2First Impressions
2For the purposes of this book, there are three parts to connecting with other people: meeting, establishing rapport and communicating. These three parts happen quickly and tend to overlap and blend into each other. Our goal is to make them as natural, fluid and easy as possible, and above all to make them enjoyable and rewarding.
Obviously, you begin the connecting process by meeting people. Sometimes you meet someone by chance—the woman on the train who turns out to share your passion for Bogart movies. And sometimes it’s by choice—the man your cousin introduced you to because he loves Shakespeare, fine wines and bungee jumping, just like you.
If meeting is the physical coming together of two or more people, then communicating is what we do from the moment we are fully aware of another’s presence. And between these two events—meeting and communicating—lies the 90-second land of rapport that links them together.
If you make the right impression during the first three or four seconds of a new meeting, you create an awareness that you are sincere, safe and trustworthy and the opportunity to go further and create rapport will present itself.
We call the first few seconds of contact the “greeting.” Greetings are broken into five parts: Open—Eye—Beam—Hi!—Lean. These five actions constitute a welcoming program to carry out in a first encounter.
Open. The first part of the greeting is to open your attitude and your body. For this to work successfully, you must have already decided on a positive attitude that’s right for you. This is the time to really feel and be aware of it.
Check to see that your body language is open. If you have the right attitude, this should take care of itself. Keep your heart aimed directly at the person you’re meeting. Don’t cover your heart with your hands or arms and, when possible, unbutton your jacket or coat.
Eye. The second part of the greeting involves your eyes. Be first with eye contact. Look this new person directly in the eye. Let your eyes reflect your positive attitude. To state the obvious: eye contact is real contact!
Get used to really looking at other people’s eyes. When you’re watching TV one evening, note the eye color of as many people as possible and say the name of the color to yourself. The next day, do the same with every person you meet, looking him or her straight in the eye.
Beam. This part is closely related to eye contact. Beam! Be the first to smile. Let your smile reflect your attitude.
Now you’ve gained the other person’s attention through your open body language, your eye contact and your beaming smile. What that person is picking up subconsciously is an impression not of some grinning, gawking fool (though you may briefly fear you look like one!) but of someone who is completely sincere.
Hi! Whether it’s “Hi!” or “Hello!” or even “Yo!” say it with pleasing tonality and attach your own name to it (“Hi! I’m Naomi”). As with the smile and the eye contact, be the first to identify yourself. It is at this point, and within only a few seconds, that you are in a position to gather tons of free information about the person you’re meeting—information you can put to good use later in your conversation.
Take the lead. Extend your hand to the other person, and if it’s convenient find a way to say his or her name two or three times to help fix it in memory. Not “Glenda, Glenda, Glenda, nice to meet you” but “Glenda. Great to meet you, Glenda!” As you’ll see in Chapter 7, this will be followed by your “occasion/location statement.”
Lean. The final part of introducing yourself is the “lean.” This action can be an almost imperceptible forward tilt to very subtly indicate your interest and openness as you begin to “synchronize” the person you’ve just met.
Handshakes run the gamut from the strong, sturdy bonecrusher to the wet noodle. Both are memorable—once shaken, twice shy, in some cases.
Certain expectations accompany a handshake. It should be firm and respectful, as if you were ringing a hand bell for room service. Deviate from these expectations and the other person will scramble to make sense of what’s happening. There is a feeling that something is wrong—like hot water coming out of the cold tap. The brain hates confusion, and when faced with it the first instinct is to withdraw.
The “hands-free” handshake is a handshake without the hand, and it is a powerful tool. Just do everything you would do during a normal handshake but without using your hand. Point your heart at the other person and say hello. Light up your eyes and smile, and give off that same special energy that usually accompanies the full-blown shake.
Incidentally, the “hands-free” handshake works wonders in presentations when you want to establish rapport with a group or audience.
Firing Energy
Nothing says more about your likeability and approachability in a flash than the quality and the level of energy you give off. You can try this in class or at work but two people can do it just as well.
With your group, make a circle about 12 feet across. Decide who is going to begin. That person chooses someone across from them in the circle, gathers up all the energy they can throughout their body and stores it in their heart. Then, all at once that person looks the other in the eye, says “Hi!”, claps their hands together and points their right (the handshake hand) directly at the person’s heart: firing all the energy stored inside them in a flash.
This is a long description of something that takes no more than a second, but when all six channels—body, heart, eyes, smile, clap and voice/breath—are fired in a rapid flash there is a vast transfer of energy.
Immediately after receiving the energy, the other person should fire it at someone else in the circle in the same way. Continue, fast and focused, firing energy at each other until everyone has been struck at least three times. Be sure to make contact with all six channels at once.
As a variation, you can choose to fire different qualities of energy: logic/head energy, communication/throat energy, love/heart energy, power/solar plexus energy and sexual energy. You've already fired love/heart energy.
Now, with a single partner do the same head to head instead of heart to heart. Keep firing logic/head energy at each other until you both agree that you can feel and differentiate it from love/heart energy. After two or three minutes sending energy back and forth, try the other regions: throat to throat, solar plexus to solar plexus, etc.
It gets even better. Figure out which kind of energy you want to send, but don’t say what it is. Now greet your partner, shake hands, say “Hi” and fire! The goal is for your partner to identify the kind of energy he or she is receiving. Practice and practice until your body language becomes subtle and almost imperceptible.
Next, go out and try it on the people you meet. Fire energy when you say “Hi” to someone in a supermarket, to your waiter in the cafe, to your sister-in-law or the guy who fixes the photocopier in your office. They will notice something special about you—some might call it “star quality.”
Rapport is the establishment of common ground, of a comfort zone where two or more people can mentally join together. When you have rapport, each of you brings something to the interaction—attentiveness, warmth, a sense of humor, for example—and each brings something back: empathy, sympathy, maybe a couple of great jokes. Rapport is the lubricant that allows social exchanges to flow smoothly.
The prize, when you achieve rapport, is the other person’s positive acceptance. This response won’t be in so many words, but it will signal something like this: “I know I just met you, but I like you so I will trust you with my attention.” Sometimes rapport just happens all by itself, as if by chance; sometimes you have to give it a hand. Get it right, and the communicating can begin. Get it wrong, and you’ll have to bargain for attention.
As you meet and greet new people, your ability to establish rapport will depend on four things: your attitude, your ability to “synchronize” certain aspects of behavior like body language and voice tone, your conversation skills and your ability to discover which sense (Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic) the other person relies on most. Once you become adept in these four areas, you will be able to quickly connect and establish rapport with anyone you choose and at any time.
Read on, and you’ll discover that it’s possible to speed up the process of feeling comfortable with a stranger by quantum-leaping the usual familiarization rituals and going straight into the routines that people who like each other do naturally. In virtually no time at all, you will be getting along as if you’ve known each other for ages. Many of my students report that when achieving rapport becomes second nature, they find people asking, “Are you sure we haven’t met before?” I know the feeling; it happens to me all the time. And it’s not just people asking me the question. I am convinced that half the people I meet, I’ve met before—that’s the way it goes when you move easily into another person’s map of the world. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Everyone seems to have a different sense of the word “communication,” but the definitions usually go something like this: “It’s an exchange of information between two or more people” … “It’s getting your message across” … “It’s being understood.”
In the early days of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a research project devoted to “the study of excellence and a model of how individuals structure their subjective sensory experience,” Richard Bandler and John Grinder created an effective definition: “The meaning of communication lies in the response it gets.” This is simple, and brilliant, because it means that it’s 100% up to you whether or not your own communication succeeds. After all, you are the one with a message to deliver or a goal to achieve, and you are the one with the responsibility to make it happen. What’s more, if it doesn’t work, you are the one with the flexibility to change what you do until you finally get what you want. In order to give some form and function to communication here, let’s assume that we have some kind of response or outcome in mind. People who are low on communication skills usually have not thought out the response they want from the other person in the first place and therefore cannot aim for it.
The skills you will learn here will serve you on all levels of communication, from social dealings like developing new relationships and being understood in your daily interactions all the way to life-changing moves for yourself and those in your sphere of influence.
The formula for effective communication has three distinct parts:
Know what you want. Formulate your intention in the affirmative and preferably in the present tense. For example, “I want a successful relationship, I have filled my imagination with what that relationship will look, sound, feel, smell and taste like with me in it, and I know when I will have it” is an affirmative statement, as opposed to “I don’t want to be lonely.”
Find out what you’re getting. Assess what you’re doing to achieve your goal and the response it’s getting. For example, you may discover that going to bars isn’t a great way for you to meet people.
Change what you do until you get what you want. Design a plan and follow through with it: “I’ll invite three friends for dinner Saturday night and ask them each to bring someone.” Do it and get more feedback. Redesign your plan if necessary, and do it again, evaluating whether it works better. Repeat the cycle—redesign–do–get feedback—until you get what you want. You can apply this cycle to any area of your life that you want to improve—finance, romance, sports, career, you name it.
• Know what you want.
• Find out what you’re getting.
• Change what you do until you get what you want.
This is terrifically easy to remember because a certain Colonel had the good sense to open a chain of restaurants using the abbreviation KFC for a name. Every time we see one of his signs, we can use it as a reminder to ask ourselves how well the development of our communication skills is going.
In the following chapters, we’ll examine the arena of rapport in much more detail, as well as the value of a Really Useful Attitude in projecting a positive image of yourself. You’ll learn what happens at first sight on the surface and below the surface and the importance of having your body language, your voice tone and your words be congruent, or all saying the same thing. No crossed signals, no mixed messages, no confusion. You’ll discover how your body language appeals to some but not others and how, by making a few adjustments to your own movements, you can positively affect the way people feel about you.
Then we’ll delve deep into the warm and welcoming world of synchrony. You’ll learn how to align yourself with the signals other people send you so that they’ll feel a natural familiarity and comfort around you. We’ll also discuss the massive importance of voice tone and how it influences the moods and emotions we want to convey.
A whole chapter is devoted to starting and maintaining sparkling conversation. We’ll explore all the ways to open people up and avoid closing them down. We’ll also deal with compliments, obtaining free information and being memorable.
Finally we’ll go even deeper, down to the very core of the human psyche. The astonishing truth is that although we navigate the world through our five senses, each of us has one sense that we rely on more than the other four. I’ll show you how people are giving clues about their favorite sense all the time and how you can move onto the same sensory wavelength as theirs. Do people who rely mainly on their ears differ from those who rely mainly on their eyes? Darn right they do, and you’ll find out how to tailor your approach to communicate with them.
Each chapter includes at least one exercise that will help you realize the power of connecting. Some of these exercises can be done alone, but others you have to do with a partner. Let’s face it, face-to-face communication and rapport skills are interactive activities—you can’t learn to do all of them all by yourself.
At the end of the book is a workbook with 21 more exercises designed to help you cement and put into practice what you’ve learned.
So there it is. Connecting. All day long, men, women and children give away vital keys to what makes them tick—to how they experience and filter the world—through their body language, their tone of voice, their eye movements and their choice of words. They simply cannot help doing this. Now it’s up to you to learn how to use this wonderful, nonstop flood of information to achieve improved outcomes and more satisfying relationships.