Some actions that look quite natural to you and your friends can misfire badly when tried on people you have just met. Want to know how some of your habits can be a turn-off at the first meetings?
1. Treating Everyone to Drinks from the Bar
With some people it may be a mechanical gesture of goodwill, but hold your horses: it isn’t such a good idea actually. Why? Not because a drink will come amiss. Here’s what psychologists say: people are apt to believe they did you a good turn for the sole reason of liking you. So, the great idea is to make them feel useful and helpful, build up on the pleasant feeling and ask them whether they would be so kind as to bring over a drink for you from the open bar. Aren’t they just too magnanimous?
2. Piling up Complaints
Do share a few grievances, that can make you look human and break the ice, but know where to stop. Don’t make yourself out besieged by troubles and inviting sympathy. Whenever you recount your trouble, try to steer away from it at something more positive and uniting – pick a detail from your story, enlarge on your attitude to it and ask your companion’s opinion. From there you can go to something you can do (or visit) together. This way you keep the ball rolling, while endless complaining gets you nowhere.
3. Acting Like a Stranger
There are people you meet who come not out of the blue, but from Facebook and Instagram, from your friends’ companies, so you may really know quite a few things about them. If you feel unsure to mention these things and act as if you knew nothing about them, you would be making a very embarrassing mistake. She may feel as though you think that she doesn’t connect with her Facebook photos and info with you, or that your mutual friends haven’t told you anything about her. Or, worse, that you don’t care about her. It takes so little to look a person up on social sites that the omission can look rather pointed. Moreover, if you act dumb, you are in for uncomfortable pitfalls when it will surface that you knew something all along.
4. Displaying Confidence? Think Twice
Naturally people with confident, powerful postures draw more attention to themselves straightaway, and we may feel tempted to emulate to impress people who know us but little. If you straighten your back, push back the shoulders a little, put your legs wider, you will not only feel more confident, but effect changes in your body, scientists say. Amy Cuddy, social psychologist at Harvard and body language expert, explains that the feeling of dominance is produced by a higher testosterone level combined with lower cortisol.
Yet, Cuddy adds, you may not wish to gain by dint of confidence and dominance. Sound relationship is based on trust, and you are supposed to evoke in another person the feelings of warmth and trust. Better make them believe you understand them and are ready to give over the initiative. Cuddy’s advice is to let yourself be spoken to first rather than speak.
5. Making sure of the Introduction Order
OK, in a lot of cases the order of introducing people to one another is immaterial, but if you’re performing in a very formal situation, you ought to have things fixed up just right. You address the person you want to pay honors to first, and ask his/her permission to introduce one who is more familiar to you. Pronounce the names and titles fully, clearly and loudly so both people won’t have to get embarrassed asking for a repetition. By following these simple rules you will succeed in cutting a fine figure just by introducing!
