Read The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism Online
Authors: Olivia Fox Cabane
The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (23 page)
To emanate vocal warmth, you need to do only one thing: smile, or even just imagine smiling.
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This image isn’t just powerful, it’s also frighteningly accurate. In the United States alone, 530,000 people die each year from diseases caused by smoking. This is equivalent to 1,325 crashes of a Boeing 747 (more than 3 crashes per day).
Charismatic Body Language
It was the last day of my vacation, and I intended to enjoy every minute of it. I was strolling through a small park in the center of town, drinking in the sun, when suddenly, something caught my attention.
Perched atop a white bandstand, a short, middle-aged man was making an impassioned speech. A crowd was quickly gathering, and somehow, I felt myself being drawn in, too. There was something in the manner of his speaking—his expansive and flowing gestures, the tempo of his speech—that was captivating.
For more than forty minutes, his growing audience and I were held spellbound. To this day, I have no idea what this man was speaking about. You see, this scene took place in a small town in Mexico—and my Spanish was nearly nonexistent.
FOR NEARLY AN
hour, Ronald Riggio, one of charisma’s main researchers, had been fascinated, without understanding a word of
content.
What
the speaker was saying was clearly not important to his spellbinding power.
How
he was saying it was enough.
Words are grasped first by people’s cognitive minds, their logical side, which gets to work on understanding their meaning. Body language, in contrast, affects us on a visceral, emotional level. It’s this emotional level that you need to access in order to inspire others to follow, care for, or obey you. Business guru Alan Weiss likes to say, “Logic makes people think. Emotion makes them act.” Which would you rather have? If you speak only to people’s logical mind, you’re missing half the playing field.
Charisma, which makes us feel impressed, inspired, or thrillingly special, speaks to our emotional side. It bypasses our logical thinking. Just as the feeling of awe goes beyond our understanding and touches us at an emotional level, so does charisma.
Nonverbal modes of communication are hardwired into our brains much deeper than the more recent language-processing abilities and they affect us far more strongly. When our verbal and nonverbal signals are in congruence (when they “agree” with each other), the nonverbal amplifies the verbal. When they conflict, we tend to trust the nonverbal over the verbal. If your body language is anticharismatic, it doesn’t matter how great your message is. On the other hand, with the right body language you can succeed even with an imperfect message.
In some situations, the delivery of a message has a much greater impact than the message itself. For instance, the
Harvard Business Review
detailed research showing that when negative performance reviews were accompanied by positive body language, employees received them far better than they received positive reviews delivered with negative body language.
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Our tendency to react to
how
something is said more than to
what
is said is particularly strong in high-stakes situations—whether it’s trying to win a new client, impress a new boss, or make a new friend.
In high-stakes situations we react more strongly to body language than to words because our fight-or-flight response activates and a more primal part of the brain takes over. This part of the brain does not directly comprehend words or ideas. Instead, it’s immediately impacted by body language.
Emotional Contagion
Your body language is particularly important if you’re in a position of leadership because of the process known as
emotional contagion
. Behavioral scientists define this as “the process by which the emotions expressed by one individual are ‘caught’ by another.” Charismatic people are known to be more “contagious”; they have a strong ability to transmit their emotions to others. As a leader, the emotions conveyed by your body language, even during brief, casual encounters, can have a ripple effect through your team or even your entire company.
This ripple effect is due to the mirror neurons in our brain, whose job it is to replicate or mirror in our own mind the emotions we observe in someone else. When we detect someone else’s emotions through their behaviors or facial expressions, our mirror neurons reproduce these emotions. This is what makes empathy possible.
I’m often called in by leaders with strong personalities who already have powerful charisma and need to learn how to manage their emotional contagion. We analyze what impact they’re having on whom, and then give them the skills to control it at will.
Let’s imagine that you interact with someone while in an anxious emotional state. As they read your body language, their mirror neurons fire up, mirroring that state. They go on to meet someone else, replicating the process—and your emotional state spreads. Emotional contagion “triggers arousal in others, in a sort of chain reaction.”
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Within organizations, leaders’ emotions always propagate fastest because people are strongly affected by those in a position of power (we can thank our survival instincts for this, too). Through emotional contagion, your emotions can strongly affect your followers’ effectiveness.
When positive, emotional contagion can be a wonderful thing. In controlled experimental settings, leaders’ positive emotional contagion was shown to improve not only their followers’ moods, performance, and effectiveness but also the followers’ perception of the leaders’ effectiveness.
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Emotional contagion can of course have a corresponding negative
effect, and it’s worth increasing your awareness of your own internal states, as well as your skill in handling your emotions, in order to manage the consequences of this propagation.
Chapter 12
will help you do this.
The potency of your emotional contagion is one good measure of your level of charisma. When researching
Social Intelligence,
author Daniel Goleman analyzed a video of Herb Kelleher, the charismatic cofounder of Southwest Airlines, strolling through the corridors of the airline’s hub. Goleman said, “We could practically see him activate the oscillators in each person he encountered.”
Conscious Mirroring
Have you ever noticed that people who have been married for many years often end up looking like each other? It’s actually a well-documented fact that as we spend time together, we tend to adapt to each other’s body language.
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This naturally includes our facial expressions, which end up shaping our faces in similar ways by repeatedly using the same facial muscles.
This tendency to mimic the body language of others is technically called
limbic resonance,
and it’s hardwired into the human brain. Limbic resonance is made possible thanks to a certain class of neurons called
oscillators,
which coordinate people physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. Daniel Goleman details in the
Harvard Business Review
what happens when two accomplished cellists play together. Not only do they hit their notes in unison, but, thanks to oscillators, their right brain hemispheres are more closely coordinated to each other’s than they are to the left hemispheres of their own brains!
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Imitating someone’s body language is an easy way to establish trust and rapport. This technique, which is often called
mirroring
or
mimicking,
is the conscious application of something that many charismatic people do instinctively.
When you consciously mirror someone’s body language, you activate deep instincts of trust and liking. For this reason, it can be
a great aid when you need people to open up. A former political journalist mentioned how effective mirroring was during interviews. “People get share-oriented,” he told me. They just instinctively start sharing more.
Several studies across the world have found that mirroring someone’s body language can get them to pick up your dropped items, buy your products, or give you a better deal. Mirroring even makes you more attractive to others.
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During your next few conversations, try to mirror the other person’s overall posture: the way they hold their head, how they place their feet, the shifts in their weight. If they move their left hand, move your right hand. Aim also to adapt your voice to theirs in speed, pitch, and intonation.
Because people focus primarily on themselves while interacting, they usually won’t notice that you’re mirroring unless you are exceedingly obvious about it. However, here are some ways to increase subtlety:
- Be selective: do only what feels natural to you. For instance, some gestures are gender-specific.
- Use variations in amplitude: if they make a big gesture, you could make a smaller one.
- Use lag time: let a few seconds elapse before you move into a mirrored position.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege to coach a few extraordinary individuals who dedicate their lives to improving those of others. One of my all-time favorites is Darius, the young cofounder of New Scholars, a nonprofit dedicated to creating “a Peace Corps for entrepreneurs.”
Early one morning in Nairobi, Kenya, Darius was on his way to meet the director of Africa’s largest entrepreneurial network. This was a critical moment for him, his one chance of cementing a partnership between his young organization and an industry behemoth. Darius decided that this would be the perfect place to put the mirroring technique to the test:
When we arrived, we were greeted by George, one of the organization’s executives. He invited us to the boardroom, where we made small talk over tea. I paid close attention to George while we were talking. He was sitting away from the table, legs crossed, and leaning forward. Gradually, I moved into a similar position. This had a noticeable effect: George started getting more excited, speaking faster, and getting really engaged in the conversation. So I matched his excitement and pace. This felt natural and easy.
The organization’s director, Nathan, arrived shortly thereafter. The minute he walked in, I felt the energy in the room change. It became less relaxed, more tense. Nathan sat farther away from the table, leaned far back in his chair, and crossed his legs in a different way from George. So I gradually matched his posture, moving farther from the table, leaning farther back, and recrossing my legs.
Noticing that Nathan’s tone was slow and deliberate, I matched my tone according to his. As he waved his hands occasionally to emphasize a point, I responded in kind. At one point, he turned sideways and leaned an arm on the table.
When it was my turn to speak, I inched close enough to place my arm on the table and turned sideways, too. Though I knew I was copying his moves, it still felt natural, and Nathan was obviously completely unaware of what I was doing. As I did this, I could feel the atmosphere getting more comfortable and more relaxed.
Finally, as our conversation came to a head, I asked Nathan how he saw this partnership coming together. He sat up, turned to face the table, and firmly tapped it with each point he made. My heart sank—what he had just announced was very different from what we had been hoping for. But I let him finish without interruption; and when it was my turn to speak, I sat up, faced the table, and said, “Here’s how we see it.” With each point, I firmly tapped the table just as he had.
I was shocked by what happened next. Nathan sat up, looked around the room, and agreed to every single one of our
requests, even those we didn’t think we had any hope of obtaining! I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. I don’t know if it was entirely due to the mirroring, but I can tell you that I’ve never had a meeting start the way this one did and yet end the way this one did. We got everything we wanted, without giving up anything. This is the most important deal we’ve had to date.
As Darius’s story shows, mirroring someone’s body language is often enough to achieve rapport and sometimes enough to bring them around to your point of view. Mirroring is also one of the few techniques that can help overcome a bad first impression. It’s extraordinarily effective. In fact, I can tell you that although I teach this material, the techniques still work on me even when I realize people are using them!
But what about cases in which the other person is exhibiting negative body language? Do you still mirror then? Well, it depends. In some situations, you want to first mirror their body language, then gradually lead it in a more positive direction.
Let’s say that one of your colleagues comes in to see you, clearly upset about something. She timidly taps on your open door to ask permission to enter. As she walks in, her steps are hesitant. As you invite her to tell you what’s going on, she seems anxious and drawn into herself, having trouble even finding words to express her concerns.
This is where mirroring could be useful in establishing rapport. What you could do in this situation is carefully observe her posture—the way she’s sitting, how she’s holding her head, what her shoulders are like—and gradually move into the same position. Look for rhythms. Is she nodding her head periodically? Tapping her knee? Fidgeting with a button? You can find a way to loosely mirror that, too. And, of course, match your voice to hers: adopt a similar cadence, tempo, and volume.