My sisters and I used to play the Biography game when we were younger. We would go to the airport to watch all the people coming and going and make up stories about who they were, where they were going to or coming from, what they did for a living, what their families were like, what interesting little secret they were hiding, etc. We inferred all of this just by looking at them, and we evaluated each other's biographies on a pass / fail basis, and of course for creativity! Sound familiar? It should. We do it each and every day whether we realize it or not, and it's what our clients, customers, employers, employees, and complete strangers are doing to us every day. It's called thin slicing* and you should know how to use it to your advantage. When applied correctly, it can actually alter human behavior. Think of the possibilities! We toggle back and forth between our conscious and our unconscious modes of thinking all the time. We make decisions or conscious choices based upon previous experiences and outcomes. It is the unconscious brain that spurs our spontaneous, split-second decisions and first impressions. Did you know these snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled so you can alter someone's perception and behavior? For example, the world today demands that we maximize our communication opportunities, but many of us overlook the unspoken or non-verbal communications that we send and receive. You already know that 93% of face-toface communication is non-verbal (55% facial expression, 38% tone of voice, leaving only 7% for words!). If we want to get really high falootin' about it, we can talk about neural programming and how our brains filter out "noisy" data around us all the time, then there's the nature vs. nurture / genetic vs. programmed argument ... blah blah blah! What it comes down to is this: like it or not, we have ultimately become a product of the MTV generation. We have been programmed to take things in via 15 to 30-second sound bites. We make thin-slice snap judgments, and so do our clients. Learn to use that to your advantage by knowing what visual communications you're sending out via the way you look, the way you dress, the way you carry yourself, the way you enter a room, the expression on your face, the tone of your voice, and more. Create your own 30-second sound bite for your communications-visual, verbal, or whatever form they take. Whether your communications are formal or casual, take control of the message you're sending! * thin slicing: aka pattern recognition acceleration, as discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.