How to Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less

Brain Lock

Challenge a friend to answer the following questions without moving his eyes. Tell him to look directly at you at all times and to keep his eyeballs perfectly still. Then ask the first question: “Do you like the house (apartment or whatever) you live in?” Depending on whether he answers yes or no, ask this follow-up question: “Quickly list six things you like (or don't like) about where you live.” Either your friend will be completely tongue-tied, or he'll find himself struggling to think of his answer. Searching for how things look, sound or feel without any eye movement is almost impossible. He'll be like a rabbit paralyzed in the grip of a car's headlights.

Hypnotists know that if they can stop your eyeballs from moving, you won't be able to think. A meditative state is easily accessed in the same way. Stare at a stationary spot with your eyes open, or place your attention in one spot your forehead, for examplewith your eyes closed. Provided you can keep your attention fixed, you will stop your inner dialogue and lose all sense of time.

deadline," her eyeballs dart off to the other side as she constructs a picture of herself at the kitchen table with her laptop.

Feeling a bit confused? Look at this diagram:

To avoid all confusion, imagine that this diagram is pasted on the forehead of the person you're facing.

Don't worry about the person's left vs. your right; simply look at the diagram as if you were directly facing the other person. (In general, the directions apply to righthanded people, who make up 90% of the population.)

Incidentally, these actions are not the same as the movements your eyeballs make when you look around a room or across a landscapethey are totally independent of the requirements of the ability to see. Your eyeballs serve two purposes: 1) roving about to see what's going on; 2) activating sensory memory channels.

I t's her 40th birthday, and Ingrid has decided to treat herself to an all-inclusive holiday in Portugal. She's wandering through her neighborhood mall when she discovers a travel agency that she hasn't noticed before. There she meets Sheldon, who runs the place, and tells him of her exciting plans.

“I just feel I need to get away and pamper myself at long last!” Ingrid says to Sheldon as she sits down in a chair facing his desk. She smooths out her dress over her knees and looks down to her right. “I'm under so much pressure at work that I really need to unwind.” Sighing, she crosses one leg over the other, leans forward and shakes her head slightly. “The tension at the office is eating me alive.”

Sheldon is delighted. An obvious sale is sitting right there in front of him. He leans back in his chair, opens ->

When you first begin looking for eye cues, people's eyes may appear to dart about randomly. All you need is a little practice at reading these movements.

Have fun, let it happen naturally and, above all, never tell anyone what you're doing. That would, quite rightly, make people self-conscious and embarrassed. Keep these skills to yourself.

his arms wide, then slaps his hands together sharply and smiles at Ingrid.

“Oh boy,” he says, “have I got the dream vacation for you.” He riffles through a pile of brochures on his desk. “Just feast your eyes on this!”

He hands Ingrid a colorful brochure plastered with the usual palm trees and bright blue skies, then continues his pitch without waiting for her reaction:

“Looks fantastic, eh? Check out the color of the water brilliant turquoise! Look at these cute villas with their redtiled roofs! And cant you just see yourself on that long white stretch of beach?” He looks up and to his right, just imagining the view.

Ingrid slides back in her chair, her heart sinking. Somehow, despite the gorgeous pictures in the brochure, despite Sidney's passionate descriptions, Portugal feels farther away than ever.

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.

“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 a 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 goodnaturedly. Slowly, he began to laugh, too. Then we all laughed. That's what it's all about.