Why Self Improvement Wont Get You A Girlfriend

Summary

In this video, HealthyGamerGG explores the common notion that self-improvement is the key to success in dating. The discussion delves into how such advice may unintentionally assert that individuals are not 'enough,' leading to potential setbacks in self-esteem and personal growth. The video underscores that dating success cannot be guaranteed, advocating for self-awareness and authenticity over self-doubt. By improving personal attributes like kindness and intelligence, individuals can enhance their attractiveness without relying on preconceived notions or societal pressures. Ultimately, the video highlights the importance of living authentically and adjusting perceptions to embrace genuine connections.

Highlights

• HealthyGamerGG explores why self-improvement might not guarantee dating success. 🤔
• Self-improvement advice could backfire by attacking self-esteem. 🙅‍♂️
• True success in dating comes from authenticity and personal integrity. 🏆
• Kindness and intelligence over superficial traits lead to meaningful relationships. 💖
• Reassessing perceptions about dating can enhance personal and social life. 🧠

Key Takeaways

• Self-improvement is not a guaranteed solution for dating success, as it might imply people aren't enough. 💔
• Authenticity and self-awareness are crucial in forming genuine connections. 🧘
• Kindness, intelligence, and financial security are key aspects people seek in partners. 💡
• Advice should be personalized as generic guidance often lacks specificity. 📖
• Changing life perceptions can drastically improve social interactions and dating. 🤝

Overview

The video by HealthyGamerGG dives deep into the pitfalls of thinking self-improvement is a quick fix for dating woes. The discussion opens with a critical analysis of how such advice, although well-meaning, can lead to feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. This narrative challenges the pervasive idea that more effort or change is always needed without considering the individuality and genuine self-worth of people.

Further into the conversation, the importance of authenticity, kindness, and human connection over generic self-improvement comes to the forefront. While it's tempting to think that hitting the gym or earning more money will directly equate to dating success, the speaker points out the essential role of intrinsic personal values and intelligence, emphasizing that how we perceive and project ourselves deeply impacts our dating experiences.

Concluding with a call to introspective thinking, the video encourages viewers to shed assumptions and preconceived notions. By learning to interact with individuals as they are, and not as projections of past biases or social media influences, people can create healthier, more genuine relationships. This shift away from societal pressures to focus on personal authenticity and direct, honest communication is highlighted as a transformative approach to improving one's dating life.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 10:00: Introduction and Misconceptions about Self-Improvement in Dating The chapter begins by challenging the reader's perception of their dating life and encourages living differently to experience change. It questions assumptions made when someone doesn't respond to texts, emphasizing that our perceptions are projections rather than reality.
• 10:00 - 20:00: Key Traits for Attractiveness and Self-Improvement The chapter titled 'Key Traits for Attractiveness and Self-Improvement' discusses the impact of commonly given advice on self-improvement, such as going to the gym or lowering standards, which are often perceived as helpful at first glance. The speaker reflects on how these suggestions, although well-intentioned, can have negative effects, leading to feelings of inadequacy. This realization highlights the potential for self-improvement strategies to backfire, as they might imply that one is not sufficient as they are.
• 20:00 - 30:00: Perceptions and Projections in Dating The chapter titled 'Perceptions and Projections in Dating' delves into the common perceptions and societal pressures faced in the realm of dating. It highlights the tendency to attribute failures in dating to personal inadequacies, such as not having enough money, lacking dating experience, or not focusing on oneself sufficiently. The narrative critiques the prevalent notion that self-improvement is the ultimate solution to dating challenges. It raises the issue that advising someone to improve themselves might inadvertently imply that they are not good enough as they are, which contradicts the encouragement to 'love oneself.' The chapter emphasizes the often overlooked understanding that dating is complex and cannot be boiled down to individual shortcomings.
• 30:00 - 40:00: Selection Bias and Its Impact on Dating This chapter explores the concept of selection bias in dating, illustrating how failing in a relationship isn't always due to a lack of merit or effort. It brings attention to the role of chance and luck in romantic success and critiques the common advice of self-improvement as potentially damaging by inadvertently suggesting individuals' self-worth is defined by their dating success. The chapter underscores the misleading notion of meritocracy in dating, advocating for a recognition of luck and external factors impacting romantic outcomes.
• 40:00 - 50:00: The Role of Personalized Coaching in Self-Improvement This chapter explores the pitfalls of self-improvement strategies that originate from feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. It critiques common advice given in areas like dating, where people are often told to 'just improve' or 'do better,' and highlights how such advice can imply personal deficiencies. The chapter serves as a guide on understanding and addressing these challenges, emphasizing the importance of personalized coaching in fostering genuine self-improvement.

Why Self Improvement Wont Get You A Girlfriend Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 We don't realize that we could live very different lives if we started living different lives. When someone doesn't text you back, does that mean that they're texting other people? How do you know that? We do not perceive what someone else is. What we perceive is our projection of them. So, how can you fix your dating life with this? This is where what you need to do is why we need to stop telling people that self-improvement is a solution to their dating wos. Whenever my friend talks to me about relationships and dating, and if I tell him about how things didn't go
• 00:30 - 01:00 for this girl or something, he would tell me that I need to go to the gym, I need to self-improve, I need to work on myself, I need to put myself out there more, I need to lower my standards, etc. I feel like he thinks advice like th these this is helpful, but I realize now that why these kinds of advice tends to be more harmful than helpful and why self-improvement eventually backfired on me. It feels like the advice is rooted on the idea that you're not enough. You didn't put yourself out there enough. You didn't work out enough. You didn't
• 01:00 - 01:30 make enough money. You didn't have enough dating experience. You didn't focus on yourself enough. Somehow, we're made to think that if a girl doesn't like us back or it didn't go well, then there's something we failed to do or didn't do enough. Hence, the advice of self-improvement keeps getting thrown around as if doing that would solve our problems. But by giving that advice, it's like you're telling the person that they aren't enough. You can't expect people to love themselves while implicitly telling them that they aren't enough. What people fail to realize is that dating is one of those things where
• 01:30 - 02:00 you can do all of the right things and still fail. You can be good enough and the girl will still not like you back while a girl can like you even if you're not in your most optimal form. There's a lot of luck that comes to play yet somehow we are telling people that their failure is because they are not good enough. You know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, it might seem like telling people to self-improve so that they can do better with dating is good advice, but what you're really just telling them is that they're not good enough in hitting their self-esteem. Maybe they would try to
• 02:00 - 02:30 self-improve, but now it comes from a place of insecurity and incompleteness, so it's bound to backfire, right? So, when someone struggles with dating, we'll tell them, "Hey, just go to the gym. Just improve. Just do just do better, bro." And sometimes when we get this kind of advice, you know, it implies that we aren't enough. So if you guys want to understand how to deal with this, this is going to be a little bit challenging. Okay? I think there's a
• 02:30 - 03:00 really simple way to solve I want to say 80 to 90% of the problems in your dating life. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's simple. It doesn't have a bazillion steps. That's all it means. So when we look at this post, it feels like this advice is rooted on the idea that you are not enough. So when we interact with the world, there is the actual information and existence of the world outside of us and then there is our interpretation of the events around us.
• 03:00 - 03:30 So if we were to look at this advice, if you're someone who struggles to date and someone gives you advice to improve your life, I think that is good advice, right? So let's understand this. This person is completely correct that there is nothing you can do in the dating world to guarantee success because there is another human being involved at least for now until we get love robots, right? There's another human being with another set of preferences, another set of feelings and other set of circumstances. There's no way that you can guarantee
• 03:30 - 04:00 success. So now the issue becomes, okay, if I'm approaching dating and there's nothing I can do to guarantee success, what is in my control? So what is in my control are things like improving my attractiveness, improving my uh financial potential, right? So it's really interesting where a lot of people, you know, think that there are a couple of different things that research shows that people look for in partners. Okay, the first is kindness. So this
• 04:00 - 04:30 isn't being nice, this is being kind, trying to be a good person. So when people are assessing each other trying they're trying to figure out okay how will this person treat me how will they treat the people that I care about. So kindness is really important. The second one is intelligence right? So people tend to look for partners that can effectively solve problems. One of the best signals of intelligence by the way is wit. So we tend to assess people's intelligence not by their degrees but by their wit. The third thing is potential
• 04:30 - 05:00 for financial security. So you want to be with someone who you believe as your progre as your relationship progresses this person will be able to provide at a minimum for themselves and ideally for you. These are the things that we look for. So if you want to increase your chances of success you can't do anything to guarantee success but there are a lot of things that you can do to make yourself more attractive to increase the odds. So I think it's a good idea to do those things. Changing your life isn't
• 05:00 - 05:30 easy. When I was flunking out of college, I had to travel all the way to an ashram in India to begin a 7-year journey to put my life back together. Unfortunately, that option isn't available to everyone. That's why I've taken most of what I've learned, distilled it into the most important points, not just from India, but also my years of training as a psychiatrist into our coaching program. Coaches will help you set appropriate goals, maintain motivation, and hold you accountable. Thousands of people from all over the world have tried HG coaching and have
• 05:30 - 06:00 seen sustained improvements in purpose and direction in life and even reductions in feelings of depression and anxiety. So if you're interested in putting your life together but don't have 7 years to wander around India, definitely check out HG coaching. Now this person still has a valid point that doing those things doesn't necessarily guarantee success. And now we come to the biggest problem in dating which is not what the outside world is doing but our reactions to things. So when I said there is a simple
• 06:00 - 06:30 thing that you can do which will solve 80% of your dating problems. What was your reaction to my statement? Did you immediately say, "Oh my god, this guy is so full of it. This guy is like trying to sell me something. This guy doesn't know what my life is like." So, what I want y'all to pay attention to is in your mind how quickly and automatically you rejected what I was going to say, right? Like
• 06:30 - 07:00 immediately your mind has a response where it fills in the gaps. What was I going to say? Is there such a trick? Is it possible? You have no idea. But already your mind is making all kinds of judgments about me and what I'm going to say. You are not waiting for me to actually finish what I'm speaking. You are preemptively reacting to what I'm going to say. And I don't know if you guys have seen this. So, like, had a really good time. Same. I always have a wonderful time. Dinner was amazing. Please don't take this the wrong way. What's up? Did you seriously only get me
• 07:00 - 07:30 flowers? Is there something more coming? Dinner. I'm not complaining. Right. So, this text message goes on. The most female generic gift possible. Most girls don't care for them outside the movies. Lol. I would It wouldn't be so bad if you got something else, too. But just flowers. I also got dinner. It was fun. I'm confused. Dinner was an activity. Flowers are a gift. I'm not complaining about the activity of the evening. I'm complaining about the gift. Not not that hard to understand. Lol. Okay. So, when I look at the worst horror stories on the internet, this is from nice girls. I
• 07:30 - 08:00 strongly recommend nice girls and nice guys. Great great great way to learn what not to do when you're dating someone or yeah, going on dates. So, if you pay attention to all of these terrible text exchanges, what you'll find is that you're not communicating with a person. you are communicating with someone who is projecting various things onto you. Right? So when I get when I buy dinner and get you flowers, I'm running up against some kind of vision in this person's brain
• 08:00 - 08:30 that is disongruent with reality. Expectations. What are those expectations? Based on oftenimes social media influencers. The other problem is that when we ourselves are dating, what I tend to find is that people self-sabotage in dating all the time. And why do they self-sabotage? Because they are not operating based on reality. They are operating based on the projection. They are operating based on the assumptions and the associations that they attach to people's words. So
• 08:30 - 09:00 in this case, I think if you are someone who is like out of shape, right? If your standards are like unrealistic, I think those are reasonable things to improve. This advice is rooted in the idea that you're not enough. This is the critical disagreement. They're not rooted in the advice that you are not enough. That is the interpretation. That is the way that your brain associates those things. I think most of this advice is rooted in the idea that or here's how I would root
• 09:00 - 09:30 it if I was giving it to someone. Right? So now I'm making assumptions. I don't know if you guys noticed that I made an assumption. My mind did it so quickly that, oh, this advice is rooted in this and not this. I don't know that. You see how quick it happens? Maybe this advice is all rooted in the idea that you're not enough. Who am I to say that that's that the advice on the internet is all rooted in one place? Do I suddenly have psychic powers that I can understand the intentions of people, all of the human beings who post advice on the internet?
• 09:30 - 10:00 But do you see how quickly my mind jumps there? This person's mind receives this information which I think if I was offering the advice, what I would say is look, there are certain things you can control, other things you can't control. There's no way to get to 100% chance of success. But what are the things that you can do to increase your odds? What are the things that you can do to generally make yourself more competitive and more attractive to people that you're attracted to? Going to the gym, focusing on yourself, whatever. Like all that stuff sounds like steps in the
• 10:00 - 10:30 right direction. I think that's reasonable. But the key thing that we want to focus on if you guys want to improve your dating life, what you need to do is stop operating from assump assumptions. Stop operating from associations. Catch all of the gaps in your thinking in the way that you fill them in. When someone doesn't text you back, does that mean that they're texting other people? How do you know that? So, our brain operates with tons of assumptions. We fill in all kinds of gaps. We do not perceive what someone else is. What we perceive is our
• 10:30 - 11:00 projection of them. Right? And now this becomes really difficult because if I am interacting not with who you are but what I project on top of you then that becomes really hard for the other person right because you're not basing anything based on now we're kind of flipping things around. If you're projecting onto me, I'm not actually like whether what I actually do or say gets influenced by your vision of who I am. So if you give
• 11:00 - 11:30 me the benefit of the doubt, then that's great. But if you don't give me the benefit of the doubt, then I'm constantly fighting an uphill battle. And I am 100% sure that each and every one of you has been on the receiving end of this kind of experience where your parents don't give you appropriate credit. You used to be a certain way. They form an opinion of you and then even though you change, they still treat you the old way. Right? So my my favorite example of this is I worked with a patient who joined a company as an intern 6 months after another intern.
• 11:30 - 12:00 So one intern joined um like in April, the next intern joined in the fall, right? So this person has been there for 6 months. 4 years later, the intern who was there first is still lording it over. I've been here way longer than you. I came in first. I know more than you. I'm superior to you. I'm above you. Takes a lot of issue to like the second person getting promoted. They have the same job title, right? Cuz now you've been here for like 54 months and I've
• 12:00 - 12:30 been here for 48 months. There's not that big of a difference between the two of us, right? Like the experience is basically leveled out. But this other person was like, I was here first. I'm technically more experienced than you are. Therefore, you should listen to me. It's all subconscious. So this person projects out, oh this person, the my colleague is is inexperienced. I am more experienced. Shapes all of their interactions. So you'll see this all the time where people and like in dating is where it's the worst where you're like the the person you're dating or talking
• 12:30 - 13:00 to on the app is not responding to you. They're responding to this amalgamation, some, you know, Frankenstein's monster stitched together flesh golem of what they think men or women are. And for you to be on the receiving end of that feels impossible because you're not just trying to prove yourself. You are trying to prove yourself, but you're starting not from zero. You're starting from some negative 1,000 score that is based on all of this person's experiences with
• 13:00 - 13:30 your gender that started 4 years ago. So you're climb climbing out of a hole that you didn't even make. Now, here's the crazy thing. We all do this. We all do this because our human brain draws conclusions from interactions so that it can make predictions about the future. I ate at this restaurant. I started throwing up. Therefore, the next time I go to this restaurant, I'm going to be worried about throwing up. That's just how it happens. So, how can you fix your dating life with this? This is where what you need to do is remove as many associations as you can. Notice that
• 13:30 - 14:00 when someone interacts with you, you attach all kinds of meanings to their interaction. Why aren't they texting you back? Why are they texting you back? Are they texting too much? What does that mean? What do all of their actions mean? This is the most important question to ask yourself. As you become aware of all of the stuff that you are attaching on to them, these things will slowly start to reduce and then something cool will happen. You will start interacting with a human. You won't have green shades on.
• 14:00 - 14:30 You won't have red shades on. Right? Right? So, when you've got your red tinted glasses, red flags look gray, I guess, or normal. And when you have green tinted glasses, the red flags will still look gray, right? Everything looks positive or everything looks negative. Like, you can't tell. And so, what we really need to do is refine our perception, judge the person for what they are. And now, what's going to happen next? But Dr. K, what about the other people? Right? So even if I filter my percept or stop
• 14:30 - 15:00 filtering my perceptions, if I start to see the world as it is, it doesn't correct for all the crazy people out there who don't do that. And you're 100% correct, right? But this is where what I've observed, this is so like back of the napkin kind of math, is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are living in the real world and people who are living on the internet. And these two people don't usually interact very often. There are camps of people who just exist on the internet and their perception of what is
• 15:00 - 15:30 going on in the world is based on the internet. And the reason I say that these people don't interact very often is because so I'm a parent. I sometimes go to the playground with my kids. And there's a bunch of like 40some 50some late 30some parents who are tired, sleepdeprived, trying to get through the day. And they don't like live on the internet. They seem to be like relatively like they're like kind of like normies. It's kind of weird, right? Right? I'm the one 4channer amongst all the normies. And so what I've noticed is that as you start cleaning your
• 15:30 - 16:00 perception, you quickly realize, okay, this person is crazy. And you just move away from them. The other thing really cool thing that happens is once you start doing this, other people who also do this will be attracted to you and you will be attracted to them. I don't mean romantically. It's like you quickly realize okay this person is like responding to who I am instead of some projection and then you will gravitate towards them and they will gravitate towards you since you are actually
• 16:00 - 16:30 responding to who the person is your social skills improve drastically because the moment that they say oh I'm a liberal or I'm a conservative it doesn't trigger rant.exe you are able to accept this person for who they are and everyone likes being treated for what they do. No one likes being treated for what other people project onto them. And so it's kind of bizarre how quickly you will enter a different world. A world where you have social events. A world where
• 16:30 - 17:00 your friends will try to hook you up with people. A a a world where like you actually are meeting people who are like decent human beings and are not like completely judgmental like right off the bat. Like it's crazy that this world exists, but this is not a world that you will find on the apps. Maybe some people from there will be on the apps, which is why a lot of people do end up, you know, meeting and successfully engaging in relationships using dating apps. But it's like there's like two classes of people. The people who are quite, you know, open-minded and have a clean
• 17:00 - 17:30 perception and people who don't. And then there's all sorts of other caveats to that. But make sense, right? So it's the biggest problem with dating right now is the perceptions that we have. So this is the biggest mistake that I think human beings make. The world that you experience is shaped a lot by your actions. There is a selection bias. So I see this all the time. So I I had a you know a patient who was incredibly wealthy and they like to show it off.
• 17:30 - 18:00 And then what I found what they found what they struggled with is that when they started dating someone they were highly concerned that this person was just with them for their money. Right? So what they were doing is behaving in such a way where they lacked confidence. Right? Because people don't love me for me. They love me for my money. So they have some set of experiences like this. Now that I lack confidence, what am I going to do to bolster my confidence? I'm going to buy really nice things so that people are impressed by me. Now that I buy really nice things so that people are impressed by me and I walk around trying to impress everyone, I
• 18:00 - 18:30 select for the people who are attracted to nice things and then when I start dating them, they seem to be really into nice things and very materialistic. But this is a situation that I created. This is the biggest mistake that a lot of people make. When I work with dudes who are alphas and are worried that women only want one thing, they approach women in a different way. They weed out all of the women right
• 18:30 - 19:00 away who want something deeper and more meaningful. And you will select for the women who are transactional. Right? The results of any study that you do depend on your selection criteria, your inclusion criteria. You all understand that? So what you the population that you select for will give you a result. If I recruit people who are self-made millionaires and I pull them about work ethic and I take people who are
• 19:00 - 19:30 inherited millionaires and I pull them for work ethic, the answers that I get will be very different. Make sense? So a lot of our the reality that we live in is a function of our selection. And the problem is when we get really upset about something, we don't realize how much control we have over our lives. This is the real tragedy. We don't realize that we could live very different lives if we started living different lives. And this is why like I
• 19:30 - 20:00 know this sounds crazy, but like I mean I I believe this because we do this, right? This is what we do. So, I I did this for myself and I spent my life now devoted to helping other people change the way that they live their lives. I took all of the stuff that I learned, developed it into something like a coaching program, and now the real question became, okay, is this is this only like the Dr. K effect? Is there a selection bias with me? Or can we do this at scale? And what we found from our original study of 1453, this is our
• 20:00 - 20:30 pilot study of 1453 clients is that we see an average of over a 50% improvement in direction and purpose in life. 20 to 30% reductions in feelings of like anxiety and sadness and stuff like that, right? So this is something that can be learned and can be taught. That's why we make these YouTube videos because we try to teach these principles so that you can hopefully incorporate these principles. Right? All right. If y'all are interested in getting there faster and working with someone, then by all means, check out the coaching program.
• 20:30 - 21:00 If not, we're going to continue streaming. You know, we have a ton of videos, all kinds of stuff, right? So, do what works for you. Okay? So, there's a lot of people who are saying like, you know, my situation is different. I don't make any money for what I do. I can't say that about everyone. So, that that's also why. So, I want you all to understand this. Okay? So, there's a big problem with advice, which is that advice is generic. So people will say, "Oh, this is terrible advice. This is good advice." The whole purpose of advice is that it is information. It is
• 21:00 - 21:30 guidance that is offered without any specificity. You all get that? That's why advice generally speaking sucks. So especially advice that you get on the internet is not made for you. Here's been my overwhelming experience as a psychiatrist. If you want to improve your life, you have to tailor things to your life. So, we watch this video at the very beginning about, you know, some guy who uses bottled water to rinse out his mouth and goes for a swim and and whatever, right? So, any advice that
• 21:30 - 22:00 this person gives is going to be hard to translate to your situation. And a lot of people get confused about like, oh my god, like why is Dr. K like talking about coaching? Like, why is he doing this? Why doesn't he just make more YouTube videos? is because YouTube videos are going to or streams like this are going to have a drop off in applicability to your situation. I'm not saying they're not useful. I love it. Right? So, generic advice we see, by the way, people who watch our content, their depression and anxiety may improve by
• 22:00 - 22:30 somewhere around 9%. We have some data to that effect. We haven't formally studied it. And that makes sense, right? So, when I make a YouTube video, if you watch our content regularly, we're worth like maybe a 10% bump. That's like pretty good. I imagine that the range is actually greater like so some people improve a lot some people improve less but the key thing is if you're struggling like I think it's really important to work with an individual right because that person can take certain principles apply them to your individual life so the yield will be way better the way the analogy that I'd use
• 22:30 - 23:00 is like you can watch a YouTube video about how to play a game successfully that's very different from working with a coach who is analyzing your replays which one do you think will result in a greater increase in rank faster. Like I started working with a Dota 2 coach and my rank climbed by like you know about a thousand MMR like in a month and it's because they're tailored to your specific problems. Hey y'all, hope you enjoyed today's video. We talk about a bunch of topics like this on the channel, so be
• 23:00 - 23:30 sure to subscribe for more. If you're already subscribed, GG and we'll see you in chat.