Sometimes you meet a woman who seems to have a very exciting life.
Perhaps she’s young and likes to party.
Or she rubs elbows with famous people.
Or she’s very successful at what she does.
And in a lot of ways it seems impossible to compete.
A few weeks ago I met a girl at a coffee shop. We ended up back at my place that day.
We got really intimate and had a great time.
The next day she left for a week to go to LA for a video premier.
She was a model and was in a video for some famous rock band.
The day after the video premier she calls me up and tells me about it.
She tells me how glitzy this party was with paparazzi and cameras and the red carpet and afterparties and famous people hitting on her and her ex-boyfriend there and how she almost fell in her high heels and how hot she looked in her dress and how she shouldn’t have gotten so drunk and what a crazy time she was having.
And then she asks me how my weekend was.
What did I do over the weekend? I went to visit my sister in Washington DC. She is married and had a baby a few months ago.
What did we do? Well hardly anything.
What do you do with a baby? We went for a walk through the suburbs.
So, here she was with her super crazy weekend.
And there I was with the least crazy weekend you can possibly imagine.
For a moment I was thinking in my head “How can I possibly compete with what she did?”
Instead, I reframed it. I talked about how amazing my weekend was.
“My weekend was amazing. My nephew is so cute! Oh my god, it was so nice to get away from the city! It was so relaxing!”
“We went for a walk through the woods and we really got to connect with each other. I really don’t get to see her enough. I am so glad I went.”
The reframe. If you look at it through her lense, like she’s the coolest thing out there and it’s impossible to compete, you will lose.
Stop trying to compete.
Instead, turn it around, she will see things from your point of view.
Be confident in your lifestyle and how you’ve chosen to live it.
Would I have liked to have gone to a video premier in LA? Hell yeah! Sounds like fun. But I can also express to her how much I appreciate the life I’ve chosen to live.
In this way, I pull her into my world instead of me drowning in hers.
This doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate her world. I certainly do. I must be able to appreciate her or there’s no sense in knowing her.
And I’m not trying to one-up her and always follow-up her stories with my own stories. I really listen to her.
But I am constantly showing her how great my world is.
And in that way I challenge her.
In that way, she starts to question whether she has enough going for her to be around me instead of the other way round.
This is my world, baby. See if you can keep up in it.
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posted in Rapport Skills
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