FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather…

I have been thinking a lot about this. How many times do we come across people who appear very promising in the first meeting but as we spend more time with them, as we observe them closely, we find that our expectations were too high? On the other hand, aren’t there too many times when we underestimate the person we are meeting just because their tie wasn’t perfectly tight or we didn’t agree with their idea of dressing up? What I gathered is:

FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather…

I will get to the ‘rather’ part in a little while. I read somewhere that it takes just one-tenth of a second for us to judge someone and make our first impression, with confidence in impression formation increasing with increasing time taken to form the impression. (Okay, I know there is a huge risk that I have lost quite a few of you after you finished reading the last sentence, but read the title and apply it here, in short: continue reading.) So what happens after we have formed the FIRST and the so called LAST impression about someone?

If our perception about the other person is extremely good, then obviously we would like to meet that person again. And when that happens again and again, we come to know the person for who he or she really is. We realize they may not be that ‘spectacular’ person we had expected them to be and that they may also have some faults. It then boils down completely to us whether we want to be friends with that person. On the other hand, if we don’t find the other person ‘impressive’ enough, what do we do? Most of the times, we never make an attempt to know them. If, by any chance, we come across them again, we restrict ourselves to “hi” or “hello” and that’s it. That ‘unimpressive’ tag remains attached to that person in our mind.

All of us know people who have won our hearts in the first meeting and then remained our friends forever, even after we discovered various ‘unimpressive’ things about them. On the other hand, how many people do we know who didn’t seem ‘spectacular’ in the first meeting, but you just couldn’t have enough of them in your lives after you were forced to spend time with them and know them?

So, let’s complete the sentence:

FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather

FIRST IMPRESSION IS A STRONG IMPRESSION.

And it’s completely up to us how STRONG we make it to be. The best thing to do is to think:

“What if I am on the other side?”