| How to Be More Popular
Many people believe the route to success
is to be interesting—to show off or act like someone else. For
example, many teenagers can’t understand why they are unpopular. They
learned as children that to get attention they should act up a little;
to be as interesting as possible. Yet acting interesting does not make a
teenager popular. To handle their unpopularity, they might decide to
despise people or become loners. Or they try harmful acts to gain
respect: smoking, drinking, graffiti, shoplifting, drugs, sex, guns and
so on.
Acting interesting can ruin your adult
life as well. Show-off employees, self-centered managers and pompous
business owners rarely do well for long.
The secret to popularity is not to be
interesting, but to be interested.
"When a person becomes terribly
interesting he has lots of problems, believe me. That is the chasm which
is crossed by all of your celebrities, anybody who is foolish enough to
become famous. He crosses over from being interested in life to being
interesting. And people who are interesting are really no longer
interested in life. It’s very baffling to some young fellow why he can’t
make some beautiful girl interested in him. Well, she is not interested,
she is interesting." — L.
Ron Hubbard
If you are an actor on stage, you are
interesting while acting. Seminar speakers are interesting. Comedians,
models and magicians are interesting.
Yet in real life, on a one-on-one basis,
interesting people are irritating. They only do things to get your
attention and admiration. They believe they are on stage acting for an
audience of one.
If you want people to cooperate with you,
to like you or to open up to you, you must be interested.
Instead of focusing on yourself, you
start to focus on others. You notice what makes them happy or unhappy.
Your attention comes off of you and onto others.
When your thoughts are more on others
than on yourself, you feel little stress. You act and respond with more
intelligence. Your production level increases and you have more fun.
When you are interested, people love your
interest in them. They want to be around you. You are popular.
Five Ways to Be More Interested
1.
Strive to shift your attention from yourself onto other people or
objects. This is a great stress reliever.
2.
Find things about people that interest you. Force yourself to look for
interesting things. Soon you will automatically take interest in people
without thinking about it.
3.
If you catch yourself acting like someone else, you are being
interesting. Simply get interested in the person in front of you and you’ll
feel more natural. You are most effective when you are simply being
yourself.
4.
When someone makes you nervous or shy, get interested in them. Take your
attention off of yourself and on to others. With practice, you will be
calm, even bold.
5.
Focus on how you can help others. Let your interest in helping people
replace your tendency to act interesting. Your effectiveness and
popularity will soar. |
