@@CHAP@@ Introduction: Those Crucial 90 Seconds
This book is not about a new business theory; it’s about how you can become more successful in business and life by learning to connect with your customers, clients, colleagues, bosses, employees, and even total strangers in ninety seconds or less.
That first ninety seconds of any encounter isn’t just a time for making a good first impression. In the first few moments of any meeting, you connect with a person’s instincts and their human nature—their hardwired responses. In the opening seconds, our subconscious survival instincts kick in and our mind and body decide whether to run or fight or interact, whether this person offers an opportunity or a threat, whether they’re friend or foe. This book teaches you about the snap judgments that are made in those first few instants and how you can make them work to your advantage. Once you’re past those first hurdles and trust is established, you can begin connecting on a person-to-person, or (to be more precise) personality-to-personality, level. I’ll show you how to figure out just who and what you’re dealing with and how to connect with, as well as motivate, influence, and convince them.
There’s an order and a process to connecting with others: First you establish trust with the basic instincts, then you establish rapport with the personality. What results is a relationship, and every relationship holds almost infinite possibilities. How do I know this? From experience. Where I am today is light-years from where I started and where I expected to be when I began my life journey. And I owe much of my success to my ability to connect with people.
I spent a quarter of a century making people look good. I was an international fashion and advertising photographer, and that taught me a lot about making people look appealing. I’m not talking just about shooting professional models. Businesspeople, musicians, jet pilots, and farmers all went before my lens, and I got each of them not only to put their best face forward but to feel as if they’d been confident and charismatic all their life.
Anyone you put in front of a camera has a face, a body, and an attitude—with a message to deliver. My job was to give form to that message by influencing my subjects with my face, body, attitude, voice, and words. In this book you’ll learn how to use all these tools—face, body, attitude, voice, along with words and language patterns—to create an impression and get your message across in ninety seconds or less.
I’m not going to be taking a photo of you, but I am going to change the image you have of yourself and show you how to connect with anyone and everyone in your daily life—quickly, simply, easily. No matter your line of work, you are first and foremost in the business of connecting with other people—and those people are deciding whether that’s going to happen or not, in about the same time it takes to glance at a photograph.
Early on in my photography career, as I circulated among studios and clients in London, Lisbon, Madrid, New York, Cape Town, and Toronto, I became aware that there were certain people who could get along with anyone the moment they met them. And because of this ability, they were able to strike up instant relationships, boost their business reach, and rapidly make their way up the ladder of success. But for everyone I met who could make these fast connections, there were half a dozen who couldn’t. It was as if some people were always open for business, while others were closed—at least that’s the impression I got when I first met them. But as I got to know these “closed” people better, I saw that first impressions can be deceiving. Most of those who seemed so remote weren’t actually like that at all.