Why ‘Blink’ Matters : The Power Of First Impressions

Your Body’s A Movie!
Your body is a hologram of your being; a three-dimensional movie that is constantly on, showing others how you feel about yourself and the world. People are consciously reading your body language and they subconsciously react to your bodily signals. As you walk through life, it’s important that your body is saying exactly the same that your spoken words are conveying. The secret is all in understanding a code. It is a most elaborate code that is written nowhere, known by none and yet understood by all." How do others perceive you? How soon do you realize that you are getting tense? How well do you anticipate their unspoken feelings? You ability to understand these signals has an enormous impact on how well you get along with others. Successful people believe their success is attributable to a pattern of mutually beneficial interpersonal relationships, as much as it is due to technical skills or business knowledge. Your communication and the image you present create the first impression - often the lasting impression - on the people you meet.

Blink: First Impression in Seconds
Professional speakers and trainers have long asserted that people make up their minds about people they meet for the first time within two minutes. Others assert that these first impressions about people take only thirty seconds to make. As it turns out, both may be underestimates. According to international research, the ‘first impressions’ decisions may occur much faster - think instantaneously or in two seconds. These findings have serious implications for organizations.

According to this research, we think without thinking, we thin-slice whenever we “meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation.” This is true as snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience … they are also unconscious. People thin-slice because they have to, and they come to rely on that ability because there are lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot. Whenever we have to make sense of complicated situations or deal with lots of information quickly, we bring to bear all of our beliefs, attitudes, values, experiences, education and more on the situation. Then, we thin-slice the situation to comprehend it as quickly as possible. The implications of this concept have astonishing significance for our personal reactions to most situations.

It’s this ability to think without thinking, to make snap decisions about situations and people in a “blink”, has significant implications for how we interview and hire staff. It plays havoc with how we view ourselves and our ability to interact with people who are different than ourselves. It impacts how we develop friendships with people at work. It affects our networking and business relationship building. It affects who we believe in a work disagreement or confrontation. At the same time, this ability we have as humans, to quickly make judgment calls, saves lives, provides interpersonal insight, recognizes fake artifacts, allows us to assess situations and take action quickly and can even predict the future of a relationship. So, it’s not an ability you want to discard, even if your first snap decisions or judgment calls can also be terribly wrong.

-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net