The Likeability Factor

By: Tim Sanders

Narrated by: Tim Sanders

Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's Summary

Are you wondering how you can improve your relationships with your friends and family?

Are you curious how to get or keep the job of your dreams?

Do you want to become a more popular person?

This book will show you how to do all that by raising your likeability factor, or how much other people like you.

After all, life is a series of popularity contests. The choices other people make about you determine your health, wealth, and happiness. And decades of research prove that people choose who they like. They vote for them, they buy from them, they marry them, and they spend precious time with them.

The good news is that you can arm yourself for the contest and win life's battles for preference. How? By being likeable.

The more you are liked, or the higher your likeability factor, the happier your life will be. This audiobook will show you how to raise that likeability factor by teaching you how to boost four critical elements of your personality:

• Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others
• Relevance: your capacity to connect with others' interests, wants, and needs
• Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge, and experience other people's feelings
• Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity

Join Tim Sanders for a few hours and he'll share the results of hundreds of thousands of pages of research, numerous seminars, and hundreds of interviews with people just like you! Together you can build your likeability factor and improve your life!

The unabridged edition of this title will be available at Audible® on April 26, 2005.

©2005 Tim Sanders (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic Reviews

"A valuable look at the four personality traits [Sanders] says contribute to a person's likability." (Publishers Weekly)

Works like magic

Tim Sanders has done us a favor by updating the principles of likability based on solid research and detailed "how-to" steps that can raise our L-factors from the normal 4 thru 6 to a 9 or a 10. I have always considered myself a social and likable person, but I found when I applied his subfactors of friendliness, relevance, empathy and realness, it was astonishing how much more positive my interactions with co-workers, friends and acquaintances developed. I chose the abridged version of Sanders himself reading his text, even though he is not a professional reader, because his enthusiasm and sincerity makes up for the occasional misplaced emphasis on a word in a sentence here and there. Very listenable.

I noted there were some sour reviews of the unabridged version. Well there's no accounting for taste. I found if you listen and absorb what Sanders is saying, this is an excellent update to the principles in "How to Win Friends ..." by Dale Carnegie, which is good as far as it goes but leaves out the critical factor: realness. If you are looking to improve your relations with your fellow travelers on this planet, this listen is time well spent.

16 of 17 people found this review helpful

I like it

Sanders does a great job of presenting his analysis on why we like some people more than others and how being liked positively impacts our lives. He breaks it down into managable portions, and finishes with advice on implementing changes to improve in each area. The book is straight forward, well thought out, and most all points reference credible studies and relevent research. I found the book very enjoyable, helpful, and interesting. Sanders does a great job of reading it, so get the version with his narration.

1 of 2 people found this review helpful

yada yada yada

3 hours of listening to blah blah blah was friendly and likable therefore got on top of the world .. so & so wasn't therefore he didn't .. this research says this & that research says that ..
ok then what ???? the remaining of the audio might be of value but after 3 hours of listening to the boring tone & college students research paper and forcing myself to listen I decided to give it up ..
I didn't pay for a research paper .. I was waiting for something like "if you want to be likable this is what you need to do ... " or something like that .. otherwise why would anyone write a book on this subject ..
give me a week or two and I can write a better book ..
such a waste of time and money !!!!!

3 of 8 people found this review helpful

Being liked is Important

First part of this book successfully makes the case for being liked. It's easy to divide the world into friends (people you like and who like you) and enemies (people you dislike and who dislike you) but this is all so much conceptualisation. Being liked is something that can be learned, and you can make those who you think dislike you like you simply by changing your attitude and your behaviour.
Sanders, who narrates compellingly, uses a 4 principle model: friendliness, relevance, empathy and realness.
He uses the second part of the book to argue why these principles will enable you to succeed. There are also exercises to get you to apply the model to yourself.
The abridged version is to be recommended. I felt it would have become tedious if it had gone much beyond 5 hours.
All in all an effective book successfully transfered to audiobook format.

4 of 5 people found this review helpful

some useful things to do to help you understand

some useful things to help you understand yourself how you react and interact with others around you