Captivate – Chapter 7 Cracking personality

The author describe how the key to solve the people puzzle is to understand people. It goes with trying to decode their emotion. Sometime people might be saying something but he expresses a micro expression that tell us the opposite.

The micro expression is a brief intense emotional expression.

Some of the people flavors are:

openness : How approachable and open to new idea, how curious a person is

conscientiousness : approachable to get things done, self discipline

extroversion : How your approach towards people, talkativeness

agreeableness : How to approach cooperation and working with others

neuroticism : How to approach worry

The author also goes on explaining how to speed reading other people’s matrix.

Each one of the personality traits above have high or low.

Openness

  • High open people enjoy change, novelty and adventure. They are open to new idea, curious and a dreamer
  • Low open people savour tradition, routine and habits

Conscientiousness

  • High contentiousness people love to do list, organisation and schedule, attention details and making things perfect
  • Low contentiousness people embrace big idea and strategy

Extroversion

  • High extroversion people draw energy being with people, having social time
  • Low extroversion people crave lone time, draining when they are with people

Agreeableness

  • High agreeableness people are empathetic and caring for others
  • Low agreeableness people are more analytical, practical and skeptical, default to no

Neuroticism

  • High neurotic people usually have mood swings and worried
  • Low neurotic people are more calm and stable, less mood fluctuation

Depends on the compatibleness of the personality matrix you will need to either optimise or compromise.

To put this into practice, you can draw your personality diagram and compare them with your spouse.

Captivate – Chapter 6 The decoder

In this chapter the author describe some tips and tricks to decode people’s personality. The key is to listen by feeling and hearing. The author go in depth explaining how to decode the facial expression when someone is angry, content, etc. We can mimick these expression and learn to understand and decode the facial expressions. There are 7 facial expression that we need to master, they are :

– Anger

– Happiness

– Contempt

– Fear

– Surprise

– Disgust

– Sadness

Once we can identify the facial expressions, we can then attempt to decode the micro expression.

Captivate – Chapter 5 How to be likeable

The author talk about how to make yourself be ridiculously likable. In conversation we need to thread commonality, this means that we are trying to find what do we have in common with the other people. When we find the commonality suddenly the conversation gets easier and we both connect at a deeper level as we can relate to each other much better. Use the following conversational phrases “me too”, “teach Me”, you can also adopt the 5 why, to get to know the topic better.