The Top Three Things I Learned From My Time As An Escort That Hold People Back From Succeeding
People are afraid of taking the lead to their detriment, one-dimensional thinking, lack of genuine curiosity, and much more
I was 20 when I first started out as a sex worker — I was at university, and I didn’t want to have big student loans. The only way I could see to avoid big student loans was sex work, as such I signed up with a local agency and for the next five years worked as an escort.
Here are the top three things that I learned during my time selling sex for money.
One of the main reasons people don’t get what they want is that they don’t take the lead and ask for it
When I first signed up to be a sex worker, I was confident I would do well, mainly because I believed myself to have good social skills, good bedroom skills and — despite a few body hangups — to be attractive. However, despite my best efforts, my meeting with my first punter was awkward to say the least, and this is despite the fact that the guy was lovely and very understanding.
With my confidence shattered, I told the girl who ran the agency, and this is what she said to me, “You made the same mistake most newbies make with their first call, you expected the guy to lead.” She was right, I had.
The reason this was life-changing for me was that over time I realised that frequently I expected people to take the lead, and not just when I was in the bedroom with guys, I realised that when I wanted something from someone, I would try to get them to offer it to me.
My previous time as a bar worker best showed this, I wanted the role of supervisor, but rather than ask for it, I instead tried to work extra hard so that I would be offered it. The new guy did not, he just asked for it and got it.
The amount of friends of mine — more female than male, but male as well — who can tell similar stories and who made similar mistakes is high in number. We want something, but then we don’t ask for it and instead try to see if we can get people to offer us it. They rarely do.
My time as a sex worker taught me how to avoid this pitfall, and that learning how to take the lead and make it explicitly clear what you want and expect from the get-go can be life-changing. After all, I saw a good number of very successful men, and it was amazing how from the get-go, they made explicitly clear what they wanted and expected. That’s why they got it.
So, if you want to get ahead in life and get what you want, start taking the lead and making it explicitly clear what you want and expect — and from the get go at that. It’s amazing how doing so more often than not leads to you getting what you want and expect — promotions and wage rises included.
The main reason a lot of people struggle to make connections with people is that they are not curious enough about people
A big problem I had in my early days as an escort was that the conversations were robotic and fake. I didn’t think that mattered, after all, they just wanted sex, right? Wrong. Some did but most wanted conversation as well, along with a form of intimacy, and some even wanted a friend of sorts.
My inability to give the people coming to see me any of those things by building a rapport with them was hindering my ability to get regulars. This was a problem because regulars are where the real money is in sex work, but also it is safer having a group of regulars rather than constantly seeing lots of new people.
The girl who ran the agency once again stepped in and offered something profound that changed my life, she said, “Just be super curious, but in a genuine way. People love that.”
At first, I thought she just meant indulge them, something I felt I was already doing. She had not, she had meant be legitimately curious, and she went on and told me that many of the people who were coming to see me would likely be very switched on and that I could likely learn from them in many ways, I just had to discover what it was I could learn.
I took this to heart, and I started being genuinely curious by asking them about themselves. Before I knew it, I had a group of regulars and was learning lots of new things, from psychology, to business, accounting, engineering, this industry, that industry, the stock markets, how to invest, everything you can think of, some people were coming to see me and most of the time we were conversing, and they were teaching me new things — and I’m not talking about the sexual kind.
That is the power of genuine curiosity, you start learning lots of new things and through that process connecting with people who are on the same page as you.
So, if you want to start building up genuine connections with people, whether that be work-based ones, or real-world ones, start being genuinely curious about people, especially in regard to who they are, what they think, and what they know. The connections and the flow of knowledge that come with genuine connections will soon follow.
Most people suffer very much from one-dimensional thinking and it is very much to their detriment
My biggest fear about getting into escorting was the fact that I would be having sex with lots of men that I likely would never in a million years ever want to have sex with. But a friend of mine who got into sex work before me said this, “The way I see it, I don’t have sex with people, I just give them a performance-based massage.”
At first, I didn’t really understand what she was saying, but I soon did because I came to the same conclusion. In my mind to this day, I never had sex with any punter, I gave them a performance-based massage. It was just the performance-based massage I gave them was one that involved not just my hands, but often my mouth and vagina. Also, I often allowed them to use my vagina to massage themselves, I also often allowed them to give me a massage. I also often now and then massaged their egos verbally. But it was always a massage, never sex.
And I actually quite enjoyed giving people these performance-based massages, I would never have enjoyed having sex with them, but I actually took pride in giving them a good performance-based massage.
Often, we look at things in a very one-dimensional manner, so from one perspective. Sex is sex, love is love, this is this, and that is that. But this way of thinking is a mistake because everything looks different from a different perspective. I had thought sex was always sex, then I learned it was not, it could also be a performance-based massage.
This is why learning to look at things from a different perspective is so powerful, it changes the picture completely and when you see different pictures, everything changes.
So, if you wish to change your life for the better, one of the best ways to do so is to start changing the way you look at things, it’s amazing how doing so can present an angle where suddenly things just look so much better and make so much more sense.
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