 Gentlemen, James Marshall here from the Natural Lifestyles and Reporting Floor 21 Convention from Abed. Now, I've got a very important video for you today. This I recently released on my own channel, it got a whole lot of buzz and feedback from guys that it really resonated with and I wanted to share it with you guys here today. This is all about the six phases that you will inevitably need to go through over the long term when you're trying to become excellent with women. Most guys think that seduction is about learning some techniques or a method, getting good at it and then forgetting about it, but really this is a long game. This is about personal evolution and growth and if you don't understand the different phases that you will need to go through and master, then it's very easy to fall off the track and basically give up. I consider this to be probably one of the most important videos that I've ever put out. I suggest you watch it. Hope you enjoy. Gentlemen, James Marshall here. Today I want to cover a topic which I get asked about a lot, which stems around this question, which is how long does it take to get good at this? So guys ask me this a lot, especially when they come on a workshop after a couple of days, when they've been out slogging it out in field and getting the inevitable rejections and all the nasty stuff that happens when you first start this and they start thinking, ah, how long is this going to last? Like how long is it going to go on all this going up to girls and then saying go away before I can finally just be surrounded by chicks all the time and not have to worry about this? And usually I don't like to give guys any definitive answer about this because most men who are getting involved in seduction are often very analytical. They tend to think about things in terms of metrics and that's not really the way I teach. I want you to think I need to do a thousand approaches in order to get X level of ability. However, what I do want to talk about today is something that's become really apparent to me as I have been writing my book, which is in a nutshell that there are distinct phases that you will go through if you follow this journey to its conclusion. There is no conclusion. It cycles around and starts again, but if you take it through to your potential, you will come through what I've just broken down into six distinct phases. And it is really important that when you get into this, that you start to look at this as a long game, right? Because I think many men come into the seduction sphere and what they think is okay, I'm going to learn a method, a method, choose a method and I'm going to get really good at it and then I will be done. And I will always have pussy and girlfriends and love in my life. It doesn't really work like that. It's not like riding a bicycle. You don't just learn it once and then you're done for life. The process takes time and in answer to that question, how long does it take? I am going to give an answer now. In my experience, my personal experience and from teaching many people and watching guys get good at this, it takes at least two years and often up to five years to get very good at this. Now before you go, oh, shit, five years, screw this, I'm going to go and watch Game of Thrones. You need to be aware that I don't mean it's going to take five years before you get laid. I don't mean it's going to take two years before you get results. You can get results now, right? If you just turn off your computer and walk out the door, don't even listen to the end of this video and go and talk to a girl, you'll get a result, right? You'll get some learning. You might even get that girl's number. You might even end up fucking that girl. So of course you can get results almost instantly as soon as you start taking correct action. But what I'm talking about is in order for this to become an instinct, something that is truly internalized and something that works whether or not you're in a good state, whether or not you're depressed or supremely happy, I know that I can go tomorrow morning very grumpy and in a bad mood or whatever and I can make this work. I'm not dependent on my state. I don't have to be warmed up. For the last few weeks I've been literally locked in this room, writing my book, filming all this stuff. I have an approach to a girl in ages and tomorrow, sorry, next week I have to go and teach a workshop. I'll get up on the Monday, I'll go out and I'll get my group of guys in Budapest and I'll start approaching girls and demonstrating and within a couple of sets I'll be fine, I'll be back on because of all of the years of work that I did previous to that. So what I want, the purpose of this video is to start to get your head around the idea that this is going to be an arc of development that is going to last years and it's a beautiful arc. Those years are not something to dread. Those will be the best years of your life. Actually, when I look back over my life, that period when I really started getting into this and through to when I really had it locked in, even though that was probably the most difficult part of my life, it's so precious to me. I learned more in that period than I ever did and never will again. The curve was exponential. And as I've been writing this book, which is about my life during that period, particularly over the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about this and it was during this writing process that I started to really divide these phases and look at them as distinct discrete entities and see that yeah, they do exist and they happen pretty much to anyone who goes and follows this rabbit hole as far as it can go. And so I wanted to give you guys a brief taste of that tonight just to see you can start thinking about where is this going long term. In my as part of my book launch, which is coming out this week, I have put together a very long version of this. It's essentially a course that allows you to plot out the next two to five years of your life psychologically and also for in terms of what behaviors and what methods you're going to be following. Because if you have a roadmap in the same way that you start university and you do X amount of years study because you know that at the end of that you'll be qualified to move on to something else. You should start thinking about your seduction practice like that. Don't think of it like I'm trying to learn this pickup skill today and hopefully I can get it over with as soon as possible so I can just stop feeling these weird feelings when I talk to girls. I have always looked at seduction as a catalyst and a mechanism for expansive personal growth for a supreme personal growth. It's always been around about trying to find myself not run away from myself. It's always been about developing myself not just trying to develop a skill, right? So let's just look at these very briefly at what these six phases are that you will inevitably go through, whether I call them six phases or not. They're going to happen to you if you follow this. And look, and the nature of them is that within each phase are certain inherent pitfalls, certain things that are very difficult or aspects that people tend to get bogged down in and plateau or often give up. And that's what you need to be really wary of because if you're not aware of what the characteristics, the tendencies of the phase are, then it's very easy to fall off into the pitfalls that are associated with it. On the other hand, there are certain lessons and goals and breakthroughs that you will be aiming to go through during that phase. And these are the things that you need to focus on. Okay, so if you look at phase one, which I call the beginner's mind. Phase one is where a lot of men are currently at. This is where you are first becoming conscious that it's possible for just a normal guy to start going and talking to women. They find very attractive in everyday situations, whether that's day game, night game, on the street, in the club, whatever. Prior to you being aware of that as an idea, and for most people now, that's a fairly mainstream idea. Back when I was starting this in the early 2000s, that was not a common idea. It was not generally accepted that a normal dude could just go and do this. Now, because of the internet, because of the proliferation of this information, most people can at least intellectually accept that it's possible. For the guys that out there that keep holding on to these, it's only for short tall guys, it's only if you're good looking, it's only if you're not Asian. It's all their higher actresses every time they do infill. All of this stuff that we keep seeing on our infill videos and other infill videos, I just feel really sorry for you guys. I'm not faking my infill videos. I get laid, Liam gets laid, my students get laid. I've got nothing to really prove anymore. You are the poor fucker that's the one that has to sit there holding on to this limiting belief and not getting laid. So I can't do much for the people that are holding on to these limitations. But for most guys, okay, they accept that it's a possibility. They're entertaining a space inside their psychology. And this is where the beginner's mind phase really develops. It's that process of thinking about it, planning it, investigating material. But the pitfall of that is of course that you stay there. You stay in the analysis or the worst, the situation that I explained where you deny that it's possible. This is also the phase where people start going out and hopefully starting to talk to girls. And this is the beginner's hell, okay? So when you first go out approaching girls, often you get a lot of rejections. You don't get what you hope you're gonna get instantly. You don't necessarily get the numbers or the kisses or the dates or the sex. And then sometimes you just do. Sometimes you just get laid because you go out and you try the guys that pull the trigger, try to pull the trigger, other ones that get laid. I always say that the people who get good at this are the ones who try to open and try to close. The rest in the middle, you'll get better at that as we go along. Okay, so this is the beginner's mind phase. And you need to accept that it inherently has a lot of struggle in it and a lot of struggle and self-doubt as well. Because at this point, you don't necessarily have enough reference experiences of success. You don't yet really have faith in yourself, in the system or the action of seduction. And so it is a very delicate phase and it is one where you need to change your benchmark of goals. Don't think you're gonna get models the day you go out and talk to girls. Maybe you will. Okay, maybe you'll get a model. But if you do, that will be an outlier. That will be just a statistical anomaly. More likely that you'll get a variety of results, many of which will just be feedback, learning, experience, that's really what you're trying to take from this beginner's phase. Okay, so if you keep going, and unfortunately many men don't, they do this, they go and do a dozen approaches and they're like, oh, that was, I didn't like that. That felt weird. I feel silly, I was embarrassed. This is, I'll just, I'll go and do some more research and I'll get back to this in a year. Don't do that, please. Just stay with it because, yes, it gets better. The second phase is the dating game. That's what I call it. This is where you are now comfortable enough with everyday approaching. You can approach girls in the day. You can approach them at clubs. You're not an expert. It's not perfect. You don't get the girls all the time but you are getting numbers. You're getting dates. Sometimes you get laid. You're still probably going through periods, long periods of enforced celibacy. You're probably not getting sex as often as you'd like. You're still dealing with a lot of the frustrations and now because you're deeper into the interactions with girls, so you're on dates, you'll have more of those experiences was where you're having, you're sitting across a girl at a date and it's just not working. The conversation is not necessarily flowing or you get through that and then you almost get her home and she slips through your fingers and then she doesn't return your calls. So this phase is more about consolidation. This is about getting more experience with not just the meeting a girl and getting her phone number. It's getting more experience with being with women. So spending good amounts of time with attractive women and for many men, that's new. Especially if you've come from technical backgrounds or female isolated backgrounds due to your culture or your choice of career or whatever and you don't spend a lot of time around beautiful women. This should be really the major aim for this time is to get used to being around hot girls, learn how to be relaxed with them, learn how to have conversations, learn about what makes them tick, what they're actually thinking, what they actually respond to. This is a great time for much more deeper experimentation and that should really be what you're looking for. What I would say the main pitfall of this second phase is settling, right? Because at this phase, you will start to have sex. You'll be dating girls and sometimes they'll take their clothes off and you won't be looking through their window. You'll be in the room with them and then the temptation can be to just go, all right, well, this girl's cute and she's nice. I haven't met a girl that's like this maybe even before and she wants to have a relationship so I think I should do that because I'm not sure if I'm really gonna get any better at this or it gets any better than this at all. And that's a very bad mistake to make. At this point in your development phase two, when you're really still just learning about women and about dating and how they tick, you shouldn't be getting into a long-term relationship. Definitely start having casual relationships. Start having fuck buddies. Don't just have one-night stands. I don't advocate having lots and lots of one-night stands particularly. I don't judge them. Sure, I've had some great one-night stands but you don't get to know somebody that well usually in one night and if that is the style of seduction you're getting into which is just like 4 a.m. trashy pickups where you take home drunk girls and bang them and don't see them again. If you continue like that, I've met some people who do that for decades. That's a very shallow existence and you'll never learn much about women and you'll never have any really great connections. So yeah, sure, have the odd one-night stand when it comes along but I would be aiming to develop sexual relationships with women but not exclusive. Get stuck in one for years at this point. Reason being, you don't have choice yet. If you get into a serious relationship when you don't have choice, then you will lose power very quickly. The woman will very often wrap you around her little finger and crush you because more or less you asked her to because you stepped into it without the resources and the boundaries to know what you really want and what you're really willing to put up with. So that is the danger, main danger of phase two. Phase three is multiple lovers. Now this is where stuff gets really fun and really complicated, really interesting. So this phase is where we're going, we're coming out of the going on lots of dates to now we are seeing girls regularly, not just one, maybe two, maybe three, maybe more. I for a time have tried to do this with around five girls, that's too many unless you're only doing this. Remember that I don't have a normal job and in the book that I wrote, it reaches this peak where I reached the sex pentangle which is five girlfriends all at once because I just wanted to see if that was possible. It is, I don't think it's that healthy. So this is having a couple of lovers or two, three girls that you see regularly, maybe one you see once a week, one that you only see once a month because she comes into town every now and then. If this is where you start to work out the multiple relationship dynamics. Now some guys will be at this point going, well, that's not really what I'm after. I don't really want to have five girlfriends or three girlfriends or even two girlfriends. I got into this because I wanted to get a great girlfriend. Fine, that is a perfectly healthy and reasonable goal and I'm not here to try and convince everyone they need to be polyamorous and have 10 girlfriends. However, it goes back to what I said before about choice. Most men follow this cycle, inactive single. Single, not because they want to be but because they have to be, celibate, not out of choice, more or less they're not getting any sex. Maybe they occasionally get lucky just at a party or one drunken night and then long dry stretches of no sex and they think that's normal. Like guys talk about it, oh, I've been through a dry patch. I'm like, what does that mean? I haven't been laid in a few months. If that's where you have come to a point where you think that's normal, then I've got news for you. That's not okay. That is not okay. If you're in that position, you need to desperately get out of that position. To be a happy, healthy, functional adult male, you need to be having sex a lot every week at least. I mean, I prefer to have sex every day and I worked very hard and very diligently to get to the point where that is my reality. I have sex every day. I want to have sex now. There was times in my life where I didn't and that is painful. And for guys where that's lasting months, how can you really be concentrated on anything else? How can you actually enjoy your life if you're not getting the base level of sexual and intimacy satisfaction? So most people, most men, sorry, go from inactive single to eventually they come across a girl, usually how through their social circle and she's okay or she's decent or she's just, she'll do or she will have sex with you. And the girl decides usually, okay, yeah, I want a boyfriend and then you start a relationship. That lasts for a hell of a long year, two years, five years, 10 years and children, maybe, whatever it is, you break up inevitably and the man is out cold again on the street, often heartbroken or overweight or out of practice socially back out to inactive single. And then he continues that, a lot that miserable path until eventually he bumps into another girl and does that again. Then what does he do? He does that one, two, three times over about 10 years, maybe. And then when he's 30s or he's late 20s, one of that girl decides she wants children and so he more or less has to marry her. They have kids and that's the end of his dating life and that's the woman he's gonna be with. It doesn't usually end there actually. That relationship then lasts five, 10, 15 years. They have a horrible divorce. The guy loses half or more of his shit. There's children and courts involved and it's a horrific mess. I deal with this all the time. I'm teaching men who come out of those positions and men who are headed in that direction if they don't do something very serious about it. So make no mistake, if you don't take action in your dating life and you don't happen to have a really good social circle, sometimes guys can get away with this. That's why cool guys and girls will sometimes say, hey, shouldn't people just get together? Like isn't it a bit contrived to be learning this dating stuff? You should just be yourself, chill out, you'll meet somebody. Yeah, it's very fucky and easy for you to say cool hipster bar dude. Of course you meet people. You're a cool hipster bar dude and there's chicks around you all the time. If you're a guy who was brought up nerdy and is working in engineering, there's no cool people or there's no chicks around. There's no just chilling out at the party, you waiting for the girls to arrive. Okay, so when people say that I get pissed off because I'm like, that is you coming from a very entitled position because you happen to be socially very well positioned or very attractive or have one of these distinct advantages. For the average man out there, he's gonna have to take very, very clear action in order to change this not very enjoyable cycle that he's inevitably going to end up in. Which is why I tell you, you must get to phase three. If you wanna have a cool girlfriend, you have to choose her. How do you choose her? By having different cool girls in your life. Different sexy, interesting, loving people who are gonna be good to you so that you know what that's like. People get in abusive relationships because they're used to it. They don't know any better and that goes for men and women. Women who are beaten by their boyfriends or husband, people try to get them out and they often go back because they feel that's what they're worth because that's what they're used to. In the same way I see guys who are brow beaten by overbearing women who just crush their souls because they feel that's all they can get because they're used to that. So if that resonates with you at all or you feel like that might be the path you're going down, you need to be able to date more than one girl in order to choose the right one. Phase four is probably not what you would expect. It's the breakdown. So this can happen at any time, right? So in these phases, they do work generally in a chronology. However, the breakdown can happen at any time but it often happens when you're juggling a lot of girls or when you're coming to a crisis point in a relationship. And so by breakdown, I mean literally that. I mean a mental and emotional and possibly physical breakdown. I mean crying. I mean depression. I mean locking yourself in your room. I mean banging your head against a wall. I mean self-harm. I mean self-medication. I mean all the dark, hidden and often shameful things that happen to everybody but in this case I'm talking about men as they go through a process of self-discovery. Because self-help doesn't talk about this. Self-help is about positivity. It is about motivation. It is about morning routines and wheatgrass juice and doing the right kind of push-ups and all that stuff, which is great. Great, wheatgrass juice and paleo and all that stuff and smiling and affirmations. All good stuff. However, the reality of human life is it doesn't work like that. You don't just get on the super positivity program and then after that your life's awesome and there's never a moment of self-doubt. In my book, when you guys read it, you will see that I go through some very, very dark phases. I go through suicidal thoughts. I go through peer and this is when I'm getting laid. This is not me alone. This is me dealing with the existential crisis of suddenly having all these people's hearts that I'm somehow responsible for, of really questioning myself worth as a human being, of feeling like I'm a fraud, of hiding behind arrogance and bluster and false identities. Because when you get into seduction as a life pursuit, as something that is a catalyst for deep change, what you're really saying to the universe is, give me the extreme. Give me the extreme life. And if you ask for it and you move towards it, you'll get it. You'll get the extremes. You'll get the sex and the threesomes and the glamour and the power and the glory and you will get the shadow for all of that, right? You can live in a fairly mediocre, average bandwidth of life and kind of avoid the extremes. And to me, that's a slow death. That was always my motivation for getting good at this and progressing was that I wanted anything else except that. I so desperately didn't want a life where I was sitting with a girlfriend where I was like, and watching TV shows and meeting our couple of friends who were also looking at each other and going, oh, shit, is this it? Is that it? I was willing to do anything. I was willing to be desperately alone and live in despair and be broke and whatever else I had to to be away from that, right? So I was talking to my good friend, James McClain, dating coach today. We were filming some extra bonuses for the launch and I asked him like, what was it that propelled you to have these women that are of such exceptional beauty, which is something he's well known for? And it turned out that it wasn't like this super positive motivation. It was an extreme heartbreak and having his life fall apart that made him get up and move, right? So the breakdown will inevitably, breakdowns happen in your life and men are very bad at dealing with them usually. We're not taught to express our emotions. We don't usually talk to each other about these feelings. That's why when men try to kill themselves, they kill themselves. When women often try to kill themselves because they wanna get some attention, right? When a man decides he's gonna top himself, he drives his car into a wall. He hangs himself. Women take pills, just a few and then people find them and then give them some more support. It's hard for us as men to express ourselves, to cry, to ask for help, to fall apart because our worth as human beings is judged by whether we're successful, right? No, men are so scared of being losers that they can't accept that sometimes they need to fall apart. And so this is one of the phases that I look in this program, which most self-help kind of programs would avoid totally, is that it's okay to fall apart. It's okay to be on your path and just lose it. It's okay to fucking, you know, need to go and talk to a psychologist or a therapist or even in some extreme cases to go to hospital or to get on medication. I'm not, I don't advocate everyone getting on antidepressant so I think they can be heavily overused but there are circumstances where these interventions need to be involved. Better that you actually learn to navigate the breakdown rather than wait till it gets to a deadly point in your life. Right, so how do you make best use of a breakdown? Well, you don't want to stay there forever. You don't want to roll around in depression forever. However, the thing to take out of it is that it is often a signal for you to redirect your life. It's the midlife crisis, right? That's a common thing. I try to have a midlife crisis every year. I think it's good, have a midyear crisis. Let yourself fall into a heap, have a cry, smack your head against the wall, say to yourself, I'm nothing, I'm a loser and then go, all right, okay, enough melodrama. Where am I trying to change? What is it about my life that is not working that I need to adjust? And then you can get back on the cycle. This is the perfect time to retreat. I and all of the guys in my crew, we do at least one retreat a year. So that may be going into the Amazon jungle and taking ayahuasca. That may be doing a 10-day vipassana retreat. For me, that's often going and doing martial arts retreats. All of us here are writers and we take time away. I'm in a retreat right now. I've barely left this room in weeks because I've been writing and not just writing, but I've been introspective. I've been looking back over my life. I've been taking stock of where I've come from or where I'm going. These are good things to do. Don't save those till you're retirement. Don't save those until someone has to put you in a mental institute because you just exploded. It is important phase to learn to master and not avoid because it's gonna come one way or another. Heavy shit, huh? It's important. Phase five is the one. We're told about the one pretty much from the moment we can conceptualize things. We are fed a certain storyline in terms of romantic love and women are fed this very, very heavily, but we are as well, that there is a soulmate out there for you. There is almost a predestined partner. It's like the other piece of a two-person puzzle is out there waiting for you. It was built for you and you only. And that at some point, you guys will inevitably meet thanks to the stars crossing in fate aligning. And then when you do, your life will be perfect. You will live happily thereafter and that's it. This is the fairy tale that we are sold in terms of how relationships come together. Most people after they've had a couple of relationships start to realize that that doesn't seem to work exactly like that. However, we do often hold on to this idea that when we're ready, the right person will turn up. And that's a really dangerous, dangerous myth to hold in your mind. It's possibly one of the most damaging myths you could ever, ever believe is that the one is coming. Because what it says is you just have to wait. You don't really have to do much. Okay, maybe you need to go to some speed dating things or sort of meet some people, but they're coming. And it also says you don't need to change. Now you are perfect, more or less how you are, because somewhere out there, there's this other person that will complete you. Even if you feel deep down that you're not worthy or that you're not living your full potential, there's this idea that another person will come and fix that for you. And that's bullshit. It's a complete fabrication. It's completely untrue. And such an absurd statistical kind of idea too that out of all these people on the planet that each one of us has a perfect match out there that we're all gonna line up with, how is that gonna happen? I don't see how that makes any mathematical sense either. However, it is something that people carry around. And especially for nice guys, guys who didn't have much luck with women, it's a way to kind of give yourself some solace in the same way that religion gives very, very poor, fucked people who are living in fucked up situations, some kind of hope, because at least in the afterlife, you'll get rewarded for being shat on in this life. I don't wanna take that away from most people because maybe they need it as someone famously said, religion is the opium of the masses. I don't remember who that was. But I would say the one is also the opium of the masses, the opium of the beta, the opium of the nice guy. It's this concept that, okay, be nice, do your job, earn money, buy a house, get a car, the girl will come. And no, she won't. A girl will come. Someone will turn up probably at some point and then you will have to convince yourself that that is the one. So when I'm talking about this phase of stepping into the one, I'm talking about not that. I'm talking about when you have earned the one, when you have become the one. Because if you've gone through this beginner's hell phase one, learning seduction, learning meeting people, learning basic social skills, learning how to have some choice, you've gone through the dating rigmarole of understanding women, of communicating with them, of learning how to touch them, learning what they like in terms of being interacted with. You've started becoming their lovers. You've learned to become a great lover. You know how to make girls have orgasms. You start to understand their fantasies and that a lot of them are darker and weirder and way more complicated than anything you've ever imagined. And you've become a man of value because you hold yourself to be valuable because you have become interesting because you have a wealth of life experience. Hopefully you've traveled, you've got skills and hobbies and interests that make you a well-rounded character. Now you're starting to become ready to meet and pick up and seduce an exceptional woman. And in my book, you see this, right? I go through this process, this hero's journey, these phases, I have my breakdown, there's a couple of them actually. And I keep going and at some point I meet a woman that I am finally ready for. She was the one for me at that time. And if I hadn't have done all of the other stuff and I'd met her, fate wouldn't have gone, here she is, she just would have looked at me and gone, some dude, so what? But because I'd done elect training and all had all of those experiences, I was at a point where, yes, now I was matching her, now I was her equal, now I was ready. And this will happen to you probably in your journey that you'll reach a point, you'll be dating a bunch of girls and then one of them will appear that just makes you question this whole lifestyle. I talk to guys about, they ask me this fairly regularly, I get guys who are reaching the point of, you know, the phase three dating multiple lovers and they say, well, there's this one girl, she's really cute and she's actually the hottest girl I've ever been with, she's lovely. Maybe I should just be with her, wouldn't that be a smart decision? And I say to them, if you're asking me like that, then it's not the right decision. If there's question, if it's really a compromise and you're looking to balance things out and going, well, on one hand there's this, but on the other hand there's this, you're still settling. And no judgment, okay, sometimes people settle and then they make it work and then they grow to love each other and they have functional relationships and you don't have to have the most extreme life possible. For me, I want the best that is possible in my life. So I would say if that's what you want then if there's any question in your mind, should I be with just this girl, then you shouldn't. If it's so clear to you, if everything in your body and your cells screams, this is the girl, this is the one for now, then do it and throw yourself into it 100%. And the way that you build that, the paradigm that you live within is up to you. It doesn't have to be monogamous man, woman, only be together. That's what society tells you. You can have a primary lover and you can have other lovers. You can have a relationship like I do now where I have one lover who I'm deeply in love with, which is my partner, and we also bring other girls to join us because we're both interested in females. There's all sorts of different dynamics that people can do and that's up to you to build with your partner or partners. So what I am talking about is a primary relationship, one where you are invested emotionally where you're in love with this person. The dangers of this are many, the pitfalls are many, mainly to do with being with the wrong person, staying together with somebody too long, losing your own personal identity, becoming codependent, monogamous or very deeply committed relationships have a lot of inherent flaws and dangers within them and it takes constant vigilance to A, keep the relationship fun and vital and B, not become this one single celled, like depressing organism. All right, so that's your phase five. Phase six, and everyone's like, what, what phase six? Phase five, happily ever after, right? Really guys, really? No, phase six is the breakup, yet another piece of self-help area that most people don't talk about. If people are talking of giving love advice or relationship advice, they very rarely would tell you how to have good breakups, how to learn the skill of breaking up and I'm here to tell you that is one of the most important skills you need to know. I've been through a number of serious relationships in my life, I've had a number of breakups and they've been bad and some of them have crippled me for years. Literally they've wiped me out in terms of feeling alive and a really bad breakup does that to you. Some people never recover from bad breakups. They carry cynicism and baggage for the rest of their life because of one deep heartbreak that they had and that's because they didn't learn to process the breakup and they didn't accept that it is actually a natural part of the cycle. Okay, sometimes, very occasionally, a boy and a girl will meet, they'll stay together for the rest of their lives and they will be very, very happy about that. Of course in my parents' generation, particularly my grandparents' generation, people did stay together for their entire lives often. That wasn't because back then they were better at being in love for 50 years, really. That was because back then marriage was different. It was not necessarily based on a feeling of romantic entanglement. It was based on practicalities. You have to get married in order to survive. You have to have children. It's part of the way the society is built. There's not really any other options. You can't be gay. You can't live in unwed situations. You can't, it was just not accepted, right? So people did. They stayed together for a long, long time, mostly. But were they happy? Were your grandparents happy all their lives? Mine certainly weren't. People did it because that was the done thing and because they were keeping families together. Whether you think that was a golden age or not, I think today's much more interesting because now we have the choice to tell people to fuck off, to say, you know, don't like you anymore and I don't have to stay here for another 20 years. In fact, I think I'm just gonna go. And that's a good thing because many relationships, even really good ones, reach a point where they're no longer good. I've had some awesome relationships in my life but at some point they became bad and they were toxic and they were no longer serving me. And knowing when it is time to leave a relationship is a vital skill. Most people, myself included, stay in a relationship about 30% at least longer than they should. And I have clients often, because I talk to them always about their lives, their previous relationships. And I hear things like, I was with my ex-wife for 10 years, it was after the first year that I realized I didn't love her. And I'm like, oh dude, oh. And then we had kids because I thought that would make things better. You know, these kinds of decisions and it just makes you wanna cry because people have put years into a partnership that was a bad idea. Not because that woman was an awful, evil human being, maybe sometimes they are, but mostly not, because not because you're a asshole, can't either, just because you two are not compatible or you were compatible for some time and then you became not compatible. So, phase six, if you wanna be a true master of this cycle, is learning to separate from a partner at the right time, be able to process the emotions, the grief, the mourning, the anger, whatever the jealousy, whatever it is that comes out of that and allow yourself to feel that and then to transmute it and let it go so that you can then return back to phase one. But you're not returning back to phase one as the novice that you first started. It's more like a spiral, right? So you go one, two, three, four, five, six and now we're at one, but we're at a higher level. Now you have all of the learning, the understanding, the experience, the expansiveness to do this journey again, which is, okay, I'm a single guy again. What am I gonna do? Am I gonna lie in my bed and cry? Well, yeah, do that for a week if you want to. But am I gonna stay there? No, I'm gonna get back out, I'm gonna meet some girls. I'm not gonna try to replace my last girlfriend because that was a heavy, intense relationship. I'm just gonna go out and do that approaching thing again because I can, because I have the skills, because if I did it the other way, the inactive single, monogamous inactive single, I'm coming out like a baby again just going, oh, shit, I am all alone and I'm older and slower and a lot of my friends seem to have disappeared because I was in a tiny little box for four years. And oh, shit, I guess I'm gonna go on RSVP.com and start swiping on Tinder. It doesn't work, guys, it just makes your fingers sore. It's a waste of fucking time. Yeah, right? So there you have it in a very small nutshell, the next two to 50 years of your life. But the point of this video is I want you to start being conscious of this, to start looking at your love life as an arc of growth, not just a skill set that you're learning, not just a scramble away from a pain point to the nearest woman that's gonna look after you because you'll pay the price for that. If you don't do this consciously, then it will just happen to you and it won't be fun. You won't get the best. It's like winning the lottery as opposed to learning how to become an entrepreneur that becomes wealthy, all right? People who try to win the lottery are delusional. If they think that's the way they're gonna get rich. It's the same way that guys who think they're gonna get their 10, their one by hanging around waiting and waiting for the one, it's the same kind of delusional bullshit. People who get wealthy, people learn how to understand money, understand business, understand that process, take some risks, lose it all, start again, lose it all, keep going until they get somewhere. Guys who get exceptional women, who have exceptional relationships are the ones that go through these six phases and then come around at some point at the back to, not to square one, but to the beginning again from a different place and then run it again. And in that way, each time you run that cycle, maybe you do a two, three, 10, I don't know, there can be many rotations that will be different for every person, but it will mean that each time you come out stronger, better and more prepared for an absolutely excellent life, which is coming to you because you've earned it. So if this has been interesting to you, if it hasn't been, then I may as well quit because I think this is pretty interesting and important stuff. I will be presenting in my product that I'm releasing this week a much more expanded version of this, a program for you to actually plan and prepare and build action steps to work through these six phases in a way that's functional, that actually serves you so that you can not make all of the mistakes necessarily that I have to make, not have all of the heartbreak and the long breakdowns, you can just make your breakdowns effective and work for you. So that's James Marshall from the Natural Lifestyles, signing out. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Now, before I go, I've got a very special announcement, which is that after 10 years of writing, I have finally finished an amount right now releasing my first ever book, which is called A Natural History, The Seduction Journals of James Marshall, which is exactly that. The evolution, the story of me going from broke, loser, hippie musician, through to international man of mystery and sexual abundance. I dish the dirt on myself. This is no holds barred. I tell everything, my ups and downs from Shaolin Temple through to becoming a porn star, a rock star, massage therapist, all my failures and right through to juggling five amazing girlfriends until I finally find the girl I dreams. It's a crazy ride. And if you guys are interested, then click the link below for full details. This is James Marshall from the Natural Lifestyles and reporting for a 20-week convention, signing out.