I’ve recently gotten a few emails and comments asking if I could be more specific about my personal PUA development: what sticking points did I have? What did I work on? How long did it take? Etc. I get this question A LOT in seminars and lair talks as well, so I decided to break it down here.

So here’s the run-down:

In The Beginning:
When: Late 2005
Situation: Had just read “The Game”. Could barely even fathom approaching hot girls, much less envision myself actually doing it. Had just gotten dumped by the love of my life, still dealing with some baggage and depression. Hadn’t had sex in almost a year.
Natural Strengths: Tall and decent-looking. Could hold a good conversation. Good sense of humor. Had some friends. If I got drunk enough, I wasn’t afraid to try and make out with a girl.
Natural Weaknesses: Scared to death of approaching. Had serious commitment/self-esteem/sexual anxiety issues. Honestly believed that I’d never get another girl as amazing as my ex to ever like me again.

Phase 1: OMG, She Talked to Me!
When: Winter and Spring of 2006
Progress Report: It took me three months to actually work up the nerve to cold approach a girl. When I finally did, I was so nervous and self-conscious, I actually apologized for talking to her. I focused mainly on going to parties and meeting girls through my friends. I used some of David DeAngelo’s Cocky/Funny to turn my humor on girls and actually got some mediocre results. A drunk make-out here, an ugly girl’s phone number there. Still no real results though.

I read the Venusian Arts Handbook (basically what became Magic Bullets) and decided to memorize some routines, magic tricks and even some palm-reading. In my first couple dozen sets of my life, I would try these and they would fail miserably. I suck at magic. One girl, while getting a palm-read, looked at me and said, “Why are you touching me?” Another girl, after a botched magic trick looked at me and said, “You should just try being normal.” Little did I know, she gave me better advice than 80% of the PUA community.

Sticking Points: I still had awful approach anxiety. Anything more than one set a night was a “good night.” Attraction game was all over the place, uncalibrated, and awkward. I sucked at routines.

Phase 2: Afraid of Sex
When: May – July of 2006
Progress Report: I took the girl’s advice and tried to just act normal on cold approaches. To my utter amazement, my results got better. I stuck with the Cocky/Funny I used at my friend’s parties and actually started getting phone numbers off cold approach.

My social circle game really started coming into its own. My occasional drunk make-outs finally turned into hook ups and in April, I ended a 16-month sex drought. The experience was terrifying.

When I got sexual with girls, I freaked out that they’d become emotional attached or involved with me (baggage from my relationship; me projecting), and would quit answering their calls. I held the limiting belief that any girl who would sleep with me wanted to be my girlfriend. Seriously…

In June, I met up with a local Boston guy through the lair. He could approach all night but couldn’t hold conversations. I could hold conversations all night but couldn’t approach because I still had crippling approach anxiety. He proceeded to approach about eight sets in the first hour. I stood by stunned and horrified at the groups he fearlessly started talking to. By the end of the night I calmed down and even opened a few sets myself. My AA finally became manageable.

It was in July in which I met a super-natural. We met because the same girl invited us both to a party of hers. To this day, I have yet to meet anyone in the community better than him. Over the next year, I would go out with him and watch him pull smoking hot girls home consistently and without hesitation. I owe a lot of the speed and extent of my development to him.

Sticking Points: Bad sexual anxiety. Sloppy escalation. Would act like a jack ass on day 2’s.

Phase 3: Finally Getting It
When: August – December 2006
Progress Report: I continued to go out five nights a week, half of which I spent with my natural wing, the other half with community guys or college friends.

Watching my natural friend interact with women quickly influenced my dominance and how sexual I was willing to be around girls. The stuff he pulled off was amazing and consistently tested my beliefs and reality.

That summer, I took a girl home from a party. She was very aggressive and it was apparently within an hour or two that we’d have sex. When we got back to my place, once again I ran into severe sexual anxiety and started freaking out that this girl was going to want to date me or something. I decided to take the bluntly honest route and talk to her, set expectations. I told her after sex, “Hey, you’re cool but you need to know this isn’t going to go anywhere.”

She laughed in my face and said, “Who said I wanted to see you again?” This experience was HUGE.

My college party/social circle game hit its peak. I had a night in August where I hooked up with three girls in one night. My college friends and their parties would continue to supply the majority of my lays for the next six months.

I got my first fuck buddies, although I was still bad at keeping them around. I still over-gamed on day 2’s and girls I had already slept with, mostly out of a lack of confidence, but also out of habit.

During this period, I probably slept with 10-12 girls, tripling the amount of women I had been with in my entire life.

On paper, I suppose I had reached legitimate “PUA” status. Within only eight months, I had gone from being a stumbling newbie who needed help approaching, to the guy most guys came to for advice in the lair. I got one night stands. I had a fuck buddy or two.

But I still had a lot of inner game work and emotional work to do — stuff I had never planned on working on, but would soon bite me in the ass.

Sticking Points: Inner game — seeking way too much validation, becoming addicted to sarging. Emotionally vacant. Still had sexual anxiety issues.

Interlude: The Salvadorean Woman
When: January – May 2007
Progress Report: I began to get frustrated in December of 2006. I still had a lot of irrational fears about girls I was seeing — I’d inexplicably stop calling them back and decide that they were needy and crazy — and kept fighting bouts of sexual anxiety.

I decided to check myself into therapy. I did some research, found a guy near my apartment who my insurance covered and I could relate to (went to same college, had been a musician and a slacker, used to womanize when he was young).

What started out as, “Hey Doc, help me keep my pecker hard,” turned into a long dialog that delved into my emotional issues — first, my ex-girlfriend (predictable) and then my parent’s divorce (whoa, didn’t see that coming) and then finally my entire adolescence.

I’m not one of those guys who shits on therapy at all. I think if you find the right therapist, it’s incredibly helpful. You just have to find the right person and be willing to open yourself up and work on yourself. I was extremely engaged every week. Every week I’d figure something out about myself, my emotional inner works, my past, my issues, etc. and then I’d spend the rest of the week turning the ideas over in my head. Eventually, after about 4-5 months, I showed up one day and it felt like I didn’t have anything to talk about. So I stopped. That was it. All in all, seeking therapy was one of the smartest things I ever did.

The other thing that happened was I met a woman. She was foreign (love it), older (also love it), beautiful, smart and rich. Our first date consisted of her buying a bottle of Johnny Walker and us sitting in her apartment until 4AM speaking in broken English (her) and broken Spanish (me). It was wonderful.

Now, as with all the other previous girls that I had really liked, I was still scared shitless of commitment, but this woman was too amazing to not commit to. She was mature and handled her emotions well, which is what I needed in the girl I dated at the time. She was fun and playful, had a sexy accent, and spoiled the shit out of me. It’s really hard to ditch a woman when she’s sexy, fun AND perfectly willing to spend $1000 on you without thinking twice.

It was good for me. It was perfect for me really. It restored my confidence, my emotional stability, helped me open myself up again. I wasn’t afraid of intimacy or relationships anymore.

Eventually, she had to move back to her country. Her family worked in the government (which in Central America is a huge deal). She finagled a job for me at the US Embassy down there and invited me to go down to live with her.

As fantastic as it all sounded, I realized she and I wanted different things. I had just gotten out of college. She wanted to settle down, probably marry and have kids. The idea that a woman was actually willing to marry me — and not even that, a woman of THAT caliber really did a number on my reality.

Unfortunately, I had to turn her down. We lost touch. She was such a blessing and I still think about her now and again.

Phase 4: Put Me Back in the Game Coach
When: May – December 2007
Progress Report: When I came back, I was rusty for a few weeks. But in no time, I was hitting it hard again, five nights a week, and the results started pouring in like there was no tomorrow. Probably a new girl every week or two for six months.

But the difference was that I was actually keeping girls around now. I was keeping them around for three, six, even eight months at a time. We always seemed to enjoy our time together. And when it came time for them to move on, I was remaining friends with them. There were almost never any hard feelings or awful drama.

Within a few months I had a large rotation of girls that I maintained until the end of the year.

Sticking Points: I still remained emotionally shallow with my girls. Also, my lifestyle had become dominated by pick up. I reached a point where I was unemployed, broke, living on a friend’s couch, and was dating four girls and going out three nights a week. It was stupid. And I quickly became miserable.

Phase 5: Girlfriend, Coaching and the Post-PUA Life
When: January – September 2008
Progress Report: I decided to put my life in order. On top of being a mess personally and financially, I was getting burnt out from all of the sarging. I don’t know about you, but after about a dozen 4-month-long casual relationships, it starts to get a bit old. The one night stands got old even way before that.

This period, I found myself slowly falling into another serious long-term relationship with my current girlfriend. She started as a FB about six months prior.

This period also saw me begin coaching which created a bizarre effect on my social life and general psyche for a while. This is documented on this blog in my “Post PUA Life” posts from the summer of 2008.

But a lot of this was just getting back to being a normal person again. As fucked up as that sounds, it was true. Learning how to NOT go out five nights a week. Learning how to go out and NOT approach girls and still have fun.

Phase 6: Emotional Freedom, Polyamory, and Beyond?
When: September 2008 – Present
Progress Report: The evolution I’ve gone through the last six months has been a deeply emotional/relationship management one. It has also been chronicles on this blog here. My saga with Erika has also been a product of this personal evolution.

Sticking Points: I’d say my sticking points now involve managing multiple deep emotional relationships simultaneously — you could call it “love logistics.” I still think when it comes down to it, the first five minutes are my weakest minutes of any cold approach. I could do better opening large groups and handling night-game logistics. But these are all things that I don’t really plan on addressing until I become single again, move and starting going out again.