Minding Your Manners: Etiquette Sessions Evolve with Generations
Shirley Jinkins, Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Excerpts from Hometown Lifestyles, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Sunday, October
22, 2000
Take it from the animated woman who teaches the Texas Rangers how to eat soup: social graces are important to business success.
“There’s a general lack of social skills in our society,” said Susan Huston, who operates an etiquette consulting business from her Arlington home. “The Number One etiquette mistake is the ‘wet noodle’ handshake.”
Huston gives wide-ranging training sessions and workshops to adults and children alike on how to dress, eat, sit, use a cell phone, and make introductions.
Huston said it’s easier for an outsider like herself to tell employees of a company how to dress, groom, and conduct, themselves. Coming from a boss, the same information would seem intrusive, she said.
“I’m down to earth, and I make it funny,” Huston said of her own secrets of success. “I use humor to teach. If you can entertain 8-year-olds and 14-year-olds for two hours, then adults aren’t hard at all.”
Why are old-fashioned table manners so important in a dot.com business world?
“ If people can’t relax and enjoy themselves at a business lunch, then that reflects back on their business,” she said.
Incidentally, Huston mentioned, the water glass is always positioned over the knife at a place setting.
“ You see people get the wrong water glass all the time,” she said. “When one at a table takes the wrong glass, it throws the whole table off.”
