Be Your Psycho-Cybernetic Self

Coach yourself to dating success

Last year, a guy commissioned me to write his Hinge profile. I interviewed him for an hour and distilled everything that sets him apart into three short paragraphs. I tried to paint a compelling portrait that would catch the attention of the right girl for him, if she happened to be Hinge and not illiterate. It didn’t hurt that he’s a handsome dude with a lucrative career.

Three weeks later, he emailed me back:

Still barely any matches / dates. To be clear, I'm not upset at you for this outcome, or really particularly surprised. The text can't overwhelm me being an ugly weirdo loser with a low status job.

I agreed that his problem certainly wasn’t the Hinge copy I wrote. But neither was it his job, hobbies, or appearance. His problem was that he decided he’s a loser. Perhaps he could spent time with just one person who didn’t think he was…

Self Surgery

In 1945, a successful plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz reflected on the surprising variance in the outcomes of surgery. A boy complained that his giant ears made people think he’s stupid. When his ears were cut down to size, he regained the confidence to express himself and no longer felt disrespected. But the Duchess didn’t just remain shy and self-conscious after her humpy nose was sculpted into classic perfection, she insisted that her nose looked the same as ever before!

Maltz came to the conclusion that the majority of his patients suffered not from a defect in their nose or ears, but from a fault in their self-image. This self-image was only loosely tied to a person’s physical appearance. It was made of habits of action and reaction, not bone and cartilage. Nonetheless, Maltz decided that it too is amenable to surgery. The resulting book, published 15 years later, was Psycho-Cybernetics.

Psycho-Cybernetics is a peculiar book, by the standards of both its time and of ours. The second chapter concludes with a prescription to reread the chapter at least 10 times. The acronym for symptoms of an automatic failure mechanism is FAILURE. The book refers to then-current research in neurology, cybernetics, and computer science, but ultimately grounds its core thesis in that assertion that “God created man in his own image […] an all-wise and all-powerful Creator would not turn out inferior products”. The word “sales” appears 139 times in Psycho-Cybernetics, the word “golf” another 100. Whether an improved self-image can help in any domain of life outside of these two is left as an exercise to the reader.

But the book’s three core ideas are powerful and correct, and they have formed the basis for much of the self-help literature published in the last 65 years.

First, that you “act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be”. Your day-to-day behavior, emotions, and even the reactions you invite from others are both driven by and limited by your self-image.

Second: this inner thermostat is adjustable, albeit slowly. It can be nudged by mental rehearsal, reliving past successes, selective forgetting of failures, and, most importantly, your observed actions in the world. Like an LLM, you train yourself into becoming a character, whether a successful one or a miserable one.

Third: the key to success in most endeavors is to train a self-image of success, give it a clear goal, and then get out of the way. Without conscious interference, your Automatic Success Mechanism (ASM) will guide the ball to the cup and the deal to its close.

I’m pretty sure this works in dating as well.

Master of Dating Administration

In the last decade and a half, my career trajectory has been:

• I got a Master of Business Administration degree during which I learned little tacit or explicit knowledge that’s applicable to administering a business.

• I worked at a successful company for 11 years, taking on dozens of different tasks of my own initiative.

• I’m suddenly quite good at many aspects of administering a business.

So what did business school actually teach me?

It taught me that I’m the sort of guy who’s good at administering a business. Since I arrived at Kenan-Flagler with almost no business experience, I was amenable to being told that this is easy enough to learn in two years. Since I found the MBA classes a cakewalk after a math degree, I learned that I’m unusually good at this. And even though on my first day at work post-MBA I was more delusional than good at anything, I just kept acting like I was until the reality of my skill caught up to my MBA self-image.

In that post I also wrote that the main reason I don’t want to pursue dating coaching as a career is that I don’t want to be a solo operator. I want to join a great team with a great founder. Dozens of you shared my post, and in the last three weeks I’ve talked with incredible founders and team leads almost every day. I’m really grateful to everyone nudging my dream career towards reality.

It’s only fair that I share the playbook I would use if I were to do dating coaching: the Psycho-Cybernetic playbook. I never learned it from a coach; perhaps you don’t need one either.

The Torah on One Foot

The whole of the Psycho-Cybernetic playbook is just be yourself, the rest is commentary. Unfortunately, “just be yourself” is as commonly given as it is useless, as commonly misunderstood as it is wise. Thus the need for commentary.

People who need this advice imagine “yourself” as a fixed target that you should aim the verb “be” at. This is precisely the wrong attitude. “Yourself” is a real thing, but it is neither fixed nor visible to you to aim at. It is the result of your actions, deliberate and non-deliberate, not their object. “Being” means the absence of deliberate action, the letting go that lets “yourself” act non-deliberately. When I give this advice, I say let yourself be.

That’s how “just be yourself” is misunderstood. The reason it’s useless is that people seeking dating advice have no self they trust to let be. They want a list of instructions to cover up that lack of the self.

Instructions won’t help you. But I can offer you a list of steps to take towards the place where just be yourself is the only dating advice you need.

Step 0 – Dehypnotize

If your eventual success requires a successful self-image, it means that your failure is caused by a self-image set up to fail. The self-image itself may be hard to get at directly, but it’s orbited by a cloud of beliefs and stories that explain your failure. I’m too short. Men only want X. No one’s allowed to flirt anymore. It doesn’t really matter if the story is about yourself or the people you’re supposed to date or the world at large. If your story ends with “…and that’s why I fail at dating” then the self-image underneath will ensure you fail.

One thing you may notice about these stories is that they are false. You know short guys who are happily married. Your friend is dating a guy who wants Y instead. You flirted once and weren’t sent to horny jail.

Maltz likens these beliefs to self-hypnosis. He offers the following anecdote:

The gripping strength of another athlete has been tested on a dynamometer and has been found to be 100 pounds. All his effort and straining cannot budge the needle beyond the 100-pound mark. Now he is hypnotized and told, "You are very, very strong. Stronger than you have ever been in your life. Much, much stronger. You are surprised at how strong you are." Again the gripping strength of his hand is tested. This time he easily pulls the needle to the 125-pound mark.

[…] The hypnotist merely removed this mental block, and allowed him to express his true strength. The hypnosis literally "dehypnotized" him temporarily from his own self-limiting beliefs about himself.

I have spent much of this blog trying to dehypnotize you from various self-limiting beliefs. One reason for this focus is that I am still a rationalist at heart, and attacking false beliefs in longform blogs is our chief hobby and status hierarchy. Another reason is that every following step in this process is unique to you, and I can only give broad outlines without knowing you personally. But the poisoned narratives are made and distributed in public where I can see them.

When a guy tells me “you can’t flirt anymore because of #MeToo”, there could be many different things hiding behind that. He could worry that his mere presence causes women discomfort, or believe that he couldn’t handle the pain of rejection, or that women are out to get him, or perhaps he resents the expectation that men must make the first move. I tell him market logic dictates that #MeToo has not made flirting any easier or harder for men, hoping that once he discards the protective shell of the outward-facing narrative he would notice the falsity of the self-belief underneath.

Ultimately, that step is also up to him alone.

Step 1 – Pick a Target

Once your self-image isn’t set up for failure, you can aim it at success. To aim anywhere, you must first see the target. This is what I attempted with the guide to authentic wanting, except “your dream partner” turned out to be too remote and difficult a target to aim at.

When I actually coach, I give clients nearby goals to hit this week, not year-long projects. If a guy is wary of approaching women, I may try to update his self-image towards “people enjoy my company”. The target: get someone to smile in response to something you said three times this week, then move on. Imagine the outcome, not worrying about the steps to get there: I’ll make a funny observation or give a compliment and they’ll smile. Then you go out and do it until the outcome becomes not just imaginable, but expected.

Once your self-image expects easy wins, bigger goals become imaginable. I will take Julia out for Thai food and have her smiling for an hour with my playful conversation.

A good target is salient, aligned, and inside your locus of control.

• Salient: it feels real when you imagine it, in full sensory detail. The power of the ASM is that it directs your entire mind towards the goal, the conscious and the unconscious. A good goal should be deeply felt and desirable, not a cognitive abstraction.

• Aligned: you can’t succeed if you’re fighting against yourself. If you yearn to feel like a master seducer but tell me on the form that you want a wife and kids next year, you won’t achieve either. The reason you can’t align on a single target is that some parts of you are holding on to false stories about yourself. Go read the Sequences back to step 0.

• “My soulmate will stumble on me at the book store checkout line” is a lousy goal because it’s not up to you. Your self-image isn’t a narcissistic story about what happens to you because you deserve it, but about your actions and their direct outcomes.

Step 2 – Boot Up the Self-Image

Maltz is a huge believer in the power of imagination and mental practice:

Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because, again, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.

If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice is as powerful as actual practice.

I’m more skeptical, though perhaps I simply lack imagination. However, I fully agree with the first sentence: imagination lets you do what you can’t yet do in actuality. You must imagine something before you can do it.

Mental rehearsal can’t be the whole of your practice, but it’s the necessary first step. Can you visualize bantering with the barista for 20 seconds, in full HD embodied first-person POV, without the movie glitching? If you can’t, you may still be in the grip of a failure narrative or trying to hit a goal that’s too far out. Go back to Step 0 or Step 1, respectively. If the movie feels realistic, go to Step 3.

Step 3 – RLHF

Your self-image doesn’t change overnight, but it gets updated every minute of your life by observing your actions and their consequences. If you let this process run unchecked, your actions will dig a deep trench of confirmation bias around whatever self-story happened to be there. Orienting your self-image towards success requires two things:

• Setting up an environment where you get to act often and succeed sometimes, even if for small stakes.

• Updating in the right direction from both success and failure.

The LLM metaphor is very germane here. Your self-image is instantiated in a literal neural network: your brain. Success comes from gradient ascent up the win landscape, where every learning isn’t a token that’s fed to you but an action you take. Learning means fucking around.

People get stuck in dating because they’re disconnected from the actual learning landscape, or because they let failures drag them back instead of pushing them.

The former includes everyone who participates in dating discourse to find the “true rules” of dating but never actually flirts. It’s the resentment maximizers and the fuckability maximizers. These people may think highly or lowly of themselves, imagine themselves undeserving or worthy. But their self-image doesn’t expect to win because they don’t actually play the game.

A neural network updates equally on both a loss and gain, and both nudge it in the direction of smaller loss in the long run. Learning from failure is the same. Maltz equates failure to warning lights on a car’s dashboard: you should acknowledge them them and take immediate corrective action. But your failures aren’t part of who you are, no more than low tire pressure is a core part of the car brand.

Self-image reinforcement learning isn’t a discrete action; it’s what you’re always doing in the background. The intervention is in setting your life up for learning, which usually means an active and open-minded social life, and in setting up your own mindset to be nudged in the right direction by every social interaction you have, good or bad.

Step 4 – Trust the Mechanism

The “cybernetics” part of the book comes from viewing your brain as a regulatory control system directing your body towards a target state. Maltz extrapolates this metaphor from bits of 1950s science and technology. In the decades since, neuroscience has shown this to be an accurate description at every level. Your brain creates conscious experience in the process of regulating your body into the state of being alive.

This control system can direct you into either state, success or failure, depending on which aligns with your self-image. It doesn’t even know what success or failure are, all it knows is making internal predictions come true. If you give it a clear goal that you’re fully aligned with, it will fly there like a rocket — the Automatic Success Mechanism. To get to its destination, the rocket needs thrust and steering.

Your integrity is the thrust:

A guy whose swagger doesn’t match his status in either direction is off-putting to girls. They sense the lack of integrity. Even if he isn’t consciously trying to fool other people, he’s fighting to fool himself. When a man is fully aligned he can’t even imagine pretending to be someone else for others, there’s no one he can be but his whole self.

The power of the ASM is that it mobilizes every last neuron in your brain towards the goal. But this means that without integrity, your parts are pulling in different directions. Integrity is built simply by repeatedly observing yourself being true to your values. The good news is that the more integrity you have, the easier it is to keep building on it.

The big idea of psycho-cybernetics is that when it comes to game time, the best way to steer is to let go of the wheel. If you’re scripting decision trees or arguing “shoulds” with yourself, it means that your System 2 is in conflict with the rest of you. It’s bad improv.

This is the part where rationalists get stuck, after breezing through steps 0 and 1 and forcing themselves through 2 and 3. Rationalists love thought experiments where you’re nobody in particular, and they love decision theories that produce mathematically precise plans. Being a nobody with a plan is great for solving differential equations. But in dating you have to be someone, with no plan other than letting yourself be.

Step ∞ – Keep Going

At the end of this process it stops being a process. It’s just who you are: a person who knows where they’re going and expects to arrive there. It took me about 5 years to get there with dating.

There’s no guarantee of how long it will take your automatic success mechanism to actually navigate you to success, since that depends on serendipity and market forces. I’m lucky to be a top 20% man who “graduated” into a wife-heavy market, so it took less than a year from establishing my self-image as a husband to meeting my wife.

Of course, the process never stops: only the goals change. I’m working on my self-image as a caring husband and doting father who perfectly balances family life with a demanding career and many intellectual obsessions, and that one’s pretty patchy at the moment. But I know the path now, and, most importantly, I have my wife to keep me on track. Building self-image is much easier with the help of someone who believes in who you could be. Part of my reluctance to do coaching comes from never having used a coach myself, but I do believe that the right person in your corner can make a huge difference.

How do you know when you’re in the right place, at least with respect to dating? A good sign is when someone asks you for dating advice and all you can tell them is just be yourself, because you can’t imagine doing anything else.

Hinged

When I told the guy who commissioned my Hinge copy to spend some time with people who didn’t think he was a loser, I meant his friends or coworkers. I don’t know if he read my email, but I do know that instead of friends he reached out to his ex. 10 weeks later, I got another email:

Long story short, we started talking every day, for hours. And I started to decide I wanted her back...

...And then I started to have hit after hit on hinge dates, at least for a few weeks. Cool, interesting women seemed all over me, I couldn't get them to not like me.

[…] I still feel deeply unsure how to efficiently meet good people and maintain this level of confidence and attractiveness. But I know it's possible, at least in theory.

It’s possible, in practice. All a man needs is a clear goal and a win landscape to gradient-ascend. While I would perhaps recommend that this man tune down his learning rate parameter a bit, he has all he needs.