Four Things Greater Than All Things Are: The Successful Seduction of Women

Serving as “Attract Your Dream Partner” expert for a major website, I get questions. I get the same questions in my coaching practice. “I saw this girl in the bookstore and I want to ask her out. What do I do?” “I want to ask this woman out but I can’t get her attention.” “There’s this woman at work …”

Seduction is the art of getting what you want, and “four things greater than all things are: women and horses and power and war.” That quote is from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of the King’s Jest.” It appears on the dedication page of George Crile’s bestseller, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about the War in Afghanistan. This book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802141242/susandunnmome-20n ) is a real page turner, the story of one man’s quest for women and mules and power and war. (Why mules? Read the book.)

However, if you check out “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” you will see that it ends with: “Two things greater than all things are, The first is Love, and the second War. And since we know not how War may prove, Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love.”

So let us talk of love.

Winning the hand of the woman you love is probably the most important conquest you will make because no amount of success in the workplace can make up for failure at home.

So how do you go about it?

Being persuasive about anything requires a lot more than just IQ. It requires EQ – emotional intelligence. Facts alone do not persuade people. Nor do aggressive actions. Emotions do. You’re not going to win someone over – whether it’s for a date or for a defense contract – by the simple recitation of facts. There’s a lot more involved in it than that. How you handle the emotional quotient can make the difference in the sale.

As Daniel Goleman wrote, EQ can matter more than IQ for success in life. We see people all the time who are geniuses, who can’t seem to get it together in the field of human relations.

What is Emotional Intelligence? Emotional Intelligence is a group of competencies which, together, allow you to handle your own emotions and those of others, and apply this to create win-win situations.

Handling your emotions? I’m thinking about the young man who wanted to date me in college – evidently quite a lot, because when I turned him down he replied, “That’s okay, I like your room-mate better anyway.” As we say in EQ-land, anger is a good way of knowing what you want, but not a good way of getting it. While I had not really made up my mind about him, he certainly sealed his fate with his response.

An emotional intelligence program will give you information about how the brain works, where emotions comes from, how to manage them, how to identify them in others, how to build resilience, become more flexible, and so forth.

A GOOD EQ program will also address the role of the arts – music, literature, art, dance. The Arts are included in The EQ Course™ because it’s an important avenue to understanding emotion and to whole-brained thinking. The arts provide, and build, effective knowledge and expression of emotion, development of specific important parts of the brain, fantastic stress relief with no bad side effects, and a sort of enrichment that’s hard to put into words. In fact that’s why we have the arts – for the things we must deal with for which there are no words.

Emotional expression? A kiss is still a kiss, yes, but what are you going to say when you hear the dreaded, “Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love”?

But there’s another reason why you might be interested in emotional intelligence and exploration of the arts.

One of the most interesting points to come out of “Charlie Wilson’s War” is that this congressman from Texas, whose war was the War in Afghanistan, and who eventually gained a seat on the Appropriations Committee, valued more highly his life-time appointment to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which gave him two tickets to any event he wanted to attend.

Why?

Because four things greater than all things are, and the first was women.