Sunday, July 17, 2011

What are your first seven words?

In his Book “Hard wired Humans”, a review of which was in the Weekend supplement of the Melbourne Herald Sun Newspaper, on the 9th of July, Andrew O’Keeffe, talks about how humans tend to judge and classify people within the first few seconds of meeting people and once these judgements are made, it is very hard to get them to change their judgements.
Thus he says, that even if you meet and talk with someone for an hour, it is in the first few seconds that their opinion of you is made, thus he warns that the first seven words you speak to them then, are in fact “the seven most important words you’ll say”.
According to Andrew, “The working memory of the brain has a capacity for around two seconds or seven units of data.” Thus according to Andrew, it is vitally important you get your message across with those first seven words/two seconds, or else you are just wasting your and their time!
What do you say to Andrew O’Keeffe’s theory and if valid to any degree in your opinion, how will you use this information in future, if at all? Over to you again.

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