My new book is out now and I decided to post a free chapter for you guys to get a taste
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WHAT MAKES A GOOD STUDENT
Do you want to know the dirty secret to Daygame coaching?
The student makes the coach
Daygame coaching is only as good as the guy receiving it. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. No matter how good your advice and how well delivered it is, the most important part of coaching is what comes after. If the student takes on your lessons, reviews his notes, records and analyses his sets and works to improve himself by iteration, then he can succeed. If he treats coaching as the end of the journey – that he will be blessed by great Daygame knowledge and his training is complete – and doesn’t see the coaching as just the beginning, he’ll fail. We could even say, because of this, that the best coaches are actually the ones who pick the most hardworking and dedicated students.
I decided to come up with a list of the four qualities that I think makes a good student, beyond the pre-requisites of being able to approach, having managed his AA and brought his SMV up to a suitable level. As you can see, I have a strong interest in encouraging and selecting for these qualities as it makes their success more likely and paints me in a better light. They’re all related in one way or another and highlight what I consider to be the correct mindset for a guy to get the most out of his time with me and maximise his success.
In no particular order, here they are:
He can leave his ego at home
Most students come to coaching with an open mind and are ready to learn. I give them room for debate on any topic and I encourage deep exploration of each theme. In fact, I love it when a student has a lot of questions because they help me to understand topics from new perspectives. I’m also very happy 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 and want to know a Game-specific reason for doing anything. The best I can do is present my argument and let the student decide which direction is best for him while providing guidance as to what I think his best option is.
Unfortunately, there are some students who come ready to argue. They have massive egos and aren’t really looking to learn, but instead for me to co-sign their bullshit. I appreciate that it takes a lot of courage to reach out for coaching; success with women, after all, is the most important thing in a guy’s life and in asking for help he is admitting he has a key failing. Saying that, a student won’t learn much, if anything, if he treats the session as an opportunity to heal his wounded ego and pretend that he was right all along.
Will actually change things he does
It’s understandable that guys can drill incorrect behaviours into their muscle memory. In some cases, it might have been the correct thing to do when they were at an earlier stage of their journey. An easy example that springs to mind is stopping: when you’re an absolute beginner you will have probably been told to always do front stops because you have low levels of natural dominance and need to maximise your facetime with girls. However, coaches who work more with experienced guys will likely teach a hybrid side/front stop which appears more natural and gives the girl the option to keep walking straight on if she wants to.
Incorrect behaviours can often be found in guys who had already received Daygame coaching. They may not know or understand that different coaches have different styles and areas of focus. That Daygame is not one universal philosophy or 20 point checklist such that moving from coach to coach is simply further initiation into the same school. They may even have had coaching where the instructor outright lied to them, perhaps to protect their feelings or because of their own poor knowledge of Game. That is probably the hardest for the student to accept because they have to acknowledge that they fell prey to someone’s lies and believed them.
A good student will acknowledge that they are there to learn with a new coach and that he will probably try to teach him something new and different. He needs to be willing to do things that he thinks go against established Daygame knowledge.
However, 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. 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 both during and after the session.
At the end of every coaching session my students get a document with all the notes that I took plus encouragement to methodically work through and dedicate two or three sessions to each sticking point. The students who actually do this are the ones that are the most successful.
Has realistic quality expectations and sufficient SMV
It pains me to write this segment because I do not want to be classified as Black Pill. I’m just being realistic and am willing to say the thing that many coaches won’t because it would hurt their bottom line: leagues exist and you ought to be cognisant of them. I do not want to crush any guy’s ambitions – a man has a right to open whoever 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 (interest) multiplied by any number is still zero.
Unfortunately, many guys turn to coaching because they think they will get the girls out of their league. Once in a blue moon it works, but only because the guy had some gaping hole in his Game or simply had too much AA to ever go for those girls in the first place. For most it’s an SMV deficiency issue. 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 results, but because of how little they will contribute to the interaction. This ingrains incorrect behaviours. Take opening as an example, it’s pointless in delivering an opener to a stonewall No girl or one who is merely humouring you 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 potential 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 he may only get one or two real opportunities to practice his Daygame during the session. Instead I have to break it to some guys that they need to aim a little bit farther and wider 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, their first Daygame lay: it’s different getting laid online and 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. 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.
This phenomena might even continue over to the intermediates who seek coaching. Usually they don’t have terrible SMV deficiencies but an archetype mismatch: they are approaching way outside of the subcategory of girls that they will do well with. Archetype was touched on in an earlier chapter of this book and I’ll go into a lot more detail later on during the chapters on behavioural archetypes.
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 before I would even accept a guy as a student). Some are chronic nice guys and people pleasers. 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 (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 that the answer lay in making small technical tweaks to their Game or using a new line because that would mean not having to confront their Big Problem. If a man can confront and deal with his Big Problem, he can make enormous strides forward in his dating life.
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Follow this link to purchase the new book. I hope you enjoy it.
Yours unfaithfully,
Thomas Crown
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Thomas Crown PUA 