Thanksgiving has inspired this article because Thanksgiving always reminds me how wonderful, even magical, affinity is.

I was with a group of execs I’d been working with for a while when one of them said:

“You create such a good feeling. We are not used to having such a good feeling in our culture. There’s something different about you.”

They thought it was my personality. It wasn’t. It was something we all can do any time 

I was working in a country with a culture that would not be described as “high affinity”. What is affinity?

Affinity is a feeling. It’s what you’re feeling about the other person, your emotional response to them. And very specifically, it’s how much you like them in that moment.

Affinity can fluctuate, even within one conversation. You can start out with low affinity and end up with high affinity. Or start high and go low.

I have friends who were very much in love when they got married 30 years ago. And they love each other even more today than they did back then.

There is NO limit to how much affinity you can feel. We have an infinite capacity to create ever more affinity. Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote, “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”

But, I’ve learned that many people  don’t know how to create it when there isn’t any.

In Causative Communication, people learn how easy it is to create affinity. In this workshop they take their affinity REALLY high. And they learn how GOOD it makes them feel, and how GOOD it makes the other person feel. Really surprises them.

Working in 53 countries has shown me that there’s a big cultural influence on the expression of affinity. Some cultures openly express more affinity than others. When I’m working with Italians, they say, “Ciao, Bella!” (“Hello, Beautiful!”) when they see me, and they hug and kiss me on the cheek. There are other cultures I work with where they don’t even smile.

Entire generations have been taught to look and feel sullen. Many have told me, “People in my generation have been taught to be detached.”

For them, it’s dangerous to have affinity and worse to show it. They reserve it for their families and their very closest friends. And certainly not for someone they don’t know, like me. That’s often the starting point of my relationship with them. But it’s not where we end up.

So there I was, in a country and a culture that typically has very low affinity in business relations, especially if you’re not family or a close personal friend.

Most people, when they’re faced with a group of people with low affinity, reduce their own affinity. This is a mistake.

Despite their lack of affinity, my affinity for this group of individuals that I was working with was sky high. I genuinely liked them, I was filled with great affinity for each one. There was SO much to like about each one of them.

But heaven forbid I should express it! That would have HORRIFIED them!

With the executives in this culture, if I had said something expressing affinity, like “I really like you guys!” they would have been terribly embarrassed and would have had no idea what to say.

So I never said anything. I simply let myself feel it and let it grow over the week. I liked them more and more as we worked together. It was a wonderful feeling.

As I was filled with affinity for them, they became filled with affinity. Interestingly, they became filled with affinity not just for me, but for each other as well. Affinity is the easiest thing to develop, grow and spread.

They didn’t know what they were feeling. They didn’t have words for it. They just knew it felt really GOOD. They were nodding and smiling, something this culture is known to suppress.

I didn’t say anything about it.

At the end of the program, they were smiling very big, warm smiles and told me, “You create such a good feeling.” I had another person say, “I don’t have words for what I’m feeling.”

They didn’t know about affinity and I was not in the position to teach it to them, so I said, “I think it’s magic.” And they laughed and said, “We never use the word ‘magic’ here, but we actually think you’re right. You create magic.”

This “magic” is not complicated. It is found on the other side of filling yourself with affinity.

You don’t need to get permission, you don’t need to get promoted, you don’t even need to say anything about what you are doing.

Raise your level of affinity and watch the magic happen.

Wishing you a very happy, affinity-filled Thanksgiving!

Be the cause!