One of the easiest ways you can make yourself appear more attractive to women is by improving your body language. A study at UCLA showed that 93 per cent of communication is from “non-verbal” cues. Here’s some tips that you can use right away to improve your own non-verbal communication.

Start from the center

When we feel threatened, embarrassed or nervous, we tend to cover up one or more of:

• Our face, nose & mouth
• Our neck (by lowering out head)
• Our chest (by folding our arms)
• Our groin (by crossing our legs)

If you think about it, you’ll notice that all of these run in a straight line down the centre of your body. To fix this and appear more confident, think about keeping the center of your body open. Your head should be upright, your back straight, legs comfortably apart and your hands by your sides.

Hold your drink by your side

As in the first tip above,we tend to cover our chests when we feel nervous or threatened. Head to any bar or club on a Saturday night and you’ll see hoards of men standing around with their drinks across their chests like a kind of protective shield. If you want to appear more confident, hold yours low and by your side.

Smile

Confident guys who are successful with women tend to smile a lot, so if you want to have the appearance of being one of these guys you should do the same. Smiling’s contagious, so if you’re smiling, it’s likely she will be too.

Use eye contact, but don’t stare

Maintain eye contact with her as you talk and if she’s in a group, move your eyes from one person’s to the next. If you’re not used to doing this, choose one eye and focus on it as you and her are talking. Be careful not to stare though, that can be creepy!

Don’t lean in

Next time you’re out at a bar or club, watch some of the guys that are trying to pick up girls. Most men tend to lean in towards the girl they have their eye on far more than they actually need to. Although I do recommend not being afraid to be a little physical early on, there’s no need to lean towards her unnecessarily.

Remember the quote from the Tao of Steve “We pursue that which retreats from us”. Leaning in communicates that you are chasing her. Not doing it subtly suggests that you are “retreating”.

Keep those hands still!

Another sign that you are lacking confidence is excessively fidgeting and gesturing with your hands. When we’re nervous, we tend to move around a lot more than we normally would, as we’re afraid of losing the other person’s attention. So, if you don’t gesticulate wildly and keep your hands relatively still, it will help to communicate confidence.

A little trick – hook your thumbs in your back pockets. This has the extra benefit of making you lean back slightly, and you remember that leaning in too much is bad right?

Good, confident body language is far more important than the words you use when trying to attract women. Start using the tips above straight away and you should see a big difference in the way girls act around you.

Working as a professional dating coach, I’m often researching what advice is out there for guys, but recently I took a look at the other side of the coin – what kind of advice do girls look for online?

At the time of writing there are 108 million results for “How to get a guy to notice you”, 32 million results for “How to get a guy to approach you” and a massive 122 million results for “How to get a guy to ask you out on a date”. It would seem that girls are crying out for advice on how to get guys to take notice, talk to them and ask them out. And what do you do, in most cases? Nothing.

There are a bunch of signals girls will sometimes give off so that you can tell that she is interested, but not all girls are so good at this. Here’s my advice. Next time you’re talking to a girl, if she hasn’t run away and seems to be having a good time, there’s a good chance she might like you. What have you got to lose by asking for her number and suggesting you go out for a drink together? After all you wouldn’t want her to go home lonely to search for advice on how she can get the next guy to ask her out, would you?

Amusingly, I have a bunch of female friends that are always complaining they can’t meet a “nice guy”. The truth is, they meet lots of nice guys. They just aren’t attracted to them.

So what is it about bad boys that drives women wild?

Some girls will genuinely go for guys who treat them really bad and are not good for them emotionally. These girls are often low self-esteem and probably not the kind of girls you want to be attracting anyway. However, there are some traits that “bad boys” have that you can learn from, that will help you to attract more women.

Bad boys are confident

Girls like confident guys, and bad boys usually have more than their fair share of confidence. These are men who know what they want and are not afraid to go and get it.

Aside from learning how to act more confidently by using your body language to your advantage, there are a few other things you can do to mimic what bad guys do.

For instance, “nice guys” often pander to a girl’s every want and need in a hope that she’ll like them for it. If this is you, try being honest and disagreeing from time to time. If you don’t like something she does, say so. If you want to go somewhere or do something, do it because you want to, not because you think she’ll like it.

We want what we can’t have

Girls are often told to play hard to get in order to make a man crazy about her. Well, it works the other way around too. “Bad boys” are unpredictable, difficult to make plans with and seem unlikely to get into a relationship. This has the effect of making them all the more desirable.

Never be too available to a girl, and always have something better to do if she cancels on your plans. If you get together with a new girl, don’t see her more than once per week for the first couple of months, and make sure you’ve got lots of fun stories about what you’ve been doing in between your time together.

Stimulating a girl’s emotions

Girls love a little drama in their lives. Why do you think they watch so many soap operas and spend all that time pouring over gossip magazines? This is because it stimulates their emotions.

Men who don’t understand this spend their time having polite conversations with girls, and stepping on eggshells in case they upset her. Bad boys don’t care. If they say something and it upsets her, so be it. If they think she’s being stupid, they’ll make fun of her.

Have a bit of fun, and don’t be afraid to elicit some emotions in her. If you lead her on an emotional journey, she’s likely to want you more.

You don’t have to be a complete asshole for girls to like you, but it’ll do you a whole lot of good to be a bit more selfish, show some confidence and poke a little fun at girls from time to time. If you do it right, it can be fun for both of you.

#1 Unconscious incompetence

This means that you don’t know that you’re not good at something. If you can remember before you learnt how to ride a bike, you had probably seen others riding around on their bikes and thought it looked easy. You were unconsciously incompetent, as you had no idea that you couldn’t ride a bike too.

The fact that you’re reading this probably suggests that you’re past this stage when it comes to meeting women – you wouldn’t be here i you didn’t realise there are things you could improve on.

#2 Conscious incompetence

This stage happens when you try something for the first time, and it doesn’t quite work out how you expected. You get on the bike, and fall off.

With women, it could be all kinds of things – when you first go to talk to a complete stranger and she rebuffs your approach, you’re on a date and go to kiss her for the first time and she turns you down. The list is long. Don’t worry if this is you – there will be many more times that you’ll mess up. But, that’s the only way you can learn. You must go through this stage in order to move on and figure out how to do things the right way

#3 Conscious competence

With practice, you can learn a new skill, but in the early stages you probably have to concentrate hard to pull it off. Once you’ve taken the stabilisers of the bike, you can stay on, but you’re a bit wobbly at first.

When I teach guys how to meet women, we often focus on how to approach women. We practice what to say, how to say it, and how to make your body language work for you. In the evening, we go out and do it for real. Many of the guys at this point reach a stage of “conscious competence”. They know what to do, but it takes a bit of thought to be able to do it properly.

#4 Unconscious competence

Once you practice anything for a certain length of time, it become natural or you become unconsciously competent. I imagine you can probably get onto a bike and start riding away without having to think too much.

The same goes for meeting an dating women. If you’ve never asked a woman you met for her phone number before, you’ll probably stumble over the words and make a bit of a fluff at it the first time. Once you’ve done it 40 times, it will become second nature.

How will knowing this help you to meet more women?

I’m sure you have tried something out and it didn’t work, only for you to assume that you just can’t do it. Perhaps you’ve been in a situation where you’ve tried to talk to a girl and messed up, or maybe you’ve been on a date and it went really badly. It’s easy in these situations to feel negative and like a failure.

Well, remember – to get good at anything, including meeting and attracting women, you’re going to have to go through the process above. It is a learning experience, and should be treated as such.

The good news is, the more frequently you practice, the faster you will improve. How much time do you devote to going out and meeting new women?

If you want to get good, I’d suggest you make a commitment right now that you will allocate time each week to practice. If you’re not used to approaching women, force yourself to go out and talk to five new women next weekend. If you meet lots of women but you can never pluck up the courage to ask them out on a date, make a commitment that you’ll ask out the next five women you meet.

You never know, one of the might just say yes.

For me, confidence is all about experience. The more you do something, the better at it you become and the more confident you become. It’s a virtuous circle. This applies to anything we do, including meeting women. Here are a few tips on how you can not only improve your confidence when meeting women, but also appear more confident when you’re not feeling it.

Practice, practice, practice

As I’ve already mentioned, the more you do something, the more confident you will become. Make a conscious effort to put yourself in situations that have previously felt a little uncomfortable in. Go out to a lot of bars, but rarely meet any women? Make a promise to yourself that you’ll speak to at least five new women the next few times you go out. Always see cute girls when you’re at the supermarket shopping? Talk to just one of them each time you go for the next month.

It will be a little painful at first, but stick with it, and you’ll gradually get better, and that will bring confidence.

Use confident body language

I teach a whole section on body language when working as a dating coach for men, which is quite difficult to go into in detail on a blog post, but there are a few things you can do very easily. First, stand with yoru back straight and head up – avoid the temptation to lean in towards people while ou are talking to them. When we feel threatened or nervous, we tend to cover three areas of our body – our face, our chest and our groins. Keep your arms comfortably by your side, and your legs a short distance apart – shoulder width is ideal – to avoid this.

Slow down

When we are unsure of ourselves, we tend to talk too quickly. Make a conscious effort to slow down when you are speaking, and then slow down a little more. Confident people talk slowly and clearly, as they are sure people will listen and are not concerned that someone might cut them off mid-sentence.

Smile

Not only does smiling make you appear more confident, but positivity is contagious. Wouldn’t you want women to feel positive and happy when they are around you? Then, smile more.

Think about how you can implement the advice in this article into the way you act, and you’ll soon see a difference ot just with the way that women act around you, but in many areas of your life.