Transcripts
2. How To Decrease Your Fear Of Approaching People: So let's start here with how you can decrease the fear of approaching people. So what you must know is that the fear of approaching people is something that is natural. Everyone has that. So if you look at people who are highly socially successful, they have this fear, but they have learned how to deal with that. And that's the key here. I'm going to show you some ways that you can decrease this fear of approaching. But let's start with weight comes from. So if you think about that, where does the few approaching come from? Thousands and thousands of years ago? Let's imagine that little Allen wasn't a tribe. And in order to survive, he had to be protected from the group. He had to have protection. He him, he had food like he had to be in the group. And basically, rejection would mean death because little Allen back in the days wouldn't be able to survive by himself. And we still have that's ingrained in our brain. So it means that when we think about approaching people, we have that in our brain that says, Oh, rejection can mean death. That's why we have it. Okay, so what are the ways to decrease this fear of approaching? The first thing that you should approach as soon as possible. The more you wait when you have the intention for approaching someone, the more the sphere for poaching will build in your body. So what you should do that you see someone you want to approach and you go right away in less than three seconds, you go right away so that the sphere cannot, Can, cannot increase in your body. Now what happens if there is someone you want to approach and he didn't act, what can you do? What you have to do is that you just change your intention. It means that you go from omega to have two approaches. Just personally, I'm afraid to a, let's just have a drink. Let's talk with people. You change your intention then when you look at the person, I guess, oh, this is my intention to approach and you go right away. Another advice is not to take it seriously. Most people say, Oh my God, I have this fear for approaching. And they put too much importance to say, Oh my God, I have this fear of approaching, It's incredible. My garden. The more importance you give to the sphere, the more it will impact you. I would encourage you to imagine that you're the fear that you have of a project people is a five-year-old child. Would you take what a five-year-old child says seriously now because it's a five-year-old child. If a five-year-old child says, Hey, you should be you are ugly. I agree to take that into account now because it's the five-year-old child and that's the same thing here with the fear of approaching, you're not going to take it seriously. Another great advice is that you are going to accept that this fear is there. If you resist this fear of approaching what's going to happen, that you will build up in your body. So when you're experiencing this fuel for approaching, you just tell yourself, Oh, the it's the fear of approaching. I accepted. The more you are used to just accepting that the fear is there, the more you will be able to decrease it with the techniques that I'm going to give you. Another great way is to approach the first person that you see in a new environment. It means that when you arrive in a social setting, you want to start talking to people around you because you want to show you brain that it's okay to approach people in that environment. Again. Let's go to back in the days 1000 thousand of years ago, liter and our little island was in a tribe. And if you wanted to approach a new tribe, he had no idea if it was safe or if he would be killed by someone. He had no idea. So when we enter a new environment, we are stressed because we don't know what's going on. And I totally agree that you're not going to be killed that environment. But it's still ingrained in our brain from back in the days. That's why it's important to start talking in that environment to show you bring that it's okay to approach people. So I'll also talk to the bouncer, the person that is there and that is waiting for some and just say, hi, how is it going? How are you Just to get the flow going? And I did that back in the days that they're at the university. When I a big presentation to give in front of a class of 300 people. And I was really scared. Before the presentation. I would just raise my hand and I would ask a simple question. And the fact that I will be loud and ask a simple question would just show my brain that it was okay to be loud in that environment and then my fear decrease so that the same thing here with the fear for our, for approaching. So don't be afraid. Just take action and you will see you'll become a big success.
3. The Best Ways To Approach New People: How can you approach new people easily? So I would like you to see approaching people as just opening the door in the morning. It means that when you open the door of your apartment or your house in the morning, like are you stressed? Like, Oh my God, have to open it up now. You just open the door and you go outside. So here it's the same thing. We want just to approach people to be the first part of the interaction. Just to open the door and then you walk outside and then you go through your day. That's the same thing here. So I would like you to suggest approaching people as not something really incredible, just something that you do. You start the interaction, you break the ice, you do something. And if you understand that words are only 7% in an interaction between two people. And the 93 percent are the non-verbal. It means that it's the body language, the emotions, your vibe. So if you understand that 93% is non-verbal and only 7% is verbal, most people focus too much on the first part of the interaction. And if you ask people, how did, like, what did this person say exactly when they approach you? Most people don't remember because they will remember the 93 percent of the interaction, which is how they felt, the body language and they will remember more flat rather than than the what was said. So don't other complicated just approach someone, just open the door in the morning. So as you have to say something, what can you do? The first thing that you can ask a basic question. So you can just say, excuse me, can I ask you a question? And then you ask a basic question. It can be something related to the environment, to what the person is wearing, to what the person did before. What's going to happen in the environment in the future? What happened in the past? It can be a question about a restaurant where you could eat. You could be asking this question, what would be a great restaurants to eat sushi? Like? Question is great, don't over-complicate it. And I don't want to give you the questions because it's not going to sound natural. And what works really well is that when you just go in and you ask a question in the moment and say, Hey, I have this question here. And then you ask the question and then you start the interaction. We'll see later what you can say. But just here, I wanted to show you that it's easy to start if you want to ask a question. Another great way is to complement someone is like giving a compliment on their behavior. Something that works really well is hi. My name is Alan. I just wanted to say hi because you look friendly. It's amazing. It works almost all the time. And when you say something like that, the person says, oh, thanks you. And then they have to act as someone who is friendly because you frame them like that. So it's really, really powerful. So you could read the positive behavior. You can say, Hi, my name is data. I just wanted to say hi because you look friendly, because you look open-minded, because you look positive, because you look like you're having a great time. You will read the positive behavior. Don't read the negative behavior saying, Hey, my name is Alan. I just wanted to say hi because it'll depressed. That's not what we want to do here. Just read the positive behavior. And then another great way that works really well, that you're going to walk up to someone and you are going to introduce yourself. Hi, my name is data. You're going to shake hands. They're going to look into the eyes. You're going to smile and you have to, you're going to have a confident and film hand handshake that works really well. So don't over complicated to make a great first impression, just understand that approaching someone is like opening a door.
4. It All Starts Before The Interaction: Everything happens before the interaction. So most people think that it's when they will approach someone that interaction starts. But what's really important here is that you must take care of how you feel before approaching someone. Because if you understand that a conversation between two people like 93 percent is non-verbal, it means the emotions that you feel, your non your body language, the tone of your voice, your eye contact, like the smile, will count for 93 percent of an interaction and only 7% of words. So it means that If you take care of how you feel before approaching someone, guess what? If you master your emotions, your body language will be mastered. Like everything will be aligned with the emotions that you feel. If you are stressed and you feel negative inside, all your nonverbal communication will reflect that. So it means that when you approach someone, you will, you will, you will amplify this negativity and someone like the person in front of you will be able to sense that. Because there is a rule here that says that whatever you feel, the other person feels. So a great tip here is just to put yourself in a great state before approaching someone. So that when you approach that person, that person will remember and will, will sense that you are confident that, that join a positive mood and you will be able to make a great first impression. So how can you do that? You experience what you focus on if you are stressed before social interaction is because you are focusing on the fact that the person can reject you. The person can say that you're a loser. You are focusing on all the wrong things I would say, because you are filling these negative feelings inside, instead, you want to focus on something great. So the best thing is just before approaching someone or going to a social place, the address gate to close your eyes. And you're going to remember a positive time. Remember a time when you felt happy. And if you do that, and you can do this exercise with me here, you just close your eyes for five seconds and you remember a memory when you felt happy. And then when you feel we start filling these positive emotions in your belly, you're just going to amplify them. And you can see right now and smiling and happy. And this is a great mood to approaching people. Instead of focusing on everything that could go wrong on all the negative things, I'm going to focus first on positive emotions so that when I approach someone, I will be able to make a great first impression because people will sense this positivity. And if I master what I focus on, I'm going to master how I feel so that when I approach people, I'm able to control the emotions that I'm feeling because I was able to activate this positivity. Yes, of course, sometimes that will approach someone and then I'm going to be a little bit stressing the interaction, yes. But you can control how you approach people by really focusing on grades, emotions.
5. What To Say To Make A Great 1st Impression: What can you talk about to make an amazing first impression? So I get this question a lot. Alan, what should I say in interaction to be interesting? So again, it's not really about what you say that makes an impact. It's about how you say that. It's not the words which is the 7% in an interaction is the 93%. That is the non-verbal part that will really make a difference. So when you talk to someone, don't focus too much on the words. As long as you have good intentions and it's coming from you. It means that you could say a sentence and someone will be charismatic and you can say the same sentence. It would be, you will be perceived as boring. Why is that? I could say, Where are you from? Or I could say, Where are you from? You can add emotions behind sentences. If I say, Where are you from, I have no emotion. It's only the words, the words like 7%, where are you from? It's not really charismatic. But if I add some passion, some emotion, some positivity to that question, you will perceive it as more charismatic. So if I say, Where are you from? I have more emotions. I have more charisma. And how did they activate that? Just by throwing some passion and emotion behind my words. When I approached people and I talked to them, I'm going to add passion and emotions behind my words. So a great exercise for you is right now if you're in front of the computer and like no one can hear you. And even if some people can just do it, you are going to choke and add some emotions behind the words. And first you can overdo it just to understand how it works. You're going to add some positive emotions. You're going to say, Where are you from without any emotion. And then you're going to say where you form with passion and emotion. And a great exercise to do that in front of the mirror so that you can perceive that the, the way, the way you add emotions or charismatic. Now what can you talk about? You could say, What brings you here so that you can understand why the person is here. So it means that after you approach someone, you ask, what brings you here? If you approach a group of people, you can ask, how do you know each other? And then what can you talk about? You can ask the basic questions. Yes, That's okay. If you add the emotions behind the questions, That's okay. And then what can you talk about? Most people, they just think that they can talk about.
6. Your Confident & Charismatic Body Language: How do have an amazing body language when you talk to people? So their body language that you will have will impact your confidence level. If I ask you right now, could you just picture someone who is not confident? How would you picture this person? You would say, Oh, this person is looking down, shortlist down, just closed. Not a lot of fashion emotions. The person is like that. Okay, Now, can you just picture someone who is confident? You will say, Oh, the person opens the chest, they put the shortest back, the head is straight. They have a lot of facial expressions that takes space. They use gesture. How are you able to know how a low confident person look like and how a confident person looks like. It. Just because you understand that the, the body and the mind is linked, it means that if you adopt a posture of someone who has low confidence, guess what? You're going to become more confident. But if you ask, if you adopt a posture of someone who is confident, guess what? You're going to become confident. So it's the grace that greatest hack here, if you want to boost your confidence when you are talking to people, you are going to adopt the Superman posture. What is that? You just imagine that you are Superman. You open your chest, your put your shoulders back. You had a straight. You imagine that there is a string pulling it to the sky. You gesture a lot, you take space, you smile. If you did that in an interaction, you will see that immediately you will be able to unleash the confidence in yourself. And that works really, really well. So try that, Try the Superman posture.
7. How To Warm Up Socially: It's important that you warm up socially. So what most people would do is that they will spend their day in front of the computer. They won't talked to many people. And then they have an important networking event, they have an important social events. And they want to go to that event and they are there and they haven't talked to anybody during the day. And they feel stressed and they don't feel at ease. Instead, what you want to do is to warm up socially throughout the day. A great thing to do is to try to talk to people during the day. It could be talking to people like on the streets. Just say hi. If you go to the supermarket, talk to people, they're just say hi, Just smile. Just exchange words if you will. For example, you meet a bouncer, you meet someone at at at the parking, like just exchanged a few words to warm up. The best way to do that is before going to the social event is to call a friend. For example, when I worked in front of the computer for 10 hours, 12 hours, and then I have to go to networking events to meet high-end clients. You can imagine that I'm not in a great mood to talk. So what I'm going to do is that when I go there, when I go to the events, I'm going to call a friend so that I can talk and then I can activate the power of the voice and I can eat so that it becomes easier for me when I arrived that environment to talk to people because I would have already talked to one or two friends before the event. So warp socially, you will see, you'll become a big success.
8. How To Unleash Your Charismatic Eye Contact & Smile: How to smile and look at the other person the right way. So if you smile, you're going to be perceived as more warm and friendly. And that's the same thing with eye contact. So you want to be looking into the other person's eyes when you talk to them and you want to be smiling as well. So let me talk first with eye contact. So the importance of looking into the other person's eyes. Have you ever been in a situation where you were interacting with someone and the person in front of you was not looking into your eyes, how did you feel? Maybe you felt that the person was bored, that you were not interesting, like you felt negative associations with that situation. So what we want to do here is that we want to look into the other person's eyes. And now most people would say, yeah, Ireland, but I'm shy. I'm not comfortable. And there is a great hack here. Instead of looking directly into the other person's eyes, you can look at the eyebrows. And when my friend told me that, my friends said, Hey, I have this amazing tip, look at the eyebrows instead of the eyes and said, no way, I'm going to see the difference. So we tried. My friend was looking directly into my eyes or at my eyebrows, but he was not telling me which he was looking at and it wasn't able to tell the difference. So if you're not really confident, I would say use this technique here. It works really, really well. So you use the technique of looking at the eyebrows, but you want to be evolving towards looking directly into the eyes. What can you do when you, when you talk to someone? When you are talking? You can look most of the time into their eyes. And it happens naturally that your eyes will go away. We'll look down, up. It's normal, it's when you are accessing information in your brain. So don't worry, most of the time, you look at them. Don't look at them. The creepy phase, it has to be a relaxed phase and a positive phase. And when they are talking, you fully listen to them and you fully look into the eyes. So the person is talking, I will be looking at them. If I feel that the person is a little bit uncomfortable, first, I will try to relax my face because I may be super stressed. I'm stressed when I'm talking to them. And maybe I can have a weird face now. I'm just going to relax my face. And if I see the person is not used to that much eye contact, I'm going to break the eye contact to the right or to the left. Never look down because it shows that the other person is more dominant than you. Okay? So it's easy. You practice eye contact and a great way to do that is practice with a friend, girlfriend and talk to them. Say, hey, I would like to practice eye contact with you and you explain what you learned in this video here. Smiling. Smiling is really important. Most people I would say, I'm not comfortable with how they smile. So the first exercise here, you go in front of the mirror and you look at yourself, how is mine? Are you comfortable with that? Maybe you're not comfortable with your teeth. Maybe you should get them fixed, like whatever it is. The goal here is to make yourself comfortable with your smile. Because the more comfortable you are with a smile, the more you will give yourself permission to smile. So you can go in front of the mirror. And if you're not fully comfortable smiling like that, you can just smile like that. Because being an interaction and smiling like that is better than like that. So have the like, be comfortable with how you smile. Now there are two ways to smile. There is the wrong way, and I would say the right way, the wrong way. You want to smile because you want to make an impression. You want the approbation of the other person, you want the other person to like you. Imagine the car salesman. We always laugh at your jokes because you want to get your validation, he want to get your money. So he will be always laughing. And you feel that is not natural. And this is the way that we call smiling for impression, smiling for approbation, smiling to get something from someone. And this might hear is not attractive. Many years ago, I was always smiling because I didn't want to be rejected. So as smiling, smiling, smiling all the time. And there is nothing wrong with smiling all the time. But if you smile because you won't make an impression and people to like you, they will feel that. And instead you should smile as an expression of your inner smile. You should smile because you want to smile. You want to smile because you are excited about life. You want to smile because you want to laugh at the jokes. You express, your positivity, Your Great emotions. So when you smile, ask yourself this question here. Are you smiling to make an impression? Are you smiling because it's an expression? And the best way to understand that is to look at people around you. If you go to a cafe, to a restaurant and you look at people around, you ask yourself this question here. Are there smiling because they wanted to get validation from other people or other smiling because the really want to smile. And then you will understand the difference between the two.
9. The Importance Of Making The Other Person Feel Comfortable: Make the other person feel comfortable. If you want to make an amazing, great impression, it's important that when you approach the new person, that you make them feel comfortable. And most people won't focus on that. There will be focusing on what to say next on am I going to be rejected? Is the person liking me? And there will be all stressed. And instead you are going to do something different. You're going to ask yourself this question here. Is the person in front of me comfortable? And as it's important that you understand that most people don't have great social skills. It means that when you will be talking to them, that will be stressed. And it's your job to make them feel comfortable. Because if you are able to make them feel comfortable, they will remember you and they will love you. So it's important when you talk to them, see if they are comfortable with you. If they are not, maybe tried to increase the distance between you and the other person and see if that helps. Maybe you are maintaining too much eye contact. And maybe try just to break the eye contact to the right, to the left to see to see if that helps. Maybe you're asking questions that are too personal and the person is not really comfortable. So try to talk more questions that are not personal. Use your own judgment. It means that when you are talking to someone and you see the person is not really comfortable, say, Oh, what can I do to make the other person feel comfortable? Maybe I'm taught and touching the person too much. Like what am I doing. And you send them with experience, you will get a sense on what other thing that you can do. Just give space to the other person so that they can relax and be at ease with you. So take that into account that make the other person feel comfortable.
10. An Amazing Trick To Be Liked: How to make people like you. So this one here is really, really important. A great hack that I have is that when I approached people, I'm going to ask positively framed questions. Let me explain. If I ask you a question that is framed negatively. If I say, what's wrong in the world right now, what makes you feel upset while like, what makes you feel angry? You are going to feel negative emotions. And then you are going to associate these negative emotions with me. Instead, what you want to do is to ask positively framed questions such as, what, what are your passions? What do you like doing when you have three times? What was, what is the project that you have been working on? And you're really proud of what are the next vacations that you have planned. You want to make the other person stoke about things that are passionate about, about things that trigger positive emotions. So that when you talk about that, when the person talks about that the other day to experience this positive emotions. And they're going to associate that. They are going to associate that with you. Because if you think about that, people are going to remember how they felt in an interaction, not what was said. It's again, the 93 percent of the conversation is non-verbal. It which is the motions, the energy that is exchanged between people. So it means that if you're able to trigger this positive emotions in their body, they will associate that with you. Now most people would say, yeah, Allan, this manipulation, It's not just that I make a choice of asking certain questions rather than the boring questions. Or I would say the questions that are aimed negatively. It's just a choice. I prefer to have a great time asking about positive things and building this positive energy between me and the other person. Rather than making the other person feel depressed. It's a choice. And if you understand that you are going to be a big success. So think about what are the questions that you could ask that are framed positively? It can be about the passions, the interests, the project that though I excited about the vacation, that you should ask these questions when you meet someone so that you can really make an amazing first impression.
11. The Power Of Positive Anticipation: I would like you to have positive anticipation. It means that beef approaching someone, most people that will focus on the fact that they can reject them, everything that could go wrong. And whatever you focus on, it's what you're going to experience. So before approaching someone, you're just going to close your eyes. And you're going to imagine that situation going well. You're going to imagine that you are going to approach someone and it's going to go well, by doing that, you are showing you brain that there is a possibility of it going well. And there is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It means that if you close your eyes and you imagine it going well, it has higher chances of actually going well. And most people would say, yeah, island, but I prefer to just focus on the fact that they can reject me because if that happens, I won't be disappointed. But guess what? If you think that you're going to get rejected, your whole body will scream or reject me. Reject me. Because whatever you think will manifest itself into reality. So have more confidence. Think about it going well. So before the interaction, you close your eyes for few seconds and you imagine it going well. Also you can do that at home. You just close your eyes and imagine your social interactions going well, you build on that and you will see, you will become a big success.
12. Congratulations: Thank you so much for watching this on a training on how to make an amazing first impression. I hope you enjoyed it. My suggestion for you would be to write down what you have learned from design training and then go in the world and apply them, interact with people and apply them. And you will see you will become a big success that if every day you apply the techniques that you have learned here in this course, you apply them and you always ask yourself this question, Oh, what did they do? Well, what can I do better next time? And you build on that, you are going to become a big success and make amazing first impressions with people that you meet.
Alain Wolf, Social Skills Consultant
