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How to Think Like a Beautiful Woman: Get Into Her Head Before You Get Into Her Pants
by Dr. Alex Benzer
of Tao of Dating
February 22nd, 2008
Your dating resource Dr Alex here. Duringthe Advanced Transformation Weekend seminar for men, we did a little meditation in which the students experienced the world from the point of view of a beautiful woman.
The students said that the exercise was tremendously useful to them. The Insight Generator Mindtrack takes you through a similar experience.
Below I'm giving you the Didactic Module from the Insight Generator Mindtrack, which is as close to the seminar experience as you could have gotten without actually having been there.
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The Insight Generator Mindtrack:Didactic Module
There is one fallacy that is believed almost universally that brings people a host of unpleasant emotions, particularly jealousy and dissatisfaction. This is the fallacy of believing that someone else is better off than you are, or what I call the 'grass is greener' syndrome. We tend to carve up imagined scenarios in which that guy drives a better car, is richer, has more women, or something of that nature, and therefore he must be happier than us.
Nothing could be further than the truth. To prove it to yourself, just think of the situation you're in right now. How satisfied are you with it? Is this is as good as it gets, or is there significant room for improvement? Most people will respond that yes, they could be better off. And yet, to the vast majority of the people on this planet, you who have the luxury of listening to this on a computer or other electronic device, with clean clothes, safe drinking water, electricity and a roof over your head, are vastly, unimaginably rich. It's easy to extend that argument to every other person whom you perceive to be better off than you and realize very quickly that you are either happy right where you are or you never will be happy. To a large extent, it's a choice.
I bring this up because one of the popular misconceptions is that beautiful people are significantly better off than more ordinary-looking folk. To some extent, this is true. Beautiful people are perceived as more competent, compassionate and intelligent than their peers for no reason other than their looks. These biases have been confirmed by scientific studies time and time again. Moreover, they tend to be more confident even in situations when looks don't come up, simply for the reason that they are so used to having their way. For a comprehensive treatment of this subject, I highly recommend Nancy Etcoff's enlightening and engaging book, 'The Survival of the Prettiest.'
In the meantime, Taoist philosophy says that every coin has two sides and every mountain casts a shadow. To every yin, there is a yang, and there is no unalloyed boon in this world. A wise man once said that we already have everything we could possibly have; it's just a matter of what we're willing to trade for something else.
This Mindtrack is about becoming aware of what it's like being a beautiful woman. Presumably, as men, we pursue beautiful women because evolution has programmed us to do so. There is no absolute aesthetic measure of beauty; a mole rat would not find Claudia Schiffer beautiful in any way. So what we perceive as beauty is evolution's clever trick to make us pick mates that are most likely to bear healthy offspring that can then perpetuate our genes.
Yet, at the same time that as men we desire beautiful women, we fear and dread them too. Perhaps it is because they possess the power to say no and turn us down. Perhaps it is because they make us feel inadequate, as if we can't measure up to their standard of beauty. Whatever the reason, it creates a paradoxical response: many men will move away from an exceptionally beautiful woman instead of approaching her, even though the main purpose of feminine beauty is for us to move towards it.
Desire tends to jumble up a man's brain, and so beautiful women tend to evoke certain reactions in men -- a commingling of longing, dread, uncertainty, inadequacy, hesitation, and other non-productive emotions. So let us examine the phenomenon of feminine beauty more closely and see if we can find a new perspective for understanding it and embracing it instead of reacting in other, less useful ways.
A beautiful woman is noticed at an early age, and starts to receive attention at times and in amounts that other people do not. This can work in their favor at school, at work, and in social settings. However, it can also be an embarrassment of riches, leading to a lot of unwanted attention. This means that she now has to sift through all of this information to figure out which part of it actually matters. If you get lots of mail or email, you know that sifting through irrelevant information is not a lot of fun. And one of the ways to make someone feel disoriented, confused and generally unhappy is to give her too many choices.
Let's examine this in the social realm. Since a beautiful woman is receiving so much attention -- at the store, sitting down having lunch, at work, traveling, going out -- she has to develop ways to safeguard her own peace and quiet. It may seem like it's fun being the center of attention all of the time; however, it can also be overwhelming or just plain annoying. This may require appearing aloof, curt or inattentive at times. She must get approached by so many yahoos so often that she has no choice but to develop some defense mechanisms just to maintain her personal space and her sanity.
It seems that better-looking people in general get better treatment at school and work, as shown by various studies, and as a result perform better. They also get a lot of positive reinforcement simply for being who they are -- beautiful. The shadow side of this is that they will sometimes wonder whether their advancement is based on merit or merely for their looks. Also, if they allow their looks to be a crutch, then they live in constant anxiety of losing that crutch. What would their world turn into if they were to lose that beauty? I have spoken to women as young as 21 who honestly worried that they were getting old -- clearly a thought that has no place in the mind of someone of that age.
Taoist philosophy says that within your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, and within your greatest weakness is your greatest strength. Let's examine this paradox. Let's say you've never played croquet. If I tell you "You're horrible at croquet," it's not really going to bother you much. But let's say you're a top-notch computer programmer. If I say, "Y'know, you're not much of a coder -- I've met many better," that's bound to get a reaction out of you. Where you have no strength, you have no emotional investment; where you do have strength, you have a lot of emotional investment as well.
Let's extend this to the realm of beautiful women. For a beautiful woman, her most obvious strength is the way she looks. As such, therein also lies her greatest weakness. A small deviation from the optimal is sometimes all it takes to really affect her emotionally: frizzy hair, a pimple, monthly fluctuations. Moreover, no woman believes that she is perfect, and the more beautiful she is, the more she will be fixated on that one perceived flaw of hers.
In the friendship arena, a beautiful woman is going to receive a lot of offers from men and women. People want to bask in that magical glow of beauty and receive some of the halo effect of being around a pretty person. We tend to be more willing to go out of our way to cater to beautiful people, and are all too happy to have merely the privilege of counting them amongst our friends. The issue is that if said beautiful person has any insight at all, she's acutely aware of this dynamic and is always wondering who's hovering around her because of her looks versus who is genuinely concerned about her well-being as a human. Some come to resent the hangers on; others merely tolerate them or doubt their sincerity. Of course, some of these hangers-on secretly resent the beautiful woman even as they do their best to stay close to her. They see the attention, assume that it means that the beautiful one is better off, and seethe in a phantom deficiency of their own making.
And yet, you will be shocked to find out how many truly beautiful women consider themselves lonely. This is also part of the reason why exceptionally beautiful women seem to hang around other beautiful women. The facile answer is that, well, they're all part of a club and wouldn't deign to hang out with less beautiful people. That may be partially true. But it's probably closer to the truth that when a beautiful woman is amongst other beautiful women, beauty becomes less of a point of competition, envy, or obsequiousness. She can relax a little bit and just be herself.
I did a version of the Insight Generator Mindtrack at a workshop once, where the men were taken through a guided meditation in which they saw the world through the eyes of a beautiful woman. Afterwards, I asked them how it felt to be a beautiful woman. There was a unanimous response: they hated it. Once they became aware of all the liabilities that come with the assets of feminine beauty, the men understood that it was not something they would willingly choose. Moreover, from the insights they gained during the meditation, they were more likely to have a response like compassion and understanding vis a vis beautiful women than fear, dread or jealousy.
In the end, the Mindtracks are designed to empower you in your dating life. And what a beautiful woman wants above all is to be understood and appreciated -- pretty much like anyone else. Through this Mindtrack, you can develop the vision that allows you to gain that insight. Once you have it, you will be able to do with even greater ease what evolution has programmed you to do: to approach beautiful women with grace and compassion and to allow them to feel wonderful in your presence.
The power is within you,
Dr Alex
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