All The Right Moves
This is a pretty old song that I dug up recently from karaoke, hope you enjoy 🙂
Onto the actual post….
Have you ever felt that most of the time, when you talk to strangers, it’s almost the same few lines being used?
Like in chess, we almost always start off with the book moves (king or queen pawn up), and the response is almost always the same for many players. Similar to a simple interaction, we always start off with ‘how are you’ or ‘hey what’s up?’ and receive similar responses like ‘im good’ or ‘im fine’. Without these book moves, people would just feel out of place. The best thing about them is that they work on ALMOST everybody. It’s just a polite way to start.
Thing is, how far can you take these book moves?
There’s always the old ‘pat on the back’ trick to make the other person feel closer to you. If not that, there’s the ‘listening for similarities’ and high fiving the other person whenever he mentions something you both have in common to penetrate through their barriers. We all make such book moves in hopes that it can further develop some sort of bond. A new and not fully recognized book move is to simply identify the small subconscious gestures of who you’re talking to, and to imitate them naturally.
The point of these book moves is to create likability for yourself, and to instantly gain the other person’s trust. But how well do they work? We could probably high five the other person EVERY SINGLE TIME he says something similar that we do, and follow it up with something like ‘we’re so similar! why didn’t I meet you earlier?’
To be honest, they do indeed work pretty well, or else they wouldn’t be recognized as book moves in the first place. I have to say that some people have won me over with the exact same book moves just because they were executed so well and done in such a subtle and natural manner.
However, the problem with book moves is that the same closeness just isn’t there. When I first met my high school friends, we didn’t have any book moves. It was that spontaneous interaction which grabbed me and rendered me loyal to them up to this point and beyond. In the longer scale of things, book moves appear to work in the short run because it stimulates our endorphins, but it doesn’t appear to create the same attachment you might feel when you encounter a person who you met without these moves.
