How to Become a People Magnet

Your success and happiness in life, to a great extent, depends on how you get along with other people.

‘Common sense is the least common of all senses.’

Understanding people means recognizing them for what they are—not for what you want them to be, nor for what you think they are, but for what they really are.

People are, above all, interested in themselves. Yup. Sorry. No matter who you are, people will always be a thousand times more interested in themselves than in you.

The most important subject that anyone will want to talk about with you is… THEMSELVES.

When you are talking to people, forget about ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘mine’ for a while and substitute it with a word that will make you a very sought after conversational partner: The word ‘YOU’.

When you get from ‘I,’ ‘my,’ ‘mine,’ to ‘YOU’ and ‘YOUR’ your power and influence will increase by a significant degree.

Let them finish their sentence. Don’t interrupt people. Make a short pause before answering. This gives them the feeling that you have listened closely and are interested in what they have to say.

When you are about to disagree with someone, always have in mind the magic question, ‘Do I want to be right or do I want to be in peace?’

Smiling people are perceived as more confident and more likely to be trusted. People just feel good around them. Smile and win in all relationships.

If you show genuine passion and enthusiasm, it will be difficult to resist you and to not like you. Enthusiasm is contagious.

Make the following your golden rule: If you can’t say nice things, say nothing. Don’t put people down.

Accept and like people just as they are. On the long run, that will be more influential than any advice or lectures, you have to give.

Accept. Approve of. Appreciate. Use this formula to become a people magnet.

When you want to influence people always have in mind: It’s what they want, not what you want.

He loved strawberry and cream, but when he went fishing he didn’t use strawberries with cream to bait the fish, but worms. Fish want worms, not strawberries.

A good listener will always have the advantage over a good talker because he or she always allows people to hear their favourite speaker in the world: themselves.

Quiet down the little voice in your head that comes up with advice or a solution, thirty seconds after the speaker starts speaking. Don’t listen to answer. Listen to understand.

Don’t interrupt the speaker until he or she is finished, or don’t just wait for your counterpart to pause so that you can begin to speak. Don’t change subjects. On the contrary ask for more.

In a world where everybody continually wants to talk about themselves, listening is GOLD.

Get others to talk about them, and they will swear you are the greatest conversationalist they ever met.

It is human nature to like and respond to people who appreciate us and show us gratitude. Be grateful to people and show it to them with kind words or little gestures and you can be assured that it will come back to you multiplied.

People don’t want to be judged. Period. People want to be liked, made to feel important, and appreciated. Not judged.

They say being angry and having resentments towards another person is like drinking poison and hoping the other individual dies from it.

Even the rude people you meet deserve your kindness and respect. Well, actually it’s them who probably need your kindness most.

Often if you have a challenge, it’s a much better way to explain it to your employees, friends or family than to give out strict orders. If you ask people, they come up with the best solutions. Use that potential.

Pygmalion Effect—Our belief in a person’s potential brings that potential to life.

French proverb in mind: ‘The while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings.’

This is called selective perception. Your focus is essential because science shows that how we experience our life is a matter of interpretation, a matter of choice, and it’s up to us where we choose to put our focus.

Criticism is useless. The only thing it does is put a person on the defensive and makes them try to justify themselves. Criticism is dangerous. It hurts the pride of a person and causes resentment.

Don’t use the word ‘but.’ The word ‘but’ cancels out everything that stands before it.

Dale Carnegie writes in his classic, How to make friends and influence people about how praise altered the future of H.G. Wells from being suicidal to becoming one of the great American novelists and one of the fathers of science fiction, or how Lawrence Tibbet went from singing in a church choir and hardly getting by to becoming a famous opera singer and recording artist. Both of these great artists’ stories were changed by a little bit of praise, by some small encouragement.

If you start praising people for what they do well—instead of constantly reminding them of their faults—you will see true miracles happening.

Praise a person, and you awake their desire to excel.

Only the ones who have learned to like themselves can be generous and friendly to others.

Once you start to like yourself better, only then can you begin to like others better. Only if you become more and more satisfied with yourself, can you become less critical and more tolerant toward others.

Low self-esteem people, on the other hand, are insecure, arrogant, and mistrusting. Everybody seems to be a threat to them. Behind the loud person, the show-off, the bully, the person that walks into the room like a peacock, many times there is an insecure, low self-esteem person.

We think that Michael Jordan has been born a genius on the basketball court and nobody tells us that he worked countless hours on the courts,

we think Michael Phelps has been born a 23 times gold medalist at the Olympics and nobody tells us he even trained 12 hours on weekends because he figured like this he will train 624 hours more per year than his competitors.

We forgot that practice and repetition achieve mastery and that work and consistency beats talent every time.

Science has now found out that the way we talk about ourselves or events has a profound impact on our mindset and even our reality. People who tend to talk pessimistically in the morning tend to experience their day as much worse, while people who speak positively at the start of the day tend to experience their day as much more positive, meeting with much more opportunities.

Tampering with other people’s self-esteem—and that’s what you are doing by being sarcastic or teasing—can do a lot of damage to the person even when done in fun.

Eliminate complaining, sarcasm and teasing from your conversations and use positive talk.

Studies show that gratitude letters can increase happiness and decrease depression for the person that writes it for as long as three months after the writing of the letter.

Gratitude is one of the single best ingredients for happiness and great relationships and the antidote to all those negative emotions which damage our relations like greed, envy, jealousy, rage, arrogance and so on.

Did you notice that you can’t be grateful and unhappy at the same time? You also can’t be worried and grateful at the same time. And you can’t be angry and grateful at the same time. Choose gratitude.

Don’t judge people. Everyone you meet is fighting their own battle, and we don’t know anything about it. If people are rude, irritated, mad, don’t judge them for being as they are and instead feel sorry for them. Pity them. The only thing they probably want is somebody to care for their battle, some sympathy. Be that someone.

If you manage the art of answering to an insult with kindness and sympathy, the world is yours.

When you stop making assumptions, and start to ask questions, your communication will reach a new level of clarity, free from mind-movies, imagined worst-case scenarios and judgment.

Get over the need to be right. Remember what you want: To be right or to be in peace? Be smart. Choose peace.

You can only be affected by somebody calling you an idiot, a bad writer, a bad spouse, if somewhere deep inside you, you think you are.

Life is too short to spend time with people who don’t treat you with love and respect. Let them go and make new friends.

If you are the type of person that needs other people to be perfect in relationships, you are doomed to encounter unhappiness in your relationships because nobody can ever live up to your high standards.

Perfectionism is the enemy of good relations, because very often perfectionists are extremely sensitive to criticism, and always on the defensive.

Perfectionists are also less likely to try, and less likely to put themselves on the line, which are two of the main ingredients to happiness and healthy relationships.