1People Power
1Connecting with other people brings infinite rewards. And whether it’s landing the job, winning the promotion, gaining the sale, charming a new partner, electrifying your audience or passing inspection by future in-laws, if people 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 The Office or Lost 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 Your Brain Alive, Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin quote studies by the MacArthur Foundation and the International 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 pedaling 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 Bowl—the 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, 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.
The Internet has been touted as the ultimate tool for bringing people together into shared communities of interest. And it’s true: you can have fun with an ever-expanding network of “friends” on Facebook, and 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, 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 on Match.com who interests you romantically, but would you agree to marry before meeting at least 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 feel a connection in person, the relationship might not last. These things can only be determined by face-to-face contact.
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 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 save—it 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?
Instinctively, we assess, undress and best-guess each other. And if we can’t present ourselves fast and favorably, we run the risk of being politely, or impolitely, passed over.
The second reason for establishing likability in 90 seconds or less has to do with the human attention span. Believe it or not, the attention span of the average person is about 30 seconds! Focusing attention has been compared to controlling a troop of wild monkeys. Attention craves novelty—it needs to be entertained and loves to leap from branch to branch, making new connections. If there’s nothing fresh and exciting for it to focus on, it becomes distracted and wanders off in search of something more compelling—deadlines, football or world peace.
Read this sentence, then look away from the book and fix your attention on anything that isn’t moving (a great piece of art doesn’t count). Keep your eyes on the object for 30 seconds. You’ll probably feel your eyes glazing over after just 10 seconds, if not before.
In face-to-face communication, it’s not enough to command the other person’s attention. You must also be able to hold on to it long enough to deliver your message or intention. You will capture attention with your likability, but you will hold on to it with the quality of rapport you establish. More and more it comes down to three things: 1) your presence, i.e., what you look like and how you move; 2) your attitude, i.e., what you say, how you say it and how interesting you are; and 3) how you make people feel.
When you learn how to make fast, meaningful connections with people, you will improve your relationships at work and even at home. You will discover the enjoyment of being able to approach anyone with confidence and sincerity. But a word of caution: we’re not about to change your personality; this is not a new way of being, not a new way of life. You are not getting a magic wand to rush out into the street with and have the world inviting you to dinner—these are connecting skills to be used only when you need them.
Establishing rapport in 90 seconds or less with another person or group, be it in a social or community setting or with a business audience or even in a packed courtroom, can be intimidating for many people. It has always amazed me that in this most fundamental of all life skills, we’ve been given little or no training. You are about to discover that you already possess many of the abilities needed for making natural connections with other people—it’s just that you were never aware of them before.