Be the Best Gift this Holiday Season. Choose to give the best of yourself to your loved ones. BE a great friend, a great spouse, a great parent. Listen to them. Use their name when talking to them. Smile. Make them feel good. Give genuine compliments. Find something you like about them and share it. Make people feel like a million bucks… it’s worth much more than any material present! Just visualize that everybody has a sign on their forehead that says: ‘Make me feel good’…. and then spread your magic!
Be interested, not interesting. People will forget your story and they will forget what you did. They will always remember how you made them feel! We often think that in order for people to like us, we need to be interesting. While we worry about finding the right thing to say to impress, while we prepare an answer in our head, we forget the most important part of the conversation: listening to the person in front of us.
This may sound like an egocentric concept, and yet, fundamentally, there is nothing you are interested in more than your own self. It is human nature to look out for one’s self. When you are in a relationship, by keeping this information in mind, you can use this fact to give people what they crave the most, unconsciously: a platform on which to shine.
I had a client who was terrified of meeting new people. The idea of introducing herself to someone new was daunting. Small talk was her nightmare. After working on her own limiting beliefs—as she believed she was not interesting and had nothing to say to these strangers—she completely shifted when she realized that she did not even need to be interesting. After working with me, she did find inside herself that she was an amazing human being with brilliant unique character traits that made her absolutely awesome. She gained self-confidence in herself and knew that she had indeed a lot to share with the world. However, it did not matter. One can only share once they have listened. She applied a listening rule that I will share with you in my blog series, and she is now looking for opportunities to meet new friends. She became a pro at making people feel amazing about themselves by truly listening to them and by being genuinely interested in them.
Start listening and encouraging people to tell you more about themselves, compliment them genuinely when they say something deserving, like a “wow, you are great” kind of comment. Make them feel good about themselves and they will remember you. Not your story and not what you did, but the way you made them feel. You can spend a whole evening with someone without saying anything, apart from the questions and the “tell me more …” comments, and they will go back home and tell their spouse: “I met the most interesting person today!” Yet, they know nothing about you. You just made them talk about themselves and they loved it.
People will forget what you gave them, they will forget your story and they will forget what you did. But they will always remember how you made them feel!
Happy Holiday Season!