The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (21 page)

Now imagine a big corporation in which one employee (say, the human resources director) is responsible for all employee termination. Whenever people think of her, they immediately think of the negative associations tied to her job duties. In fact, the long-term negative effects of such associations are so well-known that an entire industry developed around being the bearers of bad news—firing people, closing plants, etc. These specialized firms will come in to deliver the blow, serve as the focal point for people’s resentment, and then leave, presumably taking the worst of the negative associations along with them.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger”? Back in ancient Persia, a messenger would be dispatched after a battle to bring the king news of either victory or defeat. If the messenger reported victory, he was treated to a feast. But if he came bearing news of failure, he was immediately executed. Though we no longer execute people on a whim, the underlying basis for this custom remains: people will associate you with whatever feelings you produce in them on a consistent basis.

In 1904, Ivan Pavlov (who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize) was studying the process of digestion in animals; in this case, the dogs kept at his laboratory. To call the dogs’ attention once their food had been put out, he would ring a bell. As he was idly playing with the bell one day, he noticed a curious phenomenon: just by hearing the sound of the bell, the dogs not only rushed up to the usual feeding place but also started drooling.

Many cat owners will tell you that they barely have to start opening a can of cat food for their feline to appear at its bowl. As it turns out, we humans work exactly the same way. Are there certain songs that make you feel energized? How about one that makes you feel nostalgic and misty-eyed? Have you ever been brought back to a
specific moment from your childhood just by experiencing a certain taste or smell?

We associate feelings with sights, sounds, tastes, smells, places, and, of course, people, which is why others will associate you with the way you make them feel. For most charisma, but especially kindness charisma, it’s critical to make others feel good about themselves. Benjamin Disraeli’s genius was his ability to make whomever he was speaking with feel intelligent and fascinating. People would associate the wonderful way they felt around him with the man himself.

Because we’re constantly creating associations in people’s minds, it’s crucial in both business and social situations to be aware of how you’re making people feel. To be charismatic, you need to create strong positive associations and avoid creating negative ones.

When one of the world’s largest accounting firms asked me to coach their “rising stars,” I was struck by how earnest, hardworking, and well-intentioned these bright young managers were. Chosen for their high level of knowledge and competence, they served a two-year term in the firm’s headquarters before returning to their local offices. And yet they were intensely disliked by the rest of the firm.

During these two years, the young managers served as experts for all local offices, who would turn to them in difficult situations, e.g., when questions were tricky or when things had gone wrong. Because they spent their time finding mistakes and providing the right answers (or explaining what the answer should have been), these back-office experts had become associated with difficult situations and unpleasant feelings.

You can imagine how hard it was afterward for the rest of the firm to be warm and welcoming to these same experts when they “repatriated” to the very offices whose failings they’d had to point out. Talk about bad associations! Because of this setup, making others feel supported and being positively associated was a challenge for these rising stars.

To reverse this negative connotation and broadcast as much warmth as possible, we worked to ensure that they communicated a better ratio of neutral or good news to bad news. They learned to highlight what people had done
right;
they started sending out e-mail updates with useful tips, and would even include a “kudos” section to congratulate any local office that had done a good job. These
techniques helped them use their high-status position as experts to give their warmth and praise even more weight.

Take a Compliment

We often impair our warmth with negative associations without even realizing it. Negative associations can happen anytime someone feels bad when they’re around us, and they are a particular risk if we make people feel bad about themselves—wrong, inadequate, or stupid.

How do you feel when someone pays you a compliment? For instance, when someone says you look good or you have accomplished something impressive, do you instinctively downplay it? For many people, compliments feel both pleasant and a little awkward, and they don’t quite know how to handle them. Many of us either turn bashful or modestly deflect the compliment by saying something like “Oh, it’s nothing…”

Unfortunately, doing this sends a message to your admirer that they were wrong to compliment you. They will probably feel rather foolish, and there’s even a chance that they will associate this experience of feeling foolish with you. If you do this enough, pretty soon they’ll stop trying. If, on the other hand, you make them feel good for complimenting you, they’ll enjoy feeling good about themselves, and so will want to do it again.

The next time you’re given a compliment, the following steps will help you skillfully handle the moment:

1. Stop
   .
   
2. Absorb the compliment. Enjoy it if you can.
   
3. Let that second of absorption show on your face. Show the person that they’ve had an impact.
   
4. Thank them. Saying “Thank you very much” is enough, but you can take it a step further by thanking them for their thoughtfulness or telling them that they’ve made your day.
   

Imagine giving a compliment to Bill Clinton. How do you think he would take it? I’d been making this suggestion to clients for some
time when one of my friends told me he’d had that exact experience in person, when the former president was touring Google’s headquarters:

Creating positive associations to highlight the warmth dimension means that you make a person feel good when they’re around you. Clinton is known to make everyone he’s speaking to feel as if
they
were the most important person in the room. How can you make people feel this way?

First, think about how you would behave if you were indeed speaking to the most important person in the room. You would probably want to hear everything they had to say. You’d be truly interested, maybe even impressed, and that attitude is exactly what will make people feel great about themselves and associate all those feelings with you.

As Dale Carnegie said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming truly interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
⁵
One great trick is to imagine that the person you’re speaking with is the main star in a movie you’re watching right now. This will help you find them more interesting, and there’s even a chance that you’ll make them feel like a movie star, too. Charismatic people are masters at using positive associations, whether consciously or subconsciously, and you’ll often hear people rave about how “special” and “wonderful” these charismatics made them feel.

I tell all my clients: Don’t try to impress people. Let
them
impress
you,
and they will love you for it. Believe it or not, you don’t need to sound smart. You just need to make them feel smart.

Get Graphic

If you were told the number of deaths caused by smoking every year, would you remember that exact figure three months from now? Probably not. But what if you were told that this figure was equal to three fully loaded Boeing 747 planes crashing into the earth every day for a year, with no survivors?
That
image you’d remember for a while.
^*

A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed—and for good reason. Image generation has a powerful impact on emotions and physiological states and a high impact on brain function.
⁶
Our brain’s language-processing abilities are much newer and less deeply wired than are our visual-processing abilities. When you speak in words, the brain has to relate the words to concepts, then translate the concepts into images, which is what actually gets understood. Why not speak directly in the brain’s own language? Whenever you can, choose to speak in pictures. You’ll have a much greater impact, and your message will be far more memorable.

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.
⁷

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.

During Chrysler’s remarkable turnaround, Lee Iacocca initiated a series of factory closings, which of course meant that thousands of workers would be fired. To mitigate the emotional backlash that could have ensued, he used a battle metaphor, comparing himself to an army surgeon, a job he called “the toughest assignment in the world.” In the midst of battle, with wounded men everywhere, doctors must prioritize which ones to attend to. This is called
triage:
helping those with the best chances of survival and ignoring the rest.

With this one metaphor, Iacocca made people feel that the plant closings were painful for everyone but done in the general good interest, and that he himself was in the trenches with his men, a lifesaver treating an organization at war.

When you craft your images and metaphors, try to make them sensory-rich: involve as many of the five senses as possible. Believe it or not, you can do this in almost any situation, even with the driest of subjects.

One of the aforementioned accounting firm’s rising stars asked me to help him communicate the importance of a complex new regulation in such a way that everyone would realize just how critical it was to ensure clients’ abidance. Here’s the metaphor we came up with: “If you don’t bring your clients into compliance, it’s as if they’re innocently paddling along a river, and you know there’s a waterfall coming, yet you do nothing to stop them from going over the waterfall, watching as they crash down to the rocks below, their bodies mangled, blood spilling through the water.” Harsh? Yes. Effective? You bet.

Of course, you’ll want to take great care in choosing the right metaphor for your particular goal. In the previous example, we wanted to shock people and frighten them into remembering something important. I was quite comfortable in suggesting a rather unpleasant metaphor. Be aware of the emotional tenor of your metaphor and choose accordingly.

Avoid White Elephants

This tendency of the brain to think in pictures can sometimes be problematic. Once an image is imagined, it’s nearly impossible to
unimagine it. Remember the white elephants exercise? When entreated to
not
think of a white elephant, your brain sooner or later (usually sooner) will focus exactly on what you want to avoid.

One young CEO told me: “We’ve had some revenue trouble. When I talked about it with my team, I would occasionally use the phrase ‘It’s nothing that will sink the company.’ One of my employees told me that every time I said that, it made him imagine the company sinking. I stopped using the phrase.”

It’s not just metaphors that can paint the wrong picture. Some common phrases can have the same effect. When you tell someone, “No problem,” “Don’t worry,” or “Don’t hesitate to call,” for example, there’s a chance their brain will remember “problem,” “worry,” or “hesitate” instead of your desire to support them. To counter this negative effect, use phrases like “We’ll take care of it” or “Please feel free to call anytime.”

Deliver High Value

Attention is a precious resource, just like time and money. Anytime you ask people to listen to what you say or read what you’ve written, you’re asking them to
spend
both their time and their attention on you. You’re asking them to give you some of their resources.

What are you giving them in return? Whenever people are asked to expend any of their scarce resources, you can bet that they are (at least subconsciously) measuring the return on their investment. You can deliver value to others in multiple ways:

• Entertainment:
  Make your e-mail or meeting enjoyable.
  
• Information:
  Give interesting or informative content that they can use.
  
• Good feelings:
  Find ways to make them feel important or good about themselves.
  

The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay, so the higher the value ought to be. Professional speakers, when rehearsing a new presentation, will often have their first attempt
taped and transcribed, and then go over each sentence, aiming to tighten their speech as much as possible.

In fact, aiming to deliver high value for low effort brings together all the points we’ve covered in this section. When you speak or write, use few words and lots of pictures, and strive to make your communications useful, enjoyable, and even entertaining.