Communication Tips: Make yourself interesting – and interested!

Dating Tips: Interesting conversation. Photo: www.freedigitalphotos.net

A key part of any relationship is giving your date the time and attention that they deserve. Paying attention makes the other person feel valued and feel good about themselves, which is clearly a very good thing when dating! Given that you’ve managed to make the time, how do you pay attention? There are two ways:

• Matching the other person in important respects – or at least avoid badly mismatching. Matching works to help others feel at ease with you. Match height: conversations when one of you is standing and the other is sitting are awkward!Try to speak at a similar speed and volume to the other person. Match eye contact: some people like a lot of eye contact, others are shyer and give less. Note that matching is not the same as mimicking: that would only serve to make the other person really uncomfortable and very uneasy!
• Find an interesting topic: the most fascinating, immediate  and important subject there is! That topic is you: you are the most important topic to yourself.In the same way, if you want to get their attention and make them feel valued then you need to talk about them. Becoming intensely interested in them is very powerful: when you do this you will tend to match them automatically! Here’s how:
  • Imagine that the other person has done all the things that you want to do, knows what you want to know if only you can find out. There are no boring people, only listeners who were incapable of finding out what they’re really like. You’ll want to know:
  • What are they like? What sort of person are they? How deep do they go?
  • What have they done in their life?
  • How can they possibly think what they think?
  • What is important to them?

Be wary though: a date is not an interview. If you treat it as such, you won’t get the job!

You can find out more about building interest, and whole host of other topics in NLP and relationships by Robin Prior and Joseph O’Connor.