I was in a cafe today and I saw a masterclass in human relations.
A bare-shouldered girl was sitting and working near the entrance to the cafe.
A guy came out of the bowels of the cafe, and confidently walked over to the hand sanitizer that was stationed next to the girl. He pumped out a disgusting quantity of sanitizer onto himself. “Good morning,” he said to the girl, sanitizer dripping off his hands.
Apparently, they knew each other. But the girl didn’t seem excited by the encounter. She didn’t turn to face the guy, and she kept staring at her laptop.
No matter. The guy started to enthusiastically speak about the work he was currently doing. He kept his gaze on the girl, spoke loudly, and didn’t move.
The girl still refused to turn towards him. She kept scrolling through Facebook on her laptop, occasionally picking up her phone to continue scrolling there.
And yet the guy kept talking at her, more about the project he was working on.
Gradually, the girl put down her phone. Bit by bit, she turned more and more towards the guy. She started to add a sentence here or there to his stream of words.
Finally she started laughing. And then she started to show the guy stuff on her own laptop that she was working on. He leaned in to see better, putting his hand on the back of her chair.
Chapter four of Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People tells you how to get people to like you. Carnegie explains:
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
And it’s true. It’s amazing how impressed people will be with your humor and wit if you just shut up and listen to them.
But the thing is, it doesn’t ALWAYS work. Because there are many situations in which people are either guarded or boring or both.
Showing “genuine interest” in these people right off the bat can backfire. It puts additional pressure on them, making them more clammed up and more guarded… and it makes you smell suspicious and needy.
So what can you do?
Well, one option is exactly what the guy in the cafe did today.
Be enthusiastically interested, not in the other person, but in your own hobby horse. At least at the start, until the other person thaws.
Because most of us, the non-psychopaths, have a strong instinct to mirror others. And if you are enthusiastically interested in a topic, it will rub off on other people. As comedian Andrew Schulz once said about his standup material:
“Who cares if they relate to it. Make them relate to it.”
By the way, this can apply to your marketing as well as to person-to-person interactions. Particularly in this day of free marketing channels, like YouTube and Facebook and email.
Write or talk about things that interest you, with enthusiasm. And some people will respond.
That’s what I do. In case you’re curious, my email newsletter is here.