Confidence, intuition, and charisma. These are the raw ingredients of mastery. Oh, yes, and one more: leadership. What kind of natural leader are you? Again, just try to note your behavior without judgment in these first few weeks on the road to mastery. You need to have a realistic sense of who you are and how far you have to go in order to get the most out of this book. So study yourself and your behavior when you’re with your colleagues, family, and friends. When you make suggestions, do people generally go along with you? Do your plans, ideas, and feelings generally get implemented, acted on, and acknowledged, or do you feel ignored and misunderstood? (Location 714)
But charisma is quite simple. It’s focused emotion. (Location 846)
That’s the secret of charisma: focused emotion. That’s how great actors turn it off and on at will. They’ve trained themselves to first feel an emotion and then to focus on it to the exclusion of just about everything else. The result is that you can’t take your eyes off them. It’s not magic, but it is a technique that takes practice and hard work to master. (Location 861)
Powerful people take up more space than other people. Their unconscious goal is control, so they control the room and the people by using more of it. They sprawl, splay, and extend their arms and legs. They take a bigger piece of the room, and they take bigger rooms—hotel rooms, for example. (Location 1319)
Finally, move less—in fact, as little as possible. Like Stewart, get everyone else to come to you if you can. Stay still and say less. Let other people come onto your turf. (Location 1337)
So the process of picking a leader has more to do with having the right kind of voice than it does having the right ideas or the right physique. (Location 1709)
I see it most with women in business, and with both men and women in businesses with a heavy emphasis on being collegial. But however it happens, you must fight it. Instead, begin your phrase or sentence at your normal pitch, allow it to rise during the sentence to show passion and energy, then bring it back down by the end to show authority. (Location 1860)
Passion often links with expertise, the third aspect of influence. Indeed, you can dominate the conversation, beating out positional power, if you have both passion and expertise. The diffident expert’s voice is sometimes lost in the clamor of people wanting to be heard. So expertise without passion is not always effective, but if it’s patient, it can be the last person standing in a debate and thereby get its turn. (Location 2086)