Make Every Man Want You: How to Be So Irresistible You'll Barely Keep From Dating Yourself! (4 page)

Important caveat: you can't practice making is-ness your business as a manipulation to make a situation
improve or get better. You've got to genuinely give it a go. Only then will the magic happen. Understanding this universal truth is essential to the Make Every Man Want You approach because this is your access point to full personal blossoming.

1. Have you noticed that when you resist your is-ness, the result is always frustration? Can you see that arguing with what is only produces pain and misery, especially in you?
   
2. How would your life shift if you made is-ness your business all the time? Do you think you'd be more or less loving? More or less effective? More or less irresistible?
   
3. What is your relationship like right now? Not what it should be if the two of you could stop arguing or could be if he had more money but what it actually is at this moment. Can you stop holding back and start loving? What kind of impact would compassion have on your relationship?
   
4. Are you willing to give up frustration and anger in lieu of a new possibility? How good will you allow your life to be?
   

As a kid, I loved music. One song that brings back fond memories was by an artist named Falco. He had a very catchy tune that I used to sing and dance to. At nine years old, I especially liked the fact that he had a thick foreign accent and sang about hot potatoes (an odd choice I thought, but hey—it was the '80s, and he was Austrian). It went something like this:

Irresistible Action Challenge

For the next twenty-four hours, make is-ness your total business. No matter what happens—your printer breaks, your date cancels, or the plane is delayed for two hours—pretend that you wanted it to happen. You can even say, "And this is what I want!" after any circumstance that your mind wants to resist. For example:

You're on hold for forty-five minutes with your cell phone provider. Say to yourself, "Huh . . . I've been on hold for forty-five minutes . . . and this is what I want!" Then, when you lose your signal and get disconnected just as you're about to speak with a customer service rep, say, "Huh . . . just got disconnected . . . and this is what I want." While it may feel slightly kooky, this exercise not only will give you a laugh but will also help you become aware of all the ways you resist your is-ness and unwittingly create misery, frustration, and upset in your life.

"Hot potatoes, hot potatoes, hot po-ta-toes, hot potatoes, hot potatoes—oh oh oh, hot potatoes . . ." The song had a really funky electronic sound, and in the summer of 1985, when I was nine years old, I thought it was cool. Fast-forward nine years. I was watching a "Top Hits of the '80s" music video special on MTV when they announced Falco was up next. "Cool," I thought. "I'll finally get to see why this guy sings about hot potatoes."

Well, to my surprise and embarrassment, the song had nothing at all to do with hot potatoes. The song was called "Rock Me Amadeus." At nine years old, I had never heard of Amadeus—it wasn't in my vocabulary yet. My young mind filled in with something that sounded familiar (hot potatoes), and until I learned otherwise, I believed Falco's hit was about steaming spuds.

The point of this story is to illustrate that everything we know is simply a collection of thoughts and information we have absorbed over our lifetime. Most of us never investigate whether those thoughts and that information are actually accurate. When it comes to men and relationships, most of us have absorbed ideas that not only are inaccurate but also undermine our ability to enjoy a healthy and satisfying love life.

Let's face it: your parents probably didn't take a How to Have Wonderful Relationships course in school. How about your grandparents? Did they have Loving and Lasting Relationships
101? Doubt it. They learned from their parents, who learned from their parents, and so on and so forth, all the way back in time.

While it's not your fault, or anyone else's, that you've been operating on some erroneous information about relationships that's been passed down since the beginning of time, it's now your responsibility to step up and use what works. As Maya Angelou says, "Now you know better, so you do better."

The first step in kicking a drinking problem is to admit you have one. Well, most women, myself included, have some form of a "thinking" problem—especially when it comes to men and relationships. We think excessively, and much of our thinking is repetitive, illusory, and downright toxic. So the first step in kicking our thinking problem is to admit that we have one.

It has been said that humans have approximately fifty to sixty thousand thoughts per day and 95 percent of those thoughts are the same ones we had yesterday. This means that unconsciously, we're all feeding ourselves the same inaccurate information over and over again. No wonder nothing ever seems to change.

The way out is through awareness. Be willing to investigate how your mind and belief system are currently configured
around men and relationships. Take a look at what you believe and why you believe it in the first place. Ask yourself, "Who put that thought there? Who said so? Is it serving me?" Regarding the last question, my guess is that, for the most part, it's not.

Now let's investigate what you know about relationships. As we discovered earlier with my "hot potatoes" lyrics, much of what we believe to be true is simply an old collection of thoughts put together by a younger, less experienced version of ourselves.

When it comes to men and relationships, our ideas are often put in place during an upsetting situation, such as a breakup. Ideas like:

I can't trust men.

I'm not pretty/skinny/talented/funny enough.

All men cheat.

Relationships are hard work.

I'll never find someone.

It's during times of disappointment that we make decisions in our minds that limit what is possible for us in the future. The problem is that we often forget those decisions were made, yet as we move forward in time, those old decisions hold us back from feeling fully alive and capable of truly connecting in our relationships.

Much like an old computer, our minds have outdated software. Investigating our thinking problem is akin to getting
a much-needed software upgrade. As we look, we'll see that the information our minds contain—especially about men and relationships—is not only outdated but also completely contradictory to what we say we want now. See for yourself. Quickly complete the following sentences:

Love is __________________________________.

Good men are _____________________________.

I'll bet you had some automatic responses, like "blind" and "hard to find." Even if we don't believe those statements to be true, our minds, like the autofill function on computers, automatically fill in the blanks based on information we've put there or heard before. If you want to make every man want you, you've got to bring awareness to your thinking problem and get clean. Remaining unaware that you are holding on to old ideas only keeps you stuck in the past and out of the present, where more fulfilling and expansive relationship possibilities exist.

Personal responsibility means being accountable for the results that do or do not show up in your life. More specifically, responsibility means you have the ability to respond to your life instead of automatically react to it. Many of us behave like robots, mechanically acting out habitual thought patterns of self-pity, overwhelming resentment, and wishful thinking. Rather than discovering who we are now or who we are with now, we re-act, or act again, based on how we reacted to similar events in our past.

Irresistible Action Challenge

What are some ideas about love, men, and relationships you hold as "the truth"? What types of things were you told by family and friends? What old decisions about men or relationships have you made during an upsetting experience? Take a few minutes and write down what you believe to be "the truth."

Now look at your first "truth" and answer the following questions. Then go back and review the questions for each old "truth" you wrote down. How old were you when you first had that idea? Is it serving you now? How willing are you to kick your thinking problem and reclaim your irresistibility?

Women often unleash old anger and resentment from the past on people they are currently dating. This commonly includes grievances held against former boyfriends, husbands, and bosses and, particularly, gripes with Dad.

This automatic behavior kills our irresistibility. It is also why many women keep having the same relationships over and over again with different men. They keep re-acting out of old, robotic habits and repeatedly produce similar, undesirable results with every man they meet. Rather than taking responsibility and investigating how they operate to see what they are doing (or not doing), they find it easier to place the blame on the "bad man" or on "bad luck."