Being interested is the new interesting
Influencing people is an art that can help you win a war and influencing power correlates with friendly behavior. If you have a friendly nature you can easily lure a person into your circle of attraction. There is this common saying that “Win a Friend to and you can win a War”. There are many people who talked about strategies to win a friend or influencing, among those experts “Dale Carnegie” is very famous due to his book “How to win friends and influence people” which was published in October 1936. In his book, he talked about the strategies and very noticeable points. He mentioned that New York made a study of telephone conversations where they found the most used word was “I” which denotes that people like to talk about themselves more than anything.
Mr. Dale also shared his experience with Howard Thurston in his dressing room where Mr. Thurston told him what is the main thing that kept him going and made him successful magician, he told him that every time he went on stage he said to himself: “I am grateful because these people come to see me, They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.” This is also a strategy to be successful as he always thought of his audience first and thankful to them rather than thinking of them as a fool or dumb.
He believed that “To be interesting, be interested” which is 100 percent right because when you start taking interest in other rather than yourself, eventually the person takes interest in you. So, it is a “WIN WIN” situation.
After reading his work, I applied it to my life. I thought to start it with some old acquaintances with whom I haven’t talked since years. When I made a call he was very shocked to hear from me and wasn’t expecting such thing. So, during the call, I asked him about his personal life and about some goals. We had a very pleasant conversation and I noticed that after asking him about his life he started a casual conversation, like friends. I think my questions made him feel more comfortable with me. He made himself unguarded and opens the doors for friendship and we are good friends now. Finally, he earned himself a position in my friends’ list. #JK
So does the other people that I connected with in these past days and tried this strategy to win over, are now better known to me, and I to them. One other strategy which is very important in winning people is that “We should greet people with a smile on our face” as it is said by our great Prophet Muhammad ?. This spread very positive vibes around us. There is this famous quote “Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours” — Dale Carnegie