RightSwiper Coaches: Craig Beck

About Craig

Both Mark and I have very different takes on dating. But we share a spookily similar path in life. That's why Right Swiper is so successful. Neither of us found dating and attracting the opposite sex easy or a skill we were born with. We both started this journey with the same obstacle: our educational environment!

In their wisdom, my parents decided I should attend a single-sex school. I have never asked them why I was sent to an all-boys school because, quite frankly, I am still annoyed about it. However, I am guessing that they figured I would concentrate on my schoolwork more without the distraction of girls. Whatever their justification, it was nonsense. The biggest problem this mono-sex education created was, at sixteen, leaving school, I didn't know how to talk to girls. I was terrified of them, and remember this was before the days of smartphones and Tinder. If you liked a girl, you had to walk up to her, often in front of all your friends, and ask her for a date. This felt like frying bacon naked, deliberately exposing your most sensitive parts to as much danger as possible. The crime is I was a slim, good-looking guy in my youth, and now, with a bit of age and wisdom, I realize there were so many girls dying for me to talk to them, but I was too afraid. Youth really is wasted on the young.

The result of this fear was that I rarely approached girls, and the first real relationship I got into pushed me right back into my comfort zone. That relationship was safe and warm, and I didn't have to risk exposing myself to rejection. By nineteen, I was living with my girlfriend; by twenty-three, I was a father, and by twenty-six, I was married. All this before I even knew who I was as a man. By the time I got into my thirties and started to understand myself better, I knew I was in the wrong relationship. While it was comfortable, it wasn't serving either of us anymore; we no longer even shared the same bed. We had become two strangers who happened to live in the same house.

It took a few years, but we got divorced, and I found myself single for the first time in nearly two decades. Shit, the last time I dated, there was no such thing as 'the internet'. Where does a thirty-seven-year-old divorced Dad go to find women?

The last time I was single, the standard place to meet women was a nightclub or bar. By this point in my life, it had been a good decade since I had even stepped inside a nightclub. I did try it, one Saturday I called up an old friend of mine and suggested we hit the town as we used to in the good old days. Boy, we were fired up as we queued to get into the club. I felt a massive rush of freedom and excitement. I let my mind wander as we shuffled forward in the cold night air. I imagined hooking up with a stunning woman and taking her home at the end of the night for crazy, wild sex. All my enthusiasm fell through the floor when I got inside the venue. I looked around at the girls busting their moves on the dance floor, and I suddenly felt like a pedophile. These women looked only a little bit older than my daughter. I suddenly felt like the most aged man alive, like old Father Time had turned up to collect his daughter from prom. At that moment I realized that everything I thought I knew about meeting women was wrong, outdated and useless to me.

A few days later I was at the Dentist, and while I was sitting waiting for my appointment, I picked up an old and well-worn copy of Cosmopolitan. An article on how more and more people are meeting in the aisles of supermarkets caught my eye. I decided that as soon as the anesthetic wore off and I didn't look and sound like the elephant man, I would put some smart, cool clothes on and hit the supermarket, ready to meet the woman of my dreams.

For an hour I walked up and down those aisles with a loaf of bread and some soup in my basket. I saw perhaps half a dozen women I was attracted to, and I set out to approach all them. The outcome of that day was a partial success. If by partial success you are willing to accept that I only had the guts to talk to one of them, all I managed to say was 'excuse me, do you know where the frozen food section is'? She pointed at an aisle at the opposite end, and I dutifully walked away, feeling like the biggest idiot on earth. The other five women may have been vaguely aware of a very pensive and stressed-looking guy who kept walking up and down the same aisle as them.

I was in trouble! I was a very successful, intelligent, and reasonably attractive man with much to offer but had no idea how to date. As I left that supermarket, my mother's words started to ring in my head. My parents have those old-fashioned values that state that despite how miserable you are, you stick to your marriage and honor the vows you made at the church. The day I told my mother I was divorcing my wife, she touched my cheek and said, 'Oh Craig, what are you doing? You are too old for this nonsense, work at your marriage because you are not going to find someone else at this time of your life'. I mean, pretty much the worst thing she could have said to me at this powerfully tricky moment in my life – thanks a bunch Mom!

You might expect that this is where I went to Mark and begged him to teach me internet dating. But there was an important thing to deal with before I got to that. I needed to work on my self-confidence. There was no way I could meet the woman of my dreams with such low self-esteem. Despite how much I wanted to quickly find 'the one' a terrifying mountain of fear blocked the road to it. Even if fate threw me into the path of this extraordinary woman as it stood, I would only mess it up by stumbling, fluffing, and panicking my way through an embarrassing retreat. Her lasting impression of me would be 'jeez, what's wrong with that loser.' I remembered that back when I decided to become a photographer, the first thing I did was book myself on a photography training course. This had to be the same logical step I would need to take in this case.

I hired a coach — someone to teach me how to be confident. Investing in knowledge is something you will hear Mark and I preach frequently in this book. I hired a guy who had a fantastic reputation for building James Bond level self-confidence in guys. His name was Labi, and he was a very handsome and charismatic Latvian guy in his late twenties. I paid him a fair old chunk of money to spend the weekend with him in London. Over forty-eight hours, he walked me up to the outer edge of my comfort zone, and then he kicked me so hard out of it I thought I had died and landed in hell. His theory was simple: to overcome fear, you must expose yourself repeatedly to the things you are afraid of. Over that weekend, he had me singing, dancing, and generally making a fool of myself all over London in the most public and embarrassing ways. The first day I hated every second of it. I wanted to crawl up and die of embarrassment, and I went to bed that Saturday night, sure that I would not be turning up for day two. However, something changed in my subconscious overnight. I woke up, and I felt different. I no longer cared what people thought of my antics; I had become desensitized to it all. I felt I could walk up and talk to anyone I wanted to, even stunningly beautiful women who previously would have terrified me.

Only then did I speak to my good buddy, Mark, and say, ' can you teach me how to do internet dating.' Nobody understands the online dating game better than Mark Keen, and in this book and the VIP club, he will share with you some fantastic advice that will cut out all the nonsense and negative stuff and get you straight to powerfully positive outcomes. I will share the deeper level stuff, the psychology of attraction, as I call it. If you ever wondered what the opposite sex REALLY wants, you are about the find out. I will teach you how to ramp up your confidence and self-worth using Fear Technology and let you into the secrets of body language and NLP.