How to win friends and influence people

     I have listened to the podcast “How to win friends and influence people”. You can find it here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008ww0k

     The duration of this record is 18 minutes. During the first listening I understood 75-80% of the information; the second listening was more effective.  The main problem of misunderstanding was fluent English, also there were some new words, which I hadn’t heart before.

     The audio is divided to three parts - a course in 'ultimate violence' in the city of London and Rio Tinto's CEO Tom Albanese on market power and China and the most interesting for me part - how to communicate better and boost your confidence.  There  were a lot of interesting examples, which I’d like to share with you.

Everything we do is based on our cultural differences. For example, in some countries we encourage people to shake hands, but in Japan it would be outrageously. In Britain to win friends and influential people we have to be pushy, an American idea is to be exposed. In Poland if you smile at someone who has introduced to you, they’ll think you are crazy and something is wrong with you.

     The main idea is that we need to get people used to dealing with other people. Nowadays people feel much more comfortable looking at computer screens or mobile phones, so we lose the ability to communicate face-to-face. There was a very interesting training. A large bank in London has a lot of branches all over the world, particularly in South Arabia. The photos of how people work were made both in Arabia and London. In London people smiled a bit, were respectful and official, they were contrasted with Arabian. It was a very effective way of training, so people in Arabia were able to change their behavior and be much more officiant to much more customers.

     It was interesting for me to listen to this record, because there were a lot of real situations which can happen  in the life of every person.