Hitman System on Media

JAKARTA GLOBE (2009)

Relationship Gurus Transform Long-Time Loners Into Lovers

Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the study of human sexuality, posited that when it comes to love, all men need enlightenment to obtain and maintain romance with their significant others.

In reality, there are some men who are naturally comfortable with women, enabling them to make even the most beautiful or the most intriguing swoon, but, unfortunately, most simply aren't.

Some men embark on a quest of finding out what women want through self-improvement courses and developing a greater understanding of the dynamics behind social interactions. For this, they often turn to relationship gurus, who teach techniques that include neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis and psychology. 

The influence of these romance gurus has reached around the world, including in Indonesia, where one group has risen above the others, establishing an Internet-based enterprise it has given the somewhat gung-ho name www.hitmansystem.com. Founders Jet Veetlev, Kei Savourie and Lex dePraxis teach Hitman System Workshops, three-day programs focusing on two main issues of the 'pre-relationship game' and 'relationship mastery'. 

Their tag line, 'From Lossy to Glossy,' roughly means transforming losers into attractive males by shifting their students from their long-held common paradigms to a new set of beliefs about women and romance, at the price of Rp 1.2 million ($120).

Jet says any prospective 'student' must first pass a screening interview. "He must convince us of his hardships in relationships with women."

Our writer signed up as an apprentice with the relationship wizards.

 

Day One

We met at a Thai restaurant in a lavish mall in West Jakarta at 6 p.m. on a lively Friday.

"We decided to hold the workshop here since the demographic of the crowd would disadvantage the students, thus making it the best place to learn these [social] skills the hard way," Lex said.

One by one, the students arrived. At first glance, most Indonesian women would probably dismiss the six of us, not only because of our physical traits, but also because of the bad vibes we gave off, our clumsy outfits and our insecure body language.

Our trial by fire began with Kei sending us off to make a 'hit,' the HS team's term for approaching and talking to women. "The workshop will not start until you guys go through with this," he said. "And as there are no refunds, we will have to send you home empty-handed." So off we went to conquer our fear of rejection, only to be left cold.

Kei then took us upstairs to a rented apartment, where Lex and Jet joined him to conduct the workshop. The trio first congratulated our bravery in admitting we had difficulties in dealing with women. The day began with participants sharing stories of their failures with women, many of which indicated serious issues of self-worth.

One student impressed the others with his melancholic tale of waiting six years for a woman, who finally married another man. Others spoke of feelings of inadequacy with women, being constantly criticized by a fiancee, being manipulated into buying a woman gifts to compete with three other suitors, or an unsettled broken heart.

The tutors then debunked common fallacies regarding women that men hear all their lives, for instance that women are fragile beings and men should pamper their emotional and physical insecurities constantly. As each student expressed his doubts and fears, the tutors countered them with answers figured out beforehand, silencing their apprentices into shared bewilderment. The day ended at 1 a.m. after we were given an assignment to create and mentally rehearse a scenario of how to approach and talk to women, ready for the next day's hit.

 

Day Two

The day's training began at noon, as we tried our mentally rehearsed scenarios out on the tutors, who posed as women. To our humiliation, each scenario was turned down on our first attempt, with the exception of the student who had waited six futile years for his love. He was unable to approach even these proxy women so was spared rejection purely by default.

The tutors-as-women were a little more welcoming on our second attempts, but we students were still unable to parlay our openings into enjoyable conversations. We stuttered and paused too long or told uninteresting stories or jokes, leading to our rapid dismissal yet again. The aforementioned student refused to take part altogether, going into a denial phase and reiterating that he couldn't do it.

The tutors walked him through the exercise, prompting him with lines to draw him out from his shell of denial. We next reviewed where we had gone wrong with the scenarios, and the tutors pinpointed the mistakes that were made.

"Your words mean nothing but how you say them is worth a thousand words," Jet said. Our mentors then delved deep into the principles of human interaction and how to attract women, correlating their techniques with the female psyche.

Emphasizing 'pre-relationship staging,' the trio's techniques relied consciously deploying 'jerk jokes,' their term for mischievous remarks on certain attributes of the woman targeted, storytelling skills and nonsexual touching.

Before taking the lessons thus learned into the field, the tutors invited a chic girl to join them on a 'fashion panel' and help assess each of the students. Each man was figuratively stripped down from head to toe by the panelists, who pointed out their fashion flaws and provided appearance and deportment tips, such as updating outdated hairstyles and dressing to suit the event and the subject's body type, rather than pulling on clothes indifferently for the sake of comfort.

At 6 p.m., freshly changed and prepared, the relationship wizards took their six apprentices to the mall once again, each counselor taking two students. Strolling from floor to floor, the instructors scouted targets for their apprentices to converse with. Tense and nervous, we students walked quietly, nervously anticipating what was to come next.

Our shyest classmate needed an extra boost from Lex, who pumped up his confidence until the student stood in a stiff cowboy stance, his left thumb hooked in his pocket as if ready for a duel. But, as stilted as he was, when dePraxis aimed him at three girls in a cafe, he stepped forward without hesitation and managed to make them giggle enough to keep him company for five minutes. It was a remarkable accomplishment for him, and he returned in the same stiff cowboy gait, but with a sublime smile on his face.

Other students also made improvements and were able to engage several women in conversation. The tutors celebrated by treating their apprentices to dinner at a Japanese steak house, where our not-quite-so shy compatriot spoke of his triumph. "The fear is still there, no matter what Lex has told me," he said. "But I can see myself walking through the fear and [speaking to women], instead of frozen to death. I made them laugh. Did you see that?"

We all discussed our personal breakthroughs with joy, as the relationship gurus said what happened with women in the past no longer mattered. "At the end of the day," Lex said, "the girls who rejected or accepted your approaches were just numbers and statistics. The most important thing is you came out as the victors of your lifelong illusions of fear and doubt. Congratulations!"

 

Day Three

The final day of training was five hours of three advance courses 'supreme influential communication' taught by Jet, 'breakup survival guide' with Kei, and 'creative intimacy and attraction' with Lex.

In the first session, Jet emphasized attentiveness. "In every daily conversation, not only do you have to memorize pivotal words such as names, places or experiences, from which you can create new topics, but also you must be aware of nonverbal cues the conversational counterpart is conveying with their hand gestures, body leaning, head tilting and other subconscious body movements. Thus you can expand the conversation into limitless topics and avoid sensitive ones."

On inevitable breakups that may crush men's hearts, Kei said, "It's not your heart that's broken, it's simply your ego that's bruised." He closed his session with the catchphrase, "What doesn't kill you will make you glossier."

Lex taught us how to use neuro-linguistic programming, hypnotherapy and psychology to create a favorable impact in a woman's mind. "Essentially, you must do and say unpredictable things intentionally in order to stir and pile women's emotions up favorably, hence, they'll never get bored of you," he said.

At the end of a three-day session, trainees become part of the HS brotherhood, a 300-strong community of workshop alumni. For the ugly ducklings turned Prince Charmings of the 35th workshop, the lessons learned were 'incredible.'

"All we have to do," said one graduate, "is believe in ourselves, take care of our dull, routine existences, and invite [women] to our wonderful lives afterward."

What could possibly go wrong?

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