What
is the single most powerful way to increase your persuasive connection with an
audience – and your charisma at the same time?
Listening.
When
you listen with your whole body, using your intuition or unconscious to read
the emotions of those with whom you’re communicating, the result is a
connection with the other people in the room that they experience as engaging,
fascinating, and indeed charismatic.
Why
is this the case? Why should focusing on someone else’s emotional state add to
your charisma? Technically, the outward focus that you must adopt will
contribute to your stillness, which, when it is combined with energy, is
charismatic. More than that, as
you establish and maintain a connection with the others in the room, they will
experience this as a heightened interest in you.
This
is the kind of magic that candidate Bill Clinton exhibited on the campaign
trail during his two runs for the White House. He would establish strong eye
contact with a questioner and, holding his whole body still as he focused on
the person, raise his eyebrows, open his eyes, and nod. All the while, he’d be
moving as close as he could to the questioner. The effect was powerful, partly
because of Clinton’s technical mastery of all the details of gesture but mostly
because of the quality of his listening. The strength of the bond that he would
establish with one questioner would, by proxy, be felt by all of the people in
the room.
That’s charisma.
Think
of it this way. Your job as a persuasive leader communicating with an
individual or group of people is most often to move them to some kind of
action. To do that, you have to change their minds. You’re taking them, in
effect, from point A to point B. That movement is not only intellectual but
also, and more fundamentally, emotional. So your job as a listener is to figure
out what your audience’s emotional state is at the beginning of your
communication and then monitor the progress of that emotional state as you move
them on the journey to action.
To
put it as simply as possible, where are they emotionally when you first meet
with them, and where are they when you’re done? If you’ve been persuasive,
you’ve moved them from passive acceptance of the current condition, or anger at
it, or frustration with it, to a refocused energy about changing it. The act of
listening to your audience, whether of one or one thousand, is monitoring that
progress from passive to active, from why to how, from emotion turned inward to
emotion turned outward.
What you’ll find when you do the work of listening hard to the people you communicate with is that you will quickly become more attuned to others’ emotional states and they will soon become more enthralled with you. They will welcome you showing up because you will be the leader who pays the most attention to them, and that commodity is as scarce as platinum in this information-saturated but emotionally distant age.
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