How to Be Popular in Any Group
How to Be Popular in Any Group
How would you like to be more popular and welcomed by people in your social or business circles?
Well, you can be by learning how to be more charming in every interaction with others.
The deepest human need is the desire to feel important. When you go through life building self-confidence and making other people feel important and valuable, they will like you, welcome you, and open every door for you. This is the secret to learning how to be popular, both professionally and personally.
If you are in business, becoming a charming person and making others feel important will help you in every business situation, from negotiating terms to borrowing money to influencing key customers.
If you are in sales, the way customers feel about you, and feel when they are with you, will determine your level of sales and referrals more than any other factor.
In your personal, family, and social lives, learning to be more charming will make you more popular, desirable, influential, and persuasive than any other quality.
So how do you become a genuinely charming person? Here are five behaviors you can practice with every person to make him or her feel more important.
How to Be Popular in Any Group:
- Smile in every interaction
- Say “thank you” early and often
- Give genuine compliments
- Give praise and approval often
- Give them your full attention
Here are the details for each of the 5 behaviors that will help gain the favor of anyone.
1. Smile in Every Interaction
Each person has a deep-down need to be accepted unconditionally by other people, without judgment or criticism.
And how to express this “unconditional positive regard?” Simple! Just smile. An open, honest, happy-to-see-you smile warms people’s hearts, makes them feel important, and causes them unconsciously to like you from the first moment.
2. Say “Thank You” Early and Often
Everyone loves to be appreciated for something—anything they have done for someone else.
When you say the magic words “Thank you” early and often, you make people feel important and happy, raise their self-esteem and increase their desire to help you and do things for you.
3. Give Genuine Compliments
Whenever you admire the possessions, traits or accomplishments of others, they automatically feel more important and valuable! As Abraham Lincoln said, “Everybody likes a compliment.”
Admire people’s choices in clothing, hairstyles, cars, briefcases, purses or office layout. Admire their homes or apartments. Admire their degrees or certificates. Whenever you compliment a person on something he or she has obviously invested time and emotion in achieving, you boost their self-image and build high self-esteem. As a result, they find you to be “charming.”
4. Give Praise and Approval Often
Give praise and approval generously for both small and large accomplishments. Whenever anyone does anything worthwhile, tell them how good they are and what a fine job they’ve done, building self-confidence and high self-esteem.
One definition of self-esteem is: How much a person feels praiseworthy.
When you praise your spouse and children, your staff and coworkers, your customers and suppliers, you make them feel more important and cause them to see you as “charming.”
5. Give Them Your Full Attention
People feel valuable and important to the degree to which they are listened to and respected.
Whenever you listen closely to another person when he is talking, his self-esteem goes up. His brain releases endorphins, nature’s “happy drug,” and he feels good about being in your presence.
You always “pay value” to a person by listening attentively, by hanging on every word. When you do, he or she warms up to you and begins to find you “charming.”
Go through life looking for little opportunities to make people feel valuable and special. Smile at them as if you are glad to see them. Thank them regularly. Compliment them sincerely. Praise them lavishly. And listen to them when they speak, building self-confidence and promoting high self-esteem.
Soon, almost without effort on your part, everyone will be talking about “what a charming person you are.”
Bonus Lesson: Apply The Law of Indirect Effort to Boost Popularity
The Law of Indirect Efforts
The Law of Indirect Effort states that you get almost everything in your relationships with others more easily by approaching them indirectly rather than directly.
For example, if you want to impress people, the direct way to go about it is to try to convince them of your admirable qualities and accomplishments. But trying to impress another person by talking about yourself usually makes you feel a little foolish and sometimes embarrassed.
The indirect way of impressing another person, however, is simply to be impressed by the other person. The more you are impressed by the other person, by who he or she is or what he or she has accomplished, the more likely it is that the other person will be impressed by you.
If you want to get someone interested in you, the direct way is to tell him or her all about yourself. But the indirect way works better. It is simply to become interested in him or her.
The more interested you become in another person, the more likely it is that the other person will become interested in you.
If you want to be happy, the direct way is to do whatever you can think of that will make you happy. However, the most enjoyable and lasting form of happiness comes from making someone else happy. By the Law of Indirect Effort, whenever you do or say anything that makes someone else happy, you feel happy yourself. You boost your own spirits, your own self-esteem.
How do you get another person to respect you? The best way is to respect him or her. When you express respect or admiration for another person, he or she feels respect and admiration for you. In human relations, we call this the principle of reciprocity. Whenever you do something nice for someone else, the other person will want to reciprocate by doing something nice for you. Most of our romances and friendships are based on this principle.
How do you get a person to believe in you, given the Law of Indirect Effort? The answer is to believe in him or her. Whenever you show that you believe in or have confidence in another person, he or she will tend to believe in and have confidence in you. You get what you give. What you send out, you get back.
Applying the Law of Indirect Effort
The most important applications of the Law of Indirect Effort have to do with developing a healthy personality in yourself.
You are structured in such a way that everything you do to another person has a reciprocal effect on yourself. Everything you do to raise the self-esteem of another person raises your own self-esteem at the same time, and in the same measure. Since self-esteem is the hallmark of the healthy personality, you can actually improve the health of your own personality by taking every opportunity to improve the health of the personalities of others. What you sow in the lives of others, you reap in your own life.
Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy load. This is most true in the area of self-esteem and self-confidence. Everyone grows up with a feeling of inferiority and throughout most of our lives we need to be praised and recognized by others. No matter how successful or elevated people may become, they still need their self-images reinforced.
There is a line that says, “I like you because of the way I feel about myself when I am with you.”
This line contains the key to excellent human relations. The most happy men and women are those who make other people feel good about themselves when they are with them. When you go through life raising the self-esteem of others, opportunities will open up successful and before you, and people will help you in ways you cannot now imagine. Practice the Law of Indirect Effort. Take every opportunity to say and do things that make people feel more valuable. Each time you express a kindness toward another person, your own self-esteem improves. Your own personality becomes more positive and healthy. You impress into your own mind whatever you express toward someone else.
Conclusion
Becoming popular is more about how you treat others than what other’s think of you. Consider your social status to be an echo or a reflection of the social energy you emit into the world. Remember to treat others as if they are more important than you are. Eventually, those feelings will be reciprocated, and you’ll find yourself near the top of the social ladder.
