How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less
Read How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less Online
Authors: Nicholas Boothman
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Self Help, #Business
How to Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less
The “secret” of success is not very hard to figure out. The better you are at
connecting with other people, the better the quality of your life.
I first discovered the secrets of getting along with people during my career as a fashion
and advertising photographer. Whether it was working with a single model for a page in Vogue or 400 people aboard a ship to promote a Norwegian cruise line, it was obvious that for me
photography was more about clicking with people than about clicking with a camera. What's
more, it didn't matter if the shoot was taking place in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in San
Francisco or a ramshackle hut on the side of a mountain in Africa: the principles for
establishing rapport were universal.
For as long as I can remember, I have found it easy to get along with people. Could it be
a gift? Is there such a thing as a natural talent for getting along with people, or is it
something we learn along the way? And if it can be learned, can it be taught? I decided to
find out.
I knew from 25 years of shooting still photographs for magazines all over the world that
attitude and body language are paramount to creating a strong visual impressionmagazine
ads have less than two seconds to capture the reader's attention. I was also aware that
there was a way of using body language and voice tone to make perfect strangers feel comfortable
and cooperative. My third realization was that a few well-chosen words could evoke
expression, mood and action in almost any subject. With these insights under my belt, I
decided to look a little deeper.
Why is it easier to get on with some people than with others? Why can I have an
interesting conversation with a person I've just met, while someone else might dismiss
that same person as boring or threatening? Clearly, something must be happening on a level
beyond our conscious awareness, but what is it?
It was at this point in my quest that I came across the early work of Drs. Richard Bandler
and John Grinder at UCLA in a subject with the unwieldy name of NeuroLinguistic
Programming, NLP for short. Many of the things I had been doing intuitively as a
photographer, these two men and their colleagues had documented and analyzed as “the art
and science of personal excellence.” Among a fountain of new insights, they revealed
that everyone has a “favorite sense.” Find this sense and you have the key to unlock a
person's heart and mind.
As my new path became clearer, I set aside my cameras and resolved to focus on how
people work on the inside as well as how they look on the outside. Over the next few
years, I studied with Dr. Bandler in London and New York and earned a license as a Master
Practitioner of NLP. I studied Irresistible Language Patterns in the United States, Canada and England,
and delved into everything to do with the brain's part in human connectivity. I worked
with actors, comedians and drama teachers in America and storytellers in Africa to adapt
improvisational drills into exercises that enhance conversational skills.
Since then I have gone on to give seminars and talks all over the world, working with all
kinds of groups and individuals from sales teams to teachers, from leaders of
organizations who thought they knew it all to children so shy that people thought they
were dim-witted. And one thing became very clear: making people like you in 90 seconds or
less is a skill that can be taught to anyone in a natural, easy way.
Over and over I have been told, “Nick, this is amazing. Why don't you write it down?”
Well, I listened, and I have. And here it is.
N.B.
like you, the welcome mat is out and a connection is yours for the making. Other people are your greatest resource. They give birth to you; they feed you, dress you, provide you with money, make you laugh and cry;
they comfort you, heal you, invest your money, service your car and bury you. We can't live without them. We can't even die without them.
Connecting is what our ancestors were doing thousands of years ago when they gathered around the fire to eat woolly mammoth steaks or stitch together the latest animal-hide fashions. It's what we do when we hold quilting bees, golf tournaments, conferences and yard sales; it underlies our cultural rituals from the serious to the frivolous, from weddings and funerals to Barbie Doll conventions and spaghetti-eating contests.
Even the most antisocial of artists and poets who spend long, cranky months painting in a
studio or composing in a cubicle off their bedroom are usually hoping that through their
creations they will eventually connect with the public. And connection lies at the very
heart of those three pillars of our democratic civilization: government, religion and
television. Yes, television. Given that you can discuss Friends or The X-Files with folks from Berlin to Brisbane, a case must be made for the tube's ability to help
people connect all over the globe.
Thousands of people impact all aspects of our lives, be it the weatherman at the TV studio
in a neighboring city, or the technician at a phone company across the continent, or the
woman in Tobago who picks the mangoes for your fruit salad. Every day, wittingly or
unwittingly, we make a myriad of connections with people around the world.
Our personal growth and evolution (and the evolution of societies) come about as a result
of connecting with our fellow humans, whether as a band of young warriors setting out on
a hunt or as a group of coworkers heading out to the local pizzeria after work on
Friday. As a species, we are instinctively driven to come together and form groups of
friends, associations and communities. Without them, we cannot exist.
Making connections is what our gray matter does best. It receives information from our
senses and processes it by making associations. The brain delights in and learns from
these associations. It grows and flourishes when it's making connections.
People do the same thing. It's a scientific fact that people who connect live longer. In
their gem of a book, Keep YourBrainAlive, LawrenceKatzandManningRubin quote studies by the McArthur Foundation and the Inter
national Longevity Center in New York and at the University of Southern California.
These studies show that people who stay socially and physically active have longer life
spans. This doesn't mean hanging out with the same old crowd and peddling around on an
exercise bike. It means getting out and making new friends.
When you make new connections in the outside world, you make new connections in the inside
world in your brain. This keeps you young and alert. Edward M. Hallowell, in his very
savvy book Connect, cites the 1979 Alameda County Study by Dr. Lisa Berkman of the Harvard School of Health
Sciences. Dr. Berkman and her team carefully looked at 7,000 people, aged 35 to 65, over a
period of nine years. Their study concluded that people who lack social and community ties
are almost three times more likely to die of medical illness than those who have more
extensive contacts. And all this is independent of socioeconomic status and health practices such as smoking, alcoholic
beverage consumption, obesity or physical activity!
Other people can also help you take care of your needs and desires. Whatever it is you'd
like in this life romance, a dream job, a ticket to the Rose Bowlthe chances are pretty
high that you'll need someone's help to get it. If people like you, they will be disposed
to give you their time and their efforts. And the better the quality of rapport you have
with them, the higher the level of their cooperation.
Connecting is good for the community. After all, a community is the culmination of a lot
of connections: common beliefs, achievements, values, interests and geography. Rome
wasn't built in a day, and neither was Detroit. Three thousand years ago, in what today we
call Rome, Indo-Europeans connected to hunt, survive and generally look out for one
another. Three hundred years ago, a French trader turned up to create a safe haven for his
fur business; he started making connections and pretty soon Detroit was born.
We have a basic, physical need for other people; there are shared, mutual benefits in a
community, so we look out for each other. A connected community provides its members with strength and
safety. When we feel strong and safe, we can put our energy into evolving socially, culturally and spiritually.
Finally, we benefit from each other emotionally. We are not closed, self-regulating
systems, but open loops regulated, disciplined, encouraged, reprimanded, supported and
validated by the emotional feedback we receive from others. From time to time, we meet
someone who influences our emotions and vital body rhythms in such a pleasurable way that
we call it love. Be it through body language, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice
or words alone, other people make our hard times more bearable, our good times much
sweeter.
We use the emotional input of other humans as much as we do the air we breathe and the
food we eat. Deprive us of emotional and physical contact (a hug and a smile can go a long
way), and we will wither and die just as surely as if we were deprived of food. That's why
we hear stories of children in orphanages who grow sickly and weak despite being
adequately fed and clothed. People with autism may desire emotional and physical contact
but can languish because they are hindered by their lack of social skills. And how often
have you heard about one spouse in a 50-year marriage who,
The Internet has been touted as the ultimate tool for bringing people together into
shared communities of interest. And it's true: if you're searching for other teddy bear collectors in Toledo or mud wrestlers in Minsk, you'll find them on the Web.
For people who are housebound because of disabilities or illness, the Web can also be a godsend.
Still, we have to remember that spending hours in front of a screen, typing into cyberspace, is a poor substitute for the full spectrum of
experience offered by face-to-face time with another person. You might well meet someone in a chat room who interests you romantically, but would you agree to marry before meeting a few times in person?
You need to be in a person's presence for a while in order to pick up all the verbal and nonverbal cues. The atmosphere created by physical and
mental presence is as important as surface attraction, if not more so. For example, what
sort of environment do the two of you create? How spontaneous are you? How strong is your
need for conversation? What about your openness, supportiveness and companionship?
If you don't meet each other's emotional needs, you may be heading for failure. These
things can only be determined by face-to-face contact. Only then can you tell if you're
really “connecting.”
despite being medically healthy, dies a few short months or even weeks after the death of
the other spouse? Food and shelter aren't enough. We need each other, and we need love.
If people like you, they feel natural and comfortable around you. They will give you their
attention and happily open up for you.
Likability has something to do with how you look but a lot more to do with how you make
people feel. My old nanny, who brought me up to be passionate about people, used to talk
about having “a sunny disposition.” She'd take me out on the promenade, and we'd spot the
people who had sunny dispositions and all those who were “sourpusses.” She told me we can
choose what we want to be, and then we'd laugh at the sourpusses because they looked so
serious.
Likable people give loud and clear signals of their willingness to be sociable; they
reveal that their public communication channels are open. Embedded in these signals is
evidence of self-confidence, sincerity and trust. Likable people expose a warm, easygoing
public face with an outgoing radiance that states, “I am ready to connect. I am open for
business.” They are welcoming and friendly, and they get other people's attention.
“Time is precious.” “Time costs money.” “Don't I waste my time.” Time has become an
increasingly sought-after commodity. We budget our time, make it stand still, slow it down
or speed it up, lose sense of it and distort it; we even buy timesaving devices. Yet time
is one of the few things we can't saveit is forever unfolding. In bygone days, we were inherently more respectful of one another and devoted more time to the niceties of getting to know someone and
explore common ground. In the hustle and bustle of life today, we rush about with so
many deadlines attached to everything that unfortunately we don't have the time, or take
the time, to invest in getting to know each other well. We look for associations, make
appraisals and assumptions, and form decisions all within a few seconds and frequently
before a word is even spoken. Friend or foe? Fight or flight? Opportunity or threat?
Familiar or foreign?