Ep. #14 The Link Between Personal Growth and Girlfriends with Sheriff

[Sheriff]: How’s it going?

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so we’re going to dive straight into the questions. You know the drill. So first of all I just want to get a bit of perspective on who you are for our readers. So, can you please just describe your dating life before you got into dating advice or actually read anything? What was it like?

[Sheriff]: You know, whenever I start a seminar, there’s a few things you see with students, and one of them is you’ve always got students worrying about, “Is this going to work for me? Am I below the level that can actually be helped?” So I normally kick them off by telling them a little about me. I mean, for me, I started off in a place it was worse than bad.

I went to a mostly little boys school, but there were a few girls there, maybe 10 girls out of 90 guys. And not being a popular kid, even like the least attractive girls were out of reach and they were kind of bitchy, because they had all these guys trying to get them. And I really kind of got this belief that some guys were allowed to talk to girls and that even the least nice, the least attractive of these personable girls were somehow quite special.

And then, unbelievably, it got even worse. My last year of high school I got mugged, and it was bad. It was a traumatic experience for me, and it made me scared to leave the house even, like I wouldn’t go out in the evenings. So when I was 18, my friends were going out drinking beer at night and I was staying in. I would physically shake with the idea of kind of going out. It really messed me up bad.

And of course, not having much else to do, I went online and I met this girl through…it wasn’t really through an online dating site, but I met her online and you know, she was my first ever girlfriend at the early age of 19. [Laughs] And we met in person a grand total of three times for [laughs] about two hours each time.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Sheriff]: But man, I was convinced we were in love.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Sheriff]: I was sunk. She lived a couple of hours away. And then one day she rang me up and she said, “It’s over,” and hung up and then refused to take my calls or answer my emails for three months. And like we’d been talking four, five hours every day, so this again, you know, another fairly traumatic experience.

And that…like that messed me up good for a year or so. Like for the whole year after that I was thinking, “Well, if I keep working hard I can get rich, and then maybe she’ll take me back.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs].

[Sheriff]: And my whole life was kind of about that at the time. So, before I got into this, it really wasn’t a good place for me.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I think you could say that. I think that's great for the users to hear because I’m sure most of them aren’t in a much better position than you were. So, how did you find out about dating advice at first?

[Sheriff]: It’s weird. When I was 17 I saw this TV program in England by a journalist called Louis Theroux, who used to go out and like find weird fringe groups and places. And one of them he had on…it was on hypnotists and other shit like that, and he was talking about this guy called Ross Jeffries, all about how to hypnotize women into sleeping with you. And being a 17-year-old I was like, “Whoa, that sounds pretty awesome,” but it took a backseat at the time.

But then after I got dumped by this girl, I did a bit of research. So obviously the research showed that it was more about confidence of having something to say and there wasn’t really much to it, and of course, hypnotizing girls into sleeping with you is kind of defined as creepy. But it turned me on to the fact that there was this big kind of world of information online, big amount of stuff out there. And the first stuff I really got into was actually David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating ebook.

Now, at this point, I was still overcoming my kind of agoraphobia from when I’d been mugged, and so going out in the evening at all was a huge challenge, not just going out and talking to girls. But slowly, surely I worked through it, step-by-step, even just going out to the bus stop, getting the bus into town, coming back, but just over and over, and I started applying some of the ideas I’d had from David DeAngelo, which I had mixed success with. Somehow the ideas I got from the book were that you should not just be a nice guy but you should actually go out and insult girls. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Sheriff]: But I had faith, man. I was convinced this was going to work. So I’d go up to girls and tell them their hair looked stupid and be kind of a little surprised when they [laughs] didn’t jump me as a result. But if you’re going out frequently, you start and you have to get good. Like if you’re going out and talking to enough people, your brain will start to guide you there, and I got better and I realized in fact there were…it wasn’t quite as simple as insulting girls and having them jump you. [Laughs] There were clearly some nuances. And in fact, I got a great tip from a guy called Jeff, who was a dating coach, and he said, “Well, rather than focusing on what’s not working for you, focus on what is working for you.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Sheriff]: And I thought about this. And I was getting to the point where I was meeting a lot of girls and they would say, “Hey, you’re a big player.” And at first I was like, “Fucking awesome. People think I’m a player. This is amazing.” But that wasn’t really translating into success. Girls would say, “You’re a real player. I’ve had a great time, but this isn’t going anywhere.” And I realized that you have to tell girls why you like them, what it is apart from the fact they have breasts and a vagina that makes them unique from other girls, which obviously, looking back, seems pretty fundamental.

So, you know, I started writing down what worked for me. I got some ideas about this. I got ideas about getting a girl to tell you stuff about her that you could show a genuine interest in. And I was quite excited about this. And about the same time I’d signed up for the Love Systems newsletter, the Love Systems Insider, and got email from Savoy which explained step-by-step everything I’d worked out by myself and added a whole bunch of new stuff in.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Sheriff]: I was like, “Holy shit, this is great.” And I was kind of hooked by that point on the Love Systems stuff.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Sheriff]: I did a workshop in London with a guy called Sinn, and my results went up straight away, even over the course of the weekend. But of course, you know, it’s a process. I kept going out, kept working at it, kept getting better and better, and it really took off from there. I stayed in touch with them and started doing an apprenticeship where I went around North America and Australia one year just teaching bootcamp after bootcamp after bootcamp, and, you know, it’s grown from there.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s great, and thanks for those tips, you know, for our users, because focusing on the positive rather than negative is definitely a great, great place to start for a lot of people. So, how do you define your ideal dating lifestyle now that you’ve learned all of this stuff and everything’s obviously changed, you were talking about how your mindset has changed earlier. So, what is your ideal dating lifestyle right now?

[Sheriff]: You know, it’s funny. People often refer to this whole kind of picking up thing as gaming. Obviously, if it’s a game, you can win the game. You know, I feel I’ve won the game three times. I’ve had three different situations now where I’d been like, “This is it. This is great. I’ve arrived.” And they’re three quite different situations, and I think the three ideas is kind of what you can be aiming for.

When I lived in Oxford, I was dating three or four girls. Over the course of a year, I was always dating three or four different girls, and I was spending quality romantic time with them. I’d have somebody come over, we’d cook dinner together, watch a movie, and it was like having a girlfriend, only there were three or four of them. If things didn’t work out with one, I’d also meet somebody new, and I had this rotation going.

And at the time I was 22 or 23 and I thought, “This is amazing.” And it was. I was meeting some really high-quality women, I was having good positive interactions with them, and it was a good stable place to be and I enjoyed it, although looking back perhaps a little unfair on the girls themselves.

When I moved to London, a friend of mine was sitting down and we’d been watching a TV show, Entourage, on TV, and we were like what, “Why aren’t our lives like that? Like why should we have to be famous?” And we resolved that we were going to set our mind to it and actually make this happen, and we did. We started a nightclub-promoting campaign. Without going into too many details, at the end of it the business model was the clubs would pay us and a hot girl we took the club, and then in the club they would give us a central VIP table and send us alcohol all night so that other people, other genuinely rich people, would try and compete with us because we had all the girls.

And it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was amazing. Like if you can imagine turning up to a nightclub four or five times a week, standing outside at 10:30, meeting up with 30 girls, being ushered to the front of the queue, shown in, everyone at the club that had fallen in line is looking at you, thinking, “Who the fuck is that guy?” because not even celebrities are turning up with 30, 40 girls in tow, being led to like the prime table in the middle of the club. And you know, when the club’s sending out alcohol and they want people want to see, well, they dim the lights, they turn down the music, they bring out the sparklers. It was incredible.

But, you know, that wasn’t really what I wanted, and there was something a bit weird about that, too, in a way, because you really got the feel, although you’re getting quite so much female attention, it didn’t feel grounded. It didn’t feel about me. It felt about kind of circumstances we’d build up around ourselves. That said, I learned a huge amount about how nightclubs work…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Sheriff]: …like some really kind of interesting ideas there about why the less attractive girls are more bitchy in a high-end nightclub, like what’s the difference from a real guest list or the kind of guest list that means you have to stand outside and peddle discount. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff I learned from there.

But finally I met this amazing girl. I’d done this exercise, when I did my first Love Systems workshop, where they said, “Write down the ideal picture of the ideal girl for you.” And I met her. I met her a little while ago and we’ve been together ever since. And for me, there’s something fulfilling about that. I feel, more than other relationships I’ve had, I feel one of the reasons it works so well is because I know that I can go out and meet new people, and so there’s no kind of feeling of settling there. There’s no feeling that I’m in a relationship out of loneliness. I feel I’m in a relationship because I’ve made a choice, because out of all these choices I found a girl I really connect with. And I think out of those three situations, having the kind of stable girls, out of doing the club promoting, and now out of having a girl who I’m madly in love with, obviously this third one is where I want to be at.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s a great story to tell, especially as most guys who start reading dating advice, they’re obviously looking for that one girlfriend. Some of them get a bit sidetracked, you know, and start looking at other things. So it’s a great point to see that you’ve come back to that first girlfriend, you know, what people actually started out for. So, what were the three things you learned or changed that made the biggest difference to your success with women over the years?

[Sheriff]: You know, there’s a lot of things that are kind of leaps of faith for guys, and one of them I think is a lot of guys try and buy a girl’s affection. They think that the way to get a girl really into you is to spend money on her, like to put on her on a pedestal. And that could be a hard belief to shake until you try it, until you make that leap of faith and you think, “No, I’m going to deal with this in my own terms,” and you see the real kind of difference in how girls react to you and interact with you from that.

I think forgetting a lot of kind of traditional dating advice and thinking in straight lines is important. Like one question I’ll ask my students at the beginning of a seminar is, “Where is the ideal place for a date?” Oh, and they come up with all these ideas, you should go for a romantic meal somewhere, go to an art gallery so you can show how cultured you are, go and see a film so you have shit to talk about. As I went on more and more dates, I realized the best place for a date was my house. If you’re going on a date with somebody, you’re there to talk to them, you’re there to find out more about them, and if you connect, to take it to the next level with them. And so anywhere that isn’t your house, anywhere that you can’t controllably have quiet so you guys can talk, you don’t have the kind of the aspects of your lifestyle, you know, the picture you bought in Morocco, the lamps from Egypt, other stuff that kind of grounds who you are as a person, and finally, that you don’t, you know, if things go really well, you don’t have to worry about, how do I get her back to my house from the art gallery on the other side of town?

I think thinking more in straight lines, questioning why you’re doing certain things, why you’re saying certain things on dates, and starting to think about what it is you want and getting focused towards that is very important as well. And finally, being bold, something—I mean, I do a lot of guest talks at seminars, and the question I love to ask people is, “If you’re on a date with a girl and it’s going well, you’re smiling and laughing and everything’s good, she’s laughing at your jokes, now you’re kind of moving closer and you’re going for a kiss with her, but then instead of kissing you she kind of just turns her head to one side, what happens to your value relative to hers?”

Now, the guys always say, well, it goes down. You’ve made your move and she’s rejected you. And I always say, no, that's bullshit. Why? I mean, what does it say about you? What kind of guy tries to kiss girls in whom he’s interested? A guy who is confident. And what gives you the confidence in that situation? What gives you the confidence in that situation is preselection. It’s those positive experiences you’ve had before that. So when you show you’ve got that confidence around girls, you’re showing her, “Well, other people are interested as well. I have this positive dating advice to look back on.”

And I think a lot of guys are scared of being rejected without realizing that the things they do that put them in a position where they can be rejected also show confidence. If you go and start up a conversation with a girl, sure she can reject you, but you’ve also shown you’ve got the balls to go and make that happen. And I think the advantage you get from that, the kind of the attraction that builds, far outweighs the risk of being rejected.

[Angel Donovan]: Awesome advice there, great three points. What is the difference between the girls you dated before and now?

[Sheriff]: Well, I’m actually dating girls now. [Laughs] That’s the main difference. I think, that said, I mean, something I touched on earlier was this feeling of, you know, if you’re settling for a girl or not, and I think that’s a key point. I think when you know you can go out any night of the week, meet new friends, perhaps start a new romantic relationship with somebody, it gives you back your power in the relationship. It means that you’re not always kind of worried about the ebbs and flows of the relationship. You’re able to kind of focus on enjoying it and building something there rather than thinking “I’ve got to make this work. I’ve got to make this work,” and you’re less willing to put up with bad…with behavior that’s perhaps not acceptable. I think people in relationships naturally test each other out, and if you’re desperately trying to cling onto that relationship, you’re going to find yourself in a position where you’re accepting behavior that’s not right, and the relationship will start to tumble down from there. So I think that’s the big key experience for me.

[Angel Donovan]: Awesome. So, is there any one great dating experience you’ve had over the years that you think back on?

[Sheriff]: I don’t know. That’s a hard one to answer. There’s been plenty of surreal dating experiences I’ve had. When I used to go out in London, I met this girl on the street, got speaking to her, and the next weekend she came down to stay with me in Oxford, and then the next weekend I went back up to London to go and meet girls again. I saw this great girl in a place really close to where I’d met this girl, and said the same thing to her, and it turned out to be the same girl at [laughs] exactly the same place, exactly the same time on a Saturday night.

[Angel Donovan]:

[Sheriff]: She kind of looked at me funny and I think she assumed I was being funny more than anything, and I quickly changed the subject. I said, “Hey, how are you? How have you been?” And it was okay.

I went on a date once and this girl’s identical twin showed up 10 minutes in and it was a double. It was weird. It was me and a pair of them. And I don’t know, I think it’s probably a good thing that one didn’t really go anywhere. It was quite weird.

I remember, my brother was kind of a natural. My brother was always really quite good with women, and so I looked up to him a lot. And he told me kind of one evening how he used to go out with a travel toothbrush in his back pocket. I was like, “That sounds incredibly pimp.” Like how much more of a cool pimp, together guy would you be if you take out a travel toothbrush because you’re assuming you’re going to get laid? So, amazingly enough, I went out, and this was when I was still learning. I had this success with this girl, we went back to hers, and I’m like, “I’ve got to show her the toothbrush.” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Sheriff]: So when we’re about to get down to it, I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to brush my teeth,” like pull out my travel toothbrush from my back pocket, and she kicked me out. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Sheriff]: Obviously, I can’t blame her. But it was worth it.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs].

[Sheriff]: It was worth it. So, I don’t know about the best dating experience, but I’ve certainly had some very surreal ones.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, thanks. They were really interesting ones. So, I mean, we’ve heard a lot about you. Now, from your side, have you got any recent goings-on or upcoming events or anything you’re involved in that you’d like to talk to our users about?

[Sheriff]: Absolutely. Love Systems, http://www.lovesystems.com, run bootcamps all over the world and we have an absolute money back guarantee if we don’t change your life over the course of a weekend. We’ve got a big Super Conference coming up in the middle of October in Las Vegas. It’s going to be absolutely fantastic. And then I run Love Systems programs pretty frequently in Australia and in London as well. So you can find out more details at lovesystems.com.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s great. Thanks for that. And of course, all of the products from Love Systems are on the website and you can actually see which ones Sheriff has contributed to on the site also. So, Sheriff, thank you for coming today and with all of these great stories I’m sure it’s going to be really interesting for all our readers. And, you know, thanks for your time and I hope to see you soon.

[Sheriff]: Alright. Take care.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, take care, man.