Making the First Impression

'First impression is the last impression' may not be literally true, but the first impression carries a lot of weight for a long time to come. For this reason, making the first impression is an important feature of one's personality. Its significance is further enhanced if the face-to-face meetings are infrequent. Consider, for example, your presentation before an interview board for employment, your first impression itself decides your future career because the board member get no opportunity for later impressions and decide on the first impression itself.. 


Body Language

Body language plays the most important role in making the first impression. Keep your head raised, chest upfront and gaze peeping directly into eyes of the beholder present you as a self-confident person. I have often noticed persons offering to shake hands as if their hand is paralyzed, they just handover their hanging hand to your palm. This creates a very bad impression of your personality. What indeed is needed is to catch hand of the other person powerfully, purposefully and pleasure-fully to covey that you are indeed pleased to meet and eager for further meetings. 

Your face says a lot what you really intend. So keep up a bold and smiling face even if you don't feel so pleased to keep margins for future meetings. Your eyes also speak with feelings of love, hatred, etc.without words. These feelings get diffused if you focus your gaze directly into the eyes of the other person.  


Hello Effect 
A person may be in any of the three modes at a time - flaring, contracting, or neutral. When you feel full of energy and enthusiasm, it gets reflected on your face and in your body movements, and you are in flaring mode. These influence others around you even if you make no intentional efforts for it. This is called your hello effect and persons around you shall notice you and would like to say a hello to you. For this, you have to be dynamic and look alert. 
Hello effect get enhanced if you have some non-traditional distinctive feature on your person like dress, hair-style, but it should not be odd-looking or considered traditionally bad. Decide on it carefully and let it work for you as an ambassador. Here you have to distinguish between abnormal, ordinary, normal and extra-ordinary and avoid being abnormal and ordinary. Usually these attributes are determined through social traditions of a place.   


Language and Accent
Whatever language you speak, try to make it pure which means words of different languages should not be mixed when you speak out. This shows your mastery over te language and this mastery is perceived by others as a habit of yours enhancing your respectability.
When you speak, don't join consecutive words but speak them as different and isolated entities. Just notice the difference between -
Whatisyourname?, 
What-is-your-name?, 
What is your name? and 
What is  your name?

and try to differentiate through four ways of pronouncing these. I am sure, you would like the fourth one.


This requires some practice. Through this your communication quality gets better. Its sure test is that the other person need not to ask yo to repeat what you just said. Such a clear communication style makes others to feel that you are confident about what you are saying.