How To Make People Like You In 90 Second Or Less - Nicholas Boothman

How To Make People Like You In 90 Second Or Less 

Connecting with other people is essential for our survival as humans

In the bygones, humans were inherently more respectful of one another and devoted more time to the niceties of getting to know each other and explore common ground. In this age of hustle and bustle, however, we simply rush about minding our businesses and focusing solely on ourselves. We now find it hard to take the time to establish meaningful connections with others.

The truth is, no one can live a quality life in isolation; we need other people to survive. Our personal growth and evolution are highly dependent on how well we connect with our fellow humans.

Your personal growth is determined by how well you connect with the people around you.

As a species, we are social animals wired to create connections with one another. We are instinctively driven to come together and form groups of friends, associations, and communities. Thousands of years ago, connecting is what our ancestors were doing when they gathered around the fire to eat woolly mammoth steaks or stitch animal hides together for clothing.

Connecting with other people brings infinite rewards. According to Nicholas Boothman, one of the benefits of creating meaningful connections with others is longevity.

When you make connections, your entire being, especially your brain, grows and flourishes. Studies have shown that people who stay socially and physically active have longer life spans.

However, being socially active 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 put yourself out there and make new connections in the outside world, you also make new connections in the inside world — in your brain. This keeps you young and alert.

Also, connecting with others makes us feel safe, and does our community a lot of good. When we are connected as a community, we look out for one another and provide strength and safety for one another. And when we feel strong and safe, put our energy into evolving socially, culturally and spiritually.

Connecting makes us feel loved.

We humans benefit from each other emotionally. None of us is a closed self-regulating system. Instead, we are open loops regulated, disciplined, encouraged, criticized, supported and validated by the emotional feedback we get 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.

When you learn how to make fast, meaningful connections with people, you will improve your relationships at work and even at home. You will also discover the enjoyment of being able to approach anyone with confidence and sincerity.

Your likeability has very little to do with how good looking you are.

Whether or not people will find you likeable it is highly dependent on how well you are able to connect with others. Likable people generally give loud and clear signals of their willingness to be sociable; they reveal that their public communication channels are open. In the coming chapters, we will discourse the techniques of making natural connections with other people.

“If people like you, they feel natural and comfortable around you.“ ~ Nicholas Boothman

It is essential to make the right impression during the first few seconds of a meeting

Meeting people is the first step in the process of connecting. Meetings often occur in different forms. Sometimes you meet people by chance — the man on the train who turns out to share your passion for football. And sometimes it's by choice — the woman your cousin introduced you to because he loves Shakespeare, fine wines and hiking, just like you.

No matter the form the meeting takes, first impression matters a lot.

If you make the right impression during the first few seconds of a new meeting, you create an awareness that you are sincere, safe and trustworthy. According to Nicholas Boothman, the first few seconds of connection is called the “greeting.” The process of greeting consists of five parts: Open, Eye, Beam, Hi!, Lean. These five actions constitute a welcoming program to carry out in a first encounter.

The first part of the greeting is to open your attitude and body language. Make the right first impression and you’ll create an awareness that you are sincere, safe and trustworthy.

This is the time to really feel and be aware of it. Try as much as possible to make sure your attitude is positive, and 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.

The second part of the greeting involves making eye contact. Be the first person to make eye contact.

Look this new person directly in the eye. Let your eyes reflect your positive attitude. It goes without saying that eye contact is real contact!

After eye contact, the next step of the greeting process is to beam.

Be the first to smile, and make sure your smile reflects 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's subconscious mind is picking up is an impression of someone who is completely sincere, and not of some grinning, gawking fool.

“Point your heart to the other person and say hello. Light up your eyes and smile.” ~ Nicholas Boothman

After giving a bright and warm smile, the next step is to say “Hi!” or “Hello!” or even “Yo!”

Whichever one you choose to say, however, make sure you say it with pleasing tonality and attach your own name to it. For instance, “Hi! I'm Jimmy.”' As with the smile and eye contact, be the first to identify yourself. This is the point where you are in a position to gather lots of free information about the person you're meeting — information you can put to good use later in your conversation.

Extend your hand to the other person, and if it's convenient, find a way to say the person's name two or three times to help fix it in memory. Not “Margaret, Margaret, Margaret, nice to meet you” but “Margaret. Great to meet you, Margaret!”

The final part of introducing yourself is the “lean.” This action can be an almost unnoticeable forward tilt to very subtly indicate your interest and openness as you start to “synchronize” the person you've just met.

To establish rapport with others, you must synchronize your interests with theirs

After introducing yourself the next step is to build rapport. Whether you are trying to make a sale, get a date, or wangle out of a traffic ticket, establishing a rapport is very important.

Rapport is the creation of common ground — a comfort zone where two or more people can mentally join together. 

Rapport is the lubricant that allows social exchanges to flow smoothly. The prize you get for establishing rapport with someone is that 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 a rapport just happens naturally and you have no clue why. You make the sale, the conversation flows, the cop tears up the ticket. However, there are other times when you just find it very hard to connect with another person no matter how hard you try. According to Nicholas Boothman, rapport comes in two forms: Rapport by chance and Rapport by design. Rapport by chance happens in response to a shared interest or when you find yourself in certain situations or circumstances.

For instance, you travel abroad to a country where people do not speak your language and you do not understand theirs. You begin to feel uncomfortable but suddenly you meet a person from your own country, maybe your own state. This person speaks your language, and whammo, you have a new best friend — for your vacation at least. All this happens because you share the same language. This is rapport by chance.

Rapport is established when the interests or the behavior of two or more people are synchronized.

When you have nothing in common with the person you are trying to with, the only way to create common ground is by establishing rapport by design. Rapport by design is established by deliberately altering your behavior, just for a short time, in order to become like the other person. You become an adapter, just long enough to establish a connection.

In establishing rapport by design, you purposely reduce the distance and differences between another person and yourself by finding common ground. The way to go about this is by adopting a technique Boothman calls synchronizing.

Synchronizing is an adapting device that allows you to make smooth connections at will and quickly.

You just do what the other person does; you become like them until they become open, relaxed and happy to be with you. To establish rapport by design you can either synchronize the other person's attitude or body language.

Synchronizing the other person's attitude involves picking up on their feelings and mirroring it back to them. This type of synchronization gives off the illusion that you deeply relate to the person's concerns and share their feelings.

To achieve this, mirror the person's movements, breathing pattern and expression as you “deeply identify” with them. Tune in to the overall mood suggested by their voice and reflect it back. Once you get in sync with the other person, they start to think, I don't know what it is about this person, but there's something I really like!

Also, you can create rapport by synchronizing the other person's body language and mannerisms. Body language is the most obvious, easiest and most rewarding feature to synchronize on your way to rapport. Synchronizing body language is of two kinds: matching, and mirroring.

Matching: Doing the same thing as the other person. For instance, she moves her left hand, you move your left hand.

Mirroring: Moving as if you were watching the other person in a mirror. If he moves his left hand, you move your right.

You may be thinking, “But won't other people notice that I'm copying their behavior?” Actually, they won't, unless the copying is blatant. The key here is to make your movements subtle and respectful.

Imitating other people’s mannerisms allows you to deeply identify with them and understand them even better.

In a nutshell, synchronizing allows you to deeply identify with other people and get a better understanding of where they're coming from. And when this happens, you feel a natural connection with the person, because you are akin — you have become like each other. Get it right, and the communicating can begin. Get it wrong, and you'll have to bargain for attention.

Having a good conversation is not all talk — it's listening, too

After you've introduced yourself, begun synchronizing, and you feel confident that rapport is building, the next step is to start a conversation.

Conversation is one vital way to build rapport and forge the bonds of friendship. It comes in two equally important parts: asking questions and actively listening. The goal is to get the other person talking, then find out what matters to him or her and synchronize yourself accordingly.

Your main aim during the earlier stages of your conversation is to search for common interests using small talks.

Once you find out what you have in common with the other person, you can start asking open questions to fuel your conversation. Open questions request an explanation and thus require the other person to do the talking. This type of question starts with one of six conversation-generating words: Who? When? What? Why? Where? How?

These words invite an explanation, an opinion or a feeling: “How do you know that?” “Who told you?” “Where do you think this information comes from?” They help us establish rapport and make connections because they oblige the other person to start talking and begin opening up.

To make your open question more effective, you can add sensory-specific verbs like “see”, “tell” and “feel”. For example, “How do you feel about calamari?“

In doing this, you're asking the person to go into his or her imagination and bring out something personal to show you. For instance, “Where do you see yourself by this time next year?” or “Tell me why you decided on Bali for your vacation.”

Closed questions will close off your chances of rapport-inducing conversation. Try as much as possible to avoid closed questions such as: Are you ...? Do you ...? Have you ...? in your conversations.

The problem with these types of questions is that they elicit a “yes” or “no” response.

And once you've been given a response, you're back where you started. Then, you will have no choice but to think of another question to maintain some semblance of a conversation.

A good conversation comes in two equally important parts: asking questions and actively listening.

As a good active listener, you must demonstrate that you're truly interested in the other person. The key to being an active listener lies in making a sincere effort to absorb what that person is saying and feeling.

You have to make an active attempt to grasp and understand the facts and the underlying feelings of what is being said. The goal here is to make the person talking feel that you're listening and feel that you care. You can show how much you understand by giving appropriate feedback.

Encourage the other person verbally by giving spoken feedback such as “Wow,“ ”Aha,“ ”Oh“ and ”Hm.“ To make things more interesting, you can go for full – blown reactions like ”Oh, really,“ ”And then what?“ and ”You're not serious. So, what did he do?“

Give physical feedback by using an open and encouraging body language.

Nod in agreement and make plenty of eye contact, but don't stare. Look away in thought intermittently throughout the conversation. For instance, looking at your hands from time to time gives the impression of participation.

If you're sitting in a chair, move to the front edge of your seat and look interested or enthusiastic. If you're standing, point your heart at the other person, nod from time to time, and look thoughtful, surprised or amused.

Any form of encouragement is welcome in a conversation; it keeps the ball rolling and shows that you're listening even though you're not saying much.

Know what you want and adopt the best attitude to help you get it

Your mind and body are part of the same system — they influence each other. When you are happy, you look happy, you sound happy, and you use happy words. Your attitudes set the quality and mood of your thoughts, your voice tone, your spoken words. And most importantly, they govern your facial and body language.

Attitudes are like trays on which you serve yourself up to other people. When you are happy, you look happy, you sound happy, and you use happy words.

Once your mind is set into a particular attitude, you have very little ongoing conscious control over the signals your body sends out. Your body has a mind of its own, and it will play out the patterns of behavior associated with whatever attitude you’re exhibiting.

According to Nicholas Boothman, there are two different types of attitudes humans can exhibit, which is either a Really Useful Attitude or a Really Useless Attitude. And the type of attitude you choose to adopt is totally up to you.

When you meet someone for the first time, you can give off a Really Useless Attitude such as anger, impatience, conceit, boredom, or cynicism. Conversely, your attitude can be Really Useful; you can be curious, enthusiastic, inquiring, helpful or engaging. Whichever type of attitude you choose to exhibit will determine whether the outcome of your meeting will be a positive or a negative one.

As far as communication is concerned, a useless attitude will get you nowhere.

Let's say you just flew into Miami International Airport and you missed your connection for Omaha. You simply have to get on the next flight at all costs, so you go up to the airline desk and shout at the representative. This is a Really Useless Attitude. If what you want is to get the attendant's maximum help, the best thing you can do is to find a Really Useful Attitude that will create rapport and get his cooperation.

No matter what you do or where you live, the quality of your attitude determines the quality of your relationships, and just about everything else in your life. A Really Useful Attitude is one of the main factors that determine whether or not people will find you likable — and it works like a charm.

Your posture, your movements, and your expression will speak volumes about you before you even open your mouth.

Generally, useless attitudes tend to come from people who don't know what they really want from their communication. You should always know what you want from your communication and decide on the best attitude you need to get it.

Once, you know what you want and which is the most useful attitude to help you get it, your body language and your voice and your words will automatically change to help you achieve your goal.

For instance, take on a cheery attitude when next you meet someone new, and you will discover that your whole being will change to the part. Your look will be cheery, you'll sound cheery and you'll use cheery words.

In life, especially when it comes to face-to-face situations, your attitude precedes you. It is the central force in your life — it controls the quality and appearance of everything you do.

So, to always appear likable and to be able to create meaningful connections, always exhibit a Really Useful Attitude. If your attitude is positive, your body language, posture, facial expression will be positive, and you will almost always get what you want.

Conclusion

We humans are social animals wired to create connections with one another. Our personal growth and evolution are highly dependent on how well we connect with our fellow humans. Connecting with others makes us feel safe, feel loved and makes us live longer. And in order to create meaningful connections, and increase your likeability, you must be able to make good first impressions, establish rapport and communicate effectively.

Always have a positive and open attitude. Your attitude sets the quality and mood of your thoughts, your voice tone, your spoken words. It also governs your facial and body language. Hence, whether or not people will find you likable is solely dependent on the type of attitude you choose to adopt.