Whether you’re the girl at the bar yelling to her friends “Oh my I have to pee SO BAD!” or the guy whose voice cracks over his first words, it’s hard to erase a first impression from someone’s brain. As said in my Big Talk course, however, where there’s a whole chapter on making a great first impression, “A first impression isn’t a last impression; it’s an influential impression.”

A good impression at first sight is what I call “the lazy man’s way to make people like you”. Princeton University research shows our snap judgments remain consistent over time. If someone judges you as “attractive”, “friendly”, and “open” within 100 milliseconds, they’re likely to think you’re all that by the end of the conversation. The study did find one thing changes as the conversation continues: a person’s confidence in the accuracy of their first impression.

Call it bias or unfairness. I call it human psychology. Work with it if you want to be seen as awesome. Here are 40 tips that will help you make a great first impression.

1. Know the importance of body language. Before you open your mouth, people judge a lot about you by the way you walk, hold yourself, and move. These types of nonverbal communication are detected before you mutter a word. It’s a myth nonverbal communication gives 93% of all communication, but body language holds a lot of weight in a first impression.

Knowing the value of body language and unspoken social dynamics in a good first impression encourages you to focus on it. You’ll be more concerned with smiling, speaking louder and clearer, and appearing calm, which will impress others more than a great conversation starter.

2. Open your body language. Open body language invites and impresses while closed body language shows ignorance and insolence. Here’s a snippet of a table from the Big Talk course explaining the difference between the two types of body language:

Imagine two people. You’re one of them. The weirdo has all the traits of closed body language while you or me – each an amazingly cool person – has all the traits of open body language. You get the vibe the other person is a creep while we’re charming.

3. Social proof yourself. Social proof is a principle of social psychology that says we look to others during obscure social situations to determine how we should behave. There are hundreds of unknown people in public social events so we observe how people treat each other to measure how we should treat someone.

If you see everyone looking towards a guy, you’ll look towards him to calculate what’s going on. If a guy seated alone for an hour approaches you for conversation, you’ll dislike him before he opens his mouth. You’ll look for information to validate why he is alone and unpopular.

Everyone knows you can manipulate your words and tell a verbal lie, but we believe what we see so use social proof to make a good first impression. Make friends before you enter a venue. Be seen chatting with the bouncer or waiter or a group of friends you just met. If every time someone spots you laughing with a group of new people, you’ve made a better first impression than anything else possible with cool body language or witty first words.

4. Put yourself at ease. Did you know if you’re tense talking with someone, the mirror neurons in another person’s brain forces them to become tense? Their body literally duplicates your tension. The strain or message that relates to it, like you’re an uptight angry jerk, is then stored in the person’s hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. Not a good way to make friends.

If you’re like most ToP readers, your body is tense right now. Heck, even I just realized I’m tense writing about tension! To see your tension and remove it, relax your forehead. Loosen your jaw. Let your face droop downwards as the tension dissipates. You can tighten a muscle for three seconds then release it to enter relaxation. Do this throughout your body whenever you think of it. Tension is unconscious, but relaxation conscious.

5. Get into shape. Light travels faster than sound, so your physical appearance is noticed before your voice or introductory comment is heard. Looks aren’t everything, but they’re important and quickly noticed.

Get your physical game together whatever that maybe. Exercise to stay in shape. Drop that greasy packet of chips in the bin. Everyone notices a guy with biceps bulging out of his sleeves or a woman with a tremendous curvy figure. We’re impressed by people with good physiques.

6. Dress stylish within the decade. I understand if your bright green neon stilettos appear “timeless” to you. However, nobody else does. When in doubt, wear black or gray. These colors are timeless and even if a dress or tie was purchased 10 years ago, it’ll come across as stylish because it’s not a shocking, bright, or ridiculous color.

Dress nice and stylish, but comfortable. You want to look your best, yet many times we tend to think dressing sharp, stylish, and sexy is more important than being comfortable. If you’re uncomfortable and constantly tugging or pulling at your shirt or dress, you’ll feel distracted and probably self-conscious. Don’t compromise comfort for style. Feel good in what you’re wearing.

This is no fashion school, yet I must say one last thing on this topic. Not only is it important to dress for comfort, it’s important to dress for your body type as well. Ladies, don’t squeeze into a revealing, slinky dress because you hear it’s the latest style, even though your chest is popping out and you can see your underwear lines through it. Men, don’t wear a fitted Slipknot t-shirt if your gut sticks out beneath it. You need tip number five if that’s the case!

7. Think positive before going in. Imagine the positive mark you’ll make on people instead of visualizing how that attractive lady will laugh at you when you approach her asking, “Did the sun come up or did you just smile at me?” (I wouldn’t blame you if you’re thinking negatively using that pick-up line). See the interaction going incredibly awesome. Believe the person you’re about to talk to is friendly. You’ll go in looking like a happier, more impressionable person.

If you’re a pessimist so you never get disappointed, read my review of Mind-Lines, a great book on reframing to think in healthy ways. The difference between a good impression and bad one may just be how you interpret it.

8. Get into a positive state. Make people’s mirror neurons work for your benefit. Put yourself into a positive state so a person’s brain makes them emotionally high in your presence.

I believe it’s unhealthy to always seek happiness and “positive emotions” because you block yourself from authenticity and a full experience of life, but there are lessons in Big Talk you can follow to boost your mood and impress people:

1. Firstly, know that energy is a choice. You can make yourself feel good at will.
2. You may get in a good mood by psyching yourself up or down. Figure out what works for you.
3. Talk with anyone or anything. If you feel great and can have a smooth conversation with your cat, I like your odds at impressing people in a conversation.
4. Take a practice dive socializing. Dive in and allow yourself to belly flop. E-motion is energy in emotion. To feel alive, action is necessary.

9. Be present. The distinguishing factor between anxious, lonely persons and those with charisma is their energetic focus. Loners are drawn into themselves. They think about past mistakes or anticipate how others may respond. I use to think of how I froze up in past conversations or I’d think about what others would think if I said something. Yeah, it’s messy.

People know when you’re not fully in the moment and are repulsed by it. Children hate when a parent pretends to listen when all they’re doing is hearing.

Just before you approach someone or at anytime during a conversation, take your mind out of the past or future and focus on the now. The best way I’ve found to do this is by taking deep and slow belly-breathes for 30 seconds. You can also observe a person’s body language. These techniques will make you more present and people will be impressed.

10. Impress the right person. Would you leave your hand print on a rock or in clay? Some people are easier to impress than others while some are worth impressing more than others.

If you have a hard-time impressing people, start picking low hanging fruit. Talk to the person alone or listen to the person looking sad. The social proof and emotional momentum will help you impress those higher up the tree.

11. Approach people from a 45 degree angle. It’s alarming to have someone approach you head on. In the caves thousands of years ago we’d kill anything aggressively nearing us. Having said that, don’t sneak up on someone like they’re your best friend. It’s not cute. In the caves thousands of years ago we’d kill anything that tried to surprise us from behind (okay, maybe your ancestors didn’t give you my schizophrenic genes, but you get the point.)

What’s the right way to walk up to people? Approach from a 45 degree angle. You can keep your geometry set in your school bag. Just use the principle as a reminder that we’re comfortable being approached by strangers at a visible indirect angle.

12. Make eye contact. The eyes give your interactions emotional meaning. If you look at any object or person as if you had ADHD, you’ll appear anxious or disinterested. Certainly you’ve heard this a million times, but giving someone a good look in the eyes right as you meet them shows you’re interested in them. Your pupils dilate and they instinctively catch on, causing automatic attraction.

13. Cast an illuminating smile. A cold turkey smile switches on in an instant. An illuminating smile turns on gradually. Make eye contact with someone then go from a blank face to a full warm smile in two seconds. Read my article “How to Be Interesting Without Saying a Word” for more help with this technique and a couple of extra tricks to impress people through your body language.

14. Don’t stare and smile like a hungry wolf. Or a hungry vampire. Eye contact is one thing, looking like someone staring at their bait is another.

Temporarily break eye contact by shifting your eyes downwards for two seconds. It’s a sign of friendliness and safety probably experienced by cave men who killed beasts that glared in their eyes (again, that’s probably my schizophrenic genes). Sharing your eye contact with the floor makes you safe and likable in the eyes of those you chat with giving them a good impression of you.

15. Remember your acquaintances name and use it. You don’t have to use their name after each sentence you say to them, but a “nice to meet you, Sarah” or “Me too Bob, I totally get that” shows you’re interested in speaking to them and are having more than just an empty conversation. If you have the memory of a goldfish, check out a post of mine for social skills resources to help remember names.

16. Shake hands well. There’s more to a handshake than a firm one. Lean forward at the hips to show interest. Ensure your hand and theirs go web-to-web. Yes, grip firmly. A strong, firm handshake shows confidence in anyone. Same for you, ladies. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you have to stick out your fingers like a delicate tulip. My last tip for a good handshake is to give two up-and-down shakes. Do these and you may just impress people with your hand skills.

17. It’s the way you say it. I’ve mentioned body language for a good impression, but the voice is another part of nonverbal communication that can impress people. A squelching voice will leave your listeners with plugs in their ears while a soothing, clear voice will have people hang on to your every word.

There’s many diverse problems in vocalics from talking too loud, fast, soft, raspy, high, indecisively, breathy, and the list goes on. To cure all these problems and improve your voice, I recommend you learn from Carol Fleming, creator of The Sound of Your Voice audio program, and her new book It’s the Way You Say It. Her book is the best resource I’ve come across to improve your voice and nonverbal communication.

18. Make the conversation about others. We think we need to impress others by drawing attention to ourselves. The opposite is true. I once saw a man wearing a shirt that said, “Oh yea, that reminds me of something that allows me to talk about myself.” For many people, this couldn’t be more true. The last person you want to be is the one who starts telling a story about themselves as soon as they hear someone mention something related. You’ll make friends easily when the conversation is on their passions, their problems, their perceptions.

19. Show interest in what they have to say. If someone talks about the awesome day they had or the recent achievement they accomplished at work, it’s worth the recognition and respect that comes along with you intently listening. Did he land a new job? Shut up about your 10 million dollar deal and be happy for him. Lean forward, ask questions, have your mouth slightly open, and be in awe.

20. Talk about yourself. Yeah, that will impress people when done right. You see, fans of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People are so adamant on making the conversation about others and being interested in people. This makes a good impression on people – without it, you’re sure to be the person everyone wishes would be gagged for silence. However, if you really want to impress a guy or girl and make them into a friend, you need to talk about yourself.

We feel close to those we understand. Without that understanding of someone’s identity, we have our shields up. If someone talks about their hot air balloon experience, ask them questions, listen to them gas, then share how you’ve never done it before and would love to do it. They may just invite you to fly away some day after you impress them.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Top 15 Dumb Mistakes People Make in Relationships
2. Ways to Resolve Conflict When Others Avoid It
3. 10 Almost Guaranteed Ways to Fail in Life
4. How to Be Charming to Men and Women
5. 14 Social Skills Resources for an Amazing Social Life

As I drove, the open car park gave me an invitation to have a little fun with my car. If landscapes could talk, this one was whispering into my ear that I should spin the wheels. “Besides, it’s late at night. No one is around and you’re feeling great. It’s an open car park with no danger. Do it!” Like a vulnerable teenager succumbing to peer pressure, I accepted the invitation.

The car became an extension of my body as it began to mimic my ecstatic mood. I put my foot down hard on the accelerator as I spun the wheel left around the first corner. As the rear tires lost their stability and the car went side-ways, I entered the next turn and spun the wheel right. The sound of screeching tires was water fertilizing my increasing smile. Smoke filled the rims of my tires and a shot of adrenaline filled my body.

Following the two consecutive drifts, I straightened the car and approached a set of traffic lights on the main road that would take me home. Had this been during the daytime, about seven cars would be in front of me before the upcoming traffic lights.

My friend who had left before me had passed through the traffic lights three seconds ago so the lights were still green. Keeping in the mood, I put my foot down on the accelerator to catch the green light. I would safely make it. I turned around the corner with a soft screech of the tires. 20 meters in front of me on the side of the road were two police officers beside their vehicle. Lucky me.

The police pulled me over. Opposite to what you might be thinking, I was not concerned. I was still in my elevated state. I smiled. I wound down my window and an angry officer came charging at me, yelling, “What the hell are you thinking? What the hell is going through your mind?” I paused momentarily, unaffected by his aggressive state. I said smilingly, “I’m just happy, I guess.” Not a smart response. Not a smart response at all.

It hit me I was out of it. I knew I should have said something else. I gulped. My mind rushed to think of some communication techniques I could use as a life boat to save me from drowning in the conversation. The moment was intense and all that came to mind were some techniques on getting out of a speeding-ticket. I thought to myself that I will give the techniques a shot. I had annoyed the officer enough. Surely it couldn’t get worse.

As I was thinking how to approach this difficult situation, I was still happy. My happy mood seemed to pour fuel on his already raging fire. “Bloody hell mate! I could just give you a ticket right now!” My smile began to lower. I no longer made eye contact with the officer. The officer’s raging mood began to infect me. He was making me feel angry. It was as if my body was overcome by an emotional virus from the officer who was the virus’ host.

I thought of the techniques to get out of a speeding-ticket and realized I was already beginning to use them. It was too late to make the officer feel safe as he approached the car, but I needed to no longer act oblivious to my mistake. I needed to show respect as officers are in a clear position of authority and often experience disrespect throughout their day that only makes them more determined to convict guilty citizens. “You’re right,” I replied. “I was stupid and careless.”

The officer was still enraged and continued to threaten me with a ticket. I knew he could easily write me a ticket, but he was not writing one possibly because officers hate the paperwork created from citizens breaking the law. I kept myself aligned with the officer’s reality by remaining in a “Yes I’m wrong, stupid, and shouldn’t have done that” mood. I continued to play psychological judo, and match my mood with his own, until two minutes later he said to drive away. And oh, no ticket!

I drove off – though feeling pleased I had beaten a reckless driving ticket – in an irritated state. The officer had destroyed my happy mood. It took two minutes of talking with the officer to completely transform my happy state into a joyless, gloomy mood, which I remained in for another two hours until I went to bed.

Emotional Contagion: When Two Minds Infect One Another

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou, poet and actress

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.” – Mark Twain, highly quoted writer

“You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.” – Anonymous

“I am involved in all of mankind.” – John Donne, 16th century poet

My story I described is probably a perfect depiction of your reality with emotions. Everyday you interact with people in different moods. Sometimes you are happier than people; other times they are happier than you. Whatever the case, emotions transfer between people. This is a fascinating peculiarity with emotions. Have you ever noticed how we feel in our interactions is not only dependent on our internal state?

• How did you feel when someone really annoyed began talking to you? You became more annoyed.
• How did you feel when someone unhappy began talking to you? You began to be unhappy.
• How did you feel when a depressed person shared their misery with you? You felt depressed and miserable.
• How did you feel when a charismatic person talked to you? You felt his energy and you began to feel happier.

Psychologists call this phenomena “emotional contagion”. It is a psychological and physiological process – a transference of emotion that can occur from mimicking body language. Elaine Hatfield, a professor at the University of Hawaii, in a study with John Carlson and Christopher Hsee, had college students watch a videotape of a man describe two very emotional experiences: his life’s happiest and saddest events. While the college students watched the tape, they were taped so the researchers could record the students’ emotional responses. The students were also asked what feelings they experienced for each story at the end of the video.

The researchers found that students showed and expressed the recorded person’s emotions. The student’s felt happy when they watched the man describe his happiest event. The students felt sad when they watched the man describe his saddest event.

Hatfield and her two colleagues, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson, in their co-authored book Emotional Contagion, say the psychophysiological phenomena occurs from automatically matching facial expressions, vocalics, postures, and movements. Hatfield says, “People tend to experience emotions consistent with the facial, vocal, and postural expressions they adopt.”

When you empathetically listen to a friend, true empathy puts you in their shoes to experience the discussed events. The friend describes an argument with an ex-partner, the yelling, the misunderstandings. You can vividly see what your friend talks about. The experience lets you feel the pain your friend feels. Well-known psychologist Albert Bandura says the shared experience results in a shared feeling. That is the price of listening: not only can you catch a cold, but you can catch an emotional cold.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
2. Dirty Tricks of Psychology for Mind-Reading and the Roots of Empathy
3. The Complete Nonviolent Communication (NVC) Process for Compassion, Understanding, and Peace
4. Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
5. The Greatest 15 Myths of Communication

At the end of the round, he had failed to qualify for the national tournament by two shots. In the clubhouse where we had a drink, we talked about what he did well and what he could have done better. “I was surprised by the quality of your chip shots and game around the greens,” I remarked. “Everything went within 2 meters of the pin.” Not to concerned about the disappointed day, Nathan replied, “Yeah, you’re right. My wedge game was strong today. Just…” to which I interrupted and said, “The eleventh 2-iron.” He echoed my words, “Spot on, the eleventh 2-iron.”

I let him continue to talk as his words almost perfectly described the words in my mind. Something happened between our minds. It was like a magic trick taking place. A mystical cable connected our minds, leading to strange psychological phenomena.

It seemed we almost had psychic powers. He was not just reading my mind, I was also reading his. There was a shared connection, a relaying of thoughts exchanged between minds. The distance between two brains was removed as two minds overcame physical boundaries to connect with one another.

There was no two persons trying to talk to one another – frustrated in their misunderstandings. There was no interpretation, judgments, or confusion about what each other meant. We were so attuned to one another that we did not even have to say a word and we would have understood what was in the other person’s mind.

What happened here? Was it just a fluke, a lucky break? Were psychic powers at work? How does psychology explain this? How can you use this information to read someone’s mind and improve your communication skills?

We Were Born to Connect: The Roots of Empathy Gave Us Innate Psychological and Physiological Connections

In 328 BC, Aristotle said humans are social animals. Nowadays, more and more evidence is showing that humans are born to connect with one another. Much fascinating research on psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and child development is revealing how we connect in our relationships.

From birth, a baby prefers his or her mother’s voice, sight, and smell than that of a stranger’s. The mother is more connected to the baby than an outsider. As the baby grows, other attachments form. Should a babysitter come over to look after the toddler as the mother leaves the house, the toddler experiences separation anxiety and clings to the mother’s leg. (The anxiety is important for survival and avoiding dangerous situations.) The child can be joyous 10 seconds prior to seeing the babysitter, but the sight of the stranger creates fear in the child and leads to large amounts of distress.

As the mother leaves the house, she feels her child’s anxiety. The child may say no words or cry no tears, yet the mother mind-reads her child’s emotional state. She is able to feel exactly what the child is feeling. There is a mind-to-mind and mind-to-body connection taking place.

Interpersonal communication is not just about direct channels – the channels like verbal and nonverbal communication obvious to people. Though we are often aware of people’s words and body language, reading someone’s mind goes to the next level. When you know another person well enough, you pick-up on indirect channels that give you hunches about the other person. Nothing needs to be said or expressed nonverbally; it is your intuition – almost a sixth sense – that tells you what is on the person’s mind.

We do not just connect through words, we connect at a biological level. Our bodies can adjust to match someone else’s body. When you deeply connect to someone during a conversation, your posture, movements, and heart rate match the other person. This power gives you the ability to control another’s mood. (It isn’t fake rapport you see in most people’s attempts to use NLP.) A mother can relieve her distressed baby with her soothing voice. Our psychology and physiology can affect someone else’s psychology and physiology. You literally change people’s bodies with your thoughts.

Social and emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman is a leader in the mind-to-mind and mind-to-body connections we share with each other. In a New York Times article, Goleman discusses the powerful connection we share with people. He refers to one study that measured a female’s anxiety. Researchers had a group of females hold someone’s hand prior to receiving an electric shock. When a female held hands with a stranger, she remained distressed. When a woman held her husband’s hand, however, brain scans confirmed little activity in the emotional parts of her brain. She kept calm. The husband’s hand was a biological source of emotional rescue. Our psychological and physiological states affect ourselves and other people at astonishing levels.

You Have Superpowers

“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.” – Napoleon Hill (1883-1970), author of the classic Think and Grow Rich!

“The greatest reward is to know that one can speak and emit articulate sounds and utter words that describe things, events and emotions.” – Camilo Jose Cela, Spanish writer and recipent of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature

“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” – Meryl Streep (1949-present), American actress

Because we were born to connect with one another, each of us has innate abilities to connect with others. Believe it or not, everyday we read each other’s minds. Whether a friend asks for your opinion on their clothes, a boss wants your input on a coworker’s performance, or a child asks for a gift, you receive what feels like sixth sense signals that tell you how to respond. When a friend asks for your opinion on their clothes, you can almost determine what they are thinking. You have memories, empathy, and gut-feelings about the person’s thoughts that tell you how to respond.

You already have “superpowers”, an ability to determine another’s state. If you did not have such abilities, you would fail miserably in your relationships; you would fail to intimately connect with your partner; you would struggle to persuade others as your negotiation skills would be insufficient to determine what the other person really wants; you would be unable to sense when someone manipulates you. Without this “superpower” to read someone’s mind, you would struggle to cooperate and connect with people.

Unfortunately, the less time you spend with someone and the more distanced you are with them, you become less able to read a person’s mind. As I am sure you know, we do not have perfect abilities to cue into another person’s thoughts. If it were that perfect, there would be little reason to communicate. We would know exactly what everyone is thinking.

It seems that a couple intimately connected to one another should know what their partner is thinking because time in a close relationship helps build the individual’s mind-to-mind connection. Married people might be laughing at reading that. Too many married couples can recall endless occasions when their partner had no clue what they thought – yet alone, what they were thinking when they tried to explain themselves.

William Ickes, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the leading expert in empathic accuracy. Ickes says misunderstandings in marriages occurs from a lack of insight into their partner’s way of thinking. While you may be motivated to understand your partner early on in a relationship, says Ickes, during the first few years of marriage most people’s empathy for their partner decreases because they become overly confident in understanding their partner.

It may seem contradictory, but assumptions destroy your ability to read someone’s mind. Reading someone’s mind is not about guessing or contriving information to arrive at a conclusion; it is about being immersed in the present as you allow yourself to be absorbed by the person’s reality. You come to act as the person acts, feel as the person feels, and think as the person thinks. Assuming information destroys your human powers to read someone’s mind, build understanding, and establish empathy.

Become a Better Superhero: Mind-Reading Tricks – Empathy Techniques

“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” – Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third President of the United States

“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), famed German writer

“Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You can smile and the whole world smiles with you. That is the magic of “emotional contagion”, a term created by psychologists to describe the infectious nature of emotions. If you frown as you walk around at work, you will infect coworkers with your sour mood. This connection we have with one another is there for a reason: it connects us! Emotional contagion plays a very important role in connecting people together.

We would be separate from each other without emotional contagion; we would have little concern for how people feel; we would be unable to read another’s mind. Intelligently taking on a person’s reality by allowing yourself to become infected with their emotions, lets you infer their thoughts. Some psychologists allows emotions to transfer from their client to themselves, which gives them the ability to peer into their client’s inner world. A psychologist can then discover a thought or feeling their client is not yet aware of.

Goleman in Social Intelligence discusses the amazing mind-to-mind connection, a connection that transcends physical boundaries. He says the intimacy of our communication controls the degree we can connect with others. When a couple are highly engaged with one another, Goleman says, “Such mental intimacy bespeaks an emotional closeness; the more satisfied and communicative a couple, the more accurate their mutual mind-reading.”

The intimacy of our communication that creates a psychic connection has a neurological justification explains Goleman. It is not some unexplained magical power, but neurological adjustment. As we communicate with someone and experience what other people experience, our neurons form pathways. These neural pathways unconsciously direct messages to form our sixth sense that gives us gut-feelings about what people are thinking. “Our trains of association run on set tracks, circuits of learning and memory,” says Goleman. “Once any of these trains has been primed, even by a simple mention, that track stirs in the unconscious, beyond the reach of our active attention.”

Intimate communication that shapes the brain can only be achieved by intimately sharing another person’s reality. Quietening your inner dialog makes you more able to detect another’s emotions. Without inner silence, empathy becomes a difficult task because there is no two-way communication.

Think back to a time when you were angry with someone you were talking to. Your anger was illogical as it caused you to do things you later regretted. You did not care what the other person felt, you were just concerned with releasing your anger and telling him or her how you felt. (The 10th chapter on emotions and logic in my communication secrets program can solve this problem for you.)

Better emotional management helps your mind-reading skills to improve your relationships. Four researchers in a study titled Physiologic Correlates of Perceived Therapist Empathy and Social-Emotional Process During Psychotherapy found that therapists and patients who felt the same had a more positive relationship. Similar feelings between people helps their relationship.

The researchers from the study say that talking uses a different part of the brain than emotional responses. Being a blabber-mouth kills your ability to emotionally connect with people and read their mind. Listening plays a huge role in connecting minds. By talking too much, we block our biological ability to feel what another person feels – and fail to build a connection akin to mind-reading.

As you quieten your inner dialog to tune into a person’s emotions, be aware that their thoughts and desires will not be the same as your thoughts and desires. Psychologists call this a “theory of mind, which describes the ability to determine another’s mental state and at the same time acknowledge the differences to our own.

Body language and other nonverbal cues helps us achieve seemingly psychic powers. Annie Murphy Paul, in a Psychology Today article titled “Mind Reading”, says that body language cues such as facial expressions are a good way to tap into people’s thoughts. “We tend to focus on others’ eyes, and that helps us,” says Paul. “The many surrounding muscles make eyes a richer source of clues than other parts of the face: downcast in sadness, wide open in fright, dreamily unfocused, staring hard with jealousy, or glancing around with bored impatience.”

While the eyes play an important role in determining someone’s thoughts, as does other nonverbal signals like voice, “it’s the content of speech that contributes most to our success at mind reading” says Paul. Meaning is not always directly expressed through words, but words give us insight into people’s way of thinking. It is next to impossible to mind-read someone speaking another language.

Another trick you can use – which is one of the biggest tricks – to read a person’s mind is to keep learning about communication, personal development, and human psychology. As you learn more about yourself, you learn more about other people. You come to understand what people feel, how we act, and what we think in certain situations. It is crazy how good I am now at digging into someone’s mind and knowing what is going through their mind in a conversation. I know how people react to many statements, the feelings one has during certain moments, and how to shift all this around to make it work for me.

Responsibility Comes with Power – Be Weary of the Dangers of Empathy

There needs to be a word of warning about your mind-reading superpowers. Before you go out and use the magic tricks of mind-reading, a series of techniques that use our innate ability to connect with one another, use your powers wisely. Empathy expert Ickes, with his academic partner Jeffry Simpson, advise people against the surprising dangers of empathy. “Empathic accuracy and understanding can be bad for relationships,” writes Ickes and Simpson in their study Managing Empathic Accuracy in Close Relationships. “While accurate understanding should be good for relationships as a general rule, too much understanding in certain contexts may have deleterious consequences.”

Diagnosing is one such example of a poor application of mind-reading skills, which is discussed in my communication secrets program. We diagnose others when we express people’s intentions. We try to act above others. You can try to mind-read your partner by diagnosing them (“You’re just jealous”, “Why do you always try to argue with me?”, or “Liar, I know what you really mean”) and hurt the relationship as a result of your diagnosis.

As you learn more about communication, you may be tempted to use the communication barrier of diagnosing because you will understand the human mind. Just as a partner in a marriage gets into relationship-trouble by assuming they understand their partner, the same happens when you are overly confident about understanding how our minds work.

The sad thing about diagnosing is its accuracy is irrelevant. Merely assuming or revealing someone’s intentions makes them defensive. Your superpowers and all the tricks you have been given to read someone’s mind that are suppose to connect people together, can separate you from people.

Use your mind powers wisely young Jedi. Know when to get into someone’s head and when to stay out. It is not the power to read another person’s mind that will give you great power with people, for that is a skill we all have; rather, having the skill to keep on understanding people is what will give you power. Understanding is, after all, the purpose of peering into someone’s mind.

(To discover cool mind-tricks used by popular magicians to “wow!” their audiences, click here.)

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Mind-Lines by Michael Hall and Bobby Bodenhamer
2. The Magical Science of Emotions: Emotional Contagion, Mirror Neurons, and the High Road to Happiness
3. Review of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
4. Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
5. The Greatest 15 Myths of Communication

Part three of this course provides you with many tips, techniques, and pieces of advice to help you correctly apologize. The advice I’m about to share with you will help you in ways beyond an apology. The tips can be applied to many areas of your life and communication as you will soon see.

What It Means to Correctly Apologize: To Be Forgiven and Forgotten?

Some people think apologizing correctly is as simple as saying “sorry” for a mistake. This is a shallow understanding of what you need to achieve in an apology. The goal of apologizing – and what I define as “apologizing correctly” – is when the person you hurt accepts your apology and forgives you. The person neither rejects your apology by saying something like “no need to apologize” nor holds the mistake against you. Things do not necessarily return to the way they were before.

It is beyond the purpose of an apology to make your relationship stronger, indifferent, or worse because these outcomes depend on the severity of the mistake. If you keep screwing up by making mistake after mistake, you’ll have successfully apologized when the person forgives you – but it doesn’t mean your relationship is the same as it were before the mistake.

There is a lot of confusion about the old phrase “We must not forget; but we must forgive”. We know forgiveness is a must. Without it, the person unwilling to forgive emotionally suffers – often leaving the person who did the damage unscathed. But where does forgetting sit in a successful apology? Should we aim to have our mistakes forgotten by those we hurt?

If another person holds the bitter memories and resentment of your mistake against you, the person has not forgiven. It is almost humanly impossible, however, to forget another’s mistake. Forgiveness heals the past releasing ill will against the person. Not forgetting provides a memory of the pain that guides future actions. Forgiveness and forgetting are closely knit together, yet define entirely different things.

An apology is successful when it is accepted and the mistake no longer is held against you. The person may not forget your mistake, but he or she forgives you and no longer resents you for the mistake or uses it to manipulate you. Resentment, frustration, anger, gossip, bitterness, ill will, and other outward manifestations of hatred are erased upon a successful apology. Someone with these emotions possibly signals the person has yet to forgive.

Now that a successful apology is defined, I feel it’s important to note that apologizing correctly can only do so much. There is no iron-clad, fool-proof, guaranteed technique to successfully apologize. Sometimes you need to suffer through your mistakes and bear the punishment. Apologizing can sometimes be a bandage on a wound to help heal the pain. If the wound is repeatedly reopened, it is not the bandage’s fault, but the person who inflicted the pain. Most people can forgive you so many times before they lose trust in your. They cannot forget the pain you have caused them. A reoccurring problem needs to be dealt with instead of expecting an apology to make amends.

Though apologizing correctly can be difficult, use the following tips. You will fix your mistakes, repair your relationships, and initiate emotional healing and freedom. Master these tips and you will be equipped with the tools to repair emotional damage from your mistakes.

Plan

Plan what you’re about to say by thinking your apology through beforehand. Prepare yourself to give a sincere apology. You can also write down your apology to clarify your thoughts so you increase the chances of it being a success.

When intense emotions fly everywhere in a situation, such as in a heated argument, it’s hard to think of what you want to express – yet alone say it in a constructive manner. Intense emotions blind you to constructively express your thoughts. Plan your thoughts before going “live” with your apology to increase the likelihood of a successful apology. A plan gives you guidelines to act from – helping you remain on track and not deviate with relationship damaging statements too common in emotionally intense situations.

The same lesson in planning carries over to help you achieve life goals. Success stems from the seeds planted with planning. Don’t take this advice lightly. Planning nurtures golden relationships.

Responsibility

Admit you hurt the person. Your innate social intelligence will give you an intuition or feeling when you hurt someone. If you hurt the person by saying something offensive, admit that you made the mistake. Don’t say, “You shouldn’t be offended by what I said.” Avoid a non-apology (from part two on barriers and mistakes made in apologizing), which involves blaming the other person while simultaneously giving a poor apology. Here are non-apology examples:

• “I apologize to those I hurt because of their loss.”
• “I’m deeply sorry for those who I may have offended.”
• “Please take my apology if you were offended by what I said.”

These examples appear to be apologies, yet are attempts to avoid responsibility. Own up to the mistake and take responsibility regardless of your intentions and whether it truly hurt the person. The little voice that tries to take you away from accepting responsibility and apologizing is your ego. Egos are filled with deceitful lies and pride trying to deter you from responsibility.

Timing

For a little problem you need to apologize straight away and prevent it from growing into a big one. It’s very simple. If you accidentally step on someone’s foot, obviously you should say “sorry” straight away instead of apologizing at a later time. (I’m sure the person will think you’ve got some serious problems if you write an apology for stepping on their foot.)

For a more serious problem, take the time to get in a good environment where you can honestly apologize and they can safely respond. Don’t cause more pain by “going into a boiling room” by trying to apologize when the two of you have red-hot emotions.

In addition, it may be necessary to give the person time after your apology. You can have all the right ingredients for a meal, but time is needed to cook the ingredients. Provide the person with extra space to let him or her come to terms with what happened. Letting your apology seep in could be what makes your apology successful.

Explain

Why did you make the mistake? You are not justifying what you did, rather you are to Let the person know about your faults. Become vulnerable. Explain to the person that you didn’t see them there, you let your anger get the better of you, you were ignorant, you should have understood them better – whatever the mistake maybe.

Explain why you did what you did without blaming the mistake on external circumstances. It is tempting when explaining your mistake to shift the explanation onto the other person. You start off by saying, “I’m sorry for not taking out the garbage…” then your selfishness can kick in as you say “…but I always take out the rubbish and you don’t ever do it!” Explain the problem, but don’t convert it into someone else’s problem through a non-apology.

Use the who, what, why, when, and how to get you started in explaining your mistake. You don’t need to explain everything – just say what you think will help clear up the understanding between the two of you.

One last point about explaining is to avoid going overboard with your apologies and make a big issue over something small. It’s annoying to have someone constantly say “sorry” or use other forms of apologizing when you have forgiven the person and moved on. When the person has forgiven you, move on.

Sympathy – Display Your Social Emotions

Sympathy, a powerful “social emotion”, is an expression of pain felt by the person you hurt. This is important because social emotions, in general, create cooperation and understanding. We don’t learn in school how to feel another person’s pain, yet we have innate social emotions that make us feel, behave, and act in a way that complies with social codes. Remorse, embarrassment, and guilt are important emotions to display in your verbal and nonverbal communication when giving an apology. A guilty individual showing remorse is more likely to give a successful apology than someone that hides their social emotions. (If social emotions fascinate you, I discuss them in-depth in the tenth chapter of my Communication Secrets of Powerful People Program.)

Display sorrow for your actions. Communicate sympathy to show you understand the person’s pain and your mistakes. If you want, you can go one step further than sympathy by showing empathy, which involves psychologically and physiologically experiencing what the person feels. (See here for a more detailed discussion on sympathy versus empathy.) The pain connects the two of you to build understanding and harmony.

Share the person’s pain by reflecting your feelings about the mistake with something as simple as:

• “I’m sorry I lied to you. I feel guilty that I’ve let you down.”
• “Having scratched the car, I feel ashamed that something so careless will hurt our finances.”
• “I feel I have let you down and hurt our relationship by yelling at you.”

A common misunderstanding with sympathy is you focus on yourself, diverting attention from the hurt person. Sympathy, however, shows the person you are also suffering from your blunder. The person will be more understanding and willing to discuss their feelings because you have expressed yours. The person may even be happy to receive this little bit of secret revenge. If someone hurts us, we get a little kick of happiness seeing them also suffer from their actions.

How Did It Go?

Was your apology a failure? If an apology failed, do not take it personally. Failure is a result, not a person. If your apology failed and you are certain you successfully applied all these tips, try alternative forms of apologizing, such as writing an apology or getting someone else to apologize for you. Do not forget that letting time pass could make your apology a success.

On the other hand, if your apology was successful, congratulations! Be grateful for the person’s forgiveness and for a second chance. Learn from your mistake and move on.

Do not dwell on the past. You have a great future ahead of you. Make use of it by putting your attention on what you can do in this very moment to improve the relationship. You are now ready to complete emotional healing and freedom with forgiveness.

Links to all four parts of this course, “Freeing Yourself From Mistakes and Pain: A Four Part Course On Apologizing and Emotional Freedom”:

1. Power of Apologizing
2. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
3. How to Correctly Apologize
4. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven

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1. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
2. The Power of Apologizing
3. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven
4. The Complete Nonviolent Communication (NVC) Process for Compassion, Understanding, and Peace
5. How to Fight and Win Any Argument Fast

I purchased the 10th anniversary edition of this “groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be smart”. 10 years following the release of his book, Goleman’s development and popularization of emotional intelligence (EQ or EI) has built this new field of study that assists with parenting, teaching, managing people, personal success, and general wellbeing. Emotional Intelligence is an insightful book in a new field that’ll satisfy any curiosity to understand emotions.

The broad subject of emotional intelligence describes how you manage yourself and other people’s emotions. Emotional skills related to the self include, but not limited to: self-awareness, impulse control, handling stress and anxiety, self-motivation, and coping skills; while emotional skills related to relationships include, but not limited to: reading social and emotional cues, awareness of others’ perspectives, sociability, motivating people, managing conflict, and listening. Nearly all these skills play an influential role in success and happiness.

Long gone are the days a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) predicates his or her success. Research shows IQ to contribute only 20% to one’s success with the remaining majority accounted for by emotional and social intelligence. Book after book now emphasizes the importance of managing your emotions and knowing how to work with other people’s emotions. If you lack emotional intelligence, you bear the consequences in bad relationships and communication.

Goleman, having received his PhD from Harvard and reported on the brain and human behavior at the New York Times for twelve years, has jammed his eye-opening book with research and hundreds of studies related to emotional skills. At the beginning of the book, for example, Goleman provides insight into the emotional and rational parts of the brain. He explains the neurology behind emotions, along with their evolutionary use, which lay the foundation for the book. Goleman sends a warning about the technicalities of this section – that it can be skipped because it’s not necessary to comprehend the book. (This section on neurology is fascinating nonetheless.)

The next section defines the nature of emotional intelligence. This section has discussions on: when smart is dumb, the development of empathy, depression, anger, happiness, optimism, focus, and much more.

The third section titled “Emotional Intelligence Applied” deals with emotions in marriage, families, trauma, business teams, and the human body. The eleventh chapter, “Mind and Medicine”, will blow you away with the latest findings on how emotions affect different parts of the human body, such as the central nervous system, immune system, and heart.

The last few chapters of Emotional Intelligence advise how parents can teach their children and teachers educate their students on emotional skills. Any principal, teacher, parent, or person involved in a child’s life will find the book’s research and insights on children’s emotional intelligence shockingly real. From guaranteed ways to predict a child’s future temperament to the development of abusive, unsociable, or delinquent children, you will learn a lot about the emotional intelligence of children. I found the research on empathy and emotional development in babies amazing. The stories of babies and toddlers empathizing with young children by sharing blankets or comforting had my nose deep into the book.

Overall, if you’re after a book that explains how you can develop emotional skills, I weakly advise you to read this book. Though there are many skills buried in Goleman’s classic, the book is more about understanding the role emotions play in our personal lives and relationships than it is about developing emotional skills. With around 300 citations of research mostly from academic journals, Emotional Intelligence bridges the impact emotions have in our lives from academic studies to the general public.

Lastly, I hope for emotional intelligence to continue broadening in people’s lives. It’s a field of study with monumental potential to shape social and worldly issues. After reading the book, you will see the importance of emotional skills in life that schools need to teach children.

Because emotional intelligence largely determines happiness, success, and the quality of relationship communication, you are sure to get a lot of powerful information on emotions in this well-written book. The book flows smoothly and should have your life doing the same. You can grab your copy of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence from Amazon by clicking here today.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
2. The Magical Science of Emotions: Emotional Contagion, Mirror Neurons, and the High Road to Happiness
3. Dirty Tricks of Psychology for Mind-Reading and the Roots of Empathy
4. Review of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
5. Review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Goleman in his groundbreaking book reveals that human minds and bodies communicate with one another. The invisible bridges give us the ability to change people’s moods, emotions, and health – as people can do to us.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience state that humans are wired to connect. This connection of influence instantaneously occurs upon human contact – sometimes without any contact at all. Relationships not only shape emotional states and general psychological experience – but also another person’s physiology. For example, your interactions with people influences your immune system, circulation, hormones, and breathing.

Unlike emotional intelligence, social intelligence focuses on the intimate connection between two human minds. Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence focuses on skills and capabilities within the individual – it deals with self-motivation, self-awareness, anxiety, and detecting social cues.

Social Intelligence goes beyond the one-person psychology to a two-person psychology that looks at the connection shared between individuals. More specifically, Goleman defines social intelligence as: 1) social awareness, which comprises of primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition, and 2) social facility, which includes synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern.

Goleman says many theories of social intelligence confine it to a cognitive context. Social intelligence tests ask participants what they would do in specific situations – a process that uses the brain’s “high road”, a slow neurological path used when we analyze and think. His model of social intelligence seeks to include the brain’s low-road, the neural circuitry hidden from consciousness that functions at incredible speeds, because an awareness of what people think or feel does not make you socially intelligent. As the book’s titles states: social intelligence is beyond the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and emotional intelligence.

Social Intelligence draws on hundreds of studies as it looks into altruism, primal empathy, attachment, rapport, and compassion to name a few topics emerging from this new field of study. From the amygdala and prefrontal cortex to spindle cells and mirror neurons, like Emotional Intelligence, Goleman once again digs deep into neuroscience and vast studies. Again, he provides many interesting anecdotes to demonstrate his principles in action, which to me gives the book more power for its application.

A standout for the book is chapter one, which reveals the emotional economy, a term that describes the give-take process of emotions. It discusses how a smile makes you happy and a worried face makes you unsure – the biological process of how emotions transmit through people like a virus.

The fourth chapter looks at human instinct for altruism. While it touches on worldly altruistic behaviors seen through people like Mother Teresa, it focuses on empathy in small-scale relationships. Like animals with instinctive compassion to assist a fellow member of its species in trouble, we have instinctive compassion to help people in our relationships. It is attention and empathy that bring forth this innate desire to love.

The last chapter I’ll mention in hope of motivating you to buy the book is chapter fifteen, which looks at the male and female brain, and the connection they share. The research in this chapter, like all chapters, is amazing and provides insight into attraction, sexual desire, libido, narcissism, and more intimate – or not so intimate – topics. You’re sure to gain a lot of advice about the opposite sex – as well as your own gender.

Without the jargon all too common in a professor’s books and within emerging fields of study, Social Intelligence is a free-flowing read in layman’s terms made easy by Goleman’s enjoyable writing style. The emerging field of social intelligence has fascinating dynamics worth learning more about from Goleman. Just like my review of Emotional Intelligence, I recommend you read Social Intelligence if you’re after a book that provides interesting research and insights into human interactions; not if you’re after vast skills to use in your interactions. You can grab your copy of Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence from Amazon by clicking here today.

Videos

Goleman discusses his book, the foundations of social intelligence, and a few discoveries social neuroscientists have made that reveal our neural connections with one another.

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4. Review of Elite Social Control by Hamilton Miller
5. Dirty Tricks of Psychology for Mind-Reading and the Roots of Empathy