The Connection Course    Compare

If you're considering purchasing this course, it's important that you have the right expectations about what it covers. This isn't a course designed specifically at teaching you dating skills, but about how to connect better with everyone you meet. Of course you can use the skills you learn to help you connect with women, but it has further reaching benefits than just that.

At the end of the course, Mark Manson talks a little about how the lessons contained here have been the best thing he's ever learned. That they have allowed him to improve his relationships with his family, women and everyone he meets. So if you're looking for a way to be able to communicate and connect with people more powerfully, you should find this interesting.

If you're wanting a course that focuses more on pickup lines and how to attract women, this isn't for you. But Mark has a lot of experience with women from when he was more involved with the dating community, and a couple of his other products that are worth checking out are Models: Attract Women Through Honesty and The Fearless Dating Course.

Mark himself points out that the skills taught in this course aren't enough on their own to get into sexual relationships with women. That if you just focus solely on building a deep connection with women and you don't sexualise the interaction, you're likely to end up in the friend zone. And some of the students feedback after certain lessons verified this - they had deep conversations with a woman but then she just wanted to be friends.

That doesn't discount the value of this course though, as it will have positive effects on how you relate to women. It just means that this isn't a complete system for talking to women and getting sexual with them. If you learn from some other products about approaching and attracting women, as well as how to be more sexual, this product will complement that knowledge really well.

The Way This Course Is Structured

The course is broken up into 24 different lessons, videos of typically two to five minutes each. So each video is on a particular topic, and at the end you'll be presented with an exercise to complete based on what you've just learned. Sometimes it'll be an exercise you can just do right there on the spot, but many of them involve you going out and talking to people. Then after you've completed the exercise, you need to post your feedback online before you move on to the next lesson.

This is good, as it holds people accountable for actually doing the work to make sure the lessons sink in. You're not going to master these skills just by reading about them, but by going out and applying them. However there doesn't seem to be any response given to the feedback, such as showing how what they've done could be improved upon. For the most part, the students seem to be picking up the ideas really well and applying them effectively. But based on some of their reports, there's a few instances where they seem to still be struggling with the concepts.

The other way this happens is that some of the students leave miniscule reports, presumably so they can go straight on to the next lesson. So they haven't taken the time to do the exercises properly, which means they aren't going to get the same benefit from it. So if you buy this product, be aware that it's going to be in your own best interests to take the time to do each exercise properly.

Another factor in people's decision to rush through the course is likely to be the pricing structure. You'll be charged at $29.95/month until you cancel your subscription or complete the course. Once completed, you'll no longer be charged but will have lifetime access to all of the material online. As one student noted, he rushed through the program so that he wouldn't be charged further, and intended to go back and review it more thoroughly after. Because the lessons are short, you could realistically complete them, do the exercises properly and still have it completed within the first month.

What You Can Expect To Learn

The focus of the course is on teaching you how to relate to people more on an emotional level. As Mark points out, the people that we deem to be the mot charismatic are those who emotionally engage us the most. So to draw others to you, you must learn to deliberately express your emotions.

This isn't the easiest thing for many guys to do, as we're used to communicating more with facts than emotions. This is the basis of lesson number nine, and shows through examples how a story can be told to focus more on the emotional aspect. This is one of the best things you can do to start developing stronger connections with women, but it'll also work to make you more interesting to everyone. The lesson is a bit short on practical advice on how to speak with more emotion, but if you start being conscious of this you'll soon pick it up.

Another area that's covered is that of improvisation. This is a really important thing to learn, as proficiency in this allows you to have spontaneous conversations with people and not run out of things to say. There is a random word generator piece of software in a few of these lessons on improvisation, that you'll use in the exercises. So you'll click on it to get a random word, have to speak about it for a minute, then do the same again with another word. As the lessons progress, the exercises you complete with this tool will become more complicated, but also more practical for talking with people.

Storytelling is given a lot of focus here as well. For starters, you'll be shown a simple three-part way to structure a story, in a way that is easy to use and doesn't overcomplicate things. Not every single story you tell has to strictly adhere to this structure, but it is a pretty practical, straightforward method to use. You'll also learn how to use storytelling as a way to relate to people better, and this is an important skill that will be particularly helpful when applied to dating.

Improving Your Relationships

By practicing all of the techniques taught in this course you should start to notice an improvement in the relationships in your life. Not only are you being taught how to communicate more effectively yourself, but also how to listen to other people and try to get a sense of where they are coming from. Mark points out that the best gift you can give someone is to make them feel understood.

There is also a lesson on how to elicit more personal stories from people, utilising the 'go first' principle. This definitely works, and is a great way to speed up how quickly you connect with people. If someone shares deeper, personal stories about themselves with you, it's going to build a higher degree of trust and connection between the two of you.

In the context of dating, if you can help a woman trust you faster then she is going to feel like she has known you for a lot longer than she actually has. This is the reason why experienced guys can meet a girl in a bar and a few hours later she feels like she has known him for all her life.

This is a great skill to learn, and will lead to women feeling more invested in their relationship with you. Something that Mark mentions at the beginning of the course is that when he was first learning dating skills, he would be able to meet women and have some success but it often didn't go anywhere. Maybe he only met up with them a couple of times and never saw them again, or it felt like he was putting in more effort than they were.

This is actually really common when guys first start practicing things they learn from the pick up community, as they're more often focused on using different lines and routines and trying to entertain the girl. But for most girls, if they don't feel that sense of connection with you, they're not going to feel the same desire to see you again. I've been through this myself, and if you're interested in spending more than one night with a girl you'll want to learn this.

There's some other really useful content in the lessons on needs and appreciation. It teaches you how to work out what the needs are that motivate people, and how you can validate them based off of this need or desire. It's also interesting to learn about the correct way to show gratitude to someone and really let them know you appreciate them, in a way that will make them feel good and build the connection between the two of you.

If you're wanting to have a serious long term relationship with a woman, then these are some of the skills that will help the two of you develop a more satisfying partnership. One of women's biggest complaints in relationships is that their man doesn't understand them or appreciate them, and that they also don't communicate effectively. This course will go a long way towards showing you how to make sure you don't end up with these problems.

A Few Weaker Areas

So while this course is overwhelmingly positive in what it offers, there were a couple of things that could have made it better. In the very first introductory video, Mark is on camera while he presents it. In the rest of the videos, they all use PowerPoint slides which he reads from while presenting the lesson. It's not a big deal, but I found it more engaging when Mark was actually in the video, as it has a more personal feel. And looking at text on screen is not the most interesting thing to watch.

For some of these lessons and exercises, I think it would have been preferable to actually demonstrate them with the aid of another person. Watching Mark talking to one of his friends and showing how these techniques look like in a real situation would undoubtedly be more effective than hearing him describe it over the top of a PowerPoint slide.

Some of the lessons also felt pretty short, and a couple of them are very similar to each other. In some cases I think a few extra examples might have been a nice addition, just to help some guys really get a feel for how to implement the idea.

The Bottom Line

The basic premise of this course is to teach you how to be able to engage people on an emotional level. To that end, it succeeds. There's a number of different conversational techniques and structures taught that will get you thinking and communicating in a way that is more emotionally relevant to people. You'll learn how to get people telling you more personal stories about themselves, which in turn will create a stronger connection between you.

Take note that this course is not specifically aimed at improving your success with women. It is about relating on a deeper level with people in general. The information here is really solid for helping you connect better with women, but is not useful if you are looking for a product that focuses on meeting women or developing sexual relationships with them.