Your Image Does Matter

• Author: Faith Dianne Pincus
• Profession: Attorney and former Federal Law Clerk
• Pages: 73-80

73

IMAGE/DELIVERY

CHAPTER SIX

Your Image Does Matter

I will never forget the day I went to a continuing legal education presen-

tation and a respected, experienced female attorney took off her sandals,

sat barefoot in a seat right in front of the first audience member, and gave

her presentation. Oh, and she wasn’t wearing a suit either—just a camisole

tank top and slacks. Seriously? Seriously?

Do I even need to analyze what is wrong with this picture? What

do you think her audience was thinking when it was actually happening?

First impressions are made faster than ever before.

Many years ago, when I began asking audience members how long

they thought it took to make a first impression, they would usually shout

out some length of time between one and five minutes. In the mid-2000s

the answer shortened to between one and two minutes. In the late-2000s

the audience usually shouted out variants of seconds—“five seconds,” “ten

seconds,” “thirty seconds.” And since about 2010 or so, we’re down to one

to five seconds. Sometimes I hear “instantaneously” and a few times I even

heard “a nanosecond.” Star Trek, here I come.

This trend in my audience’s response is telling—they now feel the

amount of time it takes to make a first impression is startlingly short.

And they’re not wrong. In 2003, a release from PR Web said that

“[p]sychologists, writers and seminar leaders caution that you only have

seven to 17 seconds of interacting with strangers before they form an opinion

of you.” More recently, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink: The Power of

Thinking Without Thinking, reported that the decisions may occur much

faster—think instantaneously or in a couple of seconds.

In the last few decades, people have become more judgmental, more

critical, and much quicker to make assumptions about a person. The communi-

cations and PR professionals I speak with attribute this to not just information

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