Sometimes all you have is that one chance to make an impression. Here’s how to make the best of it.
If you want to make a good impression on a first date, with a new boss or in a group of potential new buddies, science says you have the blink of an eye to make your mark, says
When someone meets you for the first time, information about you enters their eyes and ears (and possibly even – but hopefully not – their nose), and then fires along neural pathways into their brain. The sheer volume of this data can be so overwhelming that it’s a bit like plugging a 10-terrabyte hard-drive full of HD movies into an iPod Shuffle. In a matter of seconds – just seven, according to some experts – they will have taken in information about the way you speak, your level of attractiveness, how you dress, your facial expressions, your eye contact and a whole lot more.
Like it or not, rapid assumptions are then made about your social standing – think Eton accent vs a Coronation Street twang and all that these suggest about a person’s entire life story – your self confidence, your ‘magnetism’ (or lack of it), friendliness, openness, wealth, and on it continues.
Once these impressions have been forged, they can be hard to undo: proof, if any were needed, that the old adage about how first impressions count is painfully real.
Unfortunately, some of the data that you give out to people in that first blink of an eye is not within your control. Take your face – a study by two Princeton University psychologists found that it actually takes just a tenth of a second for people to make a judgement about you based on your face. Short of swapping it for someone else’s, there’s not much you can do about that.
Likewise, fudging your accent to make you sound better will be inauthentic, and knowing this will likely gnaw away at your conscience and confidence, thus undoing what you were trying to achieve.
But there are things you can do to maximise the chances of leaving a positive mark when first meeting people. And – surprisingly – they don’t all revolve around changing your wardrobe or turning your smile up to 11.
‘There is a very short period of time when someone first meets you where they will literally scan your face and make a decision as to whether or not your facial expression and your features are in line with what they perceive as friendly or approachable or intelligent or whatever is important to them,’ says Zeta Yarwood, a Dubai-based career coach and NLP life coach.
This is disconcerting news: if everyone has a different set of values, they will naturally be looking for different things from the people they meet. In other words – and this might seem an off-putting place to start, but it’s an important one – you simply cannot be appealing to everyone.
‘Someone might be looking for a friendly face; the next person might be looking for a professional face. It’s very individual and it’s different for all of us,’ says Yarwood.
In a way, we already know this: years of meeting random people have shown us that what works for one person (a small smile and a cheery ‘hello’) didn’t cut it with the next. It perhaps explains why first encounters can be such a challenge: all the mixed messages we’ve
received after meeting different people (‘she liked me!’/’he thinks I’m an ass!’) result in confusion and, in some cases indecision – meaning that we sometimes flit between different personas in the hope of selecting the right one.
This is, of course, a flawed approach to meeting people – and yet it’s one that many of us unwittingly adopt. No wonder that it feels like we’ve been placed under a thousand spotlights when a stranger thrusts out his or her hand.
Rather than fudging it, Yarwood says that it’s much better to be your ‘authentic’ self – the real you – although she agrees that for many people this is slightly terrifying, especially if your authentic self is one you’ve tried out before and it didn’t go down very well. But she asserts that it’s better to show the real you than put on a fake smile or adopt a louder-than-necessary voice to try and sound confident – which can leave you in an awkward emotional wilderness where you’re not sure who you’re trying to be and the person who has just met you isn’t sure who you are either.
‘It comes down to confidence,’ says Yarwood. ‘But if you’re comfortable in your own skin, you can be 100 per cent authentic when you meet others.’
Being confident and calm is often easier said than done. For many people, meeting new faces is unquestionably a nerve-wracking part of life – sometimes at a pretty mild level, but for others it can be heart-racing stuff. Millions are affected by this kind of social anxiety.
Says Yarwood: ‘The first impression people usually hope to give is, ‘I want to engage with you’, but when they are so caught up in their own head with thoughts of, ‘What are they going to think of me? Are they going to like me? Are they going to judge me?’, then it becomes very difficult for them to engage because they are internally focused, not externally focused. And it all shows up on their face.’
Counselling and practise can help – as can mindfulness,
which can enable you to focus on the other person and direct your thoughts onto them. Says Yarwood: ‘Your brain can only listen to one voice at a time, it’s either yours or the person in front of you. The idea is to shift your focus to that person: ask what you can learn about them, how you can grow from them, how you can make them feel more comfortable, what you can do to help them.’
All of those clues that people get about you when meeting you for the first time will be made the more positive if you can start to feel better about yourself – because you’ll come across as relaxed, which sends out a very powerful, positive message. It says: ‘I’m happy in my own skin.’ And that’s priceless.
Says Yarwood: ‘The moment you start to focus on liking yourself, you generally stop caring so much about what other people think of you. They are going to judge you whether you like it or not, and what they judge you on will be based on their value system, not yours. You have zero control over that, so why worry about it?’
When it comes to making a good impression, then, one way of looking at things is that there’s simply no point in getting stressed about it. The less concerned you are, the better you’re likely to come across.
However, just as the zoo keeper doesn’t enter the lion’s enclosure wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress, there are things that will negatively affect people’s impressions of you that can – and should – be ironed out.
Mohammad Ali, UAE-based master trainer at the Centre For Body Language, says that some of the no-no’s include people having their hands in their pocket, finger pointing, not paying attention, and turning either their feet or their body away from the person they are talking to.
‘People make an impression in as little as four seconds,’ he says, ‘so it’s imperative that we make sure our body language and facial expressions are showing openness and confidence and we give respect to our audience.’
Interestingly, Ali has found the UAE to be less judgemental than other places – largely because there are so many nationalities here. ‘There are many different traits that have now become normal because they have been adopted by so many people,’ he says. ‘They’ve become acceptable because we have such a multi-cultural society. It makes people more flexible and considerate here.’
Good news, then. And Yarwood has some more: ‘As long as you know that you are living true to who you are, and you are being your authentic self,’ she says, ‘then the people who you want to have in your life will naturally be attracted to your energy anyway.’
When it comes to making a good impression, one way of looking at things is that there’s simply no point in getting stressed about it. The less concerned you are, the better you’re likely to come across