Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six ways to make people like you

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

Win people to your way of thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas.
12. Throw down a challenge.

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

A leader’s job often includes changing your people’s attitudes and behavior. Some suggestions to accomplish this:

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5. Let the other person save face.
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

source: http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/win-friends.html

1. Fear of the dark

Under the bed.
Inside the closet.
Between leap and landing (floor to bed).
(Related) Long arm reaching out from under bed.

2. Fear of separation

Lost in a crowd (accidental).
Lost in a crowd (on purpose).
Lost in the woods (either).

3. Fear of abandonment

Parents dying.
Parents divorcing.
One parent moving.
Parents remarrying.

4. Fear of wicked stepparent

5. Fear of pee accidents

In school.
In bed.
In friend’s bed.

6. Fear of bras

Needing one.
Not needing one.
Anyone looking closely enough to know.

7. Fear of menstrual period

Getting it.
Not getting it.
Surprise attack.

8. Fear of embarassment

Wrong clothes.
Wrong hair.
Wrong glasses.
Wrong body.
Wrong mother.

9. Fear of Getting Pregnant

10. Fear of rejection

By friends.
By boyfriend.
By colleges.

11. Fear of being found out

12. Fear of not getting work

Not paying student loans.
Not paying bills.

13. Fear of selling out

Deserting dreams.
Embracing capitalism.

14. Fear of the dark (continued)

Parking lots at night.
Deserted streets at night.
Apartments at night.
Houses at night.
Bedrooms at night.

15. Fear of rejection (continued)

By lovers.
By bosses.
By friends.

16. Fear of being unloved

17. Fear of being unlovable

18. Fear of having married the wrong person

19. Fear of not getting pregnant

20. Fear of mortality

Parents’ mortality.
Spouse’s mortality.
Signs of mortality.
Cancer.

21. Fear of childbirth

22. Fear of losing a child

To crib death.
To falling down stairs.
To a head injury.
To bathtub.
To a bicycle accident.
To a car accident.
To a playground accident.
To a freak accident.
To pneumonia.
To cancer.
To a thousand kinds of cancer.
To a pedophile.
To a kidnapper.
To a babysitter.
To a stranger.
To a tick bite.
To a bad heart.
To thin ice.
To a swimming pool.
To falling rocks.
To drugs.
To gun violence.
To poor judgment.
To sport.
To a dare.
To driving.
To driving drunk.
To heartbreak.
To childbirth.

—Jan Pettit

So in a hot day of August and right before I was about to play with my sheep, I decided to write down two different ways I had learned to profile people.

Before you start to read, keep in mind that these models are very approximate and carry a big deal of criticism with them but they are still widely used by different organisms and institutions in order to categorize different personality traits.

Some of those models helped me in different phases of my life to take critical decisions and to amplify relationships. They are based at the principle that individuals find certain ways of thinking and acting EASIER than others. But bear in thought that people can change through the years. Also these are mere preferences so IN NO CASE you should put a tag on someone and think that he will behave always according to that model.

People have always several aces hidden up their sleeves – or elsewhere.

Having said that, my lovely and very smart reader, we can continue on with the BEAUTIFUL and SIMPLE details.

NLP – 3 preferential sensory systems

In 1970 Richard Bandler and John Grinder founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming, noticed that they can categorize people according to how they filtered the world through their senses.

So let’s say that one happy day, you take a group of people and bring them on a sunny and windy balcony overlooking a beautiful bay.

Theeeen:

- 55% of those people will be stunned by the beauty of the blue ocean while the sun is setting over the horizon (VISUALS)
- 15% of them will love to hear the wind blowing and they will GET all ECSTATIC by the sound of the waves breaking on the shore (AUDITORIES)
- 30% of them will love the feeling of the wind around them while the warmth of the sun will make them FEEL GOOD (KINESTHETICS)

- 83% of them will NOT be able to afford the price tag of that house balcony (NO MONEY type of persons)

No one has 100% one type of sensory preference but most of us have one sensory system which is much more dominant than the rest.

ow, Visuals are usually a bit more logical and tend to speak fast with a high pitched noise while they breath high. They are usually not as good as auditory people into bringing their ideas into words. When they finally do, they prefer to use verbs and words of vision like: ‘It looks good to me’ or even better the all time dumb ‘I SEE what you are saying’.

Auditories respond emotionally to the quality of the sound. They use verbs and words related to sound. They speak melodically and enjoy speaking. Now I know why I had a girlfriend that was so annoyed by loud noises, while at other moments she INSISTED on me talking to her while we were having sex.

Kinesthetics are persons of emotions and feelings. They understand the world through emotions and express them selves like that. They will tell you how GOOD they felt when they met their friend and you listen to them saying how they LIKE or don’t like someone. They are the main users of expressions like: ‘Do you GET what I’m saying?’. Among them you are going to find super-fits and sensitive, big hearted persons. They will touch you during the conversation because it is the ONLY way for them to perceive that they actually talked to you.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – 16 types of personalities

Myers-Briggs type indicator is a personality questionnaire that helps identify certain psychological differences based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Here you look at 4 different characteristics of that person, like 4 switches. Those four switches give us 16 different combinations of personalities that walk on this planet. I am one of them during the morning, another during the night and when I am drunk I am ALL 16 of them TOGETHER.

The accuracy can be disputed but here we go….

Sensing VS Intuition

Sensing prefer to trust information that is concrete and it is in the present: information is understood by the five senses. They may prefer to look for facts. For them, they find the meaning in the data.

iNtuition will trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (remembered or they may look for a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.

Thinking VS Feeling

Feeling will prefer to take decisions by empathizing with the situation, striving to find the best harmony with THEIR set of values.

Thinking will prefer to take decisions based on a more calculated, cold and more detached point of view based on ‘logic’.

Introversion VS Extroversion

Extroverted people get energy from action. They need to act in order to feel energetic.

Introverted people loose energy as they act. They need to think in order to gain energy.

Judging VS Perceiving

Judging like to think by decisions and enjoy getting things done way ahead from deadlines. When they start doing something with a certain way it will be difficult for them to change it.

Perceiving prefer to leave matters open and they will try to finish things close to deadline to see how things will form in the end. They may be impulsive near the end and they may seem too flexible in the eyes of their friends Judging.

Those 4 types give 16 combination have a coded name. Here are two examples:

- 14% of the USA population are ISFJ = Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging
- 13% of the USA population are ESFJ = Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging

That’s all folks for the moment

http://happybrainstorm.com/different-ways-to-profile-people-personality-traits/

Even for those among you, that have been brave enough to say no, usually you felt a slight feeling of guilt. Well, to make it even worse, psychology says that the person you said no to, feels you owe him something. It is like a subliminal debt and debts are bad – in any form that they may come.

There is quirky and simple way to turn the game around.

The two step process goes like that.

*When you say NO, make sure you use the word BECAUSE. I know it sounds dumb but subliminally the word ‘because’ attaches a reason to whatever follows after. Before you start to laugh think about politics. How often have you heard the word BECAUSE in politics? Quite often i could say. That is because people that write political speeches are aware of subliminal commands and they make use of them constantly.

*The second and most important step is the counter strike. The counter strike goes like this: After you say no, make sure to ask another small favor from that person. The favor should be something sligthly difficult to accomplish that would never be satisfied. As he will be forced to say NO, he will subliminally erase your debt.

Personal example: George was a nice but quite boring chap. We had common social circles and we would bump to each other quite often in different social gatherings. At some point he decided that we should go out more often. The problem was that I had more interesting things to do. Two or three times he called me and invited me to one of his house parties. Those parties were full of SUPER boring people. So, after my second denial to his invitations, i started to feel that I was now obliged to him and I knew that, if he called me a third time, I would have to accept. So I called him and asked him to go out with me on two different days:

- A Tuesday, were I knew he could not go out because he had to wake up early the other day
- Another day, when I knew he had already something arranged.

After his double no, he felt also a bit guilty but now we were even. We stopped calling each other but when we met we could always continue to chat without a heavy feeling floating on the air, something that would happen if I was the only one that had said a no.

Side note: Social manipulation is not good but sure makes life simpler.

http://happybrainstorm.com/how-to-say-no-to-someone-with-out-any-feeling-of-guilt-whatsoever/ 

• Less satisfied with life,
• Less happy,
• More likely to be depressed,
• More likely to be paranoid,
• More likely to be narcissistic.

Not a pretty picture, right? But, just like studies examining the connection between success and happiness, many of the findings are correlational. As a result we can’t say for sure that materialism causes all these things, only that they’re associated. So, for better evidence, cue the experiment.

Experiential versus material purchases

Leaf Van Boven from the University of Colorado and Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University carried out an intriguing experiment that gets at this question of whether materialism results in less happiness (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003).

They randomly divided students into two groups and gave each group slightly different instructions:

1. This group was asked to write a description of a material purchase that had made them happy. Material purchases include things like clothing, gadgets, computers and so on. This could be either something they had bought themselves or that had been bought for them.
2. The task this group had was only slightly different. They were asked to write a description of an experiential purchase that had given them pleasure. Examples of experiential purchases are meals out, admission tickets to concerts and travel.

To see how they were feeling in the moment, participants were given surreptitious measures both before and after writing these short descriptions. Then, after about a week, the same participants were given back their own descriptions of their purchases and asked to reflect on it. Again, they were asked to report on their feelings in the moment.

Comparing these two groups provided a way of comparing how participants felt about two different types of purchases. The results showed that participants felt better when they were contemplating their experiential purchases than their material purchases.

Thinking about experience

As a result of this experiment, Van Boven & Gilovich predicted that people spend more time overall contemplating their experiential rather than material purchases. To test this out they asked participants to think about experiential and material purchases they were particularly happy with. Then they were asked which they thought about more often. The results clearly showed it was the experiential purchases people thought about more often (83%).

Why do experiences fare better than possessions?

It seems, then, that at some level we understand that our experiential purchases give us more pleasure than our material purchases. But why is that? Van Boven (2005) suggests three reasons:

1. Experiences improve with time (possessions don’t).
The reason why experiences improve with time may be because it is possible to think about experiences in a more abstract manner than possessions. For example if you think back to a fantastic summer from your youth, you might easily remember an abstract sense of warm sunshine and exuberance, but you’re less likely to remember exactly what you did day-by-day. On a moment-by-moment basis you might have been quite bored, although you’ll tend not to remember that.

Material possessions are harder to think about in an abstract sense. The car you bought is still a car, that great new jacket you picked up cheap is still just a jacket. It’s more likely the experience of that summer has taken on a symbolic meaning that can live longer in your memory than a possession.

2. Experiences are resistant to unfavourable comparisons
It’s well established that social comparisons can have a huge effect on how we view what might seem like positive events. One striking example is the finding that people prefer to earn $50,000 a year while everyone else earns $25,000, instead of earning $100,000 themselves and having other people earn $200,000 (Solnick & Hemenway, 1998).

In other words it’s not about how much we earn, it’s about how much we earn in comparison to other people. It’s the social comparison, then, not the actual amount of money, that affects how we feel about our earnings.

A similar effect is seen for possessions. When there’s so many flatscreen HD TVs to choose from, it’s easy to make unfavourable comparisons between our choice and the others available (check out Barry Schwartz on why too much choice is bad for us).

Experience, however, seems to be more resistant to these sorts of unfavourable comparisons. To explain this phenomenon, Van Boven puts forward the idea that it is because of the unique nature of experience. It’s more difficult to make an unfavourable comparison when there is nothing directly comparable. After all, each of our youthful summers is different (even if only a little).

I also think it’s hard to really compare our own experiences with those of other people. Comparing possessions, however, is generally easy.

3. Experiences have more social value
There are two reasons experiences have more social value than possessions. First, experiences tend to encourage social relationships and increased social relationships are good for our happiness. Second, it is more socially acceptable to discuss our experiences with others. People who bang on about their possessions are considered much less likeable than those who talk about their holiday adventures.

Limitations

Of course, it has to be acknowledged that this type of research is at an early stage. Van Boven points to a couple of potential problems yet to be investigated:

1. The experiments examined here looked at short-term emotions – will these short-term emotions add up to long-term happiness?
2. Highly materialistic people might actually get more pleasure out of material purchases than experiences.

Materialist dilemmas

Despite these limitations, it seems that along with experimental evidence, there are also some good psychological reasons why experiences are more likely to make us happy than material possessions. On top of this, at some level we do seem to understand that experiences probably beat possessions in terms of happiness.

Set against this is the fact that we clearly live in a society awash with materialism, where objects are valued way beyond their possible contribution to our happiness. So how can this conflict possibly be resolved?

One answer to this question is that while we’re likely to think that other people are materialist, we defend our own purchases as necessary and at worst, indulgent. After all, materialism is a dirty word. A dirty word that’s on everyone’s minds.

http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/experiences-beat-possessions-why.php

“The founding father of cognitive therapy is Aaron T. Beck a psychologist not well known to the lay public, but widely revered amongst psychologists.”

This type of therapy has easily overtaking Freudian-style psychotherapy in recent decades to become the most popular form of treatment for depression, phobias and many other common psychological problems. The founding father of cognitive therapy is Aaron T. Beck a psychologist not well known to the lay public, but widely revered amongst psychologists. One of his studies is the third nomination for the Top Ten Psychology Studies.

Cognitive therapy was originally developed for the treatment of depression. In his work with patients Beck developed the idea that at the heart of depression lay one or more irrational beliefs (Beck, 1963). Here are a few examples:

• Over-generalisation. Drawing general conclusions from a single (usually negative) event. E.g. thinking that failing to be promoted at work means a promotion will never come.
• Minimalisation and Maximisation. Getting things out of perspective: e.g. either grossly underestimating own performance or overestimating the importance of a negative event.
• Dichotomous thinking – Thinking that everything is either very good or very bad so that there are no gray areas. In reality, of course, life is one big gray area.

“Beck thought depressed patients could be helped if therapists could challenge these irrational beliefs.”

These irrational beliefs took the form of ‘automatic thoughts’ which seemed to be accessible to conscious introspection. Beck thought depressed patients could be helped if therapists could challenge these irrational beliefs. At heart cognitive therapy encourages people to see that some of their thoughts are mistaken. By adjusting these thoughts it has been found that people’s emotional distress can be lessened.

For many people he treated, and for the many more subsequently treated with his – and related techniques – his methods have turned out to be remarkably effective. It’s no exaggeration to state that the ideas and techniques that have flowed from Beck’s study and similar findings brought about a revolution in treatment for many psychological disorders.

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/revolutionary-treatment-of-depression.php

Big-scale or small-scale, bargaining is a central part of our lives. Understanding the psychological processes involved in bargaining can provide us with huge benefits in our everyday lives. In a classic, award-winning series of studies, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in bargaining: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats (Deutsch & Krauss, 1962).

To do this, they used a game which forces two people to bargain with each other. Although Deutsch and Krauss used a series of different conditions – nine in fact – once you understand the basic game, all the conditions are only slight variations.

So, imagine you were a clerical worker at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1950s and you’ve been asked to take part in a psychology study. Every psychology study has a story, and this one revolves around two trucking companies…

Experiment 1: Keep on trucking

Before the experiment proper starts, the researcher explains that you’ll be playing a game against another participant. In the game you will run a trucking company. The object of the game is the same as a real trucking company: to make as much money as possible.

Like the real-life trucking company you have to deliver as many of your goods as possible to their destination in the shortest possible time. But in this game you only have one starting point, one destination and one competitor. It looks like a pretty simple game.

Here’s the catch.

The road map your one truck has to travel across presents you with a dilemma. You are the ‘Acme’ trucking company and your fellow participant is the ‘Bolt’ trucking company, although both of you have an identical problem. Have a look below.

[Deutsch & Krauss, 1962, p. 55]

Threatening gates

You are to be given one method of communication with your rival, albeit indirect communication. Each of you controls a gate at your own end of the one-way road. The gate, though, can only be closed when your truck is on the main route. This will be your threat. It is reinforced by the experimenter that you are out to make as much money as you can for yourself – the other person’s profit is not a concern.

On your marks, set, cooperate!

Once the experimenter sets you off, it soon becomes clear you’re not going to make much money at all. In the first of 20 trials, both you and your rival shut your gates, forcing both trucks onto the alternative route. This is 50% longer and means you make a loss on the trip as a whole. In the second trial your trucks meet head-on travelling up the one-way road. You both have to reverse, costing you time and money.

The rest of the trials aren’t much better. Occasionally you make a profit on a trip but more often than not it’s a bust. You spend more time on the long route or reversing than you do chugging happily along the main route making money.

At the end of the experiment, the researcher announces how much profit you made. None. In fact you made a crippling loss. Perhaps trucking companies aren’t so easy to run.

Comparing threats

You find out later that you were in one of three experimental conditions. The only differences in the other two conditions were that in one there were no gates at either end of the one-way road. In the other there was only one active gate controlled by one player.

Before I tell you the results of the other two conditions, try to guess. One condition, which you’ve taken part in, contained bilateral threat – you could both threaten each other. One condition had unilateral threat – only one could threaten the other. And the final condition had no threat at all. What was the order of profit?

In fact it turns out that your condition, of bilateral threat, made the least profit when both participant’s scores were added up. The next most profitable was the unilateral threat condition, while the most profitable overall was the no-threat condition.

Here’s the first rather curious result. While the person who had the threat – control of the gate – in the unilateral condition did better than the person who didn’t, they were still better off, individually and collectively, than if they both had threats. What this experiment is showing is that the availability of threats leads to worse outcomes to the extent that unilateral threat is preferable to bilateral threat to both parties.

Experiment 2: Lines of communication

But surely a little communication goes a long way? You weren’t allowed to talk to the other participant in this experiment, so your trucks had to do the talking for you. Bargaining is all about reaching a compromise through negotiation – surely this should help?

To test the effect of communication Deutsch and Krauss (1962) set up a second experiment which was identical in all respects to the first except participants were given headphones to talk to each other.

Here’s the next curious result: allowing the two participants to communicate with each other made no significant difference to the amount of money each trucking company made. In fact the experimenters found no relationship between words spoken and money made. In other words those who communicated more did not manage to reach a better understanding with each other.

Like the experimenters themselves, I find this result surprising. Surely allowing people to communicate let’s them work out a way for them both to make money? And yet this isn’t what happened in the experiment at all. Instead it seems that people’s competitive orientation was stronger than their motivation to communicate. On the other hand, perhaps something specific to the situation in this experiment is stopping people talking?

Participants in the second study reported that it was difficult to start talking to the other person, who was effectively a stranger. As a result they were considerably less talkative than normal. Could it be that it was this situational constraint that meant little talking, and therefore little bargaining was going on?

Experiment 3: Forced communication

Deutsch and Krauss decided to test the effect of forced communication in their third experiment. Again the procedure is the same as last time but now participants are instructed that on each of the 20 trials they have to say something. If they don’t talk on one of the trials they are gently reminded by the experimenter to do so. They are told they can talk about whatever they like, as long as they say something.

The results finally showed some success for communication. Performance in the one-gate (unilateral threat) condition came close to that achieved in the ‘no-threat’ condition (remember the no-threat condition has the best outcomes). Forced communication didn’t have much effect on the ‘no-threat’ condition when compared with no communication, and neither did it improve the bilateral threat condition much. It still seems that people are so competitive when they both have threats it’s very difficult to avoid both sides losing out.

Threat causes resentment

The most surprising finding of this study is how badly people do under conditions of bilateral threat. In this experiment not even forcing communication can overcome people’s competitive streaks. Deutsch and Krauss provide a fascinating explanation for this.

Imagine your neighbour asks you to water their plants while they’re on holiday Socially, it looks good for you if you agree to do it. On the other hand if they ask you to water their plants otherwise they’ll set their TV on full blast while they’re on holiday, it immediately gets your hackles up. Suddenly you resent them. Giving in when there is no threat is seen by other people as pro-social. Duress, however, seems to make people dig in their heels.

Applying the brakes

Before drawing some general conclusions from these studies, we should acknowledge the particular circumstances of this research. Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment covers a situation in which bargaining is carried out under time pressure. Recall that the longer participants take to negotiate, the less money they make. In real life, time isn’t always of the essence.

The present game also has a relatively simple solution: participants make the most profit if they share the one-way road. In reality, solutions are rarely that clear-cut. Finally, our participants were not professional negotiators, they were clerical and supervisory workers without special training.

Real-life implications

Despite these problems the trucking game has the advantage of being what game theorists call a non-zero-sum game. In other words if you win, it doesn’t automatically mean the other person loses. When you total the final results, as you sometimes can in a financial sense, they don’t add to zero. In real life many of the situations in which we find ourselves are of this nature. Cooperation can open the way to more profit, in financial or other form, for both parties.

As a result the trucking game has clear implications for real life:

• Cooperative relationships are likely to be much more beneficial overall than competitive relationships. Before you go ‘duh!’, remember that increasing proportions of the world’s societies are capitalist. Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment clearly shows the friction caused by competitive relationships, such as those encouraged by capitalism. I’m not saying capitalism is bad, I’m just saying competition isn’t always good. This simple fact is often forgotten.
• Just because people can communicate, doesn’t mean they will – even if it is to their advantage.
• Forcing parties to communicate, even if they already have the means to communicate, encourages mutually beneficial outcomes.
• In competitive relationships, communication should be aimed at increasing cooperation. Other methods will probably create more heat than light.
• Threats are dangerous, not only to other’s interests, but also to our own.

Remember all these the next time you are bargaining with your partner over a night out, about to shout a threat at a motorist blocking your path on a one-way road, or even involved in high-level political negotiations between warring factions with nuclear capabilities. It could save you, and the other side, a lot of trouble.

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-to-avoid-bad-bargain-dont-threaten.php

You can’t really blame them. If all it took for me to get my own way was to giggle and thrust my chest out, I don’t think I’d ever stop.

But it’s not much help to us men.

We’ve all read articles about female body language. We know how to spot if a girl is flirting with us and we’ve been told that means that she fancies us. Now it turns out that that isn’t necessarily true.

So how do you go about recognizing which are the compulsive flirts and which girls are genuinely hot for you?

Well, I’m about to tell you.

The first thing to remember is that some body language cannot be faked. Sure, she can twirl her hair and hold your gaze, but there are certain signals which only genuinely interested girls give out.

Start by looking into her eyes. If she likes the looks of you her eyebrows will twitch momentarily upwards in greeting and her pupils will quickly dilate. Her focus will begin darting between your left and right eyes and occasionally down to your lips.

Check her skin. If her blood’s pumping excitedly, her neck and chest will become slightly flushed and she may be more prone to blushing. You might also notice she’s stroking her own chest, arm or face slowly and seductively – any rhythmic caressing of herself is an absolute give away that this girl is really into you.

Finally, look for mirroring. If you’ve both turned your shoulders and legs so you’re facing each other, you know you’ve made a connection. You are also likely to start reaching for your drinks at the same time, or simultaneously sorting your hair.

Now let’s go beyond body language and look at her behavior.

You see, while compulsively flirty girls are after your attention, they’re also after the attention of every other man in the room. A woman who is genuinely into you, on the other hand, only needs you notice her and will focus all of her energies on making sure that happens.

There are various ways in which girls try to get your attention. She may ask you to dance. If you insist that she dances without you, she will spend the whole song glancing your way to check that you’re watching. She may pull out a few extra sexy moves designed to get your heart thumping.

Try talking to another girl, whether a friend or the bartender. If the flirty girl suddenly appears at your side or you notice her watching intently, you can be sure that she’s feeling jealous. She’s trying her best to impress you tonight and won’t want to share your attention with anyone.

On the other hand, if you catch her giggling and whispering with your guy friends, don’t assume the worst. Girls know they need your mates’ seal of approval so by doing her best to get them to like her, she’s trying to ensure that you will, too.

And finally, if she leans in close and starts telling you her secrets, you know that you’ve scored. By creating an aura of intimacy between you she is allowing herself to relax – and nothing is more important than that if you’re planning on taking her home.

• 1) Drying up’ or not being able to speak.
• 2) Forgetting what you are talking about your mind going blank.
• 3) Having the heckler from Hell.
• 4) Having someone in the audience who knows more than you do.
• 5) People noticing that you are nervous.
• 6) Having to run screaming from the room.
• 7) The presentation being so awful and embarrassing that your social/career relationships are forever ruined.
• The impossible to answer question from Hell’
• 9) The audience talking over you or walking out
• 10) Dying on stage (OK, so we made this one up to make it up to 10

What to Do About a Fear of Public Speaking

Firstly, let’s accept that we need fear. Without the ability to become very fearful no human beings would be here today – our ancestors relied on fear to survive bigger, stronger and faster predators.

When we become highly fearful, the unconscious mind takes over and we become primarily set up for physical action. In order to survive a physical threat we respond automatically for the sake a quick reaction. In certain situations, this can be a life-saver.

During this ‘fight or flight’ response, breathing speeds up in preparation for physical exertion, we may sweat to cool the body, or feel as if we can’t think’ Survival in very primitive conditions is primarily about action rather than thinking

How much anxiety is good for public speaking?

So we don?t want too much anxiety and we don?t want too much relaxation. We need enough tension to give us energy, and enough calmness for clear thinking and recall. We need the right balance.

Most of the petrified presenters that we train are doing the same thing!

Here’s the usual ‘pattern of fear’.

1) You have a presentation coming up.
2) You think about it, imagining things going wrong and so feel anxious.
3) Unknowingly, you build up an association between the thought of the speech and the feeling of fear.
4) You go into the actual situation and get a fear response!

Repeated often enough, this will cause the two to become very closely associated. This is ?negative mental rehearsal’ for the event. Not surprisingly, when you go into the actual situation you feel terrified!

Dogged by an Ancient Brain

As Ivan Pavlov showed, dogs who are repeatedly fed whilst hearing a bell can eventually salivate when just hearing the bell without food.

People who repeatedly feel fear coupled with imagining something find they feel fear when the situation arrives.

However, people can learn to associate tightrope walking, fighting in battles or defusing a bomb with a state of psychological calm.

You can learn to change an association.

- Do you feel that public speaking is just part of the routine?
- Do you respond to the challenge and wonder how you can make your presentation compelling, informative and inspiring?

Or, like most people do you feel you would rather die than stand up and be judged by the hard unforgiving scrutiny of your fellow man and woman?

- Is it possible to be an average presenter and learn the skills to become an inspiring and entrancing speaker?
- Is it possible to be totally terrified of the mere thought of public speaking yet learn to relax and even enjoy it?

Without a doubt, the answer is YES!

Public Speaking on the Increase

It’s a cliche to say that we live in an information culture. But it’s true! Never before has so much information been so readily available. The rate of change and development is so fast that we have to work constantly to ?stay ahead of the game’

More than ever, people are having to present information to others as part of this constant up-dating. People are being increasingly called upon to present publicly their information to co-workers and other departments.

To get ahead, you have to present!

But how often are we taught how to present? There are 2 main areas of skill:

1) Skills of effective presenting; use of teaching aids, use of the voice, structure and so on.

2) Self-management; the ability to remain calm and composed in front of an audience.

Learning these skills make a huge difference not only to the quality of your public presentation but also to your enjoyment. Truly fantastic presenters are quite a rare commodity, but that’s only because most people never took the time to learn.

Being an excellent presenter will enhance your career, social life and your enjoyment of work in general.

Great presenters can transform almost any subject into one of interest or even inspiration. A friend once told me that the most entertaining and thought provoking presentation they ever saw was about print processing!