This forum has been pretty quiet recently, but there's a lot of intelligence, good thoughts and advice on here.

I suppose everyone on here will have started this stuff with varying degrees of success/experience with woman. This is something I've thought of for a while.

I'm talking about things like mindset/attitude, feelings towards approaching and being rejected. Opinion or realisations towards women. What's some of the best success you've had? (not just in terms of getting with a specific girl, perhaps a personal "aha" moment in your head whereby you finally understood something). What's some of the worst experiences you've had or "mistakes" you've made? What have you learned and as a result improved on?

The more than contribute the better - there's a lot of folks on here with plenty of good things to say - Stein, Kowalski, Phenom etc.

So what have you learned? May even be useful to look at it in terms of pre & post discovery of PUA.

This is quite a big topic for me and I believe that I could probably talk for years about it.
For me pickup has not been about picking up women. Pickup is not the reason I have had the success I have. What it has given me though is that freedom to mature in my own way, through trial and error.

When I started, I was extremely shy, would not talk to a girl in any social situation, this stayed with me for 2 years until I moved to London to begin a Computer Science degree. What has really changed me is University and the people I've met along the way. I'm originally from Luton as some of you know. I remember calling my Dad after the first week and saying "Dad, I can converse with everyone here, I am getting along with them way better than anyone I've met in Luton". This may have been the fact of it being freshers week or it could be because of the type of person I was meeting in Uni compared to back home.

I've never really had an aha moment when pursuing women, everything transitioned naturally. I think this was due to the fact that I did not have an opinion about women and approaching, except that they were scary. I believe this is why Tyler says starting under 25 is completely different than starting above, everything is new to you, you never had time to conjure up an opinion.

A wing I met when I was 18 who's now happily married said to me when I first started, "you need to give less of a fuck", which took me alot of time to understand. But now I can honestly say I've improved, I'm not completely there yet but I'm certainly on the right track.

Right now I'm happy with my progress and once my University schedule isn't so tight am looking forward to the experiences which are yet to come. My journey has still only begun.

That you can develop yourself. Specifically PUA, then just that you can get girls if you try and put your mind to it. Its hard for me to say exactly what because I saw a glimpse of PUA when I was like 13 with Gambler in an interview on This Morning. Since then I've always remembered "SO that guy learnt I guess maybe, possibly, I could too" but with no real idea or way, and often forget and re-remembered seeing it too.

In short: before pua I would thought I didn't have a chance, now I do.

I started off in 2005 with the David DeAngelo stuff and morphed his cocky-funny concepts into my own style.. it was strange at first, then it became somehow part of my personality. I even use cocky funny with guys / mates - especially the secure naturals, anyone else either gets confused or offended, same as insecure / shy women lol..

I'm also a part qualified counsellor which is sometimes handy for the empathy/understanding / under the radar. A journey into meditation / spirituality helps too, as long as you find your way back.. this stage helped massively with being indifferent/non-needy/more grounded

More recently I've gone for the more aggressive direct approaches day game etc.. along with continuing to study NLP and Hypnotic Scripts... again the trick for me is to get concept rather than learn routines off by heart and then become a pre-programmed social robot who is unable to think outside of the box (someone who wears big platform shoes, big black hats, make-up and glitters like the 4th of July) (translation.. its a case of fuck it, we've learnt enough now guys, who's up for a beer or four and lets hit town)

I saw David DeAngelo's Man Transformation series last year on youtube - that guy has gone full circle from technique to the bigger picture and the synchronicity between what he was talking about and my journey to date was almost freaky. Without being big-headed I finally realised I knew all along, we all come pre-wired with this stuff

In short pick up is great for making the initial introduction (reducing AA), escalation, instant dates, getting numbers, the dating phase and building confidence with women / people in general - which feeds into all other areas of life. The only downside is that adhering to Pure PUA technique gets in the way of maintaining long-term healthy relationships with women.

I remember a feeling of a void. I remember wanting answers to the void. I felt I was in a place where I wasn’t happy and I wanted to transition to a place where I thought I would be. The most obvious solution at the time was the thought I had that getting better with women would help this, so I got into PU.

I sought answers firstly in PU. PU changed some perspectives and I gained some new experiences as a result but it didn’t give me the answers I was happy with.

I then sought answers in spirituality. Spirituality suited my naivety at the time, it poised some interesting concepts but ultimately it was all a bit wishy washy for me and poised more questions than it answered.

Then I looked to philosophy. Philosophy was cool; my mind was opened to interesting concepts on reality, life & the self. Whilst I learnt a lot from philosophy I always felt a bit out of my depth.

I then looked to psychology. Psychology was a bit like a culmination of learning for me, things made sense, the pieces fit and I felt for the first time I could see the wood through the trees. But still not the answers I was satisfied with.

I learned a lot in all this time, I read some books, visited some cool places, met some awesome people and experienced some amazing things but I still didn’t have my answers. I looked elsewhere to answer questions that only I truly could answer for myself.

Everything changed for me the first time I took LSD. The introspection I experienced about myself during that trip was something I couldn’t have ever learned from anything external to myself. I did it with the intent to learn about myself and not to just get high. I picked audio and visual stimulants that had significance to me and my past, both good memories and bad ones. After that experience I learned that there were no answers to be found in anything but myself.

After that experience it felt like that void had been filled, like a hunger went away. That’s not to say all my problems disappeared overnight and I had life all figured out, it was not like that at all. It was more like an acceptance that things are as they are and that’s how they are. Rejection is rejection, AA is AA, if you get laid you get laid if you don’t you don’t, who cares. It is how it is and that’s how it is.

I need to think what im going to post here. All I can say at the minute is I wanted and needed to choose to see the world as a glass half full instead of half empty. I always knew I was missing a big chunk of life. What this journey is about for me is filling that void.

I totally get what your saying about spirituality being wishy-washy.. In fact I almost got lost in it at one point, I know people inadvertently "use it" to escape reality / their problems / reject western civilization.. others embrace it to cultivate a better mind, a loving attitude towards others and develop perspective. I don't that meditate much now days, my life is for living here on earth.

PUA on it's own is insufficient.... Like you are clearly pointing out, people need to drink water from many different wells

I liked this thread as it made me re-evaluate what I'm doing with pickup and why.

With the help of some self-help books (on NLP and CBT) I worked out the root of my problems were associated with the meanings I derived from certain events. Those meanings cause emotional disturbances which then affect your behaviour.

An example would be me getting depressed over rejection. The meaning I would derive would be that I was somehow unworthy.

The resulting avoiding behaviour from this would be me not talking to girls I liked, not asking girls out, not touching or kissing them. Because I wanted to avoid the negative emotions of the rejection of any of those actions.

Over time that developed into social anxiety as well.

The best known way to deal with these type of emotional problems is gradual exposure therapy which allows you to confront and overcome your fears. I know this because I also had to do a similar thing to overcome fear of public speaking, which was holding me back in my career.

There's not been a single aha moment for me that I can put my finger on but getting into pickup seems to be working in adressing the girl issue. It's also fed into other parts of my life and improved my confidence in general.

My experience of rejection now is no more than a fleeting feeling of dissapointment.