The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (13 page)

So this is how you can access gratitude for life. Gratitude is both a great first step toward warmth and a solid technique to get back into a good mental state even in the midst of a difficult situation. Simply considering the possibility of gratitude or looking for small things to appreciate will send a positive change sweeping through your body language. As an added bonus, it may also increase your sense of security and confidence, thus improving your mental performance.

Step Two: Goodwill and Compassion

Have you ever been with someone who you felt truly had your best interests at heart? How did that feel? You likely experienced nice, warm feelings. Goodwill is a highly effective way both to project
warmth and to create a feeling of warmth in others. When you truly focus on someone’s well-being, you feel more connected to them, it shows across your face, and people perceive you as someone full of warmth. Your charisma quotient soars.

Goodwill is the second step on the road to accessing warmth and, ultimately, charisma. Using goodwill in your daily interactions can instantly infuse your body language with more warmth, kindness, care, and compassion—all very charismatic qualities.

I’ve often heard people say of meeting the highly charismatic Bill Clinton: “He makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world for him.” I know that every time I get myself into a state of goodwill, I feel an instant shift in the interaction; people immediately warm up and seem to like me more.

Goodwill improves how you feel as it floods your system with oxytocin and serotonin, both wonderful feel-good chemicals. In addition, in an interesting way, it lessens our need to make the interaction succeed. When our only aim is to broadcast goodwill, it takes the pressure off. We’re no longer striving, struggling, pushing for things to go in a certain direction. And since we’re less concerned about how the interaction goes, we can both feel and project more charismatic confidence.

Goodwill is the simple state of wishing others well. You can think of it as a mental muscle that can be strengthened through practice. Even if your goodwill muscles have atrophied, you can still build them back up. A recent study from the Wiseman Institute using functional MRI scans showed that these positive states could be learned, just like playing a musical instrument or being proficient at a sport. The scans revealed that the corresponding brain circuits were “dramatically changed” through training.

One simple but effective way to start is to try to find three things you like about the person you want to feel goodwill toward. No matter whom it is you’re talking to, find three things to appreciate or approve of—even if these are as small as “their shoes are shined” or “they were on time.” When you start searching for positive elements, your mental state changes accordingly and then sweeps through your body language.

Below are more intense goodwill exercises to experiment with. For some people, they work instantly. For others, they feel alien. Just try them out—if these don’t work for you, we’ll have others for you to experiment with.

First, a visualization. This one comes from neuroscientist Dr. Privahini Bradoo, a highly charismatic person whose radiating warmth and happiness I’ve long admired. I was grateful when she shared one of her secrets with me: in any interaction, imagine the person you’re speaking to, and all those around you, as having invisible angel wings.

This can help shift your perspective. If even for a split second you can see someone as a fundamentally good being, this will soften and warm your emotional reaction toward them, changing your entire body language. So give it a try: as you’re walking around, or driving around, see people with angel wings walking and driving. It’s worth imagining yourself with wings, too. Imagine that you’re all a team of angels working together, all doing your wholehearted best. Many of my coaching clients (even hardened senior executives) have told me how extraordinarily effective this visualization has been for them. They can instantly feel more internal presence and warmth, and I can see a great increase in the amount of both presence and warmth that their body language projects.

If you respond better to auditory guides, try a few different phrases. For instance, while looking at someone, think,
I like you. And I like you just for you.
Or try to remember this guideline:
Just love as much as you can from wherever you are
. Remind yourself of these maxims several times a day, and notice the shift this can make in your mind and body. Another saying people often find equally effective:
Of all the options open to me right now, which one would bring the most love into this world?

For some people, these three techniques are all they need to feel goodwill and, thus, charisma-enhancing warmth. For them, simply focusing on wishing others well helps them to access warmth. For others, it may not be enough. Perhaps the person we’d like to show goodwill toward is being cantankerous. Perhaps we’re feeling annoyed or resentful toward them. Or perhaps they just feel too remote.

In these cases, try going a step beyond goodwill to empathy and compassion.

• Goodwill means that you wish someone well without necessarily knowing how they’re feeling.
  
• Empathy means that you understand what they feel; perhaps you’ve had a similar experience in the past.
  
• Compassion is empathy plus goodwill: you understand how they feel, and you wish them well.
  

Paul Gilbert, one of the main researchers in the field of compassion, describes the process of accessing compassion as follows: first comes
empathy,
the ability to understand what someone is feeling, to detect distress; second,
sympathy,
being emotionally moved by distress; and third,
compassion,
which arises with the desire to care for the well-being of the distressed person.

The good news is that we have a natural tendency for compassion; it’s profoundly hardwired into our brains, even deeper and more strongly than cognitive abilities. Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson asserts that humans are by far the most empathetic species on the planet. You can think your way into compassion even if you don’t naturally feel it, Hanson assures us.

Your
willingness
to focus on others’ well-being is all you need to positively change your body language. This will be enough to give people the feeling that you really care about them, and is one of the core components of charisma.

You learn to swim by swimming. And you learn to be compassionate by practicing compassion, even if it feels awkward at first. Try the exercise on the following page to grow your capacity for compassion.

* * *

Though it may feel awkward, uncomfortable, or downright mushy, goodwill and compassion truly are valuable business skills—even in fields as dry as accounting. For Tom Schiro, one of the key executives at Deloitte, compassion is one of the top three qualities he seeks when evaluating potential leaders, and he sees it as a core tenet of charisma. Angel Martinez, chairman of the multinational conglomerate Deckers Outdoors, agrees. “Embedded in the notion of charisma is empathy,” he told me. “I don’t see how you can be an effective leader without this ability.”

So that’s how you can effectively access goodwill and compassion for others. Now let’s look at the most personal, and often the most challenging, form of compassion: compassion for yourself.

Step Three: Self-Compassion

Helen was clearly very bright. She could make forceful and persuasive arguments, and she came across as organized, trustworthy, and a good listener, intensely focused on what people were saying. But she wasn’t charismatic, and she realized it. “I know I’m
interesting,
” she told me. “I’m a good listener, and a good conversationalist. But I don’t think I’m
likable,
and I’m definitely not charismatic.”

Helen had plenty of self-confidence. So what was she lacking? Warmth. People were impressed by how much she knew, but they didn’t feel cared for. Helen couldn’t emanate warmth because she had a hard time feeling it—whether for others or for herself. Instead, she usually felt a little alienated, disconnected. In our first meeting together, she very sincerely wondered aloud, “Why would people like me? Even I don’t find myself likable.” As you can imagine, this cold internal message resonated in her head, played across her body language, and diminished how much warmth she could emanate.

For Helen, the path to charisma was through
self
-warmth. Warmth as we’ve described it so far is directed outward—toward other people, or toward life in general. But warmth can also be directed inward, toward ourselves. This self-directed warmth is called
self-compassion,
and though it can sound (and feel) uncomfortable, it can be a life-changing (and certainly charisma-enhancing) practice.

First, let’s distinguish three key concepts:

Self-confidence
is our belief in our ability to do or to learn how to do something.

Self-esteem
is how much we approve of or value ourselves. It’s often a comparison-based evaluation (whether measured against other people or against our own internal standards for approval).

Self-compassion
is how much warmth we can have for ourselves, especially when we’re going through a difficult experience.

It’s quite possible for people to have high self-confidence but low
self-esteem and very low self-compassion. Like Helen, these people may consider themselves fairly competent, but they don’t necessarily like themselves any more for it, and they can be very hard on themselves when they don’t succeed.

Recent behavioral science research indicates that it may be healthier to focus on self-compassion than on self-esteem.
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The former is based on self-acceptance, the latter on self-evaluation and social comparison. Self-esteem is more of a roller coaster, contingent on how we believe we compare to others. It also tends to correlate with narcissism.

Individuals who score high on self-compassion scales demonstrate greater emotional resilience to daily difficulties and fewer negative reactions to difficult situations, such as receiving unflattering feedback.
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Higher self-compassion predicts a greater sense of personal responsibility for the outcome of events: it helps predict levels of accountability. People who score high on self-compassion also have a lower tendency for denial. This makes sense: personal mistakes would generate less self-criticism, so people would be more willing to admit to them.

When they hear the term
self-compassion,
people often assume it is synonymous with self-indulgence or self-pity.
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Surprisingly, the opposite is true. Solid behavioral science research shows that the higher one’s level of self-compassion, the lower one’s level of self-pity. You can think of the difference between the two this way: self-compassion is feeling that what happened to you is unfortunate, whereas self-pity is feeling that what happened to you is unfair. In this way, self-pity can lead to resentment or bitterness, and to feeling more isolated and alienated. In contrast, self-compassion often leads to increased feelings of connectedness.

Self-compassion is what helps us forgive ourselves when we’ve fallen short; it’s what prevents internal criticism from taking over and playing across our face, ruining our charisma potential. In this way, self-compassion is critical to emanating warmth.

Interestingly, self-compassion can also help you emanate greater self-confidence. One of my clients was a high-performing, high-achieving bank executive who was always incredibly hard on himself.
In our very first session, Brian blurted out: “You know, that inner critic thing, man, it’s a real problem for me.” He told me he could feel his internal critic nitpicking every imperfection throughout his day.

Within minutes of trying the self-compassion technique I suggested, Brian already felt a difference. He told me: “I felt an immediate effect. I exhaled, felt relief, my chest expanded. I immediately had more presence, I felt myself being more of an ‘alpha male’ taking up more space!” Because self-compassion dispels the inner critical voice that affects body language, it can actually give you a more expansive, confident posture. For Brian, paradoxically, self-compassion was the route to being perceived as more of a confident alpha male.

Self-compassion delivers an impressive array of benefits: decreased anxiety, depression, and self-criticism; improved relationships and greater feelings of social connectedness and satisfaction with life; increased ability to handle negative events; and even improved immune system functioning.
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