The Secret to Being Liked by Everyone

By Donald Michael Kraig

When you are a healer of any sort, from licensed doctor or dentist to hypnotherapist, from massage technician to mother nurturing a child’s scraped knee, the person you are helping does better if they like you. With hypnotherapy, if your clients don’t like you, they are less likely to go into hypnosis, a necessity for the therapy’s success.

Being liked, however, isn’t limited to healing situations. If you’re applying for a job and the person doing the hiring doesn’t like you, even if you’re more qualified than any other applicant, you’re unlikely to get the job. If you run a company, whether it has two or two thousand employees, the more the people who work for the company like you the more they are likely to be more productive. And if you’re looking for a romantic partner, you just have to be likable!

Some people believe that in order to be liked you have to be born with those intangible qualities that make you likeable. Either you’ve got charisma or you don’t. And, these people believe, the majority of us who don’t have charisma or don’t seem very likeable are just fated to be unpopular, unsuccessful, and unhappy.

Don’t you believe it!

Being likable is a skill that you can acquire. In fact, it’s actually a very easy skill to develop. Some “experts” will give you a series of simple things to do to become more popular. The problem with these solutions is that they falsely assume that everyone you’re trying to get to like you is the same. They’re not, and that makes developing likeability skills, also known as “establishing rapport,” a bit more challenging. But with a little bit of awareness, anyone can do it… and that means you can do it, too!

The Basic Rule of Likeability

Surprisingly, there is just one rule to understand when it comes to being liked:

People like people who are most like themselves.

If you remember nothing else about this article, please remember this basic rule. It means that the more you are like another person, the more that other person will like you. Of course there is no way you can really know everything about another person. You can’t know every aspect of their background and history. Plus, you are a unique individual and different from everyone else. So you can’t be exactly like another person. Besides, most people are smart enough to know if you are pretending to be just like them.

But there is something you can do. It’s called modeling, and the idea behind it is that you simply act similarly to a person you want to get to like you. Note that I wrote “similarly,” not “the same.” If you act the same as another person he or she will think you’re mocking them and will neither like what you’re doing nor like you.

The secret is to observe the actions and listen to the words of a person you want to like you. Then take on some of those actions and words in a way that is not the same as the original, but reminds on an unconscious level that you are like them. Don’t give your responsive action immediately after they do an action. Wait until the time is right. Here are some examples:

• If someone crosses their legs, at an opportune moment, cross your ankles.

• If someone leans forward, at an opportune moment, lean forward in a slightly different manner, perhaps leaning slightly to the side.

• If someone makes repeated motions with one of their hands, at an opportune moment make a similar motion with your opposite hand. For example, if they turn their right hand palm up, turn up your left hand. This is called mirroring.

• If someone smiles, at an opportune moment you should smile.

• If someone strokes their chin, at an opportune moment touch your face.

• If someone keeps repeating a word or phrase such as “you know,” occasionally, when appropriate, use that expression.

Do you get the idea? You are simply showing that you are like another person. The result of these simple actions is that they will naturally like you. The most difficult part of this technique is that it needs to appear natural. You might want to practice with some friends a few times before actually putting it into action.