Name: Unpacking the psychology of seduction | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-05-21T03:30:47.000Z
Duration: 4 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So there's a great Oscar Wilde quote, which is that: "Everything in life is about sex—except for sex, which is about power."

When you think about seduction you probably think about it in a rather narrow sense in terms of erotic seduction or sexual seduction.

But what if I were to suggest to you seduction is a much deeper, wider, more mysterious thing and actually at the heart of it is the secret to success in life.

My name is Dr. Raj Persaud, I'm a consultant psychiatrist.

I wrote a book on the psychology of seduction as being the key secret at the heart of successful relationships.

I'm an international burlesque performer, creative director and teacher and producer.

If you think about your average day and the way you make your way through your average day and the people you meet: your work colleagues, your friends and people who might serve you in restaurants and so on.

If you learn the art of seduction and you seduce these people into liking you and therefore delivering what you want, you'll find it much easier to navigate your way through life.

Burlesque performers are good at seduction because we're trained to understand that we make choices in how we present our art to the audience.

On stage, we learn to use our seduction techniques consciously.

So I know that if I cast my eye a certain way the audience will focus on a certain part of my costuming.

Or if I move in a certain way it draws attention to a part of my body, and that will be part of the story that I want to tell within my act.

So we learn to be very aware of even just a glance of the eye or a stroke of the hands on the body.

We use all of these tools to direct the audience's gaze because we want to tell them a story.

So all of these micro-movements are really, really important in getting to grips with how you direct the audience to watch your act and absorb what you're trying to tell them.

When we perform burlesque at a show, we're clowning ideas of what attraction is and of what sexuality is and what seduction is.

We're playing with what might be called the traditional feminine arts, and we're using those as a springboard really to play with the audience about ideas of power and ideas of that enticement, seducement and glamour as well.

[How do you seduce someone if you're not a burlesque performer?]

Find out what that person's unmet need is and then fill it in a way it's never been filled before.

In my clinic, people come in and they're often unhappy.

They're unhappy because they're frustrated with the world.

The world is not giving them what they want.

It's not giving them a date with the people they want to have a date with.

It's not giving them popularity or love or affection.

And so people are upset and they have a demanding approach to the world.

Why is the world not giving me what I want?

So in order to get what you want from the world, you need to understand this basic transaction.

You're going to have to give something to the world to get that thing that you want.

The problem is we're always thinking about our own unmet needs, and that distracts us from focusing on the person in front of us.

And in particular, what their key frustrations are.

A lot of small talk, in terms of passing the time of day, doesn't seem to be very directed but seductive people are actually using small talk in a particular way.

What they're doing is they're figuring out the direction your life is travelling in.

They're trying to figure out what it is that drives you forward.

And that's the best way to find out what the unmet need is, and then to fill it in a way that it's never been filled before.

[Should you be yourself or act like someone else?]

One of the things that I really want the audience to go away feeling is that there is no one rule about how to be attractive, how to be sexy, how to be seductive because each of us have our own individual power.

And the importance of burlesque is to be an antidote to the one-dimensional idea that there is only one way to do these things.

So each performer really roots into their individuality and then we magnify it to make this huge explosion of individual gravitas and attraction and seduction.

Most people have very low self-esteem about the idea that they could learn to be seductive.

They believe you're either born with it, you're either drop dead gorgeous or you're not.

What I mean by that is anyone can learn to be seductive and certainly to be more seductive.

So if you learn the skills of seduction, you can be as seductive as any of the most gorgeous people you've met in your life.

Don't forget to subscribe and click the bell to receive notifications for new videos.