So I’ve been going back to reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, because I’ve been starting to volunteer with the Dianne Morales campaign for NYC mayor (check her out at Dianne.nyc 😉). It’s chock full of really good tips and tricks for working with other people. I learn by revisiting, and revisiting, and recontextualizing things, and this is no exception.
One thing that I read yesterday was: make people feel important. Everyone wants to feel like they are needed. So, if you are “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,” and genuinely, not superficially and in a fake manner, people really appreciate it. Lay it on thick, and people will respond by giving you the world. Seriously, try this: take some time today and find something about the person at the checkout that you can praise. Like, their earrings, or their clothes, or how they’re singing to themselves. Pick up on it and give them a genuine compliment—and commit to it. Chances are, unless they’re a real misanthrope, they will immediately open up and be grateful, and you’ll have brightened their day for one moment.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about, is the principle of remembering people’s names. I have a tendency to say “oh, I’m not good at that.” But that is a skill that can be developed. There’s a whole technique of tying people’s names to visual stimuli (facial structure, or other permanent features, like hair color*), information about their profession or hobbies, etc. I think it’s called mind-mapping, or something like that. Anyway, the principle from that chapter is called, “remember that a person’s name is to them the sweetest sound in any language.” Ain’t that the truth. Haven’t you ever been in a situation where someone you’ve met more than enough times still can’t get your name right? You know how annoying and irritating that is. Now imagine if the reverse were true: you meet someone you haven’t seen in years, and they instantly say your name like they just heard it yesterday. Wow!
And finally to the point of this post today: adjacent to remembering people’s names is remembering people’s birthdays. To many people their birthday is a source of great happiness—or great anxiety. I know that for me, my birthday is a time when I feel extra happy when people remember it, and extra sad when people don’t. So I decided to create a calendar in my Google Calendar just dedicated to people’s birthdays. I looked through facebook and sifted through the “friends” I have on there (you could say, acquaintances), and decided on the people to whom I could send a birthday message on their day and feel like I had something to say (Side note: this is a great exercise for determining which of those facebook friends you actually care about, and which you’re just connected with. There’s a separate post in that, somewhere). I put all the people into the Friend’s birthdays calendar that I wanted to remember, and I made a commitment for myself to begin sending birthday messages to all of these people for an entire year.
One thing that I’ve already noticed: through the process of committing the names of these people that I know to the dates of their birthdays, I’ve started to see how many people I really do know and care about. I have a tendency to forget about my friends, and then get anxious and checking-mind appears—”I have no friends, I have no friends”—I think it’s related to the “out of sight, out of mind” aspect of ADHD. Time doesn’t really exist, and so I have to work extra hard to “remember the future.” So in listing out the birthdays of my friends and family, I started to see that mental pattern, and I could feel that anxiety begin to float away. In the same way as the attentiveness of meditation allows one to feel grounded in body and mind, the attentiveness of this process of committing friends’ birthdays to my calendar has allowed me to feel grounded in my interpersonal relations.
I have committed to the habit of sending birthday greetings to everyone on that calendar, and I’m doing it for a whole year. We’ll see what happens after that. I sent my greetings out this morning and it felt really good to write out messages of love and joy to people I knew in my life. I am really curious to see what I learn this year.