A professional flirting coach taught us how to be irresistible

After 11 series of Made In Chelsea, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that posh people are bad at flirting.

But that’s where Cate Mackenzie comes in: the psychosexual therapist has lit up the love lives of Islington and Chelsea residents with workshops that claim they can make anyone irresistible.

With this is mind, we headed to a candy-floss pink basement in Carnaby Street to see if she could work her magic on us, two extremely resistible young men

Surrounded by a sea of older women and complimentary champagne, we took our seats at the front and prepared for what promised to be an enlightening session.

Learn to turn on your pilot light

The Cupid of Sloane Square made for a captivating host, and we sat down mesmerised as she began to tell us our biggest enemy when it comes to being irresistible is ourselves.

“There have been studies, and it’s not the most attractive people who are the ones who get laid.” Apparently the issue is finding “what gets you lit up” and embracing that internal fire – that is, being confident and accepting that people might actually want to flirt with you rather than sheepishly dismissing any possible suitor as someone who’s probably made a mistake.

Cate talks a lot about “connections”, and she demonstrates how to make one on Josh by role-playing a supermarket flirting scenario. On the first try he’s stuttering and bewildered – but after teaching him to relax, lower his voice and slow his speech, he sounds like a veritable flirting king.

Finding love is all about being fun and spontaneous

Cate says that the most important thing to get you in the mood to find love is having fun. She told the crowd: “Some people are so busy looking for the one, they end up looking right over their heads.”

However, “one salsa class is not enough” – to be truly spontaneous, you have to consistently go out of your comfort zone. After impulsively deciding to “go dancing all over London,” Cate met a man when he approached her at a cafe and asked about the book she was reading.

Instead of turning him away, Cate got into conversation with this stranger – and ended up happily married to him. She tells us about the importance of giving off positive energy and, after deducing that Josh has a beaming aura, asks everyone else in the class to reach out and “feel his beam”.

Get touchy-feely to prepare for the day ahead

One of the biggest parts of feeling ready to flirt is psyching yourself up ahead of time. For Cate, the best way to do this is to take 15 minutes in the morning to relax yourself, either through yoga or meditation, before beginning your “embodiment exercises.”

For women, Cate is partial to a “non sexual” breast massaging for 10-15 minutes, to help with your mood and sexual energy for the rest of the day. For men, the routine is similar – if not a bit weirder. Cate recommends “massaging your sacred wand, but not ejaculating.”

After the embodiment exercises, the next step is to reassure yourself of your own irresistibility. Taking the “Superwoman pose” (hands on hips, feet shoulder width apart, head looking upwards at angle) and repeating a mantra allows you to “believe your own energy”.

As Cate explained, the goal here is not to make you instantly aroused, but to allow you to become so more easily. She compares it to a map of London: “ To get to Zone 5 of arousal, you need to know your tube stops.”

Open up your body language

Paraphrasing Hitch, Cate emphasised the importance of thinking about what you’re saying with your body language as much as your words. As she told the group: “60 per cent of all human communication is nonverbal, body language. 30 per cent is your tone, so that means 90 per cent of what you’re saying isn’t coming out of your mouth.”

By crossing your arms and burying your face in a phone, Cate believes you’re shutting yourself off to finding someone. According to Cate, the only time it’s ever acceptable to shut off and cross your arms is when you’re uncomfortable or want to tell someone to back off.

Despite our reluctance to meet new people, we’re paired up and asked to stare into each others’ eyes – alternating “giving” and “receiving” the stare. Though awkward at first, it ends up being quite enlightening, and it definitely feels like love is in the air. Or maybe it’s just the champagne.

Don’t hold onto the past

We’re often holding onto painful past memories which knock our confidence, so Cate advises being thankful and ultimately letting them go.

She tells us a story to illustrate her point: her friend met a “gorgeous poet” in a slam poetry tent at a festival. “They shared a connection, and he asked her for a cup of tea,” Cate says: “But she refused, because she’d seen him looking at another woman.”

The moral of the story is that the relationship didn’t work because Cate’s friend was expecting him to be a cheater – her previous experiences had closed her off, and thus she missed a valuable connection.

Commit to being irresistible in public

Cate believes a real issue in the flirting world nowadays is an overreliance on technology – so she advises us to drag our eyes away from our screens and go out into the real world to find love.

“Islington and the South Bank are good areas to sit and make eyes at people,” she says. She advises making eye contact with strangers, and not closing up if you get approached by someone you might like: “How will lovely people know that you’re single, if you don’t let them?”

Cate has an infectious carpe diem mentality to talking to strangers.. As she says: “Don’t wait for the universe to set you up again.”

Overcome your ‘old head’

Cate’s lasting message is that this new, fun, spontaneous head is hard to adapt to, when we’re so used to having our old heads screwed on.

“The old head is strong,” she says, and perseverance is needed to stay confident – but as we were all made to stand in the Superwoman pose and shout in chorus “I am irresistible”, we couldn’t help but notice: we were feeling pretty damn irresistible.