The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (8 page)

Knowing how to remove the stigma of shame from difficult emotions and experiences is absolutely critical to charisma. Often, it’s not what we feel that is the most painful—it’s our
shame
about feeling this way that really does the damage. Once we see this feeling as normal and even something to be expected, it becomes much easier to bear. As with any discomfort or difficult feeling, it is helpful to remember that shame is a standard part of the human experience, and that
everyone
feels it from time to time.

Putting It into Practice: Destigmatizing Discomfort

The next time an uncomfortable emotion is bothering you, try this step-by-step guide to destigmatizing:

  1. Remember that uncomfortable emotions are normal, natural, and simply a legacy of our survival instincts. We all experience them from time to time.
  2. Dedramatize: this is a common part of human experience that happens every day.
  3. Think of others who’ve gone through this before, especially people you admire.
  4. See it as one burden shared by many. You are part of a community of human beings experiencing this one feeling at this very moment.

What you’ve just learned is how to destigmatize internal discomfort, which increases your resiliency to charisma-impairing negativity. Just by gaining these tools, you’ve raised your charisma level. These are important tools you’ll be using repeatedly throughout the rest of the book.

Step Two: Neutralize Negativity

Once you’ve destigmatized the experience, the next step in handling internal negativity is to neutralize negative thoughts. The best way to do this is to realize that your thoughts aren’t necessarily accurate at all.

Do you remember Tom’s and Paul’s experience at the restaurant caused by the itchy black suit? Even when it seems clear that someone is reacting negatively to us, what we’re seeing in their face might have nothing to do with us. What’s going on that we can’t see? Are they hungry, sick, or tired? Maybe they’re in some kind of mental or physical discomfort that they’re struggling to manage.

The next time you think you see coldness or reservation in someone’s face while they’re talking to you, try to remember that it could simply be the visible signs of their internal discomfort. You might be catching the surface tremors of an internal tempest, and there’s a good chance that it has nothing to do with how they feel about you or what you’ve just said.

This reminder helps me on a regular basis. When I’m involved in a conversation and I catch a tone of annoyance or impatience in someone’s voice, or when I see a fleeting negative expression cross their face, sometimes I still feel instinctively dismayed. It’s hard not to assume that what I’ve just seen is a reaction to what I’ve just said. But right on the heels of this instinctive reaction comes the recognition that whatever I’ve seen may well be the sign of how they’re feeling about themselves, an itchy wool suit, or something else entirely.

One of the main reasons we’re so affected by our negative thoughts is that we think our mind has an accurate grasp on reality, and that its conclusions are generally valid. This, however, is a fallacy. Our mind’s view of reality can be, and often is, completely distorted.

In one well-known study, Harvard researchers asked the participants to watch a short video in which two groups of people passed around a basketball. They were asked to count the number of passes made by one of the teams. Partway through the video, a woman walked onto the court wearing a full gorilla suit.

After watching the video, the participants were asked if they saw
anything out of the ordinary take place. In most groups more than half missed the gorilla even though it had waved its arms at the camera!
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Think you’d do better? You can try this out for yourself:

Right now, look around the room and notice everything that’s blue.

Now keep your eyes glued to this page. Without lifting your eyes, think of everything in the room that is red.

Really. Bear with me. Give it your best try.

Now look around. Do you see a lot more red all of a sudden?

Why did this happen? We have a limited capacity for conscious attention, which constrains how much we can be aware of at any particular time. Of the millions of visual inputs our eyes take in every moment, we consciously perceive very few. The conscious awareness of absolutely everything around us would be overwhelming.

To deal with this, our brain filters for relevant information—either what it considers to be important or what we’ve consciously asked it to pay attention to. Through this process, our mind does not provide us with a complete, accurate representation of reality. Because it has to filter, it gives us an incomplete view, presenting only some elements and withholding all others.

Most of the time, the elements we’re missing don’t matter, and the picture we get is fairly close to reality. But sometimes our mind will present us with a seriously distorted view of reality. And the distortion often skews negative because the elements that our danger-focused brain deems important are usually the most negative ones. This tendency is called the
negativity bias,
and here’s how it can play out in practice:

Mary is a young graphic designer who for the first time is leading a project for one of her firm’s biggest clients. A few weeks after the project starts, she gets a call from Jim, her counterpart within the client. Jim tells her: “Listen, you know I’m your biggest fan. I’ve been raving about you and your brilliant work to everyone within earshot. But somehow, my boss doesn’t get it. I guess he just wasn’t impressed when you guys first met, and he hasn’t gotten a chance to change his mind.” Jim goes on to explain that he’d like Mary to be in charge of all of his company’s design work, and that he thinks her work is so
good, he’s sure his boss will be wowed when he sees it again. Therefore, he’d like her to present her work at the company’s next management meeting.

There are many positive elements Mary’s mind could focus on. Her client says he’s a big fan of hers, her work is “brilliant,” and he wants her to handle all of his company’s projects. Mary’s mind
could
spend the next few hours reveling in her client’s praises, but that’s not how most minds work. Despite the high positive-to-negative ratio, what does Mary’s mind focus on? The one negative element: the fact that Jim’s boss hadn’t been impressed with her when they first met. If Mary gets stuck focusing on the one negative in a very positive scenario, you can imagine how unfortunate this could be for her confidence level, and thus her charisma level, when pitching day comes around.

When your brain spins negative scenarios, remind yourself that you may not be getting an accurate perception of reality. Your brain might be following its negativity bias, playing up some elements more than others, or omitting some positives entirely.

Just like an optical illusion that tricks your eyes into seeing things that aren’t real, your mind can experience thought illusions that make you feel certain an inaccurate thought is true.

Cognitive scientist Steven Hayes suggests that we see negative thoughts as graffiti on a wall. If you’re walking down the street and you see graffiti, you may find it an ugly sight, but just because you see an ugly sight doesn’t mean you’re an ugly person.

Imagine strolling along the paths of your mind. Suddenly, you notice an unpleasant thought. See it as graffiti on the wall. That’s all it is, graffiti—not a verdict on what kind of person you are.

You can also see thoughts as flickers of electricity crackling on the surface of your mind. Thoughts, in fact, have no tangible substance: they’re just little electrical impulses sent from one part of your brain to another.

Understanding that my thoughts are not necessarily valid was a revelation for me. It took a lot of practice, but these days, neutralizing unhelpful negative thoughts often happens so fast that I take it for granted. It has become an automatic reflex that often kicks in as soon as I notice an unhelpful thought that could create internal negativity.

Some of my clients like to ask themselves, “What’s the worst that can happen?” As Churchill said, failure is seldom fatal, and just realizing that even the worst-case scenario is survivable can bolster your confidence. Although for some people this can backfire—imagining the worst-case scenario increases their anxiety—it’s worth a try to see whether it works for you.

Putting It into Practice:
Neutralizing Negativity

Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well.

♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive.

♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain.

♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it.

♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.”

♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment.

♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away.

♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive.

♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did.

We’re learning here to
neutralize
unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you
not
to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind.

Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes
not
thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward.

Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it.

You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually
replace
it with a different internal reality.

Step Three: Rewrite Reality

It’s eight
A.M
. on a Monday morning and you’re driving on the freeway, en route to an important meeting. You’ll be giving a thirty-minute presentation that could change the course of your career. You’re focused and calm. All of a sudden, a large black car cuts in front of you, swerving into your lane. With your heart pounding and your hands gripping the steering wheel, you stomp on the brake. Not only did this car cut in front of you without signaling, it’s now speeding up and slowing down erratically, nearly causing you to rear-end it. And then it swerves out of your lane again, making the car to your right screech its tires. What an idiot, reckless driver! Anger surges through your veins.

What happened to your body during this incident? A fight-or-flight response made your heartbeat accelerate, your muscles tighten, and stress hormones flood your system. Now you’re pumped up with stress and anger. You know you need to get back into a charismatic mental and physical state in time for your presentation, but you have only a few minutes, and you can’t get that idiot driver out of your mind.

Once the fight-or-flight response is aroused, it’s hard to quiet down. Anger is a difficult emotion to flush out of your system—this is why an unpleasant traffic encounter in the morning can stay on your mind for hours and sometimes all day.

If you aimed to simply suppress the anger, you would pay a high price. When people are induced into a negative emotional state and then asked to
suppress
negative emotions, their internal negative experience often remains unchanged and they sustain elevated stress responses in their brain and cardiovascular system.
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But what if you happened to learn that this apparently reckless driver was actually a distraught mother whose baby was choking in the backseat, and she was desperately trying to pull over into the breakdown lane while reaching back to save her baby’s life?

Would that immediately reduce your anger?

For most people, it would.

Deciding to change your belief about what happened (technically called
cognitive reappraisal
) effectively decreases the brain’s stress levels. This came to light through research performed at Stanford using functional MRI machines. The researchers concluded that deciding to change beliefs was a far more effective and healthier solution than attempting to repress or ignore emotions.
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