I did this interview a while ago but everything we talked about is relevant for any man who wants to overcome approach anxiety, build confidence, and meet hot women. We chilled and had a few beers while talking about dating, confidence, his career and the story behind how this all started.
Cajun goes deep on how men can benefit from dating coaching, and the principles behind his attraction methods, including why men often feel they “don’t know what to say”.
Also below is a new video release from our interview (Cajun takes a stripper home).
Watch to learn how to create an abundant love life, and leave a comment below!
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Here is the transcript for my podcast interview with Derek Cajun.
Eddy: This is Eddy Baller and I’m here with Cajun from Love Systems. I’m sacrificing my time and money here to get Cajun drunk, to get his secrets, so stay tuned and wait for drunk Cajun.
Cajun: You guys are in for a real treat.
Eddy: How long have you been doing this business?
Cajun: I started professionally 2007, is when I started doing it, so it’s 6 years, maybe going on 7 or something. So yeah, since 2007, then I worked with Love Systems since the beginning of 2008.
Eddy: So you did it for a year on your own or…
Cajun: No, no, no. Well before Love Systems, it was Mystery Method, and I just got in with them and I did a couple of 1-on-1’s and I just got brought on as an instructor, and then it was just in that whole transitional phase. Nothing was official until they switched over and then I became official in early 2008. My first bootcamp or seminar that I helped out at was in 2007, so since then.
Eddy: Alright. It’s been a while.
Cajun: It’s a long time as far as the age of this (dating) industry is concerned.
Eddy: So a little bit on your background on how you started, just doing coaching in general. What inspired you to start?
Cajun: There were a couple things. I’m from the East Coast of Canada and the only reason I mentioned this is it’s because it’s a really sort of social place. It’s a small place. Everyone kind of knows everyone in the town I grew up in, and that was always normal for me. So I never understood this fear I guess, this approach anxiety. I understood it because even I would get scared in talking to a pretty girl, but I mean just talking to people in general was always really normal for me.
So I went to University of Ontario and then I moved to Toronto after university. When I was in Toronto, in university and even in high school I was always involved in drama and improv and student council, and I always had sort of people knowing who I was. It’s easy to meet people when people already know you are especially when you’re things in stage and people know who you are. That was easy. I didn’t have any skills. It was just girls who throw themselves in my lap basically.
And then when I moved to Toronto, I didn’t have that anymore, and so the first time I was like “Alright, looks like I need to figure this out.” I don’t know how to actually meet people other than having them already know who I am. So I just started going out and just talking to people. And then I end up reading The Game by Neil Strauss and after reading it I was kind of like “Shit, I’m an actor, this is ridiculous. This should be very easy for me because it’s just using lines.” Then I started doing that and I just started going out every night.
At that time, it wasn’t a huge thing at least I knew about. The whole pick-up stuff wasn’t really mainstream at that point. The Game had just been released. I read it literally like a month after it was released and no one really knew about it. So what happened was I’d go out and I didn’t even have a cellphone at that time, so I’d go out and just try to get as many girls’ numbers as possible and I’ll write them down in little pieces of paper. After a while, I started getting good enough that I wasn’t getting rejected every single time after months of doing it.
So I met a guy actually that was in the bar that noticed what I was doing one night. Me and him started going out together a lot because he had the same sort of interests as me and he ended up actually being friends with Mystery which is another interesting story. We started going out every night, about four nights a week every week for about 6 or 7 months, and that’s sort of where I cut my teeth on all these sort of stuff. I always tell guys, one my skill sets as an instructor is that I’ve literally been through every possible situation you could imagine in the negative, like getting rejected. Like I learned by failing over and over and over again. Because there weren’t really any forms that I knew about at that time, closed questions or ask for advice. I was dirt poor. I couldn’t even afford a bootcamp if I wanted to.
So I just sort of did this by trial by error and that’s sort of how I got good, is by failing over and over and over again until eventually, about 7 or 8 months in, I was consistent enough that I could get numbers and impress any guys that I was out with enough that they were like “Wow, this guy knows what he’s talking about.” That’s sort of how I get into it. I started working with Love Systems and Tenmagnet. He saw what I was doing one night and he was like “Holy shit, you’re really good for a guy that hasn’t taken one of our courses. Why don’t you come have a beer with me and the other instructors afterwards and we’ll talk.” And so I did and then he ended up inviting me to his next bootcamp and that’s sort of how I got involved.
What should you say on an approach?
Cajun: We should talk about that, because that’s something I think, especially guys that haven’t taken, because I know you have an approach as well, I think we talked a little bit before. I think there’s a lot of guys in the internet that think of the ideal way to do this. I think one of the reasons they seek us out is because “Oh, here’s this logical sort of structure I can take to pick up a girl. Yes I can say this, I can say this, I can say this. If only I can pay for their services, I will have the blueprint of the exact script to say. The truth is, I think it’s beneficial to me to have something especially when you’re starting out, that you can just rely and fall back on, and I still have this things to imagine to do as well, that when someone brings a certain topic up, you just have that story that’s associated with it that you can just pull out. It’s not scripted in a sense that you know every word, but it is sort of the same story you tell every time. But by no means are we going in thinking “We’re going to say this and then this and then this and then this.”
And so I think a lot of the times, guys have this false belief, especially very logically-minded men come in thinking, “Oh, this is the solution to my logical problem of not being able to get girls. If only I can learn the formula.” And then sometimes they get disappointed when we say “There’s no formula, you can’t do that. It’s not going to work.” I guess it’s a bit of a paradox there because there is a formula but it’s not what you think it is. It’s not like an actual written formula. The formula is more emotional thing, sort of like even esoteric sort of in nature. You got to work at honesty, confident truth, and body language and these other things that are more driven by your state and your emotions rather than the logic of what you’re saying.
Logic vs. Emotions
Cajun: Most of the things that… like there’s always stereotypical conversations men have about women or their wives, women they’re picking up or whatever. But you notice a pattern in all those right? I saw a video today, I don’t know if you saw this, the nail in the head video where it’s a girl… you saw that right? You should link to it at the end of this video or something. The video is basically a woman complaining to her boyfriend about how, she’s like “You know, it’s really, I have this pressure and it really hurts my head” and she’s talking almost like emotionally, and then it zooms out and there was a nail stuck on her forehead. And the guy is like “Aha, maybe you should just take the nail out of your…” She’s like “No, you don’t understand. You don’t get it. I’m not looking for a solution. Don’t try to help solve the problem, I just want to talk.”
One of the things that women sort of focus on in their everyday lives is emotional sort of issues, emotional problems. It’s about the emotion, not to the logic necessarily. And again, it’s not to say that women like logic, they don’t, it’s just that for them, they’re more focused on the emotional things rather than logic. This has lots of benefits as well. There’s always this thing where women talk about where men talk about politics and how women make better politicians and stuff like that, and I think in a lot of ways, in a lot of sort of positions they probably would. You look at politics more on emotional side, it’s like “Okay, well, help the people” or help the issues that are making people struggle or make things better, women way better at. Whereas the men are concentrating on things like the more logical things like the budget of a war, like the actual brass tacks, the equations of how it’s spent on budget and stuff like that.
Eddy: The step by step process.
Cajun: Yeah, and they get lost in the details and then make really bad decisions based on those things right? We see the world in two different sort of perspectives that are both equal in their own right. What guys have to realize is that when they come in to this sort of stuff with pick-up, it’s the woman’s game. So you can’t bring that logically-minded sort of mindset to it. It has to be emotionally-driven, so when you’re out at bars and you’re out meeting women and stuff you have to understand that if you’re not attracting her emotionally, there’s nothing. This is the problem, this guy think “Oh, I can attract her logically. If I make about how much money I make and the kind of car I drive and the people that I know, she should be attracted to me.” It never works like that.
How to deal with approach anxiety
Eddy: As for myself, I kind of like bulldoze myself through it just to get through, it’s like “Hey…” Do it, just do it. What would you tell to a guy who’s like, I’m sure you get this a lot too, like “I don’t know what to say but you look reallyscared,what do you tell a guy to get over it?
Cajun: When they say “I don’t know what to say,” they’re actually saying “Yeah, either I’m scared and I can’t think of anything” or they’re so focused not to keep going back to the logical versus emotion thing but they’re so focused on the formula of what they needed to say, and not just the first thing but what they say after that and after that and after that. That’s why we mentioned earlier, confident truth. If you have nothing to say, say what you’re doing. Say the truth of why you want to talk to her. So I say for guys that don’t know what to say, “Why do you want to talk here?” “Because she’s cute.” Tell her that. So you can just go up. When it comes down to it, you can always just give the honesty of what you are doing. Even going up and saying “Hey look, I never do this and I’m actually really nervous right now, but you’re really cute and I have to come over and say hi.” That is better than like doing nothing at all. In fact, that’s not even so bad. There are a lot of girls who find that really endearing and would respond positively to that.
Whereas if you go up and if you stress about it and try to even think of the most perfect line to say, if you go in with that mindset, that attitude of “I need to think of something good to say,” it hardly ever works. You’ll go in, you’ll be like “Hey, what do you think about moustaches?” and they’re going to be like “Fuck off, go away. You’re being weird,” and weird of course being what I said earlier not lining up with what you want. So yeah, a lot of guys that are in this situation, I just say “Look, you can be scared and cry right now to yourself inside and say “Oh, I don’t want to do it,” but really all you’re doing is you’re giving a power to that sort of like little girl in your head, that ego defense, saying like “No, don’t hurt yourself. You’re gonna get hurt.” You’re giving in to that. Just don’t do that. Just don’t even think about it. Just put one foot in front of the other and walk over there. If I’m teaching the guy, I’ll say “Look, if you don’t do it, I’m literally going to pull you over there and if it that’s not going to work, I’m actually and “Hey, my friend was too scared to talk to you, but he thinks you’re really cute” and sort of give them no option.
But as per when you’re out on your own, for me when I was going out I always tell myself “just walk over.” The only thing you should be thinking in your head, the only logic you should be using is how to walk. Not even in a sexy way, just make sure you don’t fall over as you’re walking over.
Eddy: So no sexy walking, just do it?
Cajun: No. I mean, if you get better, you can think about that, but for the most part, when you’re walking over, it should be state based or emotion based right? So it is “I’m going over. I don’t care if this works or not. I just want to have fun tonight.” A lot of guys, they drink right? When you drink, it lets go of the logic side of your brain. That just sorts of alleviates the pressure and it just makes you sort of less inhibited. So you don’t worry about to say because you don’t give a shit anymore. You just say the first thing that goes out of your mouth. And a lot of the time, if you’re a nervous or a shy person, your game’s a hell lot better when you’re drunk than you are when you are sober. The thing is, it would actually be a lot better if you were sober if only you let it out. But we hide behind these ideas that we need the perfect thing to say, we need to have a plan of what to do and what to say and how to move, how to touch. Well it’s bullshit. You don’t need to do that.
Eddy: It’s how the guys think that they could get a pick-up key and they just use that key and open the woman and then all of a sudden it works.
Cajun: Yeah. That’s why the advice that you also get from women, like your mom, the classic advice from your mom right? She says be yourself. That makes no sense to guys. Guys are like “That’s not advice. That doesn’t help us right?” When you get better at it, you realize that’s actually really good advice, because she’s saying it from an emotional perspective right? It’s so easy. Just be yourself. If everything you do is true to you then you’re fine. But as guys we can’t do that. When we have a problem, the problem how do I pick this girl up, and as soon as you start looking at it from a logical perspective, it all falls apart because now you’re thinking “How do I do this and it’s not a logical problem.” You’re taking a logical system and applying it to an emotional problem. It doesn’t work.
The big thing with this that I try to teach guys is that you need to abandon that. This is the biggest paradox because we do teach logical sort of structures, but the logical structures are not for the women. They’re not to pick them up. It’s for the guys. It helps the guys abandon the logical structure, or at least get them in the past and abandon it, because the only way they’re going to abandon it is if they actually have confidence and the fact that they believe they can actually do it, and the only way we can make them believe they can actually do it is to give them a logical structure so they’ll actually attempt to do it, and every time they attempt it, they get to a position which is what the initial question is asked, they don’t know what to say and they work through it. Because once you’re in there, you can’t just leave. If you do leave, you feel worse, so a lot of times guys are standing and like “Uhhh…” and they do have those awkward moments but then eventually they’ll grow, will ask a question or will hit on the subject that they don’t need any routines to talk about and it will flow naturally, and then like “Oh, that wasn’t so hard.” It’s like “Yeah, man, it’s easy. You just gotta have your brain in the right place and it has to be away from this problem solving and more on the emotional based sort of like “I’m having fun. I’m in a good state. I don’t care. I don’t need something to say.
What if I run out of things to say?
Cajun: Guys always say, as you mentioned earlier, what if I run out of things to say? What if I run out of shit to say? So here’s a big revelation for all you guys watching. You don’t make women uncomfortable when you run out of shit to say. When you make women uncomfortable when you run out of shit to say and then you get uncomfortable. That’s what makes women uncomfortable. Not the fact that you run out of stuff to say, the fact that you got uncomfortable by it. You cannot say anything and be totally comfortable and it’s okay. So if you run out of shit to say, just look at them and smile. Just look at them, lean back and smile, and they’ll say something. They’ll pick up the conversation. They’ll be like “Um, so what do you do?” And you just sort of nod of your head and smirk as if you know what’s going on. Maybe they’re hitting on you now right? And that’s the big secret. It’s not really a problem unless you let be one.
Eddy: I had this little thing with a really hot girl on a bootcamp, and I told her, while I was just standing and looking at her, “Well I don’t have anything else to say. I’m just going to stare at you.”
Cajun: Yeah you can say that. Bring the confident truth right? The fact that you don’t know anything to say, you can say that. “You know what? I’ve been talking for five minutes, I don’t have anything else to say. Say something. Give me something good.” And that’s it.
Eddy: She started laughing because of it and then she looked away and then she looked back at me, she started asking questions.
Cajun: Yeah. Women will always take your lead with that sort of stuff. It’s like “Oh, he is saying something that logically sounds awkward, but he’s not awkward, therefore it’s not awkward.” This is why when you use lines, you can say something that logically sounds very good or attractive or whatever, but emotionally they’ll buy it. That’s guys will say sometimes “Is that a line?” even if they’ve never heard of it before because they can tell by the way you say it. It doesn’t line up. This is creepy thing again, right? Reality doesn’t match up with what you’re trying to convey through your words. So this is why you need to abandon this logically minded nonsense.
Eddy: This is Eddy, signing off at the pub, slightly drunk after two beers, and with Cajun from Love Systems, and thanks again for coming out.
Cajun: I had 20 beers. For the record, I had 20 beers.
Eddy: That’s why this bill is so expensive.
Cajun: Yeah. I soak it all into my Viking beard.