It was 1968. Jane Elliot, a third-grade teacher, asked her students if they’d like to participate in an experiment.

The experiment, she told them, would allow them to understand how it felt to experience racism.

The students agreed.

She then separated the students from one another by an arbitrary but unchangeable attribute—their eye color–and assigned that attribute a social value.

On that day, a Friday, she decided to make the brown-eyed children superior first, giving them extra privileges like second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym and five minutes extra at recess. She would not allow blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain. She would offer them praise for being hard-working and intelligent. Read the rest of this entry »

Eye Contact.  It is a topic for which there is a staggering amount of confusing advice.  And for good reason.

Someone can teach you how to physically walk up to a woman, what to verbally say in a conversation and even, to a certain extent, how to touch her.

But it is very difficult to teach guys how to do things with their eyes.  I’m good friends with one of the best guys in the world when it comes to women, Cory Skyy.  He does most of his pickup with eye contact alone.

But very little of what he teaches is the actual mechanics of eye contact.  It’s too complicated and relies so heavily on inner game, which he does teach.

Eye contact is closely related to approach anxiety in that for shy guys, it comes down to one thing: conflict avoidance.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The nature of improv comedy,” Kelvin tells me, “is that you react to what’s happening.”

“A lot of times when people see a comedy improv group do something, they say, ‘Wow! You guys must think really fast!’ ”

“And the truth is, no, we’re not thinking at all. We’re just reacting.”

Kelvin was one of the most introverted guys out there before he got into improv comedy. He had so much social anxiety he couldn’t walk into a McDonalds and order a Cheeseburger.

Learning improv comedy helped him to become more spontaneous, to think less and to act more.

We all want to be spontaneous. We want to be fun, creative and witty as well. But social anxiety will kill that spontaneity. Read the rest of this entry »