The Art of the Handshake
It defines who you are.
BY TOM CHIARELLA
A perfunctory gesture? Hardly. It defines you. It defines the exchange. A hands-on study of a subtle craft.
THE HAND IS AN INTIMATE BODY PART. Its very shape and condition tell a lot about who you are. I've always hated my hands. They're meaty and fat, the very definition of a paw. In college I worked several jobs--cleaning dumpsters, pitchforking rocks out of a freshly tilled soccer field, carrying ten-gallon buckets of hot pitch across the roof of a large shopping mall--that built up a very nice, very manly set of calluses. My father used to check them by shaking my hand from time to time. He liked it when they were nasty rough, though his were always ultrasmooth. To him, this seemed to define the gap between us. I was a kid who worked his vacations because he needed the money; he was a boss who skipped his by choice.
Shaking hands, it follows, is an intimate act, though this might not be agreed upon outside the discussion board for obsessive hand-washers. But if a kiss is intimate, why not a handshake? The other night I was watching some half-assed TV show in which a guy kissed a girl, then looked at her and said, "You're a good kisser." I groaned. My teenage son was there, cutting a peach into little pieces, not paying much attention. "A kiss is not that easy," he said. He doesn't talk much, but I could tell he was speaking from experience--recent experience. "It's not like a handshake or anything."
So true, my little man, so true. A kiss is not like a handshake. It's far easier than a handshake. A kiss you perform mostly in private, again and again. Why wouldn't you get better?
But a good handshake--now that is a subtle business.
TRUTH BE TOLD, a man who has a good handshake can do any goddamned thing he wants. I'm not saying he will; I'm saying he can. He can work a room--one person to the next, shaking with strangers, with old colleagues, with huge men and tiny women alike--with his hand. People remember him; they listen to him. Men like this are followed.
The good handshake demands a particularly strong command of several divergent elements of influence in a single gesture, in one smallish moment, in order to connect with a person whom (presumably) you have never met before. Think of the components: a swift, elegant movement toward the waiting hand, wise use of the eyes, the considered grip strength, even the rhythm of the shake is important. All that and you have to speak, too; you have to be engaged enough to muster a question, remember a name, acknowledge some common experience while you grip, shake, and release.
Isn't a handshake just another grim layer of social obligation? Isn't there a reason it's called glad-handing? Well, for a person who's interested in influence, social obligation