This post is about a tennis pro who sucks with women and has an uncanny ability to drive away new clients.  I’m also going to explain the difference between social and technical skills and how it relates to advancing your career and ability with women.

I took a tennis lesson this morning with my girlfriend, Allison. She found a tennis pro off craigslist who sounded qualified, experienced and seemed like a good guy on the phone. When I met him at the court, he gives me a really weird handshake, limp noodle grip, held on for too long and really intense eye contact.  Total invasion of personal space.  So that was a little weird. He’s got a lisp and he’s really hyper, practically bouncing off the walls. We started by practicing forehands and backhands while he served balls to us. He kept on hitting it way too soft for Allison making it very hard to hit because she had to wait for the 2nd or 3rd bounce. He told her to swing hard and not worry about where the ball goes, so with the combination of his poor serves and her hard swing, she sent a good number of balls flying out of the court. The best part was everytime she hit one out of the court he was like “Awesome, nice shot!” LOL!!! For the first half hour he was pretty much a goof ball and then I left to use the bathroom. Apparently when I was gone, he started telling Allison about this girl he was obsessed with in Colorado and how he really wants her to start whoring it up and fly out to be with him.

Creepy Tennis Pro (lisp voice) – “Why can’t she just whore it up a little and come out here and be a little whorey whore.” Then he ran his hand down Allison’s thigh in a really creepy way. When I got back from the bathroom, I could tell that she was pissed. Next we worked on our serves. Allison was having trouble with the snapping the wrist motion at the top of the serve and he says “Women can never get this one and I can’t teach it. Allison, you have no chance of getting this, I can teach everything but this. Robbie, can you teach her?” I was thinking, hold on here, aren’t we paying you? This is a big no-no when it comes to business. In that moment, I decided that I couldn’t really trust his advice. I’ve played a decent amount of tennis in my life and he was already saying things that contradicted what I had been taught but I was still open to it. But when he disqualified himself by saying he couldn’t teach, I became a skeptic. I see guys making this mistake ALL THE TIME. How you do anything is how you do everything. If you disqualify yourself in one area, I guarantee it’s happening all over the place in your life. At the end of the hour lesson, we paid him $50  and he said “Great, now I’ll be able to eat for the next few days, I’ve got one penny to my name.” Riiiiiiiiight, do I really wanna take lessons from someone like that? I don’t care if you’re broke but if we are doing business, it might be something you want to keep to yourself.

The sad part was, he was actually a great player, I saw him hit some amazing demo shots and he gave me some great advice on my strokes. The problem wasn’t with his tennis skill set, the problem was with his personality, confidence and social skills. I see men who make this mistake all the time - They learn the technical skills to excel at a job but ignore the human element. It’s like the nerd who learns the Mystery Method and can’t figure out why every woman he talks to is creeped out and repulsed be him.  He’s doing everything technically correct by the book, why isn’t it working?  Another analogy is the software engineer who is a genius at writing code but can’t relate to a human being. His career can only go so far because social skills matter WAY more then technical skills. It’s what really separates the winners from the losers. This tennis pro had decent advertising and he knew how to teach tennis. He would have had two happy clients if he could have just been normal. For the icing on the cake, he tried to sell us some beat up rackets after the lesson. I wouldn’t have paid $5 bucks for any of those pieces of shit and he said he was giving us a deal at $40 a pop. HUGE con-job! If you have been struggling with these sort of issues or can relate to the tennis pro, leave a comment so we can laugh about it together.

-Robbie