How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less (13 page)

What's the problem? -È

You guessed it. Ingrid understands the world through her feelings. Look at her words:
she “feels” that she wants to “pamper” herself; she longs to “unwind” from the “pressure”
and “tension” at her office. Her language, intonation and gestures are a giveaway. She
looks down toward her feelings. What counts most to Ingrid is the way things feel.

If Sheldon had been watching for cues, he would have gently led her toward a feeling of
confidence and anticipation and warmth. “Okay, Ingrid,” he would have said.

“Ifollowyou.Iknowwhatyoumeanaboutpressure,and I have just the place for you. I've
actually been there myself. The sand is warm and soft, and, oh, the feet of those gentle
waves as they break over you and around you! And the beds in these particular villas are
amazingly comfortable and cool...” He would have accessed the same channel that Ingrid has
been tuned in to for the past four decades.

Sheldon should have taken the four steps of rapport by design to “connect” with his
customer: 1) adopting a Realty Useful Attitude to lead her toward his goal; 2)
synchronizing her body language and voice tone during their conversation; 3) using open
questions and actively listening to her responses; and 4) picking up on her sensory
preferences along the way.

you will be able to communicate with him or her on a more appropriate wavelength, be it
Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic.

In this way, you will be hourssometimes years ahead of where you would have been if you
had not known how to figure out an individual's sensory preference.

Developing a knack for detecting sensory preferences means paying close attention to
others and this alone makes you more people-oriented.

On the next pages you will find four quick, written exercises that will help you
consolidate your learning. Photocopy these pages or just write in the book. Fill in what
you can without referring back to this chapter or to the chapter before it.

Auditories will want to talk their way though these exercises and tell themselves the
answers, and Visuals will want to picture the answers in their head, but the answers must
be written down. Writing down the answers will oblige you to use all three sensesand
that's the quickest way to incorporate this information into your memory and your life
skills.

After you've filled in as much as you can, flip back over the previous pages to add to
your answers.

The foregoing “clues” in spotting sensory preferences are generalizations, of course. But
when several of these generalizations point in the same direction, the chances are pretty
good that you have discovered the primary way a person perceives the world. This will be
your most effective tool in establishing rapport and connecting with others.

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 only accomplished 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 wayin
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: OpenEyeBeam“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 wordsall 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 55% 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 usparents, peers, teachers, and so onand 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 experiencesand 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 wrongyou 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 conversationyou are being proactive and they
can't help but like you. As long as you have a Really Useful Attitude.

Where Do I Start?

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 possessed 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 bookfrom 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 carries the coherent focus of 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 youjust 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 personyour 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 acknowledgeBINGO! 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.

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.

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.