How To Make Anyone Like You Instantly

Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

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Well, listeners, as my brother Matthew so pointedly remarked in that opening intro, people don't care about your name until they know what you actually have to offer them. So let me assure you, in today's little podcast, you will be learning some tantalizing, alluring, fascinating conversation tips that are going to help you be more charming, charismatic, likable, dare I say, in your everyday life. But before we jump into the meat itself, I am Stephen Hussey, I am your host for today, and welcome to the Love Life Podcast. What are we doing here? What is the situation? We're coming up just to the very beginning of June, very shortly, and the tail end of spring, I guess. Boy, that's been one hell of a season, mostly spent indoors. I don't think I've left my town for quite a while now. I must say quite happily so at the moment. I'm writing a lot. I'm doing lots of podcasting and speaking and lots of Zoom calls, of course. I feel like many of us have become very well acquainted with Zoom over the last couple of months. All the glories of video conferencing. My Lord, has there been a lot of that going on? And we kind of work remotely a lot in our company at How to Get the Guy, so we're no stranger to Zoom, but now it feels like the rest of the world are experiencing the joys and the perils of constant video conferencing, which has been fun to view as a bystander to that. Yeah, so we're still going of course in the days of corona, but things are sort of easing up here in the UK right now. I think they're starting to loosen up some of the rules on the lockdown. Some things are opening next week, I think. Yeah, so who knows? This could be the start of some return to normality, but I feel that may take some time yet. We shall see. But what are we doing here? We're not here talking about corona. We are here to talk about something I've been chatting a lot about on my blogs and on Matt's Facebook page at the moment. I've been thinking a lot about conversation. I've been thinking a lot about generosity in conversation about being interesting to others, being a great presence, being compelling, all that stuff. And let's face it, we're all having a lot more conversations these days, it seems. So at least remotely we are. And I think it's important. I think being compelling, keeping someone's attention, and what it takes to actually make us likable in conversation is always an underrated skill, it seems. It seems there's never enough great conversationalists in the world. And I feel it's a kind of meta skill that we should always be striving to improve at and always noting, you know, just thinking about where did I lose people's train of attention there? Where was I talking too much about myself? Where was I going into a dull anecdote? What could I do to inject more emotion? Make things more exciting, be more just compelling. And not out of some kind of performing monkey routine we have to engage in every time we talk to someone, but just in the sense of, I think being interesting is a gift to give to others. I think being generous, making others feel interesting in our presence, drawing the best out of them, asking the right questions, I think these are all generous, loving acts and a way of actually showing appreciation and respect for other people's time and their attention. So I think it's very, very important not to mention the myriad benefits for our relationships, for our career, for interpersonally of being able to be a captivating, charismatic presence. It never stops being an important skill. I think it's something we should always strive to improve. And I want to jump right now into a clip of Matt talking on this exact topic, talking about how to instantly become likable in someone else's presence. So I'm going to flip over to that right now. Check it out.

Nine out of ten people watching this video are literally doing the opposite of what would make people want to be around them, want to get to know them, and fall in love with them. by the end of this video, you will know if you are one of those people. I recently needed to hire an outside company to come into my organization and do a big piece of work. We whittled it down to four different organizations that came and pitched to us for one hour each on why they should get the job. What happened in each of these hours was depressing. If you have ever been on a date without any chemistry, a boring business meeting, or listened to a tedious speech, I want you to see if my experience here explains why. In each of these meetings, these companies, for the first 30 minutes at least of the hour, talked about how their business started, who the key players were in their business, what companies they've worked with before, and what their process is for working with clients. By the end of that whole spiel, I was bored, frustrated, and even a little angry. Because what I really wanted to know beyond all else is, do you get me? Do you understand my values? Do you understand the soul of my company? We didn't end up going with a single one of those companies. Not because they weren't qualified, but because they didn't connect. See, we as human beings don't care until we connect. The crazy part about this is that we've been taught to do the exact opposite of what works. We've been taught to put our biography first and then worry about connecting. And we've been taught this since we were kids. At school, we're taught, Walk up, shake hands, say your name. But no one really cares about our name when we first speak to them. It's like going out and flirting, right? When we think of a good moment of flirting, here's what we think of. We have this fun interaction with someone and a couple of minutes in when we realize we're having fun, one person looks at the other person and says, what's your name? We say that now with curiosity, genuine curiosity because we care. We're intrigued. But when some guy comes up to you tonight out of nowhere and says, Hey, I'm Mark. We're like, I don't care, Mark. We don't care about the name until we care about the person, until we feel there's a connection. People were taught all across the corporate world to go into pitch meetings and to talk about their company. Here's how we started. Here's our chief financial officer. Here's who cares. We don't care until we connect. The speech world is filled with speeches where people start the first five minutes of a speech with, let me just explain a little to you about my backstory and where I started. Who cares? When we get up and give a speech, the first thing we should say is, here's something that will be useful to you. By the way, once I've made you care, then I can give you my bio. But before that, what does it actually matter? If any one of those four companies had come in and said, I know you're busy, Matthew, and we're busy too, let me just make sure that I understand the problem you're trying to solve. What you really need is X, Y and Z. Is that right? Okay, cool. So what you're really trying to achieve is this and this and this. If they had started like that, they would have made me the star of the show. Instead, all of them started by making them the star of the show. We're adults. but we walk around life with this very childish mindset of how is this about me? How does this thing solve my problem? How does this relate to something I know? We put ourselves at the center of everything. And maybe it's not childish, maybe it's just survival, maybe it's a practical way of being because it's about making sure that we assess how everything's relevant to us. Think about it this way. If I'm just the average person and you come up to me in that moment, I care more about me than I do about you. But you want me to care more about you than I do about me. In order to do that, you have to start by reversing your instincts and caring more about me than you do about you. Sounds simple. What that means is there is one simple trick that short-circuits all of this. If you wanna be important to somebody else, start by making them the star of the show and relating whatever it is you're gonna talk about to them and their experience.

If you've been on social media for the last decade, you have probably seen the technique Matt talks about here in action repeatedly. It works on all of us. Whenever we click a viral article, whenever we go on a YouTube video with an intriguing title, it's always because that title has found some way to relate to us, to what we want to know about, to an emotion we want to feel, to our curiosity. It gives us a reason to keep going. And sometimes to good or ill effect, sometimes they're manipulative, but nevertheless, it's always because, you know, the title might say, this woman discovered one weird secret about happiness, and you think, I'm interested in happiness. That's something that relates to something I care about. I want to see what that secret is. Any, you know, any great book, any great article, it usually starts, and I can tell you this as someone who's been blogging, trying to keep people's attention for 10 years through articles, you have to begin with some kind of pitch as to, you know, you have to think people are busy, they don't have much time, and they want information. So you have to immediately hook them with either here's a story that's really interesting or here's something amazing you're about to learn, some really interesting secret, some little nugget you didn't know, some quirky, fascinating, unusual idea. Whatever it is, you have to find some way of, in the media opening, hook the reader on something they want to know about. And again, this is part of make them the star of the show. And in conversation, I often think of this as a rule of three that kind of helps me just keep this. I don't go around with this in my head, but it's something I've thought about. You know, how do you make someone the star of the show? I think of curiosity. So just finding out what they're interested in and talking to them about that. Second, just appreciation and acknowledgement, giving them props or a compliment for something they do well and letting them know that just acknowledgement of something that they've worked hard on or something they've put a lot of energy and time into. And finally, letting them share their expertise, asking them for advice, asking for their opinion, letting them open up and reveal what they know about something if they're sort of more knowledgeable than you or they have a strong opinion or they have a view they want to express, giving them the space, allowing them a platform in which to speak that with authority. That's what makes us think, oh, I like being around this person because I get to, they seem to care what I think about things and they ask for my advice and we're happy when we can share stuff that people find interesting that people ask us about and we think this is a person I want to be around more because I get to share my wisdom with that person. So yeah, those are some ways you can apply this idea and let me know where you do use this. You can email the podcast at podcast@matthewhussie.com whether you use this in your career or in conversation or in some kind of romantic relationship that you might want to change the dynamic of. But yeah, there's so many ways you can use this. Once you start thinking in terms of making the other person the star of the show, you suddenly see how often people get it wrong and they go straight to their own self-interest and that's why people switch off or get bored, lose interest, etc. so, yeah, try that. Let me know. Podcast@matthewhussy.com. all right. Thank you so much for listening. As ever, I'm gonna leave you there today. I will see you very soon. Enjoy your weekend. Have a week. And, you know, keep out of trouble, you old ragamuffin. All right. See you later.

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