Book Review - Likeability Factor
I saw this book on sale at Border's, looked it over, then saw it on the shelf at the library that same night. What, the heck, maybe the book gods are trying to tell me something?
The full title is Likeability Factor: How To Boost Your L-Factor & Achieve Your Life's Dreams. Sounds a little cheesy, doesn't it? The author is Tim Sanders and he's a leadership coach at Yahoo!
Sanders' provided a lot of documentation to back up the intuitive fact that people who are more likeable than others are better off. They get more attention from their doctors, their kids get more care from their teachers, they're less likely to be laid off and they're less likely to be divorced.
His theory on how we evaluate someone's likeability (or L-Factor as he calls it) is that people judge on four consecutive factors. If you're missing the first factor, that's it and they will not consider you likeable and won't evaluate you further.
The factors are:
Friendliness - communicating welcome, expressing a generally positive feeling
Relevance - extent to which a person connects to your life's wants, needs and interests
Empathy - seeing things from your point of view, feeling what you feel
Realness - person who is genuine, true and authentic
The L-Factor scale is from 1 (not likeable) to 10 (most likeable). Sanders believes you can increase your L-Factor through changes in your behaviors and he provides a series of exercises to help you do just that.
Interesting theory and, though I'm not going to do the exercises, the book did make me think about ways I can improve my relationships.
The full title is Likeability Factor: How To Boost Your L-Factor & Achieve Your Life's Dreams. Sounds a little cheesy, doesn't it? The author is Tim Sanders and he's a leadership coach at Yahoo!
Sanders' provided a lot of documentation to back up the intuitive fact that people who are more likeable than others are better off. They get more attention from their doctors, their kids get more care from their teachers, they're less likely to be laid off and they're less likely to be divorced.
His theory on how we evaluate someone's likeability (or L-Factor as he calls it) is that people judge on four consecutive factors. If you're missing the first factor, that's it and they will not consider you likeable and won't evaluate you further.
The factors are:
Friendliness - communicating welcome, expressing a generally positive feeling
Relevance - extent to which a person connects to your life's wants, needs and interests
Empathy - seeing things from your point of view, feeling what you feel
Realness - person who is genuine, true and authentic
The L-Factor scale is from 1 (not likeable) to 10 (most likeable). Sanders believes you can increase your L-Factor through changes in your behaviors and he provides a series of exercises to help you do just that.
Interesting theory and, though I'm not going to do the exercises, the book did make me think about ways I can improve my relationships.