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For over a decade, David Tian, Ph.D. — a uniquely qualified therapist, life coach, and former university professor — has coached tens of thousands of people from over 87 countries to achieve happiness and success in their relationships, dating, psychology, and lifestyle.

Dr. Tian has been featured in international media, as well as co-hosting a radio show on national radio and a weekly dating advice column in a national newspaper in Singapore.

The show, “Man Up: Masculinity for the Intelligent Man” (https://www.davidtianphd.com/blog/), is David’s way of helping as many people as possible enjoy empowering and fulfilling lives, while contributing to the global understanding of masculinity in modern times. In the show, he takes your questions posed in the Man Up private Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/manupcommunity/) and answers based on his experience coaching tens of thousands of students around the world for over a decade.

Connect with David Tian here:

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“The Man Up Show” Ep.72 – How To Handle Your Social Life

How To Handle Your Social Life

  • David Tian Ph.D. explains how to find time when you say you don’t have the time.

  • Your life is a direct reflection of your peer group, David Tian Ph.D. lays down why you should choose the people you hang out with.

  • In this Man Up episode, David Tian Ph.D. gives advice on how you can naturally change yourself for the better.

David Tian: Boom! Stop. In episode 72, I answer the question of, how serious do you need to be to get your social life handled?

[Intro Music]

Masculinity for the Intelligent Man. I am David Tian, Ph.D., and this is: Man Up!

[Music Fades]

Hi, I’m David Tian, Ph.D and welcome to episode 72 of Man Up. Alright, I’m in Singapore in a classroom as you can probably tell. I got a question here, live from two gentlemen in this room named Leonidas and DiCaprio, how about that. Leonidas and DiCaprio’s question pertains to… actually it’s a question is a response to a question I asked. It’s about how serious do you have to be in order to become naturally attractive to women.

The think the results of our training programs at Aura Transformation whether they’re online or live in person is the ability to be just yourself and be sexually attractive to the women that you want in your life. This does not mean you attract all women anywhere, anytime, get any girl anytime. That’s the promise of PUA bullshit. And they don’t mean that. They mean that a certain type of club girl in a certain type of city. Or certain types of cities and certain venues in those types of cities, etc. Mostly club girls or girls who would happen to be responding to that type of guy.

No! What we’re more about is giving you what will make you happy and fulfilled and getting the wrong type of women into your life. While that may stroke your ego or get you some validation is definitely not going to make you happy and fulfilled. That’s a promise though. The result of our programs is you can just be yourself and live your life full of passion and purpose the way you want to live it. Waking up every day excited to live this life and have women naturally attracted to you. What does it take to get there?

That’s the question partly from what these guys are asking. They’re saying on a scale from one to ten, my level of seriousness about getting women, this area of women and relationships handled is six and a half, seven, seven and a half around there. The question then, back to them is, what would it take to be a nine or a ten, serious in this area of your life in order to get it handled?

The general response that I hear quite a bit is, “I don’t have the time to devote to it”. Okay, great, so what are you devoting your time to, instead. Well, let’s just list out what we do with your time. And then I find they suck at using their fucking time. Here are some of the time syncs they put into, this motherfucking thing. On a Saturday fucking afternoon or night, “surfing the internet” doing useless shit. Here’s another thing that they do,  they meet their buddies! Guess why you suck with women? Because of your buddies.

Yes, you’re going to have to find some new buddies for a little while. This is also true in the rule of five, also learning about the importance of your peer group. Your reflection, your life is a direct reflection of your peer group especially at the expectations of your peer group. Can you change your life? I don’t care if you’re nine or ten serious in getting better with women if you spend tons of time with the same people – mostly guys – that have led you to this point in your life. I’m sorry, those are the facts. And that’s why most guys will never change. That’s why if you ask the average intelligent human being in this world, is it possible for somebody to learn how to be better with women, the answer will be NO it’s not fucking possible.

And here’s why, because it’s not fucking possible if you still spend all that time with the same friends that you were spending time with before. You’re the result of your peer group. I mean, that’s just a wake-up call to some guys, right?

Let’s talk about me. Like I can directly tell you from personal experience about my life about what I had to do to get to this point. Basically as a good Christian boy, I understood the importance of personality change. After all, in Christianity, it’s about cultivating a certain type of character. A type of Godliness that’s supposed to make you naturally dwelling in heaven with God.

Sometimes if you discover it late, that work will have to happen after your life. The idea was supposed to be that you shape your character so that you naturally become holy and you naturally belong in heaven like you naturally should be there through the grace of God. This is why you pray every day. You don’t pray every day so you can get stuff from God like the health and wealth believers do. Like give me money God or I won’t love You. No, it’s just like you pray to God because he changes you as a result of it. You read the bible every day. You know, for half an hour or whatever it is a day in order to shape who you are, your character. I knew that from a young age.

The same principles apply in Confucianism and Daoism. In Buddhism and all the great wisdoms and traditions. It’s shaping who you are. Same as Aristotle. And when it comes to this, I knew the reason why those women were not attracted to me when I was starting out was because of the way I was. Because I was boring, I was illogical, I didn’t know how to relate to people, I didn’t know how to continue conversations, I wasn’t sexy, I was scared, I didn’t know how to deal with other men, I didn’t know how to assert myself, I didn’t know how to dress sexy, I was scared of taking risks, I was too scared to even spend the night over at my buddy’s house because I didn’t have contact lenses case and he was like just laughing at me.

I didn’t have a toothbrush, I’m like, “Dude, do you have a toothbrush?” Just come over man what’s the big deal. There was so many things. I wasn’t a leader, I wasn’t assertive, I wasn’t adventurous, I wasn’t easy going, I wasn’t comfortable with sexuality. I didn’t develop all of those things. Luckily I moved every semester to a different country which meant that I didn’t have a consistent peer group throughout that period except for the guys, my mentors on email and on the internet. These guys who I’d met in person for a week, or maybe a semester, and then we kept in touch on the internet. And they were my mentors.

Every time I went to a new place, I created a new peer group which was great! Because that meant that peer group tracked my progress through this area. Every semester my peer group improved in terms of its social skills, its social intelligence, its coolness. Then nowadays, in the past few years, it’s been improving especially in moral virtue, in character, in loyalty, in integrity, in things that I came back to. To some moral virtues that I was coming back to.

But before I was just looking for being social, being good with women, and just being cool with women. So that improved in every step. And sometimes I went back to the same country like China and I picked up where I left off, even though I was away for a semester, because that group was just awesome and that group continued to grow. Part of the problem is, one, do the way you’re spending your time.

Take an inventory of your time. You have as much time as Elon Musk. Elon Musk owns fucking SpaceX. He’s running Tesla and that other solar thing. And he’s doing it like middle of the week he flies from San Francisco down to southern California to work on SpaceX and flies back up to work on Tesla. That’s his commute. You have as much time as Elon Musk. That’s a great way to shatter your fucking time, limiting beliefs. Bullshit!

Now here’s what I gave up. Yes, you do have to give up some shit! Here’s what you’ve got to give up! All those stuff that’s not serving you. All those stuff that’s not helping you. That’s what I want to say, helping. All the stuff that’s not serving you. Here are some things that I gave up. I gave up spending major time with minor people. That meant sometimes these guys I had to not hang out with them as much because they were bringing me down.

Because they said, “No David, you can’t do this”. They were filling my mind with insecurities of their limiting beliefs. I want to go and hang out at some bars and just learn what’s that like because there were a lot off attractive women there that I would like to try to get to know. I didn’t want to go in there with stereotype and preconceptions because I didn’t know these firsthand. I wanted to see firsthand if they were true and it turned out in many cases they weren’t true. These are interesting people. But I didn’t know that back then because I had my own judgements. So I wanted to go see as a good intellectual researcher whether that’s the case.

So my friends, do they want to go? No! They wanted to sit around and have beers. Beer! Beer! Beer! And numbing my sense with beer. “Hey, there’s an attractive girl. Oh yeah, okay.” Two hours later like, you going to talk to her? That’s the norm. That’s why those guys weren’t improving. If I continue to hang out with them, I would not improve. That’s why most adults cannot change.

After the age of twenty-one, the general science is, the general wisdom is you can’t change who you are. You’re always going to be that way. You can’t change who you are. I however, have made a career for over the past ten years. My career has been in the business of changing people’s personalities. I went from on a Myers-Briggs scale from INTJ to an ENFP. I changed that. That is why… that is how you get naturally attractive.

You actually change who you are naturally. You prioritize fitness for one. Some people are going around with the basic equivalent of obese people. They’re like, “oh, I don’t have time to work out. I don’t have time to eat healthy blah, blah, blah, blah!”. You have to make it a priority.

Okay so that’s one thing. Take an inventory of your time. You have as much time as Elon Musk, what the fuck you’re doing with your time. Secondly, there could be that they don’t understand how important this area of their life is. If you suck with women, I guarantee you suck with people who are not your friends already. You know the thing is, it’s hard to tell Singaporeans as to why because most of them were born and raised in the same place.

They’re thirty-year olds born and raised in the same place. This is pretty rare from where I come from. Most of my friends are in completely different continents from where they were born and raised, like I am. I’m living in Asia, I was born in Taiwan but I was raised in North America… raised in Canada mostly as a kid in the US. Lived for many years in China, now I’m in Southeast Asia, spending a lot of time in Thailand where I don’t speak the language very well, still got to work on that. Again, that’s totally my excuse man.

I’ve been saying this. I think I said this in the last video when I was in Bangkok that I need to spend more time learning the language. I admit, if I prioritized it, that would get done.

But what I’m saying is that women and relationships, if you are not good at flirting and making people laugh and being able to assert yourself comfortably, you’re not going to be very good with negotiation. You’re not going to be very good with persuasion. You’re not going to be very good at the board room.

I tell you, there are so many things you’re not going to be good at. Social intelligence makes it very easy… if you’re high in social intelligence, it makes it very easy to translate all these skills across the board. Ask any of our alumni or students in our training programs how much the training with Aura Transformation actually helps them in other areas of their lives. In fact, most of our testimonials, most of the reports on our forums, in our Facebook groups are about how much it helps in all these other areas of their lives, professionally, personally in addition to just with relationships with women.

And then most importantly, it’s a new realization to a lot of guys is how much it helps in their relationships, two, three, four years into the relationship. How much they’re using this. How much they’re using our lessons. Because it’s not about the first four hours when you first meet a girl. That’s easy. We can get that done for you, we can get that done for you very easily. The hard part comes in maintaining, keeping the passion going. Not just keeping it but growing it over time.

How serious was I for my work? I was so serious about this that I used my brain as an intellectual challenge to figure out how I could do more on ten hours a week than all my colleagues do on fifty hours a week. And I did it. And you can too.

You can do it! Just use your brain.

Unless you’re in one of those jobs that makes you clock in, you’re not on one. If you need to clock in, you should go read Tim Ferris’ book on how to suggest to your boss how to have a location independent arrangement. “4-Hour Workweek”. I mean that’s an old book now. Get with the program! Another one is you can have on the side an online business. It’s like one of my favorite inspirational… inspirations… likes to say, Gary Vaynerchuk, if you really want to do this. You really want to do your passion and you have a day job, you still have 7pm to 3am.

How much do you want this?! I work 10 hours a week… 5 hours a week on my Ph.D. thesis and still got the plum job of the year when I went out in NUS which paid twenty percent more than any US university plus on top of that an expat package… thank you for NUS. They’re awesome for that package. What I do instead getting all that work done, I took at a four-month semester, I did that last month, I just stopped everything in my life and just fucking did my work to catch up.

The other three months, I went out every fucking night, I went out to meet new women on a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Then I had dates multiple times in the day when it started like I had at seven o’ clock, then nine o’ clock and eleven o’ clock lined up. You know, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, right. And then I try to get all these groups out on the Friday and Saturday, it would be a big group outing and have all my female friends out with my guy friends and at yes at the beginning… and what did all that experience do?

It took me from a scared introvert who couldn’t begin conversations with strangers, whose heart raised to stop a stranger in the middle of a shopping mall to ask directions, because even then, I still didn’t want to do that. I want to go to the directory, I could do this myself. I didn’t want to ask nobody. I was like, “Shit, I got to go ask people directions!” That’s how scared I was, to go from that to someone who you can pop me to any city, give me one night in a club, and I can go and meet three new groups of friends. And for the next night, they all invite me out or whatever they’re doing. It’s easy for me now.

That’s how I did it. I dedicated the time for it for a short amount of time. Now here’s the thing, what does it take to get a six pack to get muscle on your body, guys? What does it take? For a short period of time, you have to shock your body, so that it goes, what the fuck and it starts to build muscle. What does that mean? You actually have to put in that time to shock your body. You can’t say, “Oh, I need to from the very beginning, do a sustainable program.” You don’t fucking do a sustainable program. You do a program that shocks your body. It’s a boot camp.

You got to do it intensive style. You got to go in full in on it for a dedicated period of time whether it’s the three-month program like a P90x kind of thing or whatever. A boot camp. You go in and you put in that dedicated amount of time. That’s what I did for everything in my life. And when I come out of that, then I can take a month off and rest. Hit it hard again or at that point maybe I’ll only go three times a week instead of six.

Right, because I’ve decided whatever my priorities are. But the only way you’ll master anything, and here’s how learning happens, nobody learns shit at the beginning OR because you don’t know anything at the beginning you see experiences first curve. First learning curve goes “whooo! I learned a lot!” then it tapers off – plateau. Boom! Most people quit. Dabblers quit.

If you want any results in your life, if you want to change your life at all, this is why most people don’t change their lives, because most people don’t know how learning happens and they’re lazy as fuck… well, I don’t think they’re lazy, they’re mismotivated… they don’t understand the path. I’m telling you the path, so you can be motivated, is they get that first result and then they have to work and then so they give up.

So instead, you are going to go get that first result and then you’re going to taper off and have a plateau and then you’re going to dip a bit. But you’re going to power through that, and if you have a coach or if you have a program, you know how to power through. Because the program, if it’s a good one, like a P90x, it’ll have a rest week. You know so you have 3 weeks of working real hard then you have a rest week. That’s P90x and then you come back again with a brand new work out and then you come back up.

Many people think progress looks like this, and when it dips or plateaus, they give up. That’s not how it works. It’s like this. But each time, eventually, you get to the end of that process your dips are higher. Your lowest dips are higher than your highest highs when you started. That’s progress. And that’s the training effect. That’s how life works. That first dip to get through that, you got to go into that.

You got to invest in it for a period of time and that’s how learning happens. To be honest, if I would be honest to myself, for me to master Thai, I may have to take out – like a month at least – just do it every day. Then go to an environment where I can’t speak English. Right now I live in hotels, so my attempt to speak Thai are civilly and then they switch into English because they really want to get it done.

My Thai teacher…I actually knew this. I actually had, I lined up like two hours a day, an hour and a half a day while I was there for three weeks getting my passport renewed. The teacher was like, “How come you’re not improving? When do you use it?” I’m like,“Uhhh…” And she’s like, “Do you only speak Thai when you’re with me?” And I’m like, “Uh, yeah…” Because my life there was like basically go to the gym in the hotel and I’ll have Skype clients and meet my friends who all speak English. So obviously I wasn’t going to improve because I didn’t have the intensive experience. I need to go to a Thai only experience for a short period… like a relatively short period of time to blast through that initial dip.

That’s how serious you got to be, for a period of time. You do have to prioritize it for a period of time. That’s the only way that change will happen. It’s like when guys want to really get lean or build muscle or change their bodies in a dramatic way, they have to prioritize that.

At the beginning it will feel like your whole life is about this. Like tracking your macros and hitting the gym. It’s like after a while it will become second nature, it will become a habit, it will become a routine, you start to miss it and you can scale back a bit because you’ve already gone through that initial period where the steep learning curve happens and then you stuck through it and continue to grow.

But you can maintain it now because you know that you’ve blasted through that initial period and that’s the most important thing. It’s like lift off velocity. Like an airplane, it can go, go and go but if it doesn’t hit that speed enough to lift off, it won’t go anywhere. Like if it’s just staying at 70mph or whatever it is and it hits 80mph in order to lift off, and you never hit 80mph. You just keep starting the plane and going 50mph and stopping, and then trying again then hit 40mph, and 50 and then you just give up completely. This airplane is not going to get up in the air. Well, that’s because you didn’t hit the lift off velocity, that critical number.

Anyway, so there you go, how serious you need to be, for a period of time, you’ve got to make it a serious priority. You also have to cut out all the things that don’t help you.

Alright, so there you go. Join the private Facebook group. Click the link below, join the group. We approve requests regularly. That’s also where you can ask your questions. Until next time, man up!