How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships

by Leil Lowndes

The way you move is your autobiography in motion."

Even before your lips part and the first syllable escapes, the essence of YOU has already axed its way into their brains. The way you look and the way you move is more than 80 percent of someone's first impression of you. Not one word need be spoken.

Don't flash an immediate smile when you greet someone, as though anyone who walked into your line of sight would be the beneficiary. Instead, look at the other person's face for a second. Pause. Soak in their persona. Then let a big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes. It will engulf the recipient like a warm wave. The split-second delay convinces people your flooding smile is genuine and only for them.

In addition to awakening feelings of respect and affection, maintaining strong eye contact gives you the impression of being an intelligent and abstract thinker. Because abstract thinkers integrate incoming data more easily than concrete thinkers, they can continue looking into someone's eyes even during the silences. Their thought processes are not distracted by peering into their partner's peepers.

When you look intently at someone, it increases their heartbeat and shoots an adrenalinelike substance gushing through their veins.7 This is the same physical reaction people have when they start to fall in love. And when you consciously increase your eye contact, even during normal business or social interaction, people will feel they have captivated you.

Pretend your eyes are glued to your conversation partner's with sticky warm taffy. Don't break eye contact even after he or she has finished speaking. When you must look away, do it ever so slowly, reluctantly, stretching the gooey taffy until the tiny string finally breaks.

good posture symbolizes that you are a man or woman who is used to being on top.

HANG BY YOUR TEETH Visualize a circus iron-jaw bit hanging from the frame of every door you walk through. Take a bite and, with it firmly between your teeth, let it swoop you to the peak of the big top. When you hang by your teeth, every muscle is stretched into perfect posture position.

When meeting someone, play a mental trick on yourself. In your mind's eye, see him or her as an old friend, someone you had a wonderful relationship with years ago.

Hand motions near your face and all fidgeting can give your listener the gut feeling you're fibbing.

You see, small talk is not about facts or words. It's about music, about melody. Small talk is about putting people at ease.

The first step in starting a conversation without strangling it is to match your listener's mood, if only for a sentence or two.

Never be left speechless again. Like a parrot, simply repeat the last few words your conversation partner says. That puts the ball right back in his or her court, and then all you need to do is listen.

Always Have Something Interesting to Say

Look up some common words you use every day in the thesaurus. Then, like slipping your feet into a new pair of shoes, slip your tongue into a few new words to see how they fit. If you like them, start making permanent replacements. Remember, only fifty words makes the difference between a rich, creative vocabulary and an average, middle-of-the-road one. Substitute a word a day for two months and you'll be in the verbally elite.

Start every appropriate sentence with you. It immediately grabs your listener's attention. It gets a more positive response because it pushes the pride button and saves them having to translate it into "me" terms. When you sprinkle you as liberally as salt and pepper throughout your conversation, your listeners find it an irresistible spice.

Never, ever, make a joke at anyone else's expense. You'll wind up paying for it, dearly.

Before throwing out any news, keep your receiver in mind. Then deliver it with a smile, a sigh, or a sob. Not according to how you feel about the news, but how the receiver will take it.

People who are VIPs in their own right don't slobber over celebrities.

Once a month, scramble your life. Do something you'd never dream of doing. Participate in a sport, go to an exhibition, hear a lecture on something totally out of your experience. You get 80 percent of the right lingo and insider questions from just one exposure.

Pretend the person you are talking to is your dance instructor. Is he a jazzy mover? Is she a balletic mover? Watch his or her body, then imitate the style of movement. That makes your conversation partner subliminally real comfy with you.

Echoing is a simple linguistic technique that packs a powerful wallop. Listen to the speaker's arbitrary choice of nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives—and echo them back. Hearing their words come out of your mouth creates subliminal rapport. It makes them feel you share their values, their attitudes, their interests, their experiences.

When you respond with complete sentences instead of the usual grunts, not only do you come across as more articulate, but your listener feels that you really understand.

GRAPEVINE GLORY A compliment one hears is never as exciting as the one he overhears. A priceless way to praise is not by telephone, not by telegraph, but by tell-a-friend. This way you escape possible suspicion that you are an apple-polishing, bootlicking, egg-sucking, back-scratching sycophant trying to win brownie points. You also leave recipients with the happy fantasy that you are telling the whole world about their greatness.

become a carrier of good news and kudos. Whenever you hear something complimentary about someone, fly to them with the compliment.

Cool communicators allow their friends, associates, acquaintances, and loved ones the pleasurable myth of being above commonplace bloopers and embarrassing biological functions. They simply don't notice their comrades' minor spills, slips, fumbles, and faux pas. They obviously ignore raspberries and all other signs of human frailty in their fellow mortals. Big winners never gape at another's gaffes.