Just as with other forms of exercise, you need to build endurance. Once you’re able to maintain your new face for a minute, practice two minutes in front of the mirror and then two minutes on videotape. Keep doing this until you can maintain your friendly expression in front of a camera easily for ten minutes.
The mirror helps monitor your nonverbal messages, and this improves your performance. Don’t become discouraged by your first sight of yourself on camera. More than 90 percent of those I have known who practice using a video camera make life-changing improvements.
If in addition to looking and sounding positive and friendly, you hold yourself erect without becoming stiff when sitting, standing, and walking, people will find you more attractive. This usually is not too difficult for women, who generally have better posture than men. Still, we found it was necessary for members of both sexes, if they wanted to create a great first impression, to monitor their posture. Start by videotaping yourself while you’re sitting, standing, and walking. If possible, have a friend or family member videotape you when you’re not aware you’re on camera.
It’s not a matter of remaining West Point ramrod straight. That doesn’t send a positive message; it says, I am stiff and uptight. Keep your head erect and your shoulders back. The best way for a woman to do this is to put a book on her head and a tightly rolled washcloth on each shoulder. Practice moving from place to place while keeping all three balanced. When you can keep both the book and the washcloths in place for ten minutes—or better still, when you can keep them in place without even thinking about it—go to the next step. Sit with them in place. Wear them while you watch television or do some desk work until you can keep them in place without effort.
Erect posture says to most people that you’re positive and self-assured, which in turn makes you more attractive. Men like women who like themselves.
When you’ve mastered these skills, you’ll have no trouble making a good first and second impression. Life in general will become easier.
Charm Crosses Over
Sending positive nonverbal and verbal signals not only makes you more attractive to men but also helps you marry. I knew the exercises in my sales training brochure had done this for some women, and I assumed it would work for others as well. I was right—and the results were better than I would have guessed. Since the afternoon Margie asked me about using sales skills in social settings, at least three hundred women who tried it reported back that it had worked.
Once you learn to make a good first impression in a business setting, the skill is transferable to social situations.
What your Clothes Say
Of course, what you choose to wear is just as important as the body-language messages you send. I tested the class message sent by women’s clothing and its impact on the people they meet years ago while researching the Dress for Success books. I assumed the reaction that took place in a business setting would be similar to the one that occurred in a social setting, and I was right. As we’ve seen, men are much more likely to approach a woman if she is dressed in an outfit with which he is comfortable. Men are more likely to marry women from a background similar to theirs—but it’s usually women they perceive as their “betters” in social situations.
A perfect example is seen in the movie Working Girl. Melanie Griffith plays a twenty-something secretary from a blue-collar family who meets and charms a successful businessman—played by Harrison Ford—from an upper-middle-class background. When we first meet her, she is wearing cheap clothing and jewelry, overdone “big” hair, and inappropriate makeup. They all scream blue collar. Then she undergoes a makeover. She starts dressing in expensive-looking, understated clothing similar to what her older female boss wears; she loses the processed hairdo for a short, neat executive style; and finally she tones down her makeup. In real life, she would have had to spend more time working on her body language and verbal patterns, but nevertheless the effect is spectacular. It makes the relationship between the two characters, who are obviously going to be lovers, believable.
We all judge people by the way they present themselves. When a man meets a woman for the first time, he reacts in a predictable way to her body language, facial expression, speech patterns, and clothing. He has been conditioned by the other women he has met, by Hollywood images, and by his background to make judgments based on how she looks. Sometimes those judgments are based on how he processes information, but just as often they are unconscious. No matter how he makes the judgments, they control his actions.
While sending an appropriate class message increases the chances that a first meeting will lead to a relationship, signaling that you are—to borrow a phrase from the older generation—a “proper young lady” is even more important. The men we talked to often described their fiancées as “decent,” “family-oriented,” or what I refer to as “situational virgins.” More than 80 percent of the men we put in focus groups who were getting married in 1999 sooner or later said or even bragged that the women they were going to marry were the kind of woman you would be proud to introduce to friends and family. There was no question they were talking about the women’s virtue. You could tell by the vocabulary the men used when describing women they would not marry—women who by their standards were “loose,” “easy,” or worse. Those who were more broad-minded replaced sexual virtue with social virtue. They described their fiancées as women they could take home to Mother or introduce to their bosses.
The Perils of Dressing for Sex
After they gave these descriptions, we asked men when they first realized that their fiancées were “nice girls.” More than 70 percent told us they knew the minute they met, and almost half said or implied that this was what had first attracted them. The biggest surprise was that when asked to describe their fiancées when they first met them, 19 percent of the men described what the women were wearing. I’ve been researching clothing for more than thirty-five years, and never did more than 7 percent of the men questioned remember what anyone wore at a business meeting that had taken place more than three months earlier. More importantly, many of the men described their fiancées’ outfits when explaining how they knew the women were virtuous. They made comments such as this:
The vast majority described clothing that announced the woman was respectable. Only seven men of the more than two thousand we questioned said their fiancée was dressed in a very sexy outfit when they met. This was backed up by the women, most of whom remembered