What Are the Most Common Beginner Mistakes/Sticking Points (Anti-Game and Scarcity Mindsets)

Hey guys, I hope you're doing really well. Welcome to another podcast. This is a Q&A podcast from the November Q&A I think. And this question comes from Mr. J. And it's all about anti-game and later on I'm going to talk about scarcity mindsets. So Mr. J's question is, you've mentioned something to the effect of fairly early in a guy's journey, his principal challenge becomes eliminating anti-game. What are some common anti-game behaviors you see? So this is a very good question because it highlights a key part of the beginners journey. Like Mr. J said, eliminating anti-game. So what is anti-game? Anti-game are all of your unattractive behaviors. So you can think of game as displaying attractive behaviors. Anti-game is unattractive behaviors. So you can use those terms interchangeably. Now what I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to give you a big list of all the things that could be considered anti-game. But these are literal tactical game activities, behaviors. So tactical versus strategic. Tactical is what you do given a set of resources. Whereas strategic is what you do given you can change your resources. So a good strategic game decision might be to Geomax, you know, go to or take more trips, you know, let's say you live in London. You can't quite move to Central Eastern Europe, but you can take trips there during the year. More of your time day gaming is in somewhere that's better for your archetype, your level of masculinity, the kind of girls you're into. So your results will improve. That's a positive game, a strategic game choice. But today really we're talking about tactical game, i.e. what you do in the moment. A quick disclaimer I want to give is that this is not an exhaustive list. There are probably a million ways you can f things up with a girl. And even if you're doing, you know, textbook game, well then you might be talking to a girl who needs untex book game. Just as an example, in a lot of game textbook, game literature, you know, what the coach or the person writing the textbook will try to get you to first is being more masculine and having higher dominance, more conviction. Now there are some girls out there who they themselves are a bit more dominant. And so going in with her, let's say 90 to 100% masculine is actually inferior to going in say 80% masculine to 20% feminine, sort of Yin Yang, you know, you can imagine that it's a balance between the two with a small amount of each other inside it. So for example, if you're in the West, then you perhaps, in fact, you probably don't want to go 400% masculine. But let's say you're in Serbia, Belgrade, you will want to go 100% masculine. So that's just an example of how there are a million ways that you can have things up with the girl. And actually, sometimes what's perfect game by the textbook is not the optimal thing to do. So let's now get into a list of the most common anti-game behaviors that day gamers will do. Now just to say this is for definitely for beginners and you would imagine that as a lawyer intermediate you have taken care of most of these traits as an intermediate. What will happen is you're sometimes full foul of these traits or for foul of these behaviors when you forget to do the wrong thing or you become lazy. But as an intermediate, a true intermediate, someone who's really proficient, shouldn't be doing these things very much at all. Okay, the first, the first part of this actually is a bit more meta level and that is not getting social and neglecting your vibe and not thinking about day game as a lifestyle/personality change. So the reason why I've included this as anti-game, I admit it's kind of at a meta level. Don't worry, from here we're gonna get a lot more specific and practical. But when you have some guys who think it's okay, it's day game time and I'm going to be put my day game hat on for the next two hours and then for the rest of the time I am just going back to my cho-di-quire self. So for that guy, he's making a sort of a mistake with his game because when he then goes to put his day game hat on, he's rusty and the hat isn't really suited for him if you wanted to continue that metaphor to continue that analogy. So the first point of anti-game is not trying to take those lessons from day game and apply them throughout your whole life. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to be approaching every day or you must do an approach every time you go to the supermarket but you can keep an eye out for opportunities to approach, I/OIs, the like and such, but also just opportunities to get social with people and work on becoming the social guy as in the guy who feels comfortable and people get a vibe of that vibe off of that he talks to people. Okay so like I said the first one was a bit more meta but now let's get into the very practical stuff. He has a poor stop. It's low conviction, it's not dominant. Commonly the guy will be quiet, will be quite quiet. He'll try to stop her from too far away so he'll come in say like not one arms length away but like two or more arms length away and he's too quiet and the girl never even hears him. You know so many girls these days have headphones in, they don't even know he exists and he thinks he's got blown out but literally the girl didn't even register him because she didn't, couldn't see or hear him. Adding to that he doesn't persist so commonly when you go to a stop a girl you might have to say excuse me excuse me excuse me hello stop excuse me just a second you might have to say stopping words, stopping phrases like five times before she before she stops. What I like to tell my students when my coaching is that don't let, don't reject yourself. Let her be the one to reject you. So stopping this was the first practical stage of anti-game and different things a guy can do as unattractive behaviors. Okay the next one is bad body language so hunching hiding your body with your hands being shifty standing too far away and then as well as your body language it's having poor eye contact not looking the girl in the eye and sort of looking away sort of fearfully to see if people are watching. That is a way that you have an anti-game behavior which is an unattractive trait. The flip side to that is that your body language should be positive strong imagine there are hooks pulling your shoulders back and your heads up head up head up and facing the girl head on showing her I have nothing to fear judge me because I have nothing to fear. Okay next anti-game category is opening poorly so opening with a quiet voice by the way you should be projecting your voice when you get the girls attention and at least during the opener you don't have to be shouting at her or anything but she she needs to get the verbal impression that you exist and have presence and a confidence saying what you have to say. Anyway opening quietly talking too fast of course that one will persist throughout the set as an anti-game behavior generally talking too fast belies someone's low self-esteem. Normally someone who has low self-esteem feels the need to talk quickly because they think if I don't speak quickly I need to say if I don't pack as much information into what I'm saying in a short period of time the person will leave so it's telling the other person I need to impress you I need to get lots of information in here for you to like me. This also kind of plays into how some guys I know in the past or I would say okay go straight into the stack but I think you need to leave a little bit of a pause between your opener exchanging names and greeting each other then going into your first topic because a) it shows low self-esteem by going excuse me I thought you looked very nice are you Spanish and it's jumping into the next thing it sounds kind of strange it shows low self-esteem like I was talking about before but also you actually want to add in a little bit of a filter with a pause okay getting back to opening not using a strong complement this is an interesting case of anti-game and it's anti-game in my opinion other guys will probably disagree with me but I think if you run up to a girl in the street and all you can say is oh I was walking with my friend back there and I thought you looked very nice I thought you looked nice would you really run after a girl in the street if you were that kind of natural guy who just did this naturally tell a girl she looks nice no no you'd need to be motivated by more than that so you would need to or you would want to say gorgeous beautiful really cute adorable lovely any of these very nice strong complements and actually what's even better than that is giving a compliment and then backing it up so excuse me can I just say you're very beautiful and very stylish I like that a lot and she can get bold over with that positive energy. Where is it you're going over and saying, "Oh, I think you look nice", then she could infer that you're trying to protect yourself by not giving a strong compliment. Okay. Moving on to the main part of the conversation. These are all very common beginner mistakes. Asking too many questions, so the conversation goes, "You ask a question, she answers. You ask a question, she answers. This is a, through boring manner of conversation. And, you know, as a beginner, everyone falls prey to it because that's what happens when you can't think of things to say. You just ask questions. Your ability to use statements and expound on what she said is impaired because your brain is so riddled with anxiety. You can't think straight." So, carrying on, jumping topic. So, this is why I say to guys, look, make a list. Those three topics we always talk about. Where you're from, what you're doing right now and what your job is or what you study. Come up with 10 different talking points for each of these conversation topics. And that way, some of them will pop into your brain. And during your set, you'll be able to expand each topic. So, just in general, conversational depth is better than conversational breadth. So, you're better going deep into, say, three topics than being spread out over seven to ten topics. In a weird extreme, you could see what it was like spending the entire set talking about one topic. So, you could do that as a little exercise. Just say today, I'm only going to talk about where she's from. And one thing I say to students is, when they're jumping topics is I say to them, when you get that urge to move topics, and we all get it, we're like, I can't think of anything else to say. Just ask one more question on the topic. Now, of course, early on I said, don't ask too many questions, but I'm trying to make it easy for you to learn how to extend the topics. So, when you feel that urge to move topic, then just make one more comment. Ask one more question. Okay. Being friendly rather than flirtatious. This, again, is a very common anti-game behaviour. It's not necessarily an unlikable behaviour, because being friendly with people is nice. You know, you get along with people, you're social, but it's not attractive in the sense of attractive as a mate. So, that's why it's an anti-game behaviour, being friendly rather than flirtatious. Being apologetic. You shouldn't really ever be saying the word sorry during your set. A lot of guys will ask a question, or they'll try a tease, but then they'll pull it back, and they'll, you know, retract their tease. So, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. You should always be standing by what you say. But if you feel that something hit incorrectly, then you can always just take a tangent. So, off the top of my head, let's say this, you say, I made a make this joke, and I say, "Oh, I hate Paris. Why? It's full of French people." And she's like, "Oh, well, actually my, you know, like my half sister is French, and I think they're lovely people." And then I might say, "No, but the reason why I hate them is they're always so well dressed, and they're like, effortlessly cool, and I hate that." So, you see, like, you're kind of going off an tangent to explain why you said something before. You shouldn't really ever be saying to a girl, "Sorry for something." Of course, look, if you do literally say something insulting, you should say, "Sorry, you should say, oh, sorry, I didn't think it would come across that way, but to be honest, by then that's probably dead." Another anti-game behavior, now I put this in my notes in quotes. I'm going to include these notes in the comments, you know, in the description underneath, because I think it would be useful for you guys, just my, to see my list here, that, put this in quotes, "failing shit tests." But you need to understand, my view on shit tests isn't the same as the accepted wisdom, a, a, a, a green amplify, you know, if she says, "I have a boyfriend," then you're like, "Oh, I have a goldfish." Something cheesy and awful like that. I don't recommend doing that. Failing shit tests would be things like, the kind of shit test that a health-fully minded girl gives out more passive. So, for example, at the end of the set, you say to her, "I'd love to take you for a drink sometime." And then at that point, you should just shut up. Look, in the eye, and then this is where she'll be looking in your eyes and making sure there's no chinks in your armor, that you really stand behind what you just said. So that is kind of like a shit test. She's not giving you shit, actually. It's more like a conviction test if you want to say that. But a failing a shit test, failing that test, whatever you want to call it, in that moment, would be then trying to pull it back. So, that would be not standing by what you say, which we've said before is anti-game. So then you're saying, like, "Oh, if you want to, only if you want to, you know, or maybe not a drink or coffee instead, you know, that's, that would be failing a test." Okay, this one again is a bit more of a meta-level anti-game behaviour is just thinking too much. So the, when you do game, you actually want to be kind of stupid. You want to get out there, be willing to make a fall out of yourself, do approaches and be willing to get blown out. Not following a girl for five minutes trying to think of the perfect opener, just get in there. So it's better to do some, as I've said, for so many years, you know, it's better to do something badly than not at all. Another flip side meta-level sort of anti-game behaviour is being a paper alpha and having weird autistic behaviours. So what someone might think is, all right, I'm just going to do the opposite all of these behaviours I've talked about so far, which would be probably good in most cases. But like, let's say you go too far, so you go, you turn into this weird tyrannical, intense, super eye contact like laser beams the whole time, paper alpha or sort of autistic kind of guy. Like that's anti-game as well and that's because you're taking on a behaviour which is just weird. You know, it's, it's, it will fail the smell test. Anyway, back to the practical ones. Closing weekly, you know, you say to her, oh, let's hang out rather than you say I want to take you off or drink sometime or let's meet for a coffee, I want to take you for a coffee sometime, something like this. Some guys are really bad at this, they really fumble the clothes. They could have done a great set, but then at the end they leave the girl with this feeling of, yeah, he's just a pussy. You know, you've got to own the clothes, you've got to own the clothes. Okay, onto texting. Texting too much, you know, sending too much in every message, you know, just as a general rule of texting less is more. Being needy and boring, you know, texting like it's um, your mum that you're texting. Or else, you know, getting into these weirdly long text exchanges where it's like you're sending essays backwards and forwards to each other. If I ever see that in texting, I think this is going nowhere. Unless of course you're already, you're already boyfriend girlfriend. It's a bit, I don't know why, but it just seems to never end in anything. If you're sending essays to each other, you know, more than four lines in one, one single message. I think what happens is the girl just feels that there's been too much investment before the date and now it's almost like this assumption that we're going to be boyfriend girlfriend. Like I guess that worked with some girl who has like super into you already, but it's disrespecting the seduction process. What I mean by that is girls know that there is a way to be seduced by a guy. And part of that is that the guy has to, for example, the guy has to ask her help. So, and the guy has to like propose. So the guy proposes something, not propose marriage, but puts an idea forward in the woman except it. Now something like four out of five times when a girl has said, "Do you want my number?" You know, really quick into the set. I think that's going to be a flake. And she's kind of even on the surface, you're getting a number, but it's a false positive because she's just giving it to get me to go away. So there should be a certain level of, even if it's minor, like a certain level of difficulty built into every lay, because the girl knows that that's part of a seduction and how it should be. Even if it's one of those things where everything is as smooth as the bonnet of a Porsche, up until the moment when she's back at your place and you know, like I was saying earlier about the eye contact when you go to take a number. Maybe you say to her, come over here in your bedroom. And she just looks you in the eye. And that's the moment where she's giving you that kind of token pause. Anyway, the point I was trying to say is the back to texting. When you're sending these big essays to each other, that's not what a good seduction is like and girls know that. And so generally I've found in myself, my wings, my students, if you're sending big paragraphs backwards and forwards to each other, it's not going to happen. She either sees you in the wrong way and/or she's not interested enough and therefore isn't playing by the rules of seduction. Texting too often, here's a big one, asking for too much signal. It's like, you know, trying to message her too much to just get the responses to confirm that she's coming on the day. You know, like it's okay to just cut the conversation off at some point. It's okay to just put a reaction on one of her messages and think to yourself, "That's it for today, in terms of texting." Going into dating, planning the date, you know, bad and unattractive behaviors, you know, setting them at bad times, like, you know, you should be getting girls out between, like, good date start times between 730 and 830. So anti-game might be like, "You try and set the date at 10pm, and that's unattractive because she thinks, 'Oh, he thinks I'm easy.' Or else you set the date at 4pm in the afternoon, and she thinks, 'Oh, you know, that's not a dislikeable characteristic, but dislikeable behavior,' but she's thinking, 'Oh, you know, it's not attractive in the sex sense, it's what attractive in the friendly sense.' Choosing bad venues, you know, just finding venues that don't fit you in her vibe, very, like, not seductive venues, you know, taking her somewhere she hates, you know, or like, for example, she's like a real pretty, kind of, prim and proper good girl, and you're taking her, so like, a sort of venue where she's going to be really out of place and uncomfortable there. And I know some guys actually like to do that on purpose, but you do want to, you know, like, okay, give you an example. For me, there is two pubs I might have done first dates in. One is more like a sort of dive bar. And one is more just like a nice pub, but it has good lighting. So I might take the slightly fancier girls to the nice pub with good, like, good sort of darkish lighting and the more our selected girls to the more dive bar pub. All right, when you're on the date itself, you know, you have bad body language, you're saying too far away, big one lack of escalation and bouncing, you know, staying in the same venue for three hours and then like, it's almost like, you know, when you're following a girl for the approach and the negative self talk sets in, the same thing with dates is, you want to be doing little things straight away. So just, you know, you know, you meet her, you give her a hug or a kiss on the cheek, a little arm hand on the arm, let her sit down, incidental touch and get, do very, very small amounts of kino straight away because at least it will get you started on that escalation ladder. Whereas if you're sitting there and you're an hour in, you know, it's like the longer you wait to start doing little touches, the harder it will be to start doing them. Just in general, dating, this will be throughout the set, it's not taking risks, you know, some girls, you'll actually get a great reaction from them and they look at you, you're wearing your daygam outfit, your leather jacket and everything, you've got your chains and your necklace and your rings and then she's like, oh, this guy's just putting on an act. Like, he's not actually that kind of risk taker. Moving on, you on the date, you know, you won't try to pull home. After the lay, if you do actually get a girl to, to their, you know, you might slide back into neediness, you know, if the lay ever happens, so that's more anti-game, you know, you just fall foul over to the texting and the dating mistakes I've already listed here. Another meta-level anti-game behaviour is poor calibration. So for example, you don't change tact for the girl. Like I was saying earlier, you might take a case lecture to one venue and an ass lecture to a different venue. So you're moving or perhaps you're moving too fast or too slow with certain girls, you know, you're not escalating at the correct level for that girl. You don't change your levels of dominance, mentioned that at the start, but you know, some girls need to have more soft dominance, some girls need more hard dominance. So you're not finding the right balance of warmth and power for that particular girl. Now I admit, this is more of like an intermediate anti-game behaviour. So yeah, anti-game can persist in the intermediate stage, but you know, that's not really something that a beginner should be thinking about. Okay, let's move on. Let me see how long I've been going so far. This has been quite a long podcast. I think this one is going to go up on Spotify because it's been a long one. So I, if you're listening on Spotify, then this originally came out on my Patreon. If you want to listen to more podcasts like this, as well as infields, analysis of those infields, we have testing advice, dating advice, pretty much everything. Go to that Patreon and sign up if you would like coaching with me or to find out about the books that I sell, go to tomascrownpway.com. Lastly, you can follow me on X at Crown Day Game. Okay, on with the show. So far, I've listed a bunch of anti-game behaviours, but let's think now, how could we summarize these into characteristics, personality traits? And here's a list of, I think, nine of them. Anti-game characteristics, neediness, submissive, pussy-begging. By the way, that's an awful one. Guys get to the end of the set and it's like, they even do it well. They go, "I'd love to take you for a drink sometime." And she's like, "Nnnn." And he's like, "Okay, how about you just give me a number?" And he's like, "Oh, you know, but I just send you one message. You can block me straight away." Like, "That's pussy-begging, my friend. Should never be pussy-begging. It's okay to just let a girl go." In fact, if you do get to that stage, whether she's on me and are, say to her, "It's okay if you say no." Because then the ones who want to say no will, and that's liver of girls who just had to feel empowered in that moment to be able to say no, and they're okay after hearing it, will say yes, then they can say yes, otherwise you can get the number. Anyway, being too, and it's more characteristic, it's like being too quiet, but also by that I mean in your shell. Lacking conviction. Avoid risk-taking. Inability to be in the moment, slash overthinking. Can't relax. And the big one, low self-esteem. So if I was to sum up all of these behaviors, and all of these characteristics in one phrase, it would be scarcity mindset. All your issues in life stem from the scarcity mindset that you had, and usually you develop these as you're growing up. So that could be with women. That could be for money. It could be approval. Perhaps from your friends, your family. It could be affection. It could be food. Anything really. The thing that you found was kind of deprived of, maybe on purpose or not, we don't know, when you're growing up, that is what you crave as an adult and develop compulsions and pathologies around. And this scarcity mindset. Now remember, it's a faulty defense mechanism. So for example, if you were growing up and you felt that food was denied to you, so you wanted to eat more, but it wasn't given to you, then when you grow up, sorry, as a kid, you'll develop this sort of defense mechanism to eat as much as you can when you get the opportunity. Now as you're an adult, no one's holding food back from you and hopefully you get paid enough to buy as much food as you like. But you still have this weird compulsion to go and eat more food than you should have. Okay. So your scarcity is going to stop you from trying to sort of beat that scarcity because of your fear of failure and the faulty belief that you had limited chances. So with the food example, the limited chances would be to eat, but with girls, it would be, you would think to yourself, it might actually stop you from approaching because you think to yourself, I've only got, you know, 50 rejections in me in my lifetime and I can't risk one of those rejections happening when I go and talk to this girl. However, it's faulty thinking because we live in a modern day in urban environments where you can go out and approach 10 girls a day, add infinitum, infinitum, infinitum, whatever, forever. Alright, so how do we get past a scarcity mindset? This is really tough. The truth is that you kind of have to fake it until you make it when you begin. You know, go through that list of anti-game behaviours and even though you might or characteristics and even though you have those characteristics, perhaps just for that one afternoon, you promised yourself, no, today I am confident, I am going straight into my sets, I have a lot of conviction, I'm going to speak louder and I'm going to risk looking like a fool. So just for those two hours, I'm going to pretend to be the guy I want to be. Hopefully with this, now of course these aren't your true characteristics. What will happen is, most girls won't be, I mean, I'm quite fooled, like you can choose to think of it this one or two ways. You can think that you're faking it or you can think that you're temporarily taking on those traits. Obviously, one has nicer connotations than the other. But either way, let's say most of those girls either don't buy your faking or they don't buy your temperate, they think to themselves, "This is just temporary, he's not like this all the time." But some of them will buy it. Okay, that's good. Then you can develop positive reference experiences from those and then you can start to flip those anti-game characteristics. Now by developing positive reference experiences, you can then build true abundance over time. So for example, when I first started game, when I was a teenager, the first sort of girls that I'd started messaging or dating, what would happen is we'd get to the day of the date and then she would flake. Or we would go on a date and we might even kiss, but then she would then sort of like flake or something like that after the first date. And that developed this idea in my mind that something bad was going to happen eventually. However, I've done day game, you know, I've been with enough women that it's flipped my mindset now. Now I feel like I'm in abundance with women, so I expect good things to happen. It's actually more of a shock when they flake on me. Obviously that's taking into consideration. You can kind of tell if a girl is going to flake on you or not, but I don't look at the girls who are like strong babies and yeses and think to myself, something's going to go wrong with them anymore. If anything, I think something will go well with them. Okay, so, build your abundance over time. Now, it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of success to resolve these scarcity issues. In fact, most people only ever get to the stage of mechanically overriding their scarcity. So, going back to the food example, the mechanical way to override a food scarcity would be having a strict diet, calorie counting and eating roughly the same food every day, or maybe the same food every week. What would be way better is if you could reach in quotes and abundance mentality with food in the long one would be, you'll just one of those people who eats and when they're full, they stop eating. And they eat when they're hungry. That would be a perfect place to be. In terms of dayging or with women, a mechanical solution might be, like I said earlier, you just go through all of those traits and you flip them temporarily, two hours for your session, you go through all those behaviors and you make sure you just don't do them. But the mechanical resolution would be that you always feel that way, that you're putting on an act. In the long run, you want to feel like you actually have those character traits. And that takes, like I said, a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of success. One thing you really want to do in the face of your scarcity is to take risks. So you have to acknowledge that you have this scarcity to begin with. Now I'm guessing that anyone who is into day game, well, 99% of people who get into day game have a scarcity down to women and the remaining 1% have high sexual self-esteem but low self-esteem. So high sexual self-esteem, they can get a lot of girls but low real self-esteem. I, they're actually trying to pick up girls to impress other men or to, in some way, impress mom and dad because that's their way their brain works. Anyway, you have to acknowledge your scarcity. And then you have to take risks. Like I said, it's better to do something badly than not at all. So you need to think to yourself, I'm going to be willing to look the full while I fight this scarcity and identifying it is really important. As well, recognizing that it's a 40 defense mechanism from your childhood that is persisted into adulthood which isn't appropriate anymore. The last thing you've got to do is really cherish your successes way more than you think you should. So keep a positive reference experience journal write down the good things that happened to you and perhaps even just only write down the good things. You know, at the end of your session, write down two or three good things that happened to you during that session. And then once you have dates, do the same thing, just forget about the negatives. Over time, add on to those successes and those positives. And then hopefully in the very long run, you'll be able to resolve your scarcity mindset. Okay, I really hope you enjoyed that podcast. I actually enjoyed making it a lot. Like I said, I'm going to pop this one up on Spotify. And if you have any questions at all, please leave them in the comments below.