We had a great session at our Eastern Suburbs forum this morning with Jennifer Austin who was talking about the importance of “looking the part” and first impressions. With robust think tanks chrystalkisingbthe gems from the talk and the app coerienced from the members.

I look forward to sharing them with you .In due course.

Some people say 

         “trust your gut” 

 “never judge a book by its cover” 

            What do you think? 

Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” talks about how you can make accurate decisions in a “blink of the eye” – with an unconscious process called “thin slicing” so you should trust your gut. 

Gladwell writes about how an unconscious decision is made by seeing something or someone – you take your cumulative unconscious experiences – and analysing them within a blink – to make an initial first impression! 

The studies of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who created the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), indicates that  “thin slicing” enables you to unconsciously  analyze a person’s fleeting look in seconds – called a microexpression 

Your face and the way you dress is a rich source of what is going on inside your mind and although many facial expressions can be made voluntarily, our appearance and behaviour are also dictated by an involuntary system that automatically expresses our emotions. 

An interesting study in predicting whether a couple will stay married or get divorced 

John Gottman is a researcher on marital relationships whose work is explored in Blink. After analyzing a normal conversation between a husband and wife for an hour, Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 15 minutes, his accuracy is around 90%. But if he analyses them for only three minutes, he can still predict with high accuracy who will get divorced and who will make it. This is one example of when “thin slicing” works.