10Putting It All Together
10People are drawn to one another and are eager to connect—to be liked.
Successful communicators don’t go out into the world every day loaded up with skills and techniques; they go out and take what they do for granted. It’s in the “letting go” that the people, things and events in your life flow easily. This is the difference between those who struggle and get nowhere, and those who appear to do very little and have everything.
The more you act upon what you have learned here, the more you will effortlessly just assume rapport with other people. Of course, you must practice, but soon it will be as natural as riding a bike or swimming—two other skills you mastered only on the day you let go of worrying and had faith.
This book is about connecting with your greatest resource: other people. It’s about establishing rapport, an instant bond, with them as you join together mentally. You have seen that rapport is the link between meeting and communicating, and how the quality and depth of the rapport you establish can affect your outcome. Rapport can happen naturally or by design.
We have looked at the meaning of communication as the response you get and how, in order for your communication to achieve its desired outcome, a little KFC can go a long way—in fact, not just in communication but in all areas of your life where you want a positive result.
The basic template for greeting someone new is: Open—Eye—Beam—“Hi!”—Lean. You are first with the open body language, eye contact, smile and “Hi,” and the lean sets you up for synchronizing. You can remember that when you point your heart at another person you convey your openness.
You can choose your attitude. A Really Useful Attitude is paramount to how others perceive you and how you feel about yourself. You know that your attitude keeps you congruent, or believable, according to the three “V’s” of communication. In other words, when you have a Really Useless Attitude like anger, you look angry, sound angry and use angry words—all unappealing. Conversely, it’s easy to make yourself likable when you adopt a Really Useful Attitude, let’s say, welcoming, because you will look welcoming, sound welcoming and use welcoming words.
We have covered body language, open and closed, and seen how, along with facial expressions and gestures, it makes up slightly more than half of what other people get from us. That’s why it is so valuable in synchronizing for rapport by design.
When we say “I like you” to someone, what we really mean is “I am like you.” In rapport by design, we don’t wait hopefully to see if we have things in common; we move straight into synchronizing the body language, voice tone and words of the person we are meeting. We know that we have unconsciously been synchronizing emotional feedback all our lives from the people who have influenced us—parents, peers, teachers, and so on—and therefore it’s easy and natural to synchronize other people in order to make them feel comfortable with us.
In terms of talking with a new acquaintance, we have seen that questions are the generators of conversation and that they fall into two categories: open and closed. Open questions open people up, and that’s the goal of conversation. You know that giving physical and spoken feedback will “keep the ball in play.” Conversation is about describing your experiences to others, and the more colorfully you can do it, the more you can “talk in color,” the better they can imagine and share your experiences—and as a consequence increase the bonding and rapport you are creating by design.
You have learned, to your surprise and delight, that every person you meet or already know presents you with a sensory puzzle. Do they prefer to connect on a Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic wavelength? You have begun developing insight into their perceptions of the world around them.
In fact, even if you have begun to implement the techniques in this book and gotten it all wrong—you are still getting it right! You are being proactive with people, as opposed to reactive or passive. There is no downside; you can’t lose. If you are carefully observing people’s body language and expressions, listening to their words, watching their eye movements, giving feedback and making conversation—you are being proactive and they can’t help but like you. As long as you have a Really Useful Attitude.
Let me reiterate that this is not a new way of being, not a new way of life. I haven’t given you a magic wand to rush out into the street with and start tapping people over the head to make them like you. These are tools and techniques that help you establish rapport quickly.
We have covered the four basic areas of making people like you in 90 seconds or less: attitude, synchronization, conversation and sensory preferences. Improvement in any one of these areas will increase your ability to communicate effectively and quickly with other people. As you learn to incorporate all four stages into your face-to-face encounters, the effects will become more and more apparent.
You know why you connect naturally with some people and not with others, and since starting the book you have probably already begun to improve your relationships at home and at work. You are approaching people with increased confidence and sincerity and enjoying each new experience. And you have realized that you already possess most of the skills needed for making natural connections with other people.
The more you use the many tools we have shared throughout this entire book—from the image you project with a Really Useful Attitude to the sincerity and charisma you impart in your greeting, from the comfort and empathy generated by synchronizing to the ability to recognize which sense a person most relies upon—the more you’ll be able to establish rapport with ease and make people like you in 90 seconds or less.
If I had to assign a priority to these four aspects, a Really Useful Attitude stands alone in its power to generate good feelings in yourself and in others. Attitude is infectious and obvious, and it precedes you. Your attitude not only drives your behavior, it drives the behavior of others—and comes across in your body language, your voice tone and the words you use. You will notice an immediate improvement in your rapport skills the moment you begin to manage your attitude. On the flip side, if not properly managed, your attitude will work against you—just as fast. Attitude can attract or repel.
Next, without doubt, is the amazing power of synchronizing. As you have seen, synchronization is part of our natural makeup, and it’s what we already do unconsciously with those people we like. When you meet someone and you want to establish quick rapport, start synchronizing immediately. It will feel odd at first unless you’ve done the exercise on synchronizing in groups of three (see page 82), in which case you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. Two or three days are ample to become proficient, even brilliant, in this department. After all, you’ve been doing it your whole life, in one way or another, with the people who are close to you.
As your conversation skills improve and you encourage the other person to do plenty of talking, you will find yourself having time to make observations about sensory preferences. Let this come gently. Do you remember those Magic-Eye books from the early ’90s? You’d gaze at some weird-looking picture and slowly, eventually, your eyes would refocus and you’d see a picture in 3-D. Discovering sensory preferences is like that. You look and you search, and you get frustrated, and then suddenly you refocus on people and they start to look different as you establish an elegant, deep rapport at the subconscious level, where true unity is achieved. The unfolding and detection of someone’s sensory preference will continue after your 90 seconds and give you the vehicle to travel much deeper into rapport by design with your new person—your newest great resource.
So, you’re at a conference and you’ve just met Sylvie Clairoux, the head of the department you’d like to work for. The connecting is smooth, warm, sincere and respectful; your Really Useful Attitude and openness made for a perfect “greeting.” Although there are seven people at the meeting, you synchronize her body movements but with no excess eye contact. Her subconscious picks it up. There is chance eye contact, she smiles politely, you acknowledge—BINGO! You’ve been practicing this daily and have easily realized by her dress, her voice, her choice of words, eye movements and tonality that she’s probably Auditory. When you speak, you synchronize her voice tone and use Auditory words (“That sounds great!” … “Everybody on the team has voiced an opinion.”). How can this stranger not like you when you look, sound and move so much like her? At the break, you get her to one side.
“I’d like to hear more about the proposal,” you begin.
“Haven’t we met before?” Ms. Clairoux asks.
“I think she likes you!” whispers the little voice in your head.
As I write this book, I assume I like you, the reader. I assume I need you; I assume you need me. And what’s more, I assume I’m right. This is what gives me the confidence to keep on writing. We need each other; that’s the real basis for our rapport. And here we are connecting.
We can harness the power of imagination to make useful assumptions. We receive so much information from our five senses that we can’t possibly process it all consciously. Instead it gets sorted into three separate lots. The main batch of information you delete from your consciousness. For example, you weren’t aware of your left foot until I just drew your attention to it, and you probably haven’t got a clue how your fingernails grow. The second batch you distort; you feed it into your imagination and play around with it, imagining your upcoming vacation, getting paranoid about the battery in your smoke detector, that sort of thing. And the third batch is stored away under the heading of generalizations, or assumptions. When you’ve seen one frying pan, you can make an assumption that the big metal thing on your neighbor’s stove with the long handle and the sizzling pancakes in it is a frying pan; you don’t have to find out all over again what it is. Your brain will make a generalized assumption. Assumptions at their best are great for learning, but at their worst they lead to biased, unfair, limiting and dangerous fantasies. If your imagination has been distorting information to scare you away from people, all I ask is your understanding that your imagination is tricking you into making negative assumptions about people based on past experience. In this case, your imagination is running the show and the score is Imagination one, You zero.
Get your imagination under control. See it for the fun vehicle it is and use it to install some Really Useful Assumptions. Here are a few to get you going. After reading them, close your eyes and see what they will look, sound and feel like:
Assume rapport and trust between yourself and other people.
Assume/trust that you will like them and that they will like you.
Assume that what you’ll be doing with other people—connecting, synchronizing, etc.—will work.
Assume that others will give you the benefit of the doubt, and you will do the same for them.
Assume that what you’ve learned from this book will work for you because it’s worked for thousands of other people.
Assume that you are making a difference in the lives of the individuals you meet.
Assume that this difference is for the better, not just in their lives but also in your community as a whole.
Assume that a connected community is a place where we encourage, uplift and promote each other.
People who connect live longer; people who connect get cooperation; and people who connect feel safe and strong. People who connect evolve. Together we rise and fall, together we sink or swim, together we laugh and cry. And when all is said and done, it’s people that make the hard times bearable and the good times much, much sweeter.
Lately I’ve been giving a lot of talks to high school students. Many of them are looking for part-time or summer employment, and they need to sharpen their job-seeking and people skills. I’ll never forget one particular student who sullenly interrupted my talk.
“Hey, man, I’ve gone to lots of job interviews and they never hire me,” he griped. “I tried at a grocery store, a drugstore, an office … ”
Other students around him began to snicker. The reason was pretty clear. The young man was wearing torn army pants and a T-shirt with the word “Rancid” splashed across the front (that’s the name of a thrash-punk band). His left ear was pierced in three places and he had a nose ring, too. Even more to the point, he sported a bright green Mohawk that stood up six inches high on his otherwise shaved head.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“A job, whaddya think?”
“Have you thought of changing what you’re doing to get it?”
He glared at me, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “Changing what?”
“How about the way you look?” I asked, leaning forward.
“No way, man!” he practically hollered. “If they don’t like how I look, that’s discrimination!”
“Look, I see your point,” I said. (He was Visual.) “But we both know how the world works. So what do you want? The job or the haircut?”
There was a long silence. Finally he uncrossed his arms and rolled his eyeballs upward. “The job, I guess,” he muttered. Some of the other students laughed good-naturedly. Slowly, he began to laugh, too. Then we all laughed. That’s what it’s all about.