Do you have charisma and how to develop it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Nature has nothing to do with it. It's all about certain skills.

What is charisma

Initially, charisma was defined as a unique gift of body and spirit, available not to everyone. A little later, the opinion about her became more mundane, and charisma turned into a set of specific qualities that allow a person to influence others.

Charismatic personalities masterfully establish an emotional connection with people, change their opinions and behavior to suit their plans. Due to such abilities, they often become leaders and lead others, moreover, with their full consent.

This quality is useful to a person in any area of life, whoever he is: a prophet, senior manager or salesman.

Charismatic doctors tend to have more patients, and lectures by charismatic teachers are popular with students. Charisma determines success in politics and in the acting field, raises the level of sales.

And the best part is that this useful quality can be developed. In one experiment, just six weeks of training significantly increased the participants' charisma. Their speech became more emotional and expressive, so that both the subjects themselves and bystanders admitted that after the experiment, their performances looked much more attractive.

What is charisma

Charisma is not a unique gift, but a very specific set of skills that each person has to one degree or another.

Emotional intelligence

In most cases, human emotions prevail over reason. They form attachment, drive behavior, and are at the heart of any motivation. Therefore, emotional intelligence - the ability to manage one's own experiences and the feelings of other people - is one of the main qualities of charisma.

A charismatic person understands what emotions he is experiencing and why, knows how to sincerely and freely express them at the right time and suppress them when the situation requires the opposite.

Moreover, he has developed empathy - the ability to understand the experiences of other people. By responding to the feelings of others, a charismatic leader tunes in with them and creates the emotional connection necessary for affection.

Public speaking skills

Another important quality is the ability to structure your speech in such a way as to captivate and convince listeners and interlocutors. Here are some verbal strategies that charismatic personalities use.

• Metaphors. They simplify speech, excite emotions, fix information in memory.
• Stories and anecdotes. They make the story more lively and closer to the listener.
• Moral beliefs. They fill speech with deep meaning, arouse the sympathy of others.
• Separation of the feelings of a person or a group. Forms an emotional connection.
• Contrasts. They help to make speech brighter, to focus on what is needed.
• Rhetorical questions. They create a waiting effect when people anticipate the answer.

The non-verbal component also matters: body position, gestures, expressive facial expressions, intonation. Even the most interesting information will seem boring if you read it in one manner and at the same time stand like an idol.

Self confidence

High self-esteem and self-confidence are an essential quality of a charismatic personality. People are ready to follow someone who knows for sure what they are doing and will help them overcome their own doubts and fears.

All these qualities are equally present in charismatic people and allow them to easily arouse sympathy and achieve success in any area.

How to test your charisma

This is a difficult task. Charisma is easy to read when chatting or watching a video, but it remains a blurry concept without clearly defined boundaries.

To assess charisma, Howard S. Friedman, a professor of psychology at the University of California, came up with a test. It consists of 13 statements and allows you to evaluate one of the important qualities of a charismatic personality - non-verbal expressiveness and emotionality.

Friedman found that high scores on his test can predict a person's popularity and success in teaching, medicine, politics, and acting.

Try and you pass it. To do this, evaluate each of the statements on a nine-point scale, where 1 is “not at all about me”, and 9 is “completely about me”. Add up the resulting values.

1. When I hear good dance music, I can't stand still.
2. I have a loud and infectious laugh.
3. I can easily express my emotions over the phone.
4. I often touch the person during a conversation.
5. I like it when a lot of people are looking at me.
6. I have a very expressive facial expressions.
7. People say that I would make a good actor.
8. I prefer to stand out from the crowd.
9. I am not shy when surrounded by strangers.
10. I can make a seductive look if I want to.
11. I'm good at games like Crocodile, where you have to portray something.
12. At small parties, I am the center of attention.
13. When I like a person, I touch or hug him to show it.

The average level, typical for most people, is in the range from 56 to 86 points. And the higher the final score, the more charisma you have.

Remember, even if your scores hit the bottom, with the right effort, you can still develop charisma and become more attractive to others.

How to develop charisma

Since charisma is a combination of skills, its development also requires an integrated approach.

Improve your emotional intelligence

Track your emotions and identify what triggers them. Learn to respond consciously, not automatically. Practice empathy: listen to other people, try to imagine yourself in their place, understand what they are experiencing.

Work on expressiveness

Work hard on your speaking skills. Enrich your speech with metaphors, stories, contrasting examples. Practice expressing emotions through gestures and facial expressions.

In the charisma training experiment, some participants were initially shy about adopting new strategies. It seemed to them that it would look unnatural and stupid. However, after watching the video of their performance, they made sure that it works and does not look fake.

A good way to look at yourself from the outside: record a video of your speech, evaluate your skills and work on mistakes.

Build Your Self Confidence

As with speech, it doesn't really matter if you're confident or just pretending: people will believe it anyway. Moreover, if you portray confidence long enough, you can actually feel it.

Take at least the position of the body. It has been proven that open, expansive postures, when a person seeks to occupy the entire surrounding space, change his inner mood. They provide a sense of strength and power, reduce stress and increase risk tolerance. At first, you seem to pretend to be confident and open, and then you really feel it.

Practice these skills, and you can increase your charisma regardless of the original data.