Charismatic Communication – The Seven Keys to a Charismatic Voice

There are widely shared prototypes on the qualities that constitute leadership and leaders. Individuals who ‘fit’ universal categories, who look and sound the part in a particular culture, will be more readily embraced by audiences than those who don’t. In practical terms what this means is that if you want people to take notice of what you say, you have to project a visual and vocal image that meets as closely as possible the expectations of your target audience.

Research has shown that when people encounter you as a leader, speaker, or media spokesperson for the first time, they will scrutinise rapidly your looks and appearance and form an impression in seconds. They will scan your face and eyes first, make a judgement and move on to your body. This quick appraisal is usually followed by attention to your clothing and manner of dress, on which further assessments are made. They will then tune into your voice and notice your vocal quality and tone. If you fit their categories and you’re given the thumbs up, they may then choose to listen to what you’re actually saying.

The voice is one of the most valuable, albeit neglected, facets of image building. As an oratorical tool, it gives form, colour and meaning to what we say. Oddly, we find it easier to tell others if they’re speaking too fast, at a higher than optimal pitch, or too softly, for example, than to hear and correct our own deficiencies.

There are seven important elements to consider when building a charismatic voice:

Dynamic Range: How loud the volume of the voice is. Your aim should be to be heard without shouting. You should never walk into a room voice first, but should have the flexibility to lower and raise your volume to match the moment and the content.

Be multi-dynamic .The loudness range you employ in everyday speech varies enormously according to circumstances. Avoid, at all costs, being mono-dynamic. A boring speaker who sends an audience to sleep is most likely to be mono-dynamic (one loudness) rather than monotonic (one pitch) So, be louder, be softer, and make sure there is plenty of variation, but don't yell.

Resonance: Resonance occurs when the source of vibration (the vocal folds or chords) set up vibrations in other parts of your body. Your primary resonating structures (the parts of your body where sound waves directly or indirectly cause vibration) are your teeth, hard palate, nasal bone, cheekbones, sinuses, forehead, and cranium. If you resonate efficiently, the vibrations can continue to other parts of your body such as the rib cage and the spinal vertebrae. Speakers with well-trained voices ‘feel’ their voices all over their bodies.

Few of us use our full powers of resonance, thereby rarely ever reaching our potential of producing rich, beautiful, balanced and uninhibited sound. In fact, most speakers with untrained voices use about half or fewer of their resonating areas. Voices that don’t achieve full resonance potential, or that centre on a couple of resonators, usually sound a little chesty, tinny, thin, or nasal.

Read a book on voice production and practice balancing your resonators. Or, seek professional guidance from a voice specialist on how to build a rich and resonant voice. Everyone has the potential to create a mellifluous and infectious voice – you simply need to know how to release its power.

Tone: The characteristics of a sound. A cow mooing has a different sound/tone than a dog growling. A voice that carries consternation can unsettle an audience, while a voice that carries humour or mischievousness can get an audience to smile. Effective speakers develop tonal flexibility raising and lowering the tone of their voices for emphasis and de-emphasis and for creating the right tonal ambience for their messages.

Two crucial elements of tone are Range and Energy. If you have a limited range as many people do and swing between three and five notes to colour your communication, most people will interpret your voice as being flat.

The typical response from people with a limited range and energy when their voices are recorded and played back is “My voice sounds so boring!” And so it does. If your range is repressed, and if the energy level is constant or weak, your voice may not sound boring on the inside because you can hear as well as feel its energy.

The voice you hear on a recording is the voice everyone else hears, and it can put people to sleep better than any proprietary medicine if it reflects a limited range. Remember that boring teacher or lecturer who made his subject about as interesting as Donald Rumsfeld’s wardrobe ? Or the public speaker who spoke with such flat tones that she cured an entire group of septuagenarians of their insomnia? They did it with tonal inflexibility. Unless you want to become celebrated as public speaking’s answer to mogadon, stretch your vocal range and vary your energy levels..

Vocal Pitch: How high or low an individual’s resting voice is. Bill Clinton has a relatively light voice; Meryl Streep has a middle pitch, while Morgan Freeman has a very deep base voice. Every speaker has a range of notes from which they can draw. Even a light voice can be powerful if it resonates.

Many speakers automatically raise the pitch of their voice when they confront a microphone or begin speaking in front of an audience. This habit is often ingrained and may be caused by a combination of fear (stage fright) and the mistaken belief that the voice must be raised when you speak to an audience. If you begin speaking at a higher pitch, where are you going to go when you need to emphasise, or colour, your words - further upward into falsetto? Modern microphones make it unnecessary to sound as if you’re conducting a Transatlantic conversation entirely without the aid of technology.

Other speakers drop their pitch and speak from the bottom end of their range in the mistaken belief that they will deliver multiple ‘eargasms’ to their audiences. Males are particular offenders in forcing the voice deeper into the throat and chest. Some image advisers counsel their clients to drop their voice, but this is not the answer to adding authority to the voice.

Contrary to some beliefs, faked deep voices do not necessarily advertise high sperm counts and sexual prowess. If anything, they communicate sexual insecurity or gender ambivalence. The key to finding your best voice is to make the pitch compatible with the emotion being expressed and use tonal range to colour the words that need to be stressed.


Pace: This relates to the length of each sound we intone. Talking at a Gattling gun rate causes words and syllables to sound staccato, while talking slowly lengthens them, and, at extremes, makes you sound as though you were born in the Ozark Mountains.

Varying the pace, that is, walking, trotting, cantering and even galloping at times, evokes greater audience commitment because diversity stimulates attention. Pace also connects directly to emotion. For grave pronouncements pace tends to be slow, and for excitement it tends to be fast.

Silence: Sometimes more can be said with silence than all the words in the dictionary. Silence is one of the great arts of communication. Cicero said 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.'
A pause effectively used can be of immense dramatic value. See how long you can pause before your alarm system is triggered, and then pause a little longer. The rules of pause are easy to integrate into your presentation or speech patterns:

A mini pause is about a half second in duration. It allows you to break your sentences into chunks or pieces of meaning. They help your audience absorb different ideas contained in your sentences or content.

A segment pause lasts around one to two seconds. You hear newsreaders use segment pause between stories so as to indicate contrast between one story and the next. This enables your listeners to avoid confusing one idea with another

A unit pause is between two and four seconds in duration. It allows your listeners time to let an important idea sink in and flags to them that something significant or momentous has been said.

A dramatic pause can last from a second to about five seconds. This form of pause can be used before or after important words or phrases. It can also be used to get your audience to fill in a word before you have said it.

Emotional Fingerprinting: Some people call this Emphasis but I believe that emphasis is too narrow a definition to describe what one actually has to do to create true meaning through the delivery of words. Emphasis describes the colour we apply to words to convey meaning. By stressing or accenting words, we draw our listeners’ attention to them. In ordinary extemporaneous speech, the stress values you place on words are 100 percent accurate. You filter your stream of words in accordance with the emotional and intellectual value you place on their meaning in a conversation.

Combining effective emphasis with appropriate dynamic range, tone, pitch, resonance and pace reflect the emotional fingerprint of a message or part of a message. If your voice does not mirror congruently the emotional content of your message you create ambiguity in the minds of your listeners and give them something to think about other than the content of your message.

The natural filtering processes can go awry when we speak in front of gatherings of people. The emotion we feel in response to facing an audience sometimes overwhelms the emotion we would normally express through emphasis. We fall into silly vocal patterns like using an upward inflection at the end of each sentence, we punctuate our phrases with patterned umms and errs, we inhibit the vitality in our voice with restrictive breathing patterns, and so on. The end-result is a vocal performance than can be duller than dull.

© Desmond Guilfoyle 1998-2006



 

Creating Shared Space - Discovery, Groundwork & Dialogue

Charismatic communication demands a transaction between speaker and listeners, and, as with most forms of fair-trading, customer satisfaction is predicated on exchanging things of equal value. For example, in exchange for a piece of electronic equipment at your local electrical store, you hand over its alleged value in dollars. In effect, the salesman buys your money with the piece of equipment.

Similar dynamics apply when you seek to buy people's commitment to your proposals or ideas. So, what currency do you need to use to purchase attention and a fair hearing from your audience? The currency comes in three denominations:

1. Discovery 2. Groundwork 3. Dialogue

You can choose to spend a reasonable amount of time in discovery mode. It's part of a process of learning about the people you intend to influence. It enables you to gain an insight into their personal worldviews, and the information you gather enables you to respect fully their models of the world and talk their particular dialect.

Groundwork is also a key element, as it represents the preparation phase, of involving others in discussion and debate on the desirability and value of your position and ideas. It enables you to respond with feedback and engage in a mutual search for alternatives. It also provides you with the opportunity to informally test ideas on potential adversaries and modify your approach as you go along.

You can test, revise, hone, and polish your message before you arrive at a final product that incorporates the key needs of your target group. There are many benefits in accommodating other people's concerns, ideas and solutions into your final strategy or proposal. Your groundwork phase can often save you from embarrassing and sometimes perilous consequences.

Dialogue is the art of talking with people rather than talking at them or pretending to consult. It can occur during every stage of the communication process. Formal dialogue, as in a presentation or proposal, best occurs at the stage when you are certain of winning assent and support.

Open dialogue encourages commitment and motivation. It alerts you to the emotional temperature of your audience or group and avoids having an idea or strategy stall through covert opposition and resistance at every turn.

GROUNDWORK AND DISCOVERY

It may not always be possible to know the individual needs, values, or beliefs of larger audiences. So, some communications, presentations, and speeches are necessarily "catch-all" affairs where you may use other powers of persuasion to draw listeners into shared space to discuss the merits of your ideas. Size of crowd, media speeches and interviews, diversity of the congregation, and other factors, sometimes make it difficult to gain an accurate measure of your audience. Never the less, it would be foolhardy to deliver a presentation to a group of people about whom you knew nothing.

Consider extolling the virtues of Australian beef to a group of Vegans, advocating Judaism to a gathering of Shiite fundamentalists, or telling Irish jokes at a Celtic Club. The point is that if you want your listeners to like and trust you, you must tailor your message to the people you're seeking to persuade.

Even rudimentary knowledge about your audience is better than none. But, the more information you have about your listeners, the better you will be able to communicate your message using their language register. After all, if a small or large group comes together to listen to you, it must, by definition, have something in common.

When you align your content with the audience's belief and value structures, you send the signal "We are of the same mind". High-order 'sameness' is one of the most important factors determining whether your presentation will win the day or fall on deaf ears. The more your audience views you and itself as being of one mind, the more receptive it will be to your ideas and proposals.

People make rapid, unconscious calculations on the degree of one-mindedness they share with others, based on finding answers to the following questions:

· Does the speaker/leader think like I do, or think like I want to think, and have a similar attitude and approach?

· Does the speaker/leader share and reflect my core beliefs and values?

. Does s/he share my traditions: roots, culture, education and background?

Approach, attitude, beliefs, and values are significant elements people apply in determining one-mindedness. In important situations when much is riding on the success of your presentation, it would be folly to misalign or mismatch the beliefs and values of your audience.

There are two principle ways to discover and mirror the beliefs and values of your audience or target group.

1. research and/or elicit them

2. mirror universal values and virtues

In researching the values and beliefs of your audience, speak to the client group before the presentation and ask questions along the lines of "What are the things that are important to you in bringing this product to market?" or "Why is it important to you to be seen as an independent operator?" The key part of your questions should be what, why, or how, is something important. If you listen closely to the responses, you will hear words that represent values, beliefs, and deeply held attitudes. Ask questions about:

SET ONE

1. where people stand on particular issues - their values and beliefs?

2. what are the interesting aspects of particular corporate cultures?

3. where is the group focus at the moment?

4. what the primary needs are of the group - what does the group absolutely have to have in order to feel satisfied and fulfilled?

5. what particular challenges or special circumstance confront the group at the moment?

6. What does the group need to have in order to achieve its goals?

If you have been invited to speak to larger groups make a point of finding out as much as you can about the composition of your audience. Gathering the following types of information:

SET TWO

1. What are the basic demographics of the group: age range, gender, positional rank, social background, educational level, etc.?

2. What are the expectations of the audience? What do they expect of you and how has your presentation or speech been promoted?

3. Ask about attitudes, schools of thought, or general political persuasions. A group of liberal lawyers will require a different approach than a group of CBD accountants.

4. Discover as much as you can about the group or organisation that has invited you to speak. What is its history, what are its aims and objectives and what is its main thrust at the moment?

5. Find out if there are any specific issues the group is lobbying for or on which they have tgaken a strong position

6. Who are the group's patrons and senior membership?

Once you have created a map of the nature of your audience, you have an excellent starting point around which to structure the content of your presentation or influence strategy.

Inclusion and consensus-building are vital in gaining attributions of charisma and developing followers. Followers in the workplace are people who subscribe to your vision; who will invest energy, patience, trust, emotion and dedication in you and your goals. Emotional attachment to your vision and supporting values is essential if you want people to work as a team towards the missions you establish.

Charisma and influence are the result of quid pro quo's. In discovering the values and needs of your stakeholders, your part of the bargain is to do unto them as they would be done unto. You do unto "them" by establishing congruence between their needs and aspirations and your mission; by finding ways to share high-order values; by respecting individual differences you encounter, and linking beliefs and interests with your activities and goals. Your stakeholders' response will be greater emotional and motivational arousal, higher self-esteem, more cohesion and greater confidence in you.

DIALOGUE

Successful dialogue meets four fundamental tenets of effective communication:

1) credibility

2) emotional affiliation

3) 'live' evidence

4) common ground and shared benefits

The first issue you can choose to reflect deeply on when seeking to get people on board is that of credibility. Your own standing with individuals, groups, and audiences marks the initial barrier to be overcome.

Credibility is paradoxically both durable and fragile. It requires constant nurturing during the dialogue phase, particularly in the workplace. Once earned and maintained it can usually withstand the occasional expression of human frailty.

Many leaders, managers, and public figures imagine they enjoy greater credibility than they actually do. They often assume that position and authority is all that's required in shifting opinion, motivating people, and getting others to do what they want.

As any reputable leadership tome will tell you, the 'Pharaoh' era of getting results or attitude change through naked power and proclamation is long dead. And yet, the corporate world and public life are teeming with latter day Tut's and Cleo's who imagine they can shape people's opinions and behaviours with a wave of their royal sceptres and threats of public executions.

Today, authority and credibility do not come with the leadership territory. The trend in most of the western world over the last three decades is that of distrust towards, and challenge of, authority. If you want people to follow your wishes in the twenty-first century, you may like to choose the leadership tools and language of today in place of the quaint relics of the past.

Credibility maintenance at close quarters, such as the workplace or within smaller groups where contact is ongoing, is in essence no different to that of public credibility. It is earned from two principal sources.

Firstly, if you have established a reputation of competency or knowledge in a particular field, your colleagues or listeners will generally endow you with an appropriate degree of credibility within that specialist field.

Looking the part and mirroring sameness are also important factors in establishing credibility. But, an essential element in both workplace and public credibility is continuous maintenance. Personal credibility is a quality that must be ceaselessly affirmed.

Secondly, if you have demonstrated over time that you can be trusted to serve mutual interests over personal interests, your personal credibility will be higher. If you're generally considered to be a person who doesn't close the door on your morality and ethics when you leave home for work, you will have a significant persuasion advantage.

Professional ability and work-based relationships are key factors in credibility in the workplace, whereas appearance and demonstrations of expertise are important to public credibility. In mapping out a workplace or public persuasion plan, the issues of professional expertise and personal relationships form a critical part of any strategy.

You would be well advised to evaluate your ratings in both categories prior to embarking on any major persuasion undertaking. The questions you need to answer as objectively as you can are as follows:

Professional Expertise:

1) What are my target audience's perceptions about my knowledge and track record in the area in which I will seek to influence them?

2) Is my expertise acknowledged and accepted?

3) What other sources of knowledge and expertise can I reference and apply to enhance the credibility of my proposal, strategy, idea, etc.?

4) Who else can I recruit to enrich the credibility of my idea, project, etc.?

Personal Relationships:

1) Does my target audience trust me? Have I shown trustworthiness over time?

2) Do those I'm seeking to persuade view me as someone who shares kudos with them?

3) Do they view me as one of them and one who listens to them?

4) Am I in political accord with the group on this issue?

5) Am I in tune with them intellectually and emotionally

Workplace persuasion often goes awry when inexperienced managers seek to use the force of their position to effect change without attending to the above elements. Public and work-based credibility can be monitored and managed, and is the end result of what you are, what you say, and what you do.

If you desire to be a person of high credibility in the eyes of others, you can choose to conform your words and deeds to templates of trustworthiness embraced by your target audience.

Future pots in this series will explore 'live evidence'. See previous post for developing emotional affiliation with audiences.

(c) Desmond Guilfoyle 1998-2006

How to Annihilate Your Credibility

Presentations and addresses, ideally, should be inspiring and informational. For people to take notice of what you say and act on it, it is imperative you pay attention to the minute-to-minute management of your credibility and trust quotients.

If you wish to become a virtuoso in getting an audience’s back up, the following credibility and trust annihilators may help you create the perfect recipe for suspicion and doubt. With a little practice, who knows, you could become a world authority on the subject?

1. TRY TO BROWBEAT YOUR AUDIENCE: Tell your audience that they’re here to change their minds to your way of thinking – read your map on to their territory.

"It’s essential that you change the way you think about and do things. I think that unless you dramatically switch direction and follow my plan for this, we haven’t a chance in hell of getting this project up”

2. TRY TO FOOL YOUR AUDIENCE: It rarely ever works. Audiences usually know when someone is trying to fool them because they’ve had a lifetime of experience fooling and being fooled. They sense when a speaker’s delivery and content are congruent and have inbuilt ways of determining whether he/she "walks the talk". They also sense when someone has chapter heading knowledge and can recite nice, plump clichés without really knowing the substance and depth of the ‘book’. When you are speaking, your audience needs to believe that you are not just a noisy bucket of water, but, rather, a fountain of knowledge.

3. CREATE SUSPICION ABOUT YOUR MOTIVES: Create suspicion that you are seeking to influence your audience for reasons of pure self-interest: that you have everything to gain from their assent

“Forget the other wealth management funds. First National is one of the best companies I’ve ever held the agency for and I can tell you that the level of professionalism in fund management is second to none.”


4. DEVELOP A SERIOUS “I” INFECTION: Demonstrate through your behaviour that your speech is all about you, and not about your audience. Constantly self-reference your material, inflate you self-importance with wonderfully telling stories about yourself. Show interest only in your agenda

“Look, I’m not really interested in history. What I’m about is getting some serious runs on the board now. I think that’s the best option, and I believe that will set us up better for next year. I think that is priority number one and I reckon that is where most of our development funds should go ”

5. TREAT YOUR AUDIENCE WITH CONTEMPT: Talk down to them. After all, they’re just plebs. Indicate in your words and ideas that you are the guru and they are the followers.

“Anybody who knows anything about Risk Analysis would tell you that you’re on the wrong track. If you listen to me and follow what I say then you might have a chance of working out where the real risks and opportunities are”

6. USE INSIDE STORIES. Be sure to talk about actions, stories, and anecdotes involving people that the audience knows nothing about. Put a barrier between you and the majority of your listeners. Keep them in the dark. Make them feel that they are not among the elite group of which you are a member. Use their valuable time to have private, in-house dialogue with some individuals. They will be riveted.

7. BECOME A SPIN DOCTOR: Twist facts and truths to suit your argument or your convenience

“We have simply made all the necessary logistical arrangements to have our troops in place in the Middle East in the event that the United Nations sanctions military actions. We have not made a decision to commit our troops to war, nor have we made a commitment to a non-UN pre-emptive strike. We are just readying ourselves in case”

8. CREATE DOUBT ABOUT COMMITMENT: raise doubts about your belief in what you’re saying or show that you chop and change with the prevailing seasons.

“Circumstances may have dictated that I say that at the time. People say a lot of things, but what I’m saying now is that this program is the one that is going to deliver what we need.”

9. PERSONIFY GOD-LIKE PERFECTION: Never admit to any flaws in your idea, argument, or proposal. Exaggerate excessively the worth of your own proposals and totally demolish the proposals of others

“This plan is foolproof. It’s guaranteed to increase your customer flow by one hundred and fifty percent. The other plan on the table is rubbish!”

“New blush blows all other toilet cleansers out of the bowl: with blush, germs are history, your family will love you more, you’ll never die, and your fuel economy will go through the roof.”

Never admit to any wrongdoing

“It was the absolute right thing to say. The fact that the markets responded negatively was due to the paranoia of a few idiots who caused a panic.”

10. LET PEOPLE KNOW YOU’RE A LIAR: tell your audience that you tell the occasional porkie pie

“When someone raises that objection I tell them it’s nothing to worry about and really get them to focus on the benefits. You don’t want investors worrying about the market bottoming out.”

11. LOWER THE VALUE OF YOUR WORD: Go back on your word without any apologies or requests to be released from a commitment.

“Yes I did say we would consult on this, but there just wasn’t the time.”

12. ATTACK OR MAKE YOUR AUDIENCE THE BUTT OF YOUR JOKES: If you have a streak of the stand-up comic in you, humour can be an effective device if placed tactically throughout your presentation.

Self-deprecating humour that reveals your own vulnerabilities and foibles works as long as it is tasteful and ego-neutral. Stories about people and events, other than your audience, if done in good taste, sets the tone for both message retention and acceptance. But if you make your audience the butt of your jokes you create a division between yourself and your audience, and it may severely limit the impact of your message.

Attacking an audience, or making a direct attack on an audience’s belief or values systems, even if not meant to offend, will produce defensive and sometimes aggressive responses.

13. TEST YOUR AUDIENCE’S PATIENCE: The normal quid pro quo that speakers establish with audiences is based on investment of attention versus keeping to agreed time. Your listeners can be very unforgiving if you go over the time you are allocated to deliver your presentation. Preparation should ensure you don’t do this. If, however, you need more time, you should ask your audience for it and you’d better ensure you make it worth their while.

If no time restrictions have been given, you must decide during your preparation phase the optimum amount of time it will take to persuasively deliver your message. Then, tell your audience at the beginning of your presentation how much time you are asking them to invest – and stick to it.

"We have about twenty minutes to explore the moral ramifications of gene therapy with you and during this brief time…."

"I will be your speaker and you will be my audience. If you get done before I do, please let me know."


“Those are fairly hard chairs, and I believe that your backsides can sustain about 15 minutes on the topic of Getting the Best from your Advertising Dollar, and so……
…”

14. READ A PREPARED TEXT. Unless you can read a text like the best of orators, looking up to the audience more than you look down, drop the idea of reading prepared texts. Prepared texts send a number of signals to audiences, not the least that you do not have the confidence to speak from your heart and mind!

Cue sheets, or dot points designed to assist you in making crucial points are quite acceptable, but if you feel that your content must be read, hire a professional actor who is trained to bring it to life!!

Know your material back to front. Rehearse your main information loops. Edit and shape your presentation as you go along, keeping a keen eye on how your audience is responding to each point. If your audience reacts favourably to a particular point, expand on it. Feed them to the point of nearly sate their hunger, remembering to leave them with a taste for a little more.

Summary

The above trust annihilators are some of the most common faux pas committed in the name of persuasion. It may be occurring to you that audience trust goes hand in hand with how you manage your credibility.

Become an expert in credibility mismanagement. Notice what you and other people do to annihilate trust and lose the respect of colleagues and audiences. Keep building on your observational experiences, become a people watcher in persuasion situations and begin to observe the subtle and not so subtle changes in people’s demeanour when you or colleagues press their resistance buttons.

(c) Desmond Guilfoyle 2004

 

A Short Essay on Form and Emotion

Recent research has shown that in respect to emotion charismatic communicators:

1. have reached a level of psychological maturity whereas they feel emotions themselves quite strongly;

2. have a well-developed capacity to induce emotions in others

Assuming that you have achieved a reasonable level of emotional and ethical maturity, let us look at some of the tools and skills you will need to improve your ability to evoke particular emotional states in others.

Delivery style (Form) and structure of messages (Form) have been shown to outweigh content in numerous studies. In the nineties, studies of leader rhetoric by Professor Jay Conger of the University of Southern California and others strongly suggested that word structure, use of symbols and expression are deciding factors in the extent to which people will become aroused, inspired and committed to a leader's message. Arousal and the feelings of inspiration, of course, are emotional states.

Evoking Emotions

Emotion-based messages are more effective in gaining acceptance of an idea than reason-based or logical approaches. In an important paper on nonverbal skill, personal charisma and initial attraction researchers go as far as to claim that personal charisma centres on "dramatic flair involving the desire and ability to communicate emotions and thereby influence others." Researchers seem to have finally caught up with what the advertising industry has taken as a given for the last seven decades: you don't sell the sausage, you sell the sizzle.

Charismatic and influential communicators recognise that meaning is the outcome of human intercourse. They work with their listeners to create and shape the definitions that lead to meaning, and emotions play a primary role in creating meaning.

Charismatic communicators view followers and audiences as active participants and not passive spectators. Those who think and behave charismatically understand that emotion drives action. They do not skint on the expression of their own emotions and they create scenarios in which to share emotion with their followers.

To understand the importance of emotion, turn on your television set and study the commercial breaks, read a newspaper for the ads or listen to radio commercials for the underlying emotions they evoke:

A busty bimbo draped over a Buick in a local newspaper ad. Television images of fun-loving, acne-free teenagers hooning around on a beach with the girls of their dreams and drinking brown muck in a shapely bottle. A commercial featuring a warm, loving family (grandpa included) expressing terminal goodwill towards each other, while pushing burgers with a fat content exceeding that of Jay Leno down their throats.

Let's take the hamburger example to illustrate how you can be drawn in by messages designed to evoke unconscious choice by pressing your emotional hot buttons. The first thing to consider is that you do not enter the experience of viewing the ad with an empty mind. You bring to the experience all your memories, hope, values, beliefs, past decisions, perceptions and so on. Imagine you're the parent of a fairly young family. Now let's look at what the hamburger ad depicts:

A warm and friendly atmosphere (enhanced by yellow lens filters and perfect mood music), a young family in deep rapport, the kids impeccably behaved and directing loving looks at mum and dad. Mum winks at dad with a sweetness that would melt the heart of Pol Pot as she takes a delicate bite of her burger. Little Melissa manages to do the impossible - suck on her shake and smile at the same time. Grandad playfully runs one hand through little Troy's number two haircut, clutching a handful of golden french fries in the other, mouth poised to receive them. The junk-food giant's name and logo leap on to the screen, and a jingle reinforces the family theme.

The message? Families that eat cholesterol bombs together will be so close they can hear each other's arteries harden! Your unconscious response? Wouldn't it be great to take the family into a restaurant and have that experience?

What a feeling of longing the scene would evoke in parents of real-life Melissas and Troys: warts and all kids who affect to have the word 'no' permanently formed on their lips. Kids who cost a fortune to educate; who won't clean their rooms; who always want something, and who can be so emotionally draining with their petulance and self-absorption you feel like strangling them at times.

And to have a pop like that! A gentle patriarch who isn't always interfering with the raising of the kids; whose language isn't peppered with 'shoulds', ought to's' and 'musts' and whose emotions are not imprisoned behind a wall of post World War Two machismo.

The spin-doctors that created the ad would be highly aware of the pressures of family life. They may well have researched them to identify key triggering agents. They know through experience and research that a powerful 'go for it' impulse is required to overcome the quite natural objections middle class parents may have to fat-saturated junk food. They needed something quite extraordinary to produce an emotional propellant, and what better motive in these days of unhappy or stressed families than a promise of a familial Garden of Eden at a local hamburger joint?

The above is an example of unethical persuasion, because everyone who has ever had the impulse to rush into a junk food outlet, ostensibly to have a family experience, knows that the experience never matches up to the promise.

However, the process the advertising agency designed to create and share an emotional space with its target audience is similar to that of effective charismatic communiactors. The only significant difference is that ethical charismatic communicators would choose to sell something more meaningful and healthy than a double-beef-triple-bacon cheeseburger with fries. They would evoke emotion in what they passionately believed were legitimate story lines to reinforce a major point.

In our professional lives we may like to operate under the illusion that reason is the basis of most of our major decisions. Why is it, then, that in survey after survey of business leaders and executives the vast majority of respondents report that they make their major decisions mainly on hunches and "gut feel"?

Under the veneer of reason you will inevitably discover emotions at play. This is why the expression, reading and evoking of emotions are so important in the persuasion process

Ethical charismatic communicators are mindful that emotions play the primary role in people's choices to act or not to act on their ideas and suggestions. They understand two important aspects of emotional exchange. First, they pay attention to their audiences' collective state of mind and constantly monitor for changes in the emotional state of their listeners. They calibrate responses and fashion the form and content of their messages so as to pace and lead their audience to more receptive emotional states.

The second important factor about those who act and behave charismatically is that they give themselves permission to show the degree of emotional commitment they have in their own ideas and visions. They reveal that the origins of their ideas are not only from their heads but also from their hearts. From a whisper to a roar, the emotional appeal of their messages mirrors what they more than often accurately perceive are the emotional states of their audiences.

(C) Desmond Guilfoyle 1998

Charismatic Communication – Ten Tips for Building and Maintaining Credibility

Some people imagine they carry credibility somewhere on their person. If that were the case you’d have most of the politicians and half of the CEO’s around the world lining up for credibility implants!

Credibility isn’t something you have. It’s an honorific title bestowed on you by others. It is the end result of people placing their trust in you, and this is an important point to acknowledge and embrace. Credibility is earned when you adequately satisfy criteria for expertise and engender trust through building meaningful relationships with those you seek to persuade.

Credibility management essentially describes the relationship you establish and maintain with your audience. It is the result of the minute-to-minute management of your audience’s credulity meter or the day-to-day management of honourable workplace or professional relationships. Charismatic communicators tend to engage in continuous monitoring to ensure that the credulity of their listeners is not tested either by what they say or how they say it.

When credibility is absent, when credulity has been stretched to breaking point, your message will have about as much impact as a self-confessed serial burglar trying to convince a group of right-wingers that the three strikes law is unconscionable. At best you may evoke mute indifference, at worst, open scorn, astonishment, and you’d better believe it, organised hostility.

The following actions and behaviours enhance credibility and receptivity, both in the workplace and in public forums:

1) Begin your persuasion strategy with a passionate search for answers. Identify an issue, problem, or effect, and invite your listeners to help you solve it. Instead of announcing your perfect solution and reading your map on to your listeners’ territory, invite your audience to join in you creating a joint map of the available solutions.

”Competition in our industry is overwhelming. Everyone is competing on price. But, is a price war the answer to maintaining our market share, or can we up the ante and compete on other terms? Can we explore those other terms? Can we discover opportunities that, if exploited, would give us an edge over our competition, above and beyond that of price?”

2) Demonstrate that you are putting your audience’s interests first. No plan, idea, or proposal is perfect. Your outcomes can be better, in terms of trust and credibility, if you point out the negatives and deficiencies in your proposal, rather than have your audience discover them for itself.

“This new system will deliver fantastic efficiencies in the medium to long term, but it would be remiss, indeed deceitful of me, not to alert you to the short term risks.

3) Make your audience your primary focus. A trap in which many leaders and speakers fall is that of their “I’s” being too close together. Even if credibility is high, a sure way to lose it is to come across as self-obsessed and seemingly unmindful of the audience’s presence.

Often leaders are so driven by their own ideas that they fail to acknowledge or validate the concerns and questions of those they’re seeking to persuade. They dismiss or ignore ‘What if?’” and supplementary questions with what is often interpreted as extraordinary rudeness. Little do they realise that rail-roading is one of the most prevalent triggers of resistance in audiences.

If you want people to embrace your ideas or proposals it is better that your attention is directed almost exclusively on your audience, constantly drawing your audience into a space where you can work on and negotiate shared perceptions and meaning. Effective persuasion involves a coalition of both the persuaders and listener’s views formed into one outcome.

Questions and interruptions should be treated as opportunities for dialogue. Questioners can be framed as valuable contributors to the process and not fobbed off:

“I really appreciate you sharing your observations and doubts. Sceptics are a valuable commodity and I would encourage you all to become sceptical about what I say, because, as everyone knows, sceptics actually try things out to discover for themselves if an idea can work for them. In trying this idea on for size you can help make it better.”

4) Talk on the level of your listeners. You may experience warm fuzzies when you let our ego out for exercise and adopt a superior position to that of your listeners, but they won’t.
You may know more than your listeners, but your job as a communicator isn’t to intimidate them with your self-importance, isn’t to tell them how much you know and how little they know. If you want to be a peacock go live in a zoo. You role as an agent of influence is primarily to encourage your listeners to think much the same as you do on a particular issue, subject, or proposal.
Use the language of inclusion. Speak on the level of your listeners and build the framework for your ideas around the goals, expectations, rewards, values, and feelings of those you wish to persuade.

“Well, at first I was as confused as anyone. When I came across gap analysis, I thought it was something a proctologist did. Then I discovered as you can that it’s an important tool that you can use to better plan the kind of work you want your people to do.

5) Be candid. How often have you witnessed political figures die lingering public deaths because of the insane political convention that demands defence of the indefensible? How often over the last decade and a half have public figures been sent to Coventry not for their original offence but for covering it up and lying about it? Wriggling out of situations with attempts at distortion and deception blows your credibility out of the water. The one great exception to this in recent times is Bill Clinton and there are significant reasons why he survived that will be explored in later articles.
Public figures frequently cultivate images that incorporate God-like qualities of self-possession and uncompromising virtue. This is often the first major snare they set for themselves. If you promote yourself as a reincarnation of St. Peter, do expect to have some difficulty in admitting your cock-ups. In engineering your public identity, it’s worth your consideration to present as an individual with a strong commitment to making life better for your constituents or colleagues than a candidate for canonisation, if for no other reason than you have a shorter distance to fall.

6) Be sincere and say only what you believe. Decades of lies in advertising, poetic political ‘truths’, corporate mendacity, and high levels of distrust towards the mass media, have made your average punter a fairly wary individual.

According to recent social research, people are a fairly cynical lot. They have suffered much as consumers, as members of the polity and at the hands of those who toil in the fields of deceit and human exploitation.

The excesses of the past have made the job of ethical persuaders and speakers a difficult one, and perhaps that is as it should be. As novel as it may sound, real sincerity can now be classed, to use the parlance of professional salespeople, as a unique selling position, or USP. One of the easiest ways to reinforce your credibility at work or in the public arena is to build a reputation of sincerity.

If, for example, someone challenges you on the basis of inconsistency with previous statement, be sincere in your response. Admit the inconsistency and turn it your advantage.

“You’re right I did say that because it was what I believed was true. I now have a different view since having learned some things along the way. So (chuckle) thank for reminding me that I’m wiser today than I was then.”


7) Make the claim fit the idea or product. Your credibility is not only based on expertise and personal status but is also tied up with the quality of your ideas and believability of your statements. Claims need to be supported, inferences and conclusions should be crafted carefully, and your evidence backed up by credible research and back-grounding.

People can and do confuse fact with opinion, opinion with well-reasoned argument, and inference with truth. You may it extremely useful to have a clear understanding of the distinctions between facts, opinions, and reasoned argument, because it may temper any tendency you may have to present opinions as evidence or make unsupportable claims.

Many speakers fail in the persuasion process because they confuse the above categories. Remember that just because you believe something is true doesn’t necessarily make it so. To support a point, idea, or hypothesis you have to do much more than articulate what you think is true. You have to build your argument on solid foundations of fact, reason, and emotion.

The claims you make should never stretch the credulity of your audience. A useful rule of thumb is to match your claims with what you know your listeners will believe. You may well be of the opinion that your idea is the best thing since the silicon chip, but if you don’t have the evidence to support the assertion, you would be well advised to consider tempering your claims to what you know will be accepted by those listening.

There are two ways in which to present opinions that increase the probability of them being accepted by your listeners:

1. If you have occasion to state an opinion, use non-declarative language such as “It’s my belief”, “I have found”, “It seems to me”, “I feel” etc. For example, “I feel the movie had too much unnecessary violence in it.” This signals that you are offering an opinion as an opinion and not stating it as a fact. However, there is still a risk that people will oppose what you say and derail your argument or discount your credibility.

2. The following technique substantially increases the likelihood of your opinion being accepted by your audience.

Break the active language rule and strategically use passive language that displaces you from the ownership of the opinion. For example, “Some people would argue that the movie contained too much violence.”

To add power to your opinion draw your listener into shared space. Continue the statement with something like the following:

“And when you think about it you may find yourself agreeing that they are right. Take the beach scene. Was all the graphic footage necessary to make the point? You may think it wasn’t.”

8) Maintain your integrity at all costs. If someone says to you, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but did you know that…” what message are they sending you? Sure, they may be sending you a signal that they trust you, but are they not also sending you a signal that they can’t be trusted, that they can’t keep a secret?

The same logic applies when you tell other people that you bend the truth to suit some occasions. One of the easiest ways to create distrust and suspicion in an audience is to suggest that lying to a third party or parties is an acceptable practice. Of course you wouldn’t lie to the audience! But, the punters out there, that’s a different story!

The fact is that if you encourage people to act dishonestly or suggest there are times when embroidery of the truth is an acceptable practice, your audience will begin to seriously discount your credibility.

9) Keep your promises and commitments. A major credibility annihilator is that of welching on a promise or overlooking a commitment you have made to colleagues, clients, or groups. Charismatic leaders recognise that people often build their hopes around promises, and if a promise is broken, hopes are dashed: the next promise that’s made won’t be believed.

Promises often raise high expectations, particularly when made about career, livelihood, performance of products, and results and outcomes. If you don’t come through on a major promise or commitment, the damage to your credibility will remain as long as there are people around to remember it.

10) Earn the right to be heard. Expertise is a significant variable in the credibility equation. If anyone questions your right to speak on a subject, take careful notice. Do not dismiss it with an indignant humph or an acidic comeback line.

Open questioning of your credibility is a valuable form of feedback and gives you an opportunity to turn resistance into acceptance. Note how the following speaker seizes the opportunity to improve his credibility quotient when it’s questioned:

“You’re absolutely right in suggesting that I have to earn the right to be taken notice of. I strongly believe that it’s important to question the credentials of people as you do, because it enables us to give proper weight to what people say, doesn’t it? The proposal before you today is based on a highly successful model designed by experts at Chicago and tested by GMH for three years.”

There are numerous ways to enhance your expertise in public life and in the workplace. Gaining qualifications, writing articles, papers, and books, nominating for awards, garnering the support of luminaries in your chosen field and achieving media exposure for particular endeavours are but a few means of building on your expertise-based credibility.

Developing a history of sound judgement in your area of endeavour, proving yourself to be knowledgeable and well informed on your subject matter, demonstrating a thorough understanding of your material, and building a solid track record of success can also enhance perceptions of expertise.

© Desmond Guilfoyle 1998-2006






 

All Behaviour is Communication

Your body movements, the way you use your eyes and face, your changing skin tone, your physical posture, your voice tonality, pace, and pitch, and even your level and positioning of breath, give clues to other people about who and what you are.

In our distant evolutionary past, the accurate sending and receiving of those clues could mean the difference between grunts of approval and acceptance or assault and battery with a crude weapon.

Today, we invest a large part of our early lives learning how not to show what we’re thinking, perfecting how not to reveal our feelings and practising how not to be read or understood by others. We learn to manage the impressions others have of us during an uncompromising indoctrination into polite society in our formative years.

We create public and often private facades to hide behind, to put people off the scent. We have been conditioned to send out false cues to project as someone other than who we really are. As our culture has allegedly become more sophisticated, it seems that one of the greatest fears to emerge is that of being discovered to be completely and wondrously human.

We have developed a range of defences to prevent people from discovering that we are as human as the next person. We are taught to devalue the honest expression of our emotions. We learn, usually in collusion with significant others like parents and teachers, to suppress spontaneous reactions and expressions of true sentiment.

By the time we reach our mid-twenties, many of us have become so good at self-containment that even those closest to us rarely get a glimpse of our truer selves. The tyranny of compliance and socialisation exact a high price.

So, when we ‘do’ containment, what does it look and sound like to others? Most self-containment acts are very amateurish indeed. To excel at self-containment you need to focus on two things simultaneously: hiding your feelings, opinions, and responses and creating a credible mask to replace them.

It’s very difficult to think and hit the ball at the same time, and most of us simply don’t have the expertise and flexibility to do that. The best we can usually come up with is some neutral or dissociated state that can at times be interpreted as even-tempered. With time and practice it can come to represent our so-called nature, and at worst we may mirror the disposition and energy of that new breed of deadpan comics. How come we laugh at them when so many of us are like them?

Even temperament is a favoured disguise in our culture. The carefully modulated voice, the narrow tonal range, controlled facial mask, purposeful and limited body movement, and neutral postures are occasionally interpreted as signs of stability and emotional control. But, do those so-called qualities win hearts and minds, build corporate cultures, convince people to support your ideas, or stop an ugly development from blighting your suburb? For that you need to give voice, body, and passion to your convictions.

RENOVATING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONALITY

Your ability to express a range of emotions, your capacity to let energy flow and your ability to let your voice and body mirror the ‘emotional fingerprint’ of your content is an extremely important part of charisma and influence. In public speaking, if you deny people access to legitimate emotion associated with your sentiments, you may send them tonal and physiological signals that undermine or neutralise your content.

In some studies conducted on the range of emotions that respondents consistently found themselves experiencing, it was discovered that the majority went through life aware of four or five enduring states. Such was the success of their personal self-containment strategies, that the respondents had repudiated or forgotten literally hundreds of other states of mind available to them.

A thought that may not have occurred to until now is that the greater number of emotional states you can access, the more flexibility you will have in dealing with life’s daily challenges. It follows that the more flexibility you have, the greater number of behavioural options you will have available to you. The more options you have the better your chances of being able to control and influence your environment.

Take an average family of young children and adults and notice who’s really in control of their environment. Seemingly the adults, but we all know it’s the youngest child. Young children, thank goodness, generally haven’t learned to deny themselves permission to express their message fully.

Normal children have the widest range of behaviours and personal flexibility of any demographic category. They just ‘do’ emotion and behaviour, and they do it with purpose and passion, much to our delight and occasionally to our chagrin. When younger children do behaviour, notice how their body movements, tones of voice, energy levels, and facial and eye expressions are in total harmony. Sadly, they have something that we once had before we learned how to contain ourselves.

Of course, you need to monitor yourself in a variety of situations. It isn’t common sense to give way to your ”inner child” during a company function and throw food at the guest of honour. You wouldn’t go to the funeral of a wealthy benefactor in board shorts and sing “I’m in the money!” during the service, even if you felt that way. You may even think twice about revealing your unqualified disappointment at your partner returning home with a hairstyle that makes him/her look like an articulated toilet brush.

You can, however, respond and react within the boundaries of common sense and reasonable behaviour. In choosing to do so, you can congratulate yourself for having taken a major step towards building a more charismatic profile.

In yielding to the enormous pressures of socialisation, many people seem to have thrown the baby out with the bath water. What you may choose to consider is bringing back the bits of the baby that had the capacity to align its voice, body, and heart to the expression of its message.

Make a list, as long a list as you can of emotional states (For example, happiness, dread, exuberance, cheekiness, boldness, etc., etc.) Then, make a note of the states of mind you rarely, if ever experience. Try a few of them out. Go back to a time in your life and notice how surprising and delightful it can be to remember the physical and emotional sensations attached to those states. How did your body ‘speak’ those emotions? What physical movement and countenance was involved, and how did you voice them?

And as you find yourself reviewing your memory of long-gone expressions of emotion, begin to appreciate the fact that all you need to do is get in touch with them to bring them into the present.

(c) Desmond Guilfoyle 2006

Charisma is DONE Not Had

Bill Clinton did it to the max, Winston Churchill just about invented it, Michael Jordan does it and manages it with supreme elegance, Tiger Woods gains more of it with every post-tournament media conference, and it comes out of Oprah Winfrey’s pores. Loren Becall still does it, Marilyn Monroe had bucket loads of it and continues to enthral new generations of movie-goers, Richard Branston and Jack Welch do it on good days, but George W Bush and Vladimir Putin never do it and never will. A fair number of CEO’s, men of the cloth, sports men and women, the odd politician and many other highly visible and not so visible people do IT, so why not you?

Of course, off-the-scale charisma quotients may not be what you require to gain the visibility, status and authority needed to succeed in your field of influence. You may have little desire to become another Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, but you could be wondering what more you have to do to give your career or vocation the boost it deserves.

You may question why some of your contemporaries are more persuasive, eloquent, popular and magnetic. You may be perplexed over your failure to get good ideas across the line or agonise over the low levels of enthusiasm generated by your presentations and speeches.

Maybe you want to be a Leader and not a follower and you’re unsure of what to do to improve your leadership profile and build your charisma quotient.

Perhaps you’ve fallen for the mischievous piece of fiction that you’re either born with IT or you’re not. Contrary to what many people believe, science has found no evidence of a charisma gene. Rather, the so-called indefinable X factor appears to be structured around a set of hard won and very special behaviours.

Trial, tribulation and error may permeate the history of naturally developed charisma, but many of those unique and special behaviours are available to you if you choose to invest the time and energy required to develop them.

Research in the fields of leadership and social psychology offers evidence that charismatic behaviours are learned and regularly emerge from adverse early experiences. Many charismatic personalities it seems were talented children who experienced family crises and counterbalanced those early losses with self-sufficiency and a stronger sense of purpose in their lives.

Researchers found, for example, that charismatic leaders shared three distinguishing features in their backgrounds. Firstly, they were encouraged to excel in various pursuits early in their lives. Secondly, they were from families that encountered hardships but garnered enough resources to cope, and thirdly, they took on responsible roles at an early age. Very good advice to parents if they want to turn out a child that practices charismatic behaviours?

Other research strongly supports the idea that charismatic personalities adopt specific mental strategies and learn particular behaviours to achieve the total magnetic package you know as charisma.
The good news is that many of the variables have been identified and charismatic behaviours can be modelled. So, if you want to do IT, you can.

One of the most interesting traits identified in charismatic personalities is their strong embrace of fundamental yet simple concepts frequently overlooked by ‘lesser’ beings. Charismatic personalities realise that charisma cannot be done alone. They recognise charisma as the ultimate payoff of an open conspiracy between them and their audiences and followers.

Charismatic personalities acknowledge that the environment in which they operate is a shared space for leaders and followers to construct the charismatic relationship together. This is in contrast to many non-charismatic speakers who view their audiences as passive witnesses to the acting out of their idealised self-images.

The latter types mentioned above strut around amusing themselves with what they think are alluring and colourful performances. Listeners and audiences often interpret such entertainments as intemperate, egotistical and pretentious.

Charismatic speakers and leaders view the outcomes we describe as charisma as team efforts. They actively seek verbal and non-verbal cues from their audiences to establish if they’re on track. This, in turn, shapes their behaviour and the form and content of their performances. They also tend to be superb self-observers and constantly monitor and manage their behaviours for maximum impact of what they say and do.

They adjust their messages and performance, as the situation requires, while maintaining and reinforcing the higher, shared core values and beliefs of their audiences.

The word charisma is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘χάρισμα’ meaning “the gift of grace or favour”. Charismatic speakers and performers instinctively recognise that a “gift” is something bestowed on them by others. They know they cannot expect the favour of their colleagues, contemporaries, subordinates, or audiences, until they have created a shared space in which the charisma transaction can take place.

A primary feature of the above quid pro quo is what is called Form. In any communication event there are two fundamental elements: Form and Content. Content is relatively easy to define, as it relates to the ‘hard’ elements of a message, whereas Form is far more complex because it links to the ‘soft’ components of a communication. The easiest way to understand the two is to equate Content with what is said and Form with how something is said.

Charismatic speakers have mastered the art of embedding very special elements of Form to create a winning performance. As a means of building shared space, attention to Form is essential, and in future articles, I will explore some of the more important elements of Form that allow communicators to create the space in which the Charisma transaction takes place.

(c) Desmond Guilfoyle 2006