Omar Usman – Personal Magnetism 3 Things I Learned from the Book Charisma Myth Olivia Fox Cabane
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In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book Charisma Myth by Olivia
Fox. Now this book is really fascinating.
The basic premise is is charisma something that's
innate, genetic, something that some people have it,
some people don't,
or
can it be deconstructed
and learned by anybody? Now obviously her answer
is that it can be learned by anybody.
So the first thing I got from this
book really
was the definition of charisma and understanding what
it actually is. She says charisma is composed
of 3 of 3 parts:
presence,
high warmth, and high power. Those are the
3 things that someone who's charismatic
has to basically exude or give off to
others. Now one thing that's important to note
is what Charisma is not. It's not an
effervescent,
bubbly, outgoing, gregarious personality that we often associate
with being charismatic.
But it's these three characteristics
that basically make someone magnetic. They make people
drawn to them. One example that she gives
is if you're in a room and you
notice that everyone in the room is taking
their cues from a particular person,
without them introducing themselves as such, you know
that that's the leader. That's
them exuding their power just by the cues
of the other people in the room.
So let's break these down. Presence is the
first one. Now presence is what most people
want to work on. An executive will say,
I need to establish an executive presence,
or I need to have the presence of
a leader.
That's something that they want to work on.
Now when it comes to just presence
in a at a personal level, we know
this very well. It's when we're speaking to
someone and they're distracted. Now sometimes it's obvious
as them being on the phone, right, carrying
on another conversation while speaking to us, we
know that they're not fully present. Another way
that this happens when we're speaking with someone
and we can tell that something's wrong, something's
off. They're not fully there. Their mind, you
know, their mind is wandering, or they're going
through the motions, or something else,
and so we know that that person was
not fully present with us.
The challenge then is really, how do I
make sure that I'm doing the things to
be present for other people and not be
that distracted person?
And it's even more challenging because society is
always pushing us to being distracted. We're in
the state of what she calls in the
book, constant partial attention
with everything that we do. So she gives
some tips and tricks on how to be
more present in the moment. One of them
is very simple. If she says, be self
critical and evaluate yourself, if you notice that
your mind is wandering, if you notice that
you're doing something else, then stop and take
a breath,
and refocus,
and make yourself present in that moment again.
Because the bar of entry is so low,
because most people by default aren't present in
conversations, after a 5 minute conversation of being
present with someone, you can create a wow
factor. Now the other components of of charisma
are high power and high warmth, and this
is just giving off the impression that you
have obviously power, the ability to do things,
the ability to affect the world around you,
and then warmth is basically the goodwill that
you'll do those things for the right reasons.
When someone has high power,
but no but not high warmth,
then that person usually comes across as arrogant
or standoffish. We've all met people like that.
On the other side, if someone has high
warmth,
but they don't have power,
they often come across as overeager or subservient,
and both of those are turn offs for
most people. We tend to seek out people
who have both high warmth and high power.
The second thing that I learned from this
book, and this was a huge game changer
for me,
and that is that body language is involuntary,
but it can still be controlled. Now that
sounds like a very contradictory premise, that if
your body language is involuntary, how do you
how can you control
it? And this is where the book is
really really interesting. So she talks about a
study that the MIT Media Lab did, where
they predicted with 87%
accuracy,
watching people on the phone doing business deals,
you know, business pitches, sales calls, negotiations, all
these different things,
and with 87%
accuracy predicted who came out on top without
hearing a single word of the conversation,
purely observed by body language. That shouldn't really
come as a surprise. We've all heard things
like, you know, 80% of communication is nonverbal.
It's not what you say, it's how you
make people feel and all these different things.
Well, there's a lot of truth to those,
but how do you control it? That's the
real question. And see, we've all heard speeches,
we've all heard speakers
where you go in and you sit, and
you come out, and there might not have
been anything wrong with the talk. You might
hear a recording,
and technically everything's correct, everything's perfect, there's no
mistakes, there's nothing that you can nitpick on,
but still, you come out of that saying,
I got a bad vibe, I got a
bad feeling, something didn't connect, something didn't feel
right,
I just got a bad feeling about it.
Right? All these different things that we say,
we can't explain why, but something turned us
off. And even though we can't maybe technically
discredit what someone said, the fact that we
felt that way
discredits the person in our eyes moving forward.
On the flip side, we've all heard people
that
from a technical perspective,
their talk may not have been great. They
might not have spoken well, they may have
bad grammar, bad presentation skills, all these different
things,
but we forgive those mistakes
because we felt connected with what they had
to say. We got a good vibe from
them. Now, how do you control it? See,
to control it, we've got we have to
understand that our body
physically manifests
what's in our mind. So what we think
has a physical reaction. Let me give you
an example.
If I tell you right now to imagine
someone taking their long fingernails
and scratching them slowly down a chalkboard,
it produces a visceral fit. Like you said,
you feel a shiver go up your spine.
Like you cringe
at the thought of those nails on the
chalkboard. Every time I say that phrase, we
cringe. There's a physical reaction
to something that's in our mind. And so
when we're speaking with someone, the mental state
that we're in, the way that we view
the person, the way that we feel about
them, all of those things
come out in our body language.
So when it comes to speaking, for example,
if you view your audience with disdain, or
you view yourself as better than them, or
that maybe a conversation is a waste of
time, or if you view someone as beneath
you, or a waste of time, or something
like that, it doesn't matter what you're saying,
that message will be non verbally communicated through
your, you know, facial expressions, your hand gestures,
all these different things that you might not
be thinking about. There's a really famous video,
and I'll link to it in the description
below, from the 1992 presidential debates, and there's
a particular question
that was posed to the candidates,
and I want you to watch the video
in the description on mute.
Watch it on mute first, and then go
back and watch it with the words in
there.
When you watch it on mute, you'll start
to see when Bush is answering the question
that he's flustered, he's annoyed, he's angry, and
you see him, like, shake his hands, point
his fingers, and take very, you know, hard
movements with his body.
And there's no way that he's thinking in
his head, let me shake my hand at
this person, let me look annoyed right now.
It just happens throughout the course of talking.
On the flip side, you'll see when Clinton
gets up to talk that he projects warmth
and kindness,
even though you don't hear what he's saying,
you can tell that that's what's happening. That's
the power of your body language
being manifested from the mental state that you're
in. So controlling your mental state is not
just how you view and what you think
about the person that you're speaking to or
the audience that you're speaking to, but it's
also just what type of mood are you
in. See, she gives an example in the
book that that really
resonated with me. She says, imagine that you're
driving to work, and some jerk cuts you
off, you almost get into a wreck, and,
you know, it just when you get to
work, it's ruined your day. All you can
think about is this guy that almost got
you into a car accident, and how he
should have been going slow, or he should
have been doing this, and it affects your
general mood and your demeanor. And so when
people come and talk to you, you're a
little bit more short-tempered,
you're a little bit more curt than normal,
you're, you know, all these different things are
manifesting themselves as the day goes on in
your body language, in the way that you're
dealing with people.
You might not realize it or you might
even say I have a valid excuse,
but the reality is the people that you're
speaking to aren't having that connection. On the
flip side, she says you can rewrite reality.
And now that sounds like really crazy, but
really what it is is you're making an
excuse for the person. So she says, when
you get cut
off, imagine
what if you just told yourself that, oh,
I got cut off. You know what? That
was probably a distraught mother who needed to
get her kid to the hospital right away.
And if if that was me, I probably
would have done the same thing. And if
I'm able to basically
take this incident of getting cut off on
the road and almost getting into a car
wreck, I have 2 ways of responding to
it. 1, I can let the negativity fester,
or 2,
I can
create a logical excuse, a valid excuse, rewrite
the reality of what happened, say, oh, you
know what? It was a distraught mother, her
kid needed help, I would have done the
same thing. Now all of a sudden that
incident is over. It's not affecting my mental
state anymore, and I'm back to normal. And
this is why people recommend doing gratitude exercises
that stop and take some time to just
be thankful for the things that you have,
the things that we overlook, the things that
we take for granted, because the more grateful
that you are, the more that it affects
your mental state, and the more that you
shift your mental state to an of gratitude
and kindness,
the more that it enables you to make
that connection, make that
relationship with somebody. See, when we talk about
Christmas, it's not just being charismatic for the
sake of it, it's establishing relationships, it's increasing
influences, increasing leadership, it's increasing your ability to
do more, whether that's sales or, you know,
getting buy in for a certain initiative. All
these different things, a lot of them come
down to your ability to connect with people,
and that's why it's so important. The third
thing that I learned from this book was
the idea of practicing compassion.
We talked earlier about high warmth, like, how
do you develop warmth with someone? So that's
that aspect of goodwill. So goodwill is when
you're speaking to someone and you just you
wish good for them. It's like, oh, hey,
I hope you have a good day. That's
goodwill.
A step beyond that is empathy. And empathy
is a big buzzword now, and it's basically
your ability to identify with someone else's situation,
to be able to put yourself
in someone else's shoes and see things from
their perspective. So now you understand what they're
going through. Jesus compassion
is the 3rd level beyond that is combining
the 2. It's
understanding
someone's situation,
while still wanting what's best for them. And
when you combine those and you have that
compassion,
that creates the warmth
the warmth that we're trying to portray. The
catch is this is something that can't be
faked. See, when we talk about things like
body language and warmth, you can easily say,
well, you know what? As long as you
smile at people and you speak to them,
you'll accomplish that.
But everyone can tell the difference between a
fake smile and a real smile. If you
don't genuinely
like and care for the people that you're
dealing with, you won't be able to project
warmth, and this is an integral part of
character.
I talked about character a little bit when
I went through 3 things I learned from
the book Do Over by John Acuff. I'll
link to the video. It'll be in the
description, but I talked about part of your
career savings account is having that high character.
And in this book, we're learning that in
order to have character, in order to project
that warmth, to be that type of person
that other people want to be around, you
have to genuinely care about them
mentally. Your mental state has to be one
of care, concern, empathy, and goodwill
That will manifest itself in your interaction with
someone, and they'll be able to sense from
those from that nonverbal communication
that you are genuine, that you're establishing a
genuine relationship, and that will help you connect
and move forward. That's 3 things I learned
from the book. Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox.
There's a link to get the book in
the description. I highly recommend reading this book.
It was a game changer for me. Make
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