On Monday evening I had a small dinner party at my place. It was a last minute episode and I invited a new female friend over to join us. At first she agreed and later some doubt set in. She called me while I was taking a shower and so I missed her call. The voice mail said she was on her way. However, a few minutes later I received an SMS saying she was tired and wanted to have an early night.
For a moment I considered replying to the SMS and then I remembered I know how to deal with this kind of situation. I’ve done it before. So I called her up and spoke to her directly instead of sending a text message. The first thing I did was teasing her about not knowing which highway to take to my place. It’s easily about 30 minutes drive to my place. And maybe it’s understandable that a woman would have doubts about driving around late at night if 7pm on a Monday evening can be considered late 
Anyway as you may know Johannesburg has the worst traffic in all of South Africa. So peak hour is particularly bad here. And I weaved this into the story I was telling her, pointing out how few cars are on the road after 7pm and it would be a breeze driving to my place. She laughed. And proceeded to defended herself telling me she owns a GPS and it will direct her so she doesn’t need directions. This was a small commitment from her and I kept building on it. I talked for a while longer about her, her fancy GPS and how proud she must be to own one. She has to show me how it works one day. And then I reassured her that this dinner party was going to be fun. There’s no strings attached. In fact I would kick her ass out if she stayed to long.
She agreed to come over and that was it. I encouraged her to bring along her favourite drink. This is such a trivial thing but so crucial i.e. getting people to bring something over when they visit you, makes them invest in their decision even more. Now the moral of the story is that I didn’t do a sales job. What I mean is that I did not persuade her using logic. I did not give her a list of benefits for coming over. Instead I changed her emotional state – from being hesitant to being certain, from being afraid of making a bad decision (staying out late on a Monday night) to feeling she is making a good decision. And certainly from her behaviour and reactions afterwards she felt she had made a good decision.
One last thing I made sure my own internal state was light, fun and that I projected certainty. The key to a leading a woman is projecting certainty.
