How to make a great first impression

By Michael Myerscough, Lisa Arthur & Jodie Deakin

Have you ever started to talk to someone and realised straight away that you’d got off on the wrong foot? Have you ever had a conversation get difficult for no reason you could work out? Have you ever wished you could start over again and make a better impression? Well, you’re not alone. Let me tell you how to make your first impression a great one.

The latest research states that it can be as little as 4 seconds before someone has made their first assessment of who you are as a person! Now whether it’s 4 seconds, 14 seconds or 1 second, you still have very little time. And often in a dating situation it happens before the very first words are uttered!

You make your own first impressions more often than you think and without being conscious of it. You’re at a bar or club. You catch the movement of someone new in the room. You shift your eyes. Check face, clothes, body. Your brain processes lighting fast. You allocate them to the ‘interesting’ or ‘forget it’ bin and take appropriate action. All that happens in just a few critical seconds.

So if everyone runs this process (and they do), is there anything you can do to make a better first impression?

Yes.

One quick and easy tip I teach my female clients is that they have two major assets when it comes to getting all the attention they ever dreamed of. Well, once we get past the obvious that is. And guys this applies to you too. If you’re aiming to get as far as conversation your major assets are now your teeth and your eyes.

A confident smile

First up is a confident smile that’s warm and inviting. It should send out a message that you are a safe, happy person to spend time with.

Why is it important to signal that you’re safe? Because always, deep in the subconscious mind, the reptilian brain is obsessing over whether you are a threat or not. According to Dr. Paul Maclean, an evolutionary neuroanatomist (trust me, you don’t need to know :-) ) the three questions it asks, over and over, go like this;

1. Will it eat me?

2. Can I eat it?, and

3. Can I procreate with it?

Only one of those is about sex, the two others are about safety.

The smile is something that has to be practiced. A client of mine, Stuart, was not what you’d call a natural smiler. In repose his face looked stern and way too serious, which let’s face it is not how to win friends and influence people. Most of us know how to smile, it’s just reminding ourselves to do it. We were all babies once so the muscle memory is in there somewhere.

I coached Stuart on deliberately noticing people around him who tended to smile easily and how it made him feel. I had him notice the times he laughed out loud, how that made him feel and I had him practice smiling at himself in the mirror. I also had him jam a pencil between his teeth, as far back as he could. No, not like that, sideways! This forces your lips back into a huge grin. Go on, try it. You know you want to.

The message? Practice your smiling before you next go dating and when you’re out, remember to use it. Stuart is not alone on this challenge and if he can come across as warm and friendly then so can you.

Good eye contact

The second key is eye contact. You know that phrase, ‘he’s got shifty eyes’. A sign of a person not to be trusted. People make that judgement just from your eyes! So if you’re not able to make good eye contact, not only might you be making a poor first impression, you may also be criminalising yourself ;-)

In a dating situation, if you want to make a great first impression and communicate interest you want to develop ‘sticky eyes’. Not in the conjunctivitis sense of the word. More in the sense that you just can’t stand to break eye contact because you think the person is especially interesting or gorgeous.

You catch someone’s eye and then hold the contact a fraction longer than you’re comfortable with. One of my female clients recently used this on a train and got great results. It works especially well once you’re in a conversation and communicates great interest. Leil Lowndes talks about developing a sense of warm toffee connecting your eyes with theirs. This technique isn’t just about seduction, it’s a great way of making someone feel good about themselves and having them like you for it.

Let me take you back to that bar/club situation again. This time you shift your eyes to see the new person in the room. They’re smiling straight at you. You can’t help but return the smile. They hold your gaze and you blush slightly and look down, thinking, ‘Wow! They’re interested in me’. You’re instantly tempted to look back and see if they’re still looking at you. That feeling is the first impression you want to be creating in someone else.

Dress to impress

You need to make an effort with your appearance because both men and women notice. It doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming, it just takes a little thought and organisation. To get you on your way, here are some easy to follow tips to polish your image.

• Choose an outfit that you feel smart but comfortable in, make sure it’s appropriate for your date. Disco clothes will look (and make you feel) out of place in a cinema. Shorts and flip-flops won’t cut it in a swanky restaurant.

• Fellas, do check your finger nails. Are they clean or do they have a days graft plastered underneath them?

• Smell nice! A squirt of deodorant and a splash of aftershave or a spritz of perfume. Not too much, you want to tease your dates’ senses, rather than knock them out.

• Ladies, our male clients tell us that a face hidden by too much make up is not attractive, so keep it natural.

When you know you’ve made an effort to look good and you smell nice, your confidence will rocket. You’ll be very approachable and your flirting and conversation will flow more easily.

This is really just the beginning of how to create a great first impression.

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