Enchantment

Enchantment can occur in villages, stores, dealerships, offices, boardrooms, and on the Internet. It causes a voluntary change of hearts and minds and therefore actions.

Enchantment transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility. It reshapes civility into affinity. It changes skeptics and cynics into believers.

By putting yourself in the mindset of the people you’re trying to enchant, you’ll appreciate the amount of change that enchantment requires. It can take weeks or months for enchantment to occur, so prepare for a marathon, not a sprint.

Start with the first impression that you make: your smile, your dress, your handshake, and your vocabulary.

A fake smile won’t make people like you.

A fake smile uses only the zygomatic major muscle – the one that runs from your jaw to the corner of your mouth. A great, genuine smile uses the orbicularis oculi muscle, too. This muscle surrounds your eyes.

A real smile is so special that it has its own name: the Duchenne smile, in honor of Guillaume Duchenne, a French neurologist.

Vocabularies are the facials expressions of your mind. Use simple words. Use the active voice. Keep it short. And use common, unambiguous analogies.

For people to like you, they have to accept you. For people to accept you, you have to accept them first.

The single most important factor in determining whether or not you connect with another person is neither personality nor mutual interests – it is simple proximity.

Pursuing your passions makes you more interesting, and interesting people are enchanting.

Finding shared passions is a great tool for developing relationships because they lower the resistance.

Likable people create win-win outcomes in which everyone gains something.

One way to become likable is to adopt a yes attitude. This means your default response to people’s request is yes. Don’t be alarmed: This isn’t risky practice, because most requests at the beginning of a relationship are small, simple and easy.

A yes buys time, enables you to see more options, and builds rapport. By contrast, a “No” response stops everything.

Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. – Zig Ziglar

When people trust each other, they stop playing games, they look beyond temporary problems, and they expose themselves with less hesitation. Good enchanters are likable, but great enchanters are likable and trustworthy.

The first step to becoming trustworthy is to trust others first.

Always act with honesty.

Immediate and complete disclosure of your interests is a key component to trustworthiness.

The combination of both knowledge and competence encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment.

If you want people to trust you, show up physically and virtually, interact with people t establish trust.

Craft description for you or your organization. It should explain what you do and why do you exist. Make it short, clear, different, and humble.

Combine your cause, your vision, and your actions in a deep, intelligent, complete, empowering, and elegant message.

The best way to enchant people is to make the process easy and smooth for them to go with your flow.

People who know what they want and can clearly explain their wishes are more enchanting. Stating your goals adds to the trust factor, because you are now transparent. Your agenda is on the table, and while people might not like it, at least they know what it is.

People don’t want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith – faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. – Annette Simmons, author of Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

Quality is more important than ever, because your product must pass more than the cursory examination of an influential.

More choices can also lead to dissatisfaction because people may look back and wonder if another of the options would have been better. With more options available, there are more choices to regret. When it comes to analysis, perhaps more choices leads to paralysis, so fewer choices might help you enchant people.

Derek Sivers believes the first follower is important, because he brings credibility to the leader. Then, the subsequent followers emulate the first follower – not only the leader. In his words, “the first follower is what transforms the lone nut into a leader.”

Enchantment is a process, not an event. You will encounter reluctance, but people often resist anything worth doing.

“Instant successes” are seldom instant, and if you talk to the people behind these successes, you’ll find out that they came after months of fear, uncertainty, and confusion, along with a flagrant lack of adoption.

If you can show people social proof that others are embracing your cause, you may convince them to embrace it too.

Scarcity is a barrier to fulfillment. Nevertheless, there are people who like to overcome barriers, so scarcity increases the buzz and desirability of your cause.

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way. – Daniele Vare

Once you find a way to agree, you are more likable, and when you’re more likable, you’re more likely to overcome resistance. After establishing a toehold, beachhead, or common ground, you can build from there.

According to Benedict Franklin, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

If you’re doing something worthwhile, you will encounter competition. In fact, if you don’t encounter completion, you should wonder if you are doing something worthwhile enough.

It’s not always true that you get what you pay for, and if you have a loser of a cause, money won’t help. If you have a great cause, money won’t matter. In practice, adding financial incentives to a great cause may hurt it.

Invoking reciprocity is a powerful way to make enchantment last. Provide values upfront. Give with joy, give early, give often and generously, give unexpectedly, and don’t hesitate to ask for a favor in return when you need it and the person you’re asking can do it.

When people thank you for doing them a favor, “I know you’d do the same for me” is a much better response than “You’re welcome.”

The more an organization welcomes criticism and takes action to fix problems, the stronger its relationship with its ecosystem.

Great speakers give the same presentations over and over, but these great speakers are so good that their audiences don’t realize this.

Enchanters don’t sell products, services, or companies. They don’t think in terms of the cost of goods sold. Enchanters sell their dreams for a better future. This perspective is the foundation for a presentation that transforms people. It makes them think of what could be, not what is. It enables enchanters to draw energy from the audience and then send it back at an even higher level.

Practice your presentation until you’re sick of it. Then practice more. If you think Steve Jobs gets on stage and wings it, you’re wrong. He spends hours preparing – and he’s Steve Jobs.

Go to the venue early so you can circulate with the audience.

Make your presentation as many times as you can, because repetition improves the rhetorician.

The best Twitter tip is to take manual engagement to the extreme. Before you respond to people, look at their profiles so you can make your tweet more relevant.

Counterintuitive as this may seem, money is often not the sole, or even primary, reason for loving a job. Motivating people is not as simple as feeding money into employees and getting out results as if they are vending machines.

Provide the MAP – Mastery: people want to improve their skills and competency; Autonomy: management shouldn’t constantly tell people what to do and how to do it; Purpose: purpose refers to the meaning an organization makes – in other words, how the organization is making the world a better place.

People often judge their intentions against the results of others. By doing this, they seldom find fault with their performance and almost always find shortcomings in the performance of others.

If you want to enchant employees, you should reverse this outlook. Judge yourself by what you’ve accomplished and others by what they intended.

Sometimes, you should just suck it up and deal with adversity, because that’s what great people do. And as a bonus, you’ll enchant the folks who work for you.

If there is a single principle that can guide your management style, it is that you should never ask people to do something you wouldn’t do.

One win can overcome a hundred losses, so celebrating success is a powerful way to enchant employees. Emphasize team wins rather than individual ones and give credit to all the employees involved.

At the end of every day, one of the most value assets of your organization goes home. The question is whether they will return in the next morning. An enchanting boss makes sure his or her employees know they are valuable and they are appreciated.

The best way to enchant your employer is to make him or her look good.

You may think you see the “big picture”, but you don’t see your employer’s big picture.

People who underpromise and overdeliver are more enchanting.

Employees with many professional friendships are more enchanting, because these relationships make them more effective employees and provide social proof of their wonderfulness.

Delivering bad news as soon as possible, because good bosses want bad news early so that there are more opportunities to fix the problem. Bad bosses only want good news, however, because they prefer to live in a bubble.

Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter, when they come at you rapidly.

When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it.