I’m taking the Wooden Wingman on SteviePUA’s Tough Guy Challenge.

This is a mission designed to boost your inner game and confidence. It results in being far better skilled at dealing with mixed sets of males and females. It also turbo charges your AMOG game.

If you can pass this mission most normal mixed sets you run will be simpler. Think of this like resistance strength training for your muscles – you learn to lift heavier than normal weights so when you go back to lifting normal weights it’s far easier.

The Tough Guy Challenge goes like this:

1. You think of all the pubs and bars you would never step into if your life depended on it. They are rough, dangerous and anything can happen in them. YOU GO TO THOSE VENUES!

2. Once inside these roughest of the rough, toughest of the tough bars, you look for the people you would normally stay the hell away from. These people would cause you to grind your teeth if you dreamed about them at night. You would flee from them in your dream and be glad when you woke up. YOU TALK TO THOSE PEOPLE.

3. When talking with those people, you think of subjects you would never normally talk about. This could be your non-existent hashish stash, the car you stole and sold to a ram-raider or the police man who is making your life shit. YOU TALK ABOUT THOSE SUBJECTS.

When you can learn to do these stages successfully you have passed the Tough Guy Challenge and you will have grown in character, in balls and in your skill set. Being able to calibrate to your target and speak to them on their own terms is a high level skill and it applies as much to sarging as much as any other communication interaction. Being accepted by the person you are talking with gives you social proof, especially if they can relate to what you are saying.

We could do the Posh Chap Challenge where you go to the poshest wine bar and order a flute of champagne and discuss stock prices with the snobbiest person you can meet – this would also teach you the skill set of being able to calibrate your conversation to the person you are interacting with. But such a challenge is relatively easy. It does far more for your confidence to push yourself into a rough bar and talk to a hard man than to walz around a luxurious wine lodge.

To push yourself and really kick your ass into gear, the Tough Guy Challenge is far more effective. Believe me, I’ve done both for many years. I’ve even faked being a bouncer on the door of some of these tough bars and checked IDs of some real tough cookies.

Being someone who practises what he preaches, I have done the Tough Guy Challenge for many years in many cities. It’s taught me so much about quickly sizing up a person, calibrating their state and what they value in life. Once you can do that your next step is to build rapport with them and social proof yourself through your conversation. You need to look for ‘hits’ which show what you are saying is of value to the person and make sure you pursue those ‘hits’ and amp them up.

Once you become adept at this part of the mission, you need to learn to usurp their reality by first having them see you as an equal then to over take what dominance and control they have of the discussion so they begin to see you as someone who potentially has more value than they do.

This is high level mind fucking and when you can do this you will be on your way to becoming a true Jedi.

I’ll post more on the higher level skills of usurping the person and controlling their frame in subsequent posts.

Let’s see how the Wooden Wingman does on his training missing first!