The Charisma Myth How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

Three quick tips to gain an instant charisma boost in conversation:

Professor Stephen Kosslyn, director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, wrote me. This is the reason why visualization works so well—in fact, some athletes report feeling physically exhausted after intense visualization sessions. Visualization can even physically alter the brain structure: repeated experiments have shown that simply imagining yourself playing the piano with sufficient repetition leads to a detectable and measurable change in the motor cortex of the brain. (View Highlight)

increase the amount of power you want to convey. You can try this exercise at home on the couch, at work sitting at your desk, or even in an elevator—whenever you have an opportunity to close your eyes for a minute.

What’s the opposite of gratitude? Resentment, neediness, and desperation—

Stretching Your Comfort Zone

♦ Close your eyes and relax.

Just as the right visualization helps you get into the right body language so that the right signals flow effortlessly, you can use visualization to get into specific emotional or mental states so that the right words flow as well. (View Highlight)

If, for instance, your message needs to communicate warmth, caring, and empathy, you’ll have a far easier time finding the right words if you can get yourself into a warm and empathetic state. Visualizing a scene that brings up these feelings—imagining a young child coming to tell you her troubles at school—will help prime your mind for the right language to flow. (View Highlight)

♦ Scan your environment. Look around and find three pleasant sights

You can manufacture this gratitude-producing sense of relief by imagining your own funeral. Within seconds, this visualization can bring you into a state of emotional aliveness and, as you realize you still have your life, to a state of gratitude. (View Highlight)

♦ Sit or lie down, close your eyes, and set the scene. Where is your funeral being held? What day of the week, what time of day? What is the weather like? See the building where the ceremony is being held. See people arriving. Who’s coming? What are they wearing?

Self-confidence is our belief in our ability to do or to learn how to do something.

♦ Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take two or three deep breaths.

♦ First, adopt the body language of someone who’s utterly depressed.

Focus Charisma: Presence and Confidence

Visionary Charisma: Belief and Confidence

Developing Visionary Charisma

Kindness Charisma: Warmth and Confidence

Visionary charismatics make full use of the power of images. Presidents rated as charismatic, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, used twice as many visual metaphors in their inaugural addresses as did those rated as noncharismatic. (View Highlight)

When Steve Jobs launched the iPod Nano, he needed a dramatic way to illustrate its small size and light weight. First, he pulled it out of the smallest pocket of his jeans, giving tangible proof of just how small and slim it was. Second, he compared the Nano’s weight to eight quarters: his presentation slide shows the iPod on one side and eight quarters on the other. (View Highlight)

Can you imagine James Bond fidgeting? How about tugging at his clothing, bobbing his head, or twitching his shoulders? How about hemming and hawing before he speaks? Of course not. Bond is the quintessential cool, calm, and collected character. He epitomizes confidence.

Charisma has a few possible downsides: you can become the target of envy and resentment, others can reveal too much during your interactions, you are held to a higher standard, it can be lonely at the top, and charisma may work even when it shouldn’t.

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