Article from The Times - Corporate Flirting Courses

Thursday, February 10 2005 @ 07:44 PM GMT

It's about interpersonal chemistry
By Steve Smethurst

IT’S the start of your corporate training course. You’re in a room filled with posters, toys, fruit, nuts and coloured pens. Soothing music is playing and the aroma of essential oils wafts through the air.

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The course leader asks you to imagine that you are a god or a goddess. She tells you that you have to think about how that would feel, and how a supreme being would smile and look at other people. You are then asked to go round the room and greet everyone else, as loudly as possible, with the words, “Hello, you gorgeous god/goddess you.” NI_MPU('middle'); And it gets weirder. Before long, you will be asked if there is an animal that represents you “at your best”. Once you make your choice, you will have to “act out” the animal. As you might have guessed, this is no standard training event — it’s Charming Connections, a two-day course run by Peta Heskell, author of a series of books on the art of flirting. And these seemingly bizarre exercises are, she says, “designed to help shake out people’s inhibitions”. But what place do flirting skills have in the workplace? Well, this isn’t the hair-flicking, chat-up line type of flirting. “I’m interested in developing the ‘flirtatious nature’,” Heskell says. “Someone with a flirtatious nature has high self-esteem and a carefree confidence. They’re people that everyone loves having around. They’re upbeat, optimistic and generally smile a lot. They are natural congratulators, motivators and encouragers.” Adrian Dale was sent on the course by the consultancy he worked for. “I think they wanted staff to have social skills as well as technical ones,” he says. “It’s learning how to be a bit cooler — like when you’re at your best. Because when you’re at your best, you can do virtually anything.” So the bit with the animals isn’t so mad after all? “No,” Dale says. “It’s so you have something to remember it by. Now, if I’m in the pub and want to chat someone up, I just try to imagine how I am when I’m at my best.” If you’re wondering . . . he’s an alsatian. FLIRT FILE Peta Heskell developed corporate flirting events after a training manager, who had been on one of her flirting weekends, asked her to submit a proposal to train the front-of-house staff at the hotel where she worked. Heskell says that workplace stress is caused by “trying to suppress the fact that we are sexual beings and are attracted to each other. And as a result men and women are expected to turn that off and become automated asexual robots during working hours.” The big question: will it improve your love-life as well as your work? “Of course it will,” says Heskell. “It will improve your communication skills and make you more open to having fun.”

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