Stephan Erdman – Pimp Your Lingo: Advanced Conversation Skills For Men

Pimp Your Lingo by Stephen Erdman is an audio program of over six hours long that aims to give you the tools and knowledge to use language more effectively with everyone you talk to. While the course is aimed at guys looking to improve their success with women, the ideas shared here aren’t restricted to just for that purpose. In fact, most of the actual techniques are perhaps better used for regular social situations and business interactions than for the intended purpose of attracting women.

A Quick Note On NLP

NLP has been very popular for a number of years now and as such, has been applied to a number of different markets. Based on the idea of modeling human excellence and changing patterns of behavior, it’s a complex field that has some interesting uses.

One area in which it’s become more common is in that of meeting and attracting women, often igniting a lot of debate as to its usefulness. While guys who are already knowledgeable about NLP may do okay with it, for the average guy there is often a chance of doing more harm than good when trying to use it. This is because they can come across as sounding strange and incongruent when adopting these different speaking patterns, and it can cause women to see them as weird.

A better use for NLP is in creating rapport with people and developing a sense of connection. So once a girl is already attracted to you and you are having a deeper conversation, it is more acceptable for you to be using some of the principles and tools of NLP, as long as you don’t overdo it. Erdman states during this course that he is trained in NLP, and that’s what almost all of these techniques have their foundation in. The course is broken down into three sections: Inner Game, Rapport, and Attraction.

Inner Game

This is the shortest section of the audio program, at just under an hour. Essentially, Erdman discusses the importance of language and how you’ll be able to use it to enrich your life and have more success once you master his techniques.

He brings up a few good points here such as active voice versus passive voice, having a playful mindset and how different cultures have different relationships with their own voice.

It’s quite a long listen though and would benefit from being shortened. Rather than hear continually about how good the program is and what you’ll be able to achieve with your new skills, I would have preferred to get straight into the meat of the course and get to the actual content.

Rapport

This is the longest section of the course at around three hours and there are some useful, although quite basic, ideas presented here in this part.

Again, it would benefit from being shortened. For example, he explains and demonstrates a specific technique when talking to a female friend, then goes and explains it again and demonstrates on a male friend. For such a basic idea, this really seems like overkill.

One of the ideas involves repeating words and phrases back to the person you are talking to so that they feel you’re listening to them and thus feel a sense of connection. There’s also in-depth explanation on the value of open-ended questions versus closed questions, probing questions and a ‘yes chain’ (more commonly known as a yes ladder), amongst others.

Some of these ideas will be useful if you have never heard them before. Unfortunately there is nothing original here; all of these techniques are quite common knowledge if you have read anything about communication skills.

Another idea Erdman touches on is what he calls the 70/30 principle. The idea being that you should aim to be listening for 70% of the time and only speaking for 30%. This is useful once a woman is interested enough in you that she’s prepared to do that much of the conversational work, but is a bad idea before then. It’s much more common when you first meet a woman that you are going to have to do most of the talking yourself, then you want to begin to shift this balance so that she is the one investing more (as a general rule, since each situation is different).

It’s good that he is demonstrating these techniques by talking to a few different friends of his, mainly a couple of women. The techniques sound a bit more natural when he is using them in this context rather than just hearing it explained. It’s not quite the same as a real interaction though where the woman is responding without being aware of the techniques and that she’s being recorded.

Because of this, the women Erdman is talking to here will happily sit and have a conversation with him whereas in a real situation the reactions might be different. Specifically, a woman might ask why you are asking her such deep and personal questions, particularly if she has only just met you. And that is one of the other problems with this course; there isn’t really a structured guide on how to use it in different contexts.

If you meet a woman out at a high energy club environment on the weekend, there is little here that will help you. If you meet that same woman out for a coffee the following day, the information here will be more applicable. But going from point A to point B (seeing the woman in the club and getting her to agree to a coffee date) is not covered at all.

Note: In the bonus section there is a short video on an instant rapport approach method. You can use that technique to approach in some situations, but it is far from comprehensive and you won’t be able to use it in every situation.

There is a part where he’s talking to one of his friends and he asks her out to see a movie. It’s not made clear if this is an example of how to ask a girl out or if it is just him asking his friend to go see a movie with him. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to ask a girl out for the first time, as it borders on coming across too needy and pushy.

Attraction

This is the final section of the program and is just over two hours long. The first track is on four common mistakes guys often make to mess up attraction, and he is pretty spot on here.

Some of the attraction ideas here are pretty well known, such as being cocky and funny, and there wasn’t anything original here either. Some of the specific examples have been used before by other dating coaches. In some instances it’s a case of putting a new name on an existing idea, such as messing with rapport, which is more commonly known as breaking rapport. It would have been good to have something fresh brought to the table here.

A few of the ideas here don’t really fall under the umbrella of attraction, they are more associated with developing rapport. For example, eliciting values is a pretty well-known idea from NLP but it is not an attraction technique, it’s a rapport technique. If a woman is not already attracted to you or you don’t’ have value in her eyes in some way, she is not going to open up and get into a deep conversation about her personal values.

There are a number of tracks here dealing with questions and how to respond to them. The basic idea of being cocky and funny and deflecting her questions is nothing new, and it does have some merit. You need to be sure you don’t overdo this though, as it can get old quickly. Also be sure you have the right playful attitude or else you can come across badly.

I can tell that Erdman knows what the right attitude is, and that he has experience attracting girls using these techniques, but his German accent at times make him sound more serious than he might be intending. So for newer guys they might hear his delivery and not pick up on the little nuances there and not understand that this is supposed to be done in a joking manner. Just something that’s worth being aware of if you listen to this.

Overall Impressions

There are some good principles here, mainly for gaining rapport with people. A lot of these techniques are widely known and taught to people who wish to communicate better, such as salespeople and managers. For a course titled ‘Pimp Your Lingo’ it conjured up a different idea in my mind and didn’t quite live up to expectations.

For the actual purpose of attracting women, this is somewhat lacking. There is a big emphasis on asking questions and how to respond to questions. For many beginners, their problem is they ask too many questions and instead of a fun interaction it ends up more like an interview. There are many conversational techniques you can use when you first meet a woman but they aren’t covered here.

So this course is best used on women who you are already acquainted with or happen to come in contact with through social situations. If you’re already getting dates with women but struggle to have interesting conversations with them on the date, this will probably be helpful for you. It’s less useful in the beginning of an interaction on women you ‘cold approach’.

For those interested in online dating, there is a bonus video of about 20 minutes that shows how to apply these techniques to dating sites and social media. It’s interesting and worth a look.

The Bottom Line

Pimp Your Lingo uses a lot of ideas from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to teach some fairly basic conversational skills. Also takes some well-known ideas from other dating coaches to make this program more applicable to talking to women. There aren’t too many original ideas in here, but this might be interesting to you if you’re unfamiliar with any basic dating and social skills advice. If you already know how to attract women easily, but have a hard time developing a connection with them, you might find this useful.