The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (11 page)

Rewrite reality by considering a few helpful alternatives to your current perspective. For maximum effect, write down your new realities by hand and describe them in vivid detail.

For advanced practice, delve into the physical sensations of discomfort. Focusing on the sensations gives your mind something concrete to focus on, drawing your attention away from your feeling that the experience is unbearable.

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Yes, that’s his official title. His subtitle, of course, reads “Which nobody can deny.”

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Professor Srikumar Rao’s class on happiness was one of the most popular courses ever offered at Columbia Business School. The admissions process for the course was grueling.

IN THE PREVIOUS
chapter you learned how to skillfully handle the most common charisma-inhibiting obstacles. You’re now ready to create the right mental states that will help you reach your full charisma potential. You’ll learn how to increase confidence and how to emanate warmth and power—two of the three crucial components of charisma. You’ll also discover ways to craft any mental state you want, from serenity to triumph.

Visualization

Golfer Jack Nicklaus said that he never hit a shot, even during practice, without visualizing it first. For decades, professional athletes have considered visualization an essential tool, often spending hours visualizing their victory, telling their mind just what they want their body to achieve.

“There is good evidence that imagining oneself performing an
activity activates parts of the brain that are used in actually performing the activity,” 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.
¹

The brain is extraordinarily changeable: it’s constantly rewiring itself. The previously held notion that past a certain age it becomes set in its ways has now been proven to be quite dramatically wrong.
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Whenever we use our brain, we fire certain neuronal connections, and the more these connections get used, the stronger they become. We’re essentially wearing grooves into our brain—whichever mental processes are used on a consistent basis will strengthen. You can build and then strengthen whichever mental tendencies you focus on.

Mental preparation techniques have also become standard practice in Hollywood, where a technique known as Method acting is used by many of the Hollywood’s most respected stars. Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman all hail from this school of acting.

Method acting evolved to help actors with their most difficult task: getting their body language right. Consciously trying to control as much of their body language as possible was both exhausting and doomed to fail: even with years of training, it’s impossible to control the flow completely. If their internal emotions were not what they wanted the outside world to see, sooner or later, something of these underlying thoughts and feelings would show.

Method acting took a different approach. Rather than having people try to control their body language, it went straight to the body language source—the mind—and had the actors strive to
become
the characters they were aiming to play so that they would really feel the emotions they wanted to convey. Then the thousands of body language signals would flow naturally and congruently.

Because of its powerful mental and physiological effects, visualization is one of the most effective charisma-boosting tools available. The right visualization can help you increase your internal feeling of confidence as well as your ability to project it. Just by using the right mental images, your subconscious mind will send a remarkable chain reaction of confidence signals cascading through your body. In fact, you can display nearly any body language just by picking the right visualization.

The box below is a step-by-step guide to visualization that you can use whenever you want to change your internal state. You’ll practice visualizing confidence here, but later in the book you’ll find other useful exercises for visualizing warmth and empathy, or calm and serenity.

Some people find it simple to think through a visualization scenario. However, others are more sensitive to auditory cues, so here’s an alternative to visualization: select key phrases to mentally focus on. My clients have found a wide variety of phrases useful, so here are a few examples, which could help you access calm and serenity. They run the gamut of tastes and styles, so you may find that some raise your hackles while others strongly resonate:

• A week from now, or a year from now, will any of this matter?
  
• This, too, shall pass. Yes, it will.
  
• Look for little miracles unfolding right now.
  
• Love the confusion.
  
• What if you could trust the Universe, even with this?
  

Axioms like these can be a saving grace in moments of panic, when our brain goes blank and all we can remember are simple phrases. Beginning white-water rafters are taught an easy rhyme to remember—“toes to nose”—to remind them of the sequence of moves they should execute if the boat flips over. Even veteran firefighters sometimes fall back on a mantra like “Put the white stuff on the red stuff” to snap them into action during a fire.

You can also add real sensory input to your visualizations. For
instance, play music while you verbalize or subvocalize, choosing songs that you know make you feel especially energized and confident. Movie themes seem to be particularly useful. The executives I coach often mention the musical scores from
Rocky III
(“Eye of the Tiger”),
Chariots of Fire
(instrumental by Vangelis), or
Top Gun
(“Top Gun Anthem”). My personal soundtrack comes from the movie
Peter Pan:
“Flying,” by James Newton Howard. Don your headphones and let the music of your choice set the mood for whatever mental state you want to achieve.

If you’re ready to go all out, add movement to make your visualizations reach an entirely new level. Because physiology affects psychology (yes, your body affects your mind—more on this in the next chapter), creating certain movements or postures can bring up specific emotions in your mind.

Try to think of what gesture you tend to make when you achieve something, like a good golf shot, or when you get really good news. Is it the classic fist pump? Or maybe you raise both arms in the air and shout “YES!” By adding this particular gesture (and words, if any) to the end of your visualization, when your confidence is soaring, you’ll engage your entire physiology and “lock in” the triumphant feeling, maximizing the effect of the exercise.

With all of these dimensions—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—keep refining as you go along. If you feel that a particular image, phrase, movement, or song works well, tweak it a little and observe how that affects the results. Notice what happens when you zoom in on visual details, sounds, or sensations. Whether you’re hearing encouraging voices or feeling the warmth of the sun, keep making small changes. The combination of sights and sounds that works best for me has changed considerably over the years.

Visualization is truly a miracle method, helping you boost confidence, emanate more warmth, replace anxiety with calm serenity, or gain access to whichever emotion you’d like to feel and then broadcast it through your body language. In fact, it’s worth taking the time to develop and practice a go-to visualization to effectively help you regain calm and confidence. That way, during times of stress, you won’t need to come up with new imagery on the fly. You’ll already know what works for you.

Here are three more visualizations to use when you want a charisma boost before giving a presentation, attending a key meeting, or anytime you’re feeling anxious.

Just before giving a presentation:
Some of this century’s best-known speakers report using some version of visualization just before stepping into the spotlight. In fact, it would be unusual to find a great speaker who doesn’t. When clients ask me if they should use visualization before an important speech, I answer, “Only if you want it to go really well!”

After fifteen years of speaking professionally, I find that doing even thirty seconds of visualization makes a substantial difference to my performance. It greatly affects how charismatic I am on stage. In fact, every time I
don’t
run through a visualization just before stepping on stage, I regret it. Even when I know the speech so well I could say it backward, it’s worth using visualization to ensure that I get into the right charismatic mental state.

To make the visualization most effective, I try to arrive at the venue early so that I can walk around the stage and get comfortable with the space. I take the right music along with me and start the visualizations right there on stage, aiming to link confident, triumphant feelings to being in that particular environment. While listening to an uplifting, energizing soundtrack, I create mental movies, vividly imagining how splendidly the speech is going, seeing and hearing the audience’s enthusiastic response as I confidently move across the stage.

A few minutes before I’m due to walk out under the spotlights, I hide away in an unoccupied room (this is such a common practice for actors, politicians, speakers, and all other performers that a special room called the
green room
is often reserved for just this purpose) and run through my visualization, dancing around (yes, I’m serious) to my personal soundtrack.

Before important meetings:
One of the most impressive young businesswomen I know seems to always float on a cloud of confidence, and things somehow always go well for her. When Silvia goes to pitch a deal, people who know her take for granted that she’ll win the day.

Silvia recently confided that visualization is one of the secrets to her success. Before key meetings, she’ll imagine “the smiles on their faces because they liked me and they are confident about the value I’m bringing them. I’ll imagine as much detail as I can, even seeing the wrinkles around their eyes as they’re smiling.” She visualizes the whole interaction, all the way through to the firm handshakes that close the meeting, sealing the deal.

I’ve even found visualization helpful before writing important e-mails. 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.