COCPORN

…but were to afraid to ask.

In this post we’ll look at:

• What qualification is
• How it related to other well known concepts
• How to qualify, how to disqualify
• Ruminate on whether it is bad to qualify yourself
• What the effects of qualification are

If I’d only had an HD video-camera, this would be a video blog entry.

What is Qualification?

Let’s start with an example of qualification:

If I’d only had an HD video-camera, this would be a video blog entry.

Sounds familiar? Good! Just checking if you’re paying attention.

Those of you wanting to get a glimpse of the social matrix at work, learning qualification theory is definitely time well spent. Qualification is a beast with many heads, at it’s used in many contexts. Let’s start by looking at the different ways:

• To qualify oneself: When a person qualifies, he makes a statement or takes an action to serve as a testament to some trait or ability he/she has.
• To make someone qualify: The act of trying to make someone qualify. The reason I list it is that many people use the term “qualify her” as a synonymous phrase to “make her qualify herself”, making the waters a little muddy. We’ll look at a number of ways to make someone qualify.
• To qualify someone else: When you make a statement about someone else, focusing on a trait or ability and verbalizing it.
• To disqualify: Disqualification, either token or real, is commonly used in pickup and real life.

To Qualify

I gave you an example of a qualification previously. It’s a subtle qualification, don’t be embarrased if you didn’t pick up on it. Learning to spot qualifications is a pretty simple task. The first reason why you’d want to learn how to spot qualifications is that they say a lot about the person qualifying. Let’s kick it off by looking at some other examples of qualification.

Last year I drove from New York to Miami in my stripper girlfriend’s new Camino when we accidently got run off the road by a bunch of hillbillies.

Again, sounds familiar? The example is a paraphrase from Mystery’s example DHV stories. Mystery uses a bunch of fairly naïve techniques to push back “DHV spikes”. In how many ways is he qualifying in this one sentence? These are common thoughts that will consciously or unconsciously be created in the head of the listener.

• New York, capital of the world! This guy must be important.
• New York to Miami? The man is travelled.
• Girlfriend? Ah, preselection. Other girls like him, so I must too.
• Oh, she’s a stripper? She must be hot. He’s used to hot girls. I hope I’m hot enough for him.
• New car? She sure must make a lot of money on that body.
• Wow, what the fuck is a Camino? Sounds cool! He sure knows a lot about cars!
• They drove in her car? He’s a kept man! I wonder how expensive he is!

The DHV-spikes are stacked into a sentence and pushed back by continuing the story on a tangent about how they ended up in an accident. A tangent leading, of course, to more DHV spikes.

To the untrained eye, this is just a sentence in a story. Whether you are consciously impressed by the details casually dropped in, they are pushed back into the unconscious and serve to build a set of presuppositions about the story teller.

A less proficient person would blurt it out:

Hey! You know what? I just bought a new car! A Porsche.

Or even try to be subtle about it. Leaving the car keys on the table at a café, hoping someone would notice and care. I actually did a variation on this a while back. A girl offered me a sip of her cider, and I responded:

No, thanks, I’m driving. A BMW.

Obviously, this wasn’t really an attempt to qualify for her; this kind of blatant qualification is so apparent that it has value as a comic bit.

My friend Daniel and I were at the excellent tapas restaurant Mañana in Gothenburg a while back (dude, I know you’re starting to track qualifications in my sentences already. Good!). We were good and lubed up and having an excellent time. We started talking to three guys sitting at a table next to us. We were in a good mood, and we kept a conversation going.

Now, frankly, Daniel and I are dickheads. These guys were obviously computer geeks, and we started out subtly mocking them in a friendly tone. We escalated and at some point we blatantly dissed one of the guys’ shirt. We didn’t really do it to be mean or anything. It was just for fun, and I’m a huge fan of a little friction in my social interactions. His response, however, was textbook qualification:

I have nicer clothes at home!

Now, this wasn’t a competition in any way. But if it had been, he would be totally burned at this point.

I’ve intentionally left one huge question about qualification hanging way up in the air. Is it a good or bad thing to qualify yourself?

I want to paraphrase (I paraphrase a lot, because I’m too lazy to check my sources) Eckhard Tolle:

Things aren’t good or bad, they just are.

Instead of labeling qualifying yourself as good or bad, let’s look at the effects of qualifying yourself, as perceived by others:

• You communicate something using actions or words which wouldn’t normally be communicated. This will by many be consciously or unconsciously interpreted as compensating for something. Mystery’s DHV-spikes are therefore in fact, for many viewers, a DLV tour de force. Normal people use terms as “bragging” and “self promotion” to describe qualification when they consciously pick up on it being just that.
• You communicate something using actions or words that has already been communicated through other channels. Compare to having your date in your brand new Ferrari on your way to a restaurant, telling her “I own a Ferrari”.
• Skillful use of qualification means that the viewer (that is, the listener or the one watching you) will know more about you than he/she would if you didn’t qualify yourself. Sometimes you can enclose details that people find intriguing, and use it to create interest.
• If you qualify yourself for someone, you invest in them. We’ll look more closely at how qualification and investment interact later, but let’s just agree that there’s no way you’d enclose the contents of your wardrobe to anyone without actually investing.

Thus, if you would really want me to classify it as good or bad, I’d have to say:Mostly bad. As an attraction tool it is almost always bad. I’ll give you some dynamite pointers later to where it’s actually beneficial to qualify yourself.

What Does it Mean When People Qualify for You?

I’m not going to present this in terms of absolutes, but here’s a list of things for your consideration. Some of these are mirror images of the above observations.

• People qualify for you to raise their value in your eyes. This can be an indication that they perceive you as high value. When people qualify for you, feel free to assume it is an IOI.
• People who qualify for you invest in you.
• Knowing when people qualify for you places you in a position of power (subitems discussed in detail below):
  • Reward good behavior
  • Break rapport to spark attraction
• People who are extremely skilled at social interaction will intentionally qualify for you to bridge the perceived value gap. I’ve had this done to me at least once the last year that I consciously picked up on.

When learning to recognize that people are indeed qualifying for you, it gives you more to play with. Beware of becoming an asshole when you start noticing when people qualify for you. Everybody does it. Take it as a compliment. I’ve earlier communicated that it pisses me off when people qualify for me. It still does at times. Qualification often helps build a gap between people. Compare this to howfriends interact. Relentless qualification is a sure way to communicate “we’re not quite friends”.

Tangent: The Accomplishment Intro

In case you’re unfamiliar with the accomplishment intro, I’ll give you a quick example:

Have you met my friend COCPORN? He’s a singer, he has a single on high rotation on Voice TV.

Basically, you decide up front how a friend wants to be introduced, and you use this to raise his perceived value from the get-go. This is a trademark of Mystery and Style, and described in painful detail in the book The Game.

The idea:

• An accomplishment brought to the attention of a person by someone else but the one who accomplished it will make it seem less like bragging.
• Cool people have cool friends. Introducing your friend in a cool way will make you seem cool.

The sad reality:

• The need to qualify your friends is try-hard.
• The person being accomplishment-introduced is categorized.  This is a known verbal manipulation technique. I personally feel I start out below zero after having been accomplishment introduced.
• The one doing the introduction can benefit from an accomplishment introduction, as he takes on a screening frame. We’ll talk more about this later.

If you have friends or wings who consistently accomplishment-introduce you and you feel it’s killing your approaches, tell them to stop; now you have the reason why it’s bad. A superb alternative to accomplishment introduction is to verbalize which emotions are elicited by your friend.

Hey, meet ICON. He’s the funniest guy I know; there’s always a party where he’s at.

The described feelings don’t need to necessarily be true (you’ll find that there’s a lot of power in suggestion, tho, both for the introduced and the ones introduced for. Everybody knows ICON is a boring dweeb). Hopefully you see the difference between this and an accomplishment introduction. You should still know, however, that even the latest version is an AMOG. If you wonder why this is the case, look up prizability and the screening frame.

Making Someone Qualify

If qualification is so bad (I didn’t really say it is), why would you want to make people qualify for you?

• People who qualify invest. You might want to have people invest in you.
• People who qualify subconsciously register you as a person of value. This can be used with the concept of commitment and consistency (we’ll look at that later).
• It puts you in control of the interaction. When people qualify for you, it’s easy to propel the conversation in whichever direction you feel necessary.
• Puts you in a screening frame.

There are extremely many ways to urge people into qualifying. It’s funny to see how they respond to your technique, how people with high and low self esteem react differently. How the socially untrained fall for the simplest gambits.

You can use qualification gambits as calibration tools. We’ll talk about this in a future post.

Let’s look at some examples:

How good a kisser are you on a scale from 1 to 10?

Not sure who should be credited for this, but Swinggcat uses it in his material.

Why should we pick your company for this job?

Yeah. They are asking you to qualify. Looking at the concepts in a business setting makes it apparent how things relate to investment.

We’re having a bunch of people over for a warmup party tonight. How old are you?

We’re moving into sneaky territory. Asking a person his/her age in the context of a warm up-party is prompting him/her to qualify. Also, by qualifying, the person is tricked into he/she believing actually wants to go to a warm up-party.

Making people qualify is also a part of hoop-theory; the art and science of making people jump through your hoops.

Flipside: Spontaneously Qualifying Someone

The flipside to making someone qualify for you, and a little less powerful, is just spontaneously qualifying someone. This is quite simply done by, for example:

Hey, man, cool jacket. Where did you get it?

…or…

I like you. You’re intelligent and good looking.

Both having someone qualify for you and just spontaneously qualifying someone leaves you in the same place:

The Screening Frame

By qualifying, you put yourself in a screening frame. When you’re the screener, your perceived value rises. You are suddently the one who decides what’s good and what sucks; the guy who’s approval matters. A lot of people, especially people with low self esteem are happy to take anything that’s sent in their direction. This is the opposite of the screening frame.

Operating through a screening frame communicates:

• You are used to getting what you want.
• As you can afford to say no to things means that you have resources and opportunities in abundance.
• When it comes to people, that there is a chance you’ll say no.

All these traits are high value traits. Notice how you accomplish pretty much the same things that Mystery tries to accomplish using DHV-spikes, except that there’s no bragging involved.

Token Qualification

Token qualification, or false qualification, is the act of qualifying someone based on a lie. The previous example:

Hey, man, cool jacket. Where did you get it?

This is a known AMOG-technique; it puts you in the screening frame and prompts the guy to qualify himself. But it’s obvious you can use it even if the jacket isn’t really cool. This is a powerful tool, although the ethical side of it doesn’t work for everyone.

You can obviously use token qualification for any kind of situation.

As a mini-mission, you can try this with your boss:

Sir! I really liked the way you handled [situation X].

That is, I want you to give your boss a compliment, qualify him, either token or real. If your boss is a typical alpha kind of leader, I want you to feel how this shifts the balance of power once you put yourself in the screening frame. It is not a very risky move; after all, all you’re doing is giving him a compliment.

Disqualification

Disqualification is the ugly stepsister of qualification. As with qualification, a disqualifier can be a token disqualifier.

You will develop an acute sense of when people are doing token (dis)qualification, the same way you’ll get better at noticing when people are actually qualifying for you.

As with qualification, disqualification can be used on you or on him/her. Disqualifying yourself is counter intuitive for many people, but it’s effective for many reasons:

• It creates scarcity, and people tend to chase what they can’t have
• It communicates abundance

Examples of self disqualification:

I would love to come home with you, but I’m celibate.

…or…

Yes, boss, I’d love to take on this project, but I have no prior experience with this technology.

Disqualifying other people is very easy:

I prefer blondes.

…or…

I prefer brunettes.

And friend and I used to do stupid stuff before. We had a theme-night where the first thing we said to everybody we met was “I’m not going to have sex with you”. Like, complete disregarding context and who we were talking to. This was my first experience doing active disqualification, and I’m sure you can guess what the outcome of that evening was. *WINK WINK, NUDGE NUDGE*

Disqualification and SOI

Disqualification creates a void that’s great to fill with an SOI. This results in a subtle and cute push/pull.

It’s too bad you’re married; if you weren’t I would take you home with me.

…or mix it up a little…

You’re a cool girl. Too bad you don’t speak Armenian.

This pattern is also prompts the person to qualify, and they routinely do: “It’s not really going that well” and “I can learn!” are commonly experienced.

Qualification and Investment

As I’ve talked about before, qualification is almost pure investment. If this idea is unclear to you, I suggest you read that previous post, even though it contains a couple of factual errors.

The Promised Dynamite Pointer

You can actively qualify yourself to bridge a gap in perceived value. If you come off as extremely high value, you can get an unattainable, ethereal quality to you. You’re a fun and pretty thing, but you don’t come off as real. Spending too much time running scripts will make you intangible. Qualifying yourself for someone when you feel they have an extremely high perceived value of you puts the realback in the interaction. It makes you human, and it positions you in reach.

This is for advanced audiences. I don’t do it personally, because I have other techniques to battle the same problem, but I’ve seen at least three high value people use qualification to diffuse a value gap situation the last year. Not all of them consciously, but all of them effectively.

Summary

Qualification- and disqualification-theory is key in social interactions. And yeah, I just ordered the camera, so some of the upcoming posts will indeed be video-entries. For your convenience.