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" Yes, you love the man in your life. No, you wouldn&amp;#039;t change a thing about him. But let&amp;#039;s be completely honest here \u2014 isn&amp;#039;t there something he does (or doesn&amp;#039;t do) in bed that you would love to fix? Problem is, the last thing a man wants is to be your personal home-improvement project, especially in the bedroom. So for the last couple of months, a few girlfriends and I decided to see if we could quietly improve our sex lives \u2014 without our husbands&amp;#039; or boyfriends&amp;#039; knowing what we were doing. We deployed a few strategic techniques to tweak the way our men behaved in bed. And it was all good. Even more exciting, nobody&amp;#039;s guy complained. (Men rarely complain when they get to have good sex.) Here&amp;#039;s what we tried \u2014 and how it worked. Coach Him  Like a football coach who urges his team on to victory, we women can guide our men to big wins in the boom-boom room. &amp;quot;Coaching a man in bed means inspiring him to high performance,&amp;quot; explains Martin Sage, a business coach and motivational speaker. &amp;quot;And the best way to do that is with positive reinforcement and positive thinking. Men are simple; we want to know how we&amp;#039;re doing, and we want you to cheer us on to victory.&amp;quot; To motivate your man to do better, Sage recommends &amp;quot;lighting him up,&amp;quot; or pumping up his enthusiasm with encouraging comments. You want to fill him with positive energy and make him feel alive. &amp;quot;Structure your intimate time to resemble halftime at a great event \u2014 a celebration!&amp;quot; says Sage. What shouldn&amp;#039;t you do? &amp;quot;Criticizing him is the worst,&amp;quot; says Gigi Sage, Martin&amp;#039;s wife, also a motivational speaker, who conducts seminars for women on how to deal with men in the business world. &amp;quot;That never works. Same goes for insulting him. Instead, tell him what he&amp;#039;s doing right and go from there.&amp;quot; Catherine,* a 35-year-old publicist in New York City, told me she was frustrated because her husband always rushed things during sex. He&amp;#039;d skip over foreplay and go from kissing straight to intercourse. Annoyed one night in bed, she asked him what his hurry was. &amp;quot;That did not go over well,&amp;quot; she reports. &amp;quot;Unfortunately, he felt criticized \u2014 I think I put his lights out.&amp;quot; Catherine&amp;#039;s plan B was to try the Sages&amp;#039; &amp;quot;light him up&amp;quot; coaching philosophy. First, Catherine psyched herself up before sex \u2014 like an athlete does before he plays in a big game. (When you yourself are &amp;quot;lit up,&amp;quot; say the Sages, your man will listen to you more.) Then she started giving her guy step-by-step positive feedback: &amp;quot;As we began kissing, I told my man he was so sexy and so hot and was such an incredible manly sex machine that I wanted to enjoy every minute with him. At first, he started laughing, but as I kept building him up and providing him with his own private cheering section, he completely responded to it. It made him more relaxed and it didn&amp;#039;t seem like he was in such a hurry. I remember thinking that I often complimented him when we first met and that I don&amp;#039;t do that anymore.&amp;quot; Once Catherine realized how well her plan was working, she started to interject more motivational coaching every time they had sex. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d say, &amp;#039;That feels so great, give me more&amp;#039; if he was doing something I really liked,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And I told him whenever he did something right, every step of the way. When he touched my hair, I told him I loved that; when he rubbed my hoo-ha, I told him it felt yummy; when he gave me oral, I told him he was driving me crazy and that it felt so good. And I noticed that every time I gave him his &amp;#039;score,&amp;#039; he seemed more confident.&amp;quot; Catherine&amp;#039;s husband enjoyed the positive feedback so much that he started slowing down \u2014 which, of course, was her goal all along. &amp;quot;All of a sudden, he lingered more and took his time. I think that my enthusiasm got him excited about being a good lover boy, and then he wanted to do even more. So instead of 30 seconds of foreplay, now I get a whole 20 minutes!&amp;quot; The key, says Martin Sage, is to keep it positive. &amp;quot;Appreciation and acknowledgment make him eager to please you,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;After all, your pleasure is his ultimate goal.&amp;quot; Names have been changed. Brainwash Him People have used hypnosis to stop smoking and start cults, so why not use a fun form of it to shift your guy&amp;#039;s thinking when it comes to sex? Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, is an approach to psychotherapy that can help you replace bad habits with better ones, says NLP master trainer and clinical hypnotist John James Santangelo. Often employed by self-help gurus (Tony Robbins studied NLP at one point), NLP uses language patterns to plant suggestions in a person&amp;#039;s mind and change their behavior \u2014 literally reprogramming them. You can try it on yourself, but you can also harness it to affect the behavior of others. NLP practitioners might employ it in hypnotherapy to help people lose weight or lessen stress. So-called &amp;quot;pickup artists&amp;quot; use NLP-inspired techniques to pick up girls, saying key words such as pleasure to turn a woman&amp;#039;s subconscious mind toward sex. I decided to use a simplified form of NLP to improve my man&amp;#039;s basic bedroom technique a bit. Following Santangelo&amp;#039;s tips, I started out by identifying exactly what outcome I hoped for \u2014 which is that I really wanted my boyfriend to play with my breasts more (or, frankly, at all) during sex. The next step, Santangelo told me: &amp;quot;Take control of your emotions so you&amp;#039;re in a good mood. You can&amp;#039;t communicate effectively if you&amp;#039;re in an agitated state of mind.&amp;quot; That meant no blurting out what I was really thinking, which was, You never play with my breasts! Why not?!? I have good ones!  Next, I came up with a visual &amp;quot;trigger&amp;quot; that I could use to reprogram my guy&amp;#039;s brain \u2014 in this case, playfully bouncing my boobs in his face during sex. While doing that, I used words connected to sexual pleasure, saying things like &amp;quot;I get so excited when you do that&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;That makes me so hot.&amp;quot; This was supposed to make him learn to subconsciously associate his playing with my breasts with my getting all excited about him. To get even better results, you could try figuring out what your guy&amp;#039;s personal &amp;quot;trance&amp;quot; words are \u2014 words that have special emotional meaning for him, or, in this case, words related to sex that especially turn him on. (Just think about the kinds of things he likes to say during dirty talk.) Trance words allow you to plug directly into his subconscious to give your &amp;quot;brainwashing&amp;quot; an extra boost. I finished up by saying things like, &amp;quot;I love this. Can we do this again?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;This is sooo good, you are so hot,&amp;quot; to drive the message home so I could get even more of what I wanted next time. The idea behind all of this was to build new connections in his brain. Creating new positive associations with the trigger (my boobs) rewired him so that whenever he sees my breasts, he&amp;#039;s immediately motivated to play with them. It sounds so simple \u2014 and it worked: I swear, the &amp;quot;girls&amp;quot; and I are now living happily ever after. Be the Husband Whisperer Animal trainers use very simple methods to change a dog&amp;#039;s behavior \u2014 and if their techniques can get an old dog to try a new trick, they can help you get your man to do something new too, says Tamar Gellar, author of the book The Loved Dog and a Los Angeles-based animal trainer to the pooches of stars including Oprah Winfrey, Kelly Ripa, and Ben Affleck. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s wonderful about dogs is that they live in the moment,&amp;quot; says Gellar, &amp;quot;and the male human species is not that different.&amp;quot; We already know that giving treats (a.k.a. positive reinforcement) works on both dogs and men, but you have to apply them at the right time, Gellar says: &amp;quot;Always make sure to reward your husband right then and there for doing something right. Say something like &amp;#039;How did I get so lucky?&amp;#039; right after he did what you wanted him to do.&amp;quot; The other key, says Gellar, is to stop talking about what you want and just do it. &amp;quot;Sometimes women talk too much,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Blah, blah, blah. You never try to reason with a dog \u2014 you just show them what you want them to do. The same goes for men: Sometimes you have to show a man what you want, rather than talk about it.&amp;quot; I wanted to try tying up my boyfriend in bed, but he was so macho and dominant that I thought I&amp;#039;d never be able to convince him to submit a little. After talking to Gellar, I realized that babbling on and on to him about it wasn&amp;#039;t getting me anywhere. So instead, I got a big rope and simply said, &amp;quot;This is going to be fun. After you let me tie you up, I&amp;#039;m going to be so turned on you won&amp;#039;t believe it!&amp;quot; (Promising a positive outcome always helps.) And then I shut up and did it. And he let me do it \u2014 and he liked it! By skipping the long-winded justifications of what and where and why, and demonstrating exactly what I wanted, I helped him understand it better and avoided any arguments \u2014 with very sexy results. Challenge Him We all know how men love to play games. So why not tap into his competitive side and make improving your sex life a fun challenge? &amp;quot;Because of their high levels of testosterone, men have an instinctual need to be on top&amp;quot; (no pun intended!), says REDBOOK Love Network expert Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women. &amp;quot;Winning is paramount, which is why men sometimes engage in competitive behavior that may seem crazy. Challenging a man actually appeals to his inborn desire to prove himself to you, so it&amp;#039;s a good way to get results.&amp;quot; Haltzman adds that men particularly respond to a challenge that is &amp;quot;action-oriented,&amp;quot; meaning one that engages him physically \u2014 good news if what you want is more action in bed! Teresa, 36, a television producer in Los Angeles, told me she hated that her husband often wanted sex five minutes before he falls asleep. Needless to say, watching late-night talk shows followed by two minutes of lazy sex was just not doing it for her. So she presented her husband with a simple but strategic challenge, saying: &amp;quot;For the next two months we can have sex only at some time of day other than right before we fall asleep at night. I will have sex with you anywhere, anytime, just not while we&amp;#039;re watching Leno.&amp;quot; And her husband rose (ahem) to the challenge. First, they did it one Saturday in the laundry room while contractors were in the house, then they did it in the garage after driving home from a picnic, and once they even found themselves doing it in an apple orchard during a rest while they were out riding bikes. &amp;quot;Boy, was this game effective,&amp;quot; Teresa says. &amp;quot;It made me realize that complaining about how I wasn&amp;#039;t being satisfied was just making him tune me out \u2014 and not saying anything about it wasn&amp;#039;t going to fix the situation either. But challenging him to have sex in a different context made it fun for him to change, and our sex life ended up being more romantic for me. It really opened my eyes when I discovered what a difference a new approach can make.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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