You are not there to win over women, they are there to win over you.

Keep saying this over and over until you begin to believe it. You are re-wiring yourself. Don’t worry about the truth or falsity of it. That’s irrelevant.

The beauty of this system is that it turns the seduction template on its head. Co-opting a woman’s natural choosiness and making yourself the chooser instead of the chosen is extremely attractive to women. Because it hardly ever happens this way, women will happily strive to win the approval of a man who is clear in his words and his actions that he is judging them for worthiness of his attention, and not the other way around.


Library of Chadnet | wiki.chadnet.org