What Makes A Good Student?

Here is the dirty secret of coaching:

The student makes the coach

Your coaching is only as good as the guy who it’s being directed to, or to put it another way: you can only lead a horse to water. It’s what the student does after the coaching session which dictates how successful he’ll be.

I tried to come up with a list of the four qualities/traits that I think makes a good student. Of course, they’re all related in one way or another, and simply highlight what I consider to be the correct mindset for a guy to get the most out of his time with me. 

In no particular order, here they are.

He can leave his ego at home

The best students come to coaching with an open mind and are ready to learn, rather than ready to argue. There is of course room for debate on any topic and I’m always open to explain why I think the way I do and that there will be alternative methods out there. I’m not here to be a dictator and tell people what is the best way no matter what they are like. For example, some students need and want next to no structure whereas others want everything to be structured. The best I can do is present the argument for my side and let the student decide which is best for him, while trying to find solutions which best fit him. 

But what can really hold a student back is when he has a massive ego and isn’t really looking to learn, but to instead get you to co-sign his bullshit. The thing is, it’s a doomed mission from the start, because if it had been working the whole time, then he wouldn’t be looking for coaching in the first place. 

And I appreciate that it takes a lot of courage to reach out for coaching. Success with women is the most important thing in a guy’s life and so in admitting he needs help a guy is admitting he has a key failing. But it’s best if this humility carries beyond the initial contact email… It’s unfortunate but I have had some guys inquire about coaching before trying to frame control me because their ego won’t allow them to learn. 

Will actually change things he does

It’s understandable that guys can drill incorrect behaviours into their muscle memory, and in some cases it might have been the correct thing to do when they were at an earlier stage of their journey, but there are some guys who won’t ever change. This is related to the previous point: they only want you to co-sign their bullshit rather than take on advice that can help them change. Or else they want to be able to say “well I took the coaching” so that they can pretend that they did everything in their power. The thing they missed was actually putting the work in afterwards. 

At the end of every coaching session my students get a document with all the notes that I took during the session, plus encouragement from me to methodically work through and dedicate two or three sessions to each point. The students who actually do do this are the ones that are the most successful. 

The point of coaching is to learn and have lessons to take forwards; Rome wasn’t built in a day. 

Has realistic quality expectations

I definitely do not want to crush any guy’s ambitions – he’s got a right to open who he likes – but it’s pointless getting coaching if 80% of the girls you approach are way out of your league. As I’ve said many times before: zero multiplied by any number is still zero. 

It doesn’t matter if you have the best Game in the world if the girl is going to instantly blow you out four out of five times and then the remainder slowly edge away and are just being polite in saying anything at all. That kind of guy isn’t able to practice anything, because it’s a different experience to try and stop and open a Maybe or Yes girl than it is for a No girl. 

Grinding away on No girls is pointless, not just because of the lack of potential results, but because of how little they will contribute to the interaction; it ingrains incorrect behaviours. Take opening as an example, it’s pointless in delivering an opener to a stonewall No girl when Maybe and Yes girls would be contributing in their own way while the guy opened. 

Neither is it the coach’s role to “turn” No’s into Maybe’s and Yes’s or to “make girls like him” as if it was something you could force people to do; you can only encourage them to. You can’t turn a No into a Yes, after all. Coaches can stop things from going the other way – from Yes’s and Maybe’s to No’s – but once the session has started the snapshot of your SMV has already been taken. It’s that snapshot which will start determining who your Yes, No and Maybe’s are. 

In cases where the guy has unrealistic quality expectations it’s a waste of money to get coaching because you maybe only get one or two real opportunities to practice your Daygame during the session. Instead I have to break it to some guys that they need to aim a little bit lower – sometimes literally, if they are short – and remind them that they’re approaching these girls to learn, not to find their wife. 

All of this is especially true for guys who haven’t had their first Daygame lay and so haven’t experienced their level. I want to stress here their first Daygame lay; it’s different getting laid online or even from Nightgame because the daytime exposes your personality the most. If you have a weird personality you might turn off girls who might have matched with you online or talked to you in a club where that same personality is hidden.

But I always stress to my students: that level of quality isn’t the end of the road, but you have to find your level first before increasing it. 

Is willing to hear and act on things that are hard truths

Some guys have unrealistic quality expectations. Some are fat and/or need to dress better (this is what I will catch on the introductory call we do before I would even accept a guy as a student). Some are chronic nice guys. Some are submissive and feminine men. Some are straight up weird (neurodivergent). Luckily these kinds of students are few and far between, and every person has their own Big Problem anyway (some bigger than others), but I never shy away from letting a guy know what is truly holding him back. 

These harsh truths carry a huge ROI but they’re not what most guys want to hear. They would rather than the answer lay in perfecting their Game because that would mean not having to confront their Big Problem. 

*****

And with that all said, I hope I didn’t scare you off! Message me if you’re interested in coaching (link below) and we can get started. Everyone has some or all of the above issues to varying degrees but I hoped that in making this point I could encourage some people to look inwards and find what’s holding them back. 

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown 

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