Hide and Seek
People like to hide from one another. They may have grown out of hide and seek, but they still unintentionally try and conceal their real selves in their interactions. This is because people are afraid of being intimate with one another; yet it is exactly this intimacy that everyone craves. Want to make a connection with someone? Then you need to learn how to seek out their true selves in your conversations. Time: We are not the same person that we were 5 years ago, 5 weeks ago or 5 hours ago. What is interesting in an interaction is what is happening between two people in that moment. To have a highly charged interaction both people need to be invested in that moment and be reacting to one another. To avoid this people often talk about what their lives were like years ago. They are hiding their feelings of the present by talking about a time that has passed. Swapping anecdotes of your first day at school can be fun, but bring the interaction back to the present. Talk about how you feel in that moment, and if they don’t follow suit, be direct and ask “How does that affect you now?” This will engage them to start thinking in the present, and telling you something that is relevant to them that day. Tense: An exciting interaction is one that is focused on what the people think, feel and plan to do in the present. It’s the difference between relating old dates, speculating about ones you might get in the future, or having a great date then and there. Always think about how what the person is saying relates back to them in the present. If you don’t you’ll only ever grasp the image they choose to present of themselves [...]
Girl Talk
‘Who’s the hottest boyfriend?’ ‘Get some man know how- get clued up on the ten things we wish we’d known earlier about men’ ‘Sex to make him fall in love’ ‘My boyfriend left me for a man’ ‘Never get dumped!’ No Charisma Arts hasn’t suddenly become a women’s magazine. But if you’ve been stuck for what to say to a girl, or how to make your conversations interesting, then you too need to start thinking about what girls love reading and talking about. The quotes above are all recent tag lines from best selling women’s magazines. They tell us what women are interested in, which can help you understand how to make your conversations with them more exciting, and engaging. Take a guy’s magazine. It’s probably logically divided up, or specializes in, topics like boobs, cars or gadgets. Girls aren’t generally into those things. This is probably one of the reasons why interview style questions about ‘things’ tend to bomb. Even the most exciting ‘things’ like entertainment, travel and ipads can wind up being conversational non-starters if they don’t connect with what women love talking about which is sex, relationships, love and feelings. Yep. Definitely out of conversational safe ground with these ones…. but did you honestly think that when you catch a pair of girls in deep discussion it’s about shoes? Really? It’s good to be out of conversational safe-territory. Having a conversation with a girl about the key subjects of love and sex, is filled with a lot more opportunities to move your interaction with her forward, compared with when you’re talking about footwear or PCs. Being able to move the conversation onto relationships is also itself an escalation; especially when compared with the ‘safer’ interview subjects of what job she does and all that other stuff [...]