Learnings from Dale Carnegie, "How To Win Friends And Influence People"
JacobAldridge: The best, and most dangerous, lesson I took was the value in 'mirroring' the person you are speaking with. Subtly mirroring their body language and speech patterns shows empathy, similarity etc, and since I wasn't naturally great at body language I found it really useful as I entered the business world.Unfortunately, this habit ended up becoming second nature. While in many situations this was great - I just naturally found commonality in discussions - because I wasn't doing it intentionally it could become inappropriate.One of my coworkers was flirting with me incessantly, and not only didn't I notice that behaviour I was actually mirroring it back. My girlfriend (now beautiful wife) met me for lunch one day and was ready to kill me (fair enough). Thankfully we worked through to the root cause - this book - and I changed the habit.That doesn't take away from the book, it just shows that any of the lessons therein and discussed here will be most useful when you have a level of self-awareness that I was lacking, and which will help you apply them appropriately.