Sometimes you can almost feel the change in the air, as if a cloud has entered the room. A person whose outlook is just so negative, and their presence is so strong that it’s like a wet blanket thrown over what was all sunshine and roses (Wow that’s a lot of cliches!)
What do you do when you meet Mr Grumpy Pants?
I’ve had a few people come into my bar with a scowl on and it was as if I could read their minds through their expressions: “Don’t even pretend I’m likable.” – but I figured out a way to change their attitudes and quickly bring them to smiling with me as if I were an old friend – and it’s EASY TO DO!
I discovered this technique when associating people’s faces and names to objects or other people. For instance I’d associate someone named David with Goliath the giant by picturing him with a slingshot aiming a shot at Goliath’s head. At some point I also began looking for a particular facial feature that was similar to a facial feature belong to someone else I already knew, so that I could associate that person’s name through a fiction I would create about him where his name was involved somehow. (That process of using memory association is also called Mnemonotechnique.)
What I decided to do one day for a particularly grumpy looking customer was to see something in him that reminded me of a friend. His eyebrows.
He had eyebrows almost just like a good friend of mine, so I decided to see what would happen if I transformed the grumpy guy in front of me into my best friend in my mind and pretended he actually WAS my real friend.
It took about five seconds of me talking to and looking at “my friend” for the guy to see in me a friend and immediately lighten up, relax, smile, and fit right in with the rest of the crowd! He’d been accepted in a room full of strangers, and all it took was for one bartender to turn him into a friend.
“He Who Enters Here is a Stranger But Once.”
Site Author, David Jonathan Curtis: David Jonathan Curtis, a seasoned professional in his fifth decade of bartending and bar management, began his career in Midtown Manhattan, NY, tending and managing bars before diving into Manhattan’s bustling nightlife scene. Over the years, he has mastered high-volume, high-pressure bartending as the lead bartender in both iconic Midtown clubs and Wall Street bars, generating over $1,350,000.00 annually in personal drink sales. He has since extended his expertise to establishments in Georgia and now Tampa, Florida. David’s roles as a Bartending Instructor at the American Bartending School in Tampa, while maintaining a second job bartending, and his years experience of managing bars, and working as a Brand Ambassador along with his extensive professional library of over 1,000 bartending books, highlight his dedication to continually refining his craft. He holds a diploma in Bar Management and is BarSmarts certified by Pernod Ricard.
