The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (18 page)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Choosing the right charisma style depends on your personality, goals, and the situation.

You can alternate among different charisma styles or even blend
them together. Don’t force yourself into a charisma style that is just too awkward for you. Doing so would negatively affect how you feel and how others perceive you.

The more charisma styles you can access, the more versatile and confident you will be.

Stretch out of your comfort zone in low-stakes situations.

Stick with styles you already know well in high-stakes situations.

Let goodwill be your safety net. Coming from a place of genuine goodwill gives you the best chance of getting your charisma right.

^*
Paul Ekman’s fascinating research on this topic led him to travel around the world, going to the most remote locations and studying tribes of hunter-gatherers, cataloging and testing more than ten thousand facial expressions.

YOU NEVER GET
a second chance to make a great first impression. Within a few seconds, with just a glance, people have judged your social and economic level, your level of education, and even your level of success. Within minutes, they’ve also decided your levels of intelligence, trustworthiness, competence, friendliness, and confidence. Although these evaluations happen in an instant, they can last for years: first impressions are often indelible.

Is it possible to overcome a bad first impression? Yes, it is. Over the course of several meetings, you can sometimes change a person’s initial perception of you. But you’ll have to work much harder than if you’d come across as charismatic from the start.

Why do split-second impressions last for so long? One reason is that, according to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, when “faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
¹
Behavioral research has since proven him right. Once we’ve made a judgment about someone, we spend the rest of our acquaintanceship
seeking to prove ourselves correct. Everything we see and hear gets filtered through this initial impression.
²

If you make a favorable impression when first meeting someone, the rest of your relationship will be colored by it, thereby tipping the scales in your favor. On the other hand, an unfavorable first impression can prove impossible to overcome, often deciding the outcome of a meeting even if the rest of the interaction is impeccable. Litigators know just how much a client’s first impression on a jury can affect the outcome of the trial, and often spend hours preparing them for this first moment. This is why, even if you’re really late to a meeting, it’s worth taking just thirty seconds to get back into the right mental state and body language. Otherwise you risk giving a very uncharismatic first impression.

The other reason first impressions have such an impact is that often they actually
are
right. In one study conducted at the University of Texas at Austin, people were able to accurately judge nine out of ten personality traits by looking at a single photograph. The traits in question were extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, likability, self-esteem, loneliness, religiosity, and even political orientation.

“We have long known that people jump to conclusions about others on the basis of very little information,” said one of the researchers, “but what’s striking about these findings is how many of the impressions have a kernel of truth to them, even on the basis of a single photograph.”
³

Further studies confirmed that we’re often quite accurate in our perceptions of personality, even after meeting someone for only a few seconds.
⁴
One Harvard research team showed students a two-second silent clip of a teacher they had never seen before, and asked them to evaluate the teacher’s effectiveness. The researchers then compared these evaluations with those of students who’d experienced this same teacher for a full semester. Both sets of evaluations were impressively similar.
⁵
This means that without hearing a word from the teacher or attending one class, complete strangers could predict with fair accuracy the ratings this teacher would receive.

CEOs as well as human resource professionals will often admit
that they decide whether they’ll hire a job applicant within the first few seconds of the interview. As one senior executive once told me, “The rest of the interview is just window dressing.”

The Harvard team realized that first impressions are generated by the fastest part of the brain, which is also the most primitive. This reptilian brain generates our instinctive, primal reflexes and may have been a key to our ancestors’ survival. In hunter-gatherer times, we often had only a split second to determine whether shapes entering our field of vision were animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman, friend or foe—in other words “fight, flight, or relax?” Those able to accurately make these split-second decisions survived, thrived, and multiplied. Those who couldn’t ended up as somebody else’s protein snack.

Today, even in sophisticated business settings, we still operate on hunter-gatherer survival instincts. When we first meet someone, our instinctive question is: friend or foe? How friendly are their intentions likely to be? To find an answer we still look to the clues that were so useful in tribal times: appearance and demeanor.

If there’s any chance the person could be a foe, our next question is: fight or flight? If they did have ill intentions, would they have the power to enact them? To find the answer, our brain tries to determine which of us would win in a fight. We take into consideration factors such as height and size, age, and gender.

It’s only after both of these evaluations have taken place that the content of what we say and how we say it comes into play.

The Golden Rule

So how can you make a fantastic first impression? Our default setting here is actually quite simple: people like people who are like them. During the vast majority of our history, from which our current instincts are drawn, people lived in tribes. In such an environment, the ability to accurately recognize whether or not someone was of your tribe could have life-and-death implications. If you know how to get these instinctive responses working in your favor, you’ve won half the battle.

When people are similar in terms of attire, appearance, demeanor, and speech, they automatically assume they share similar social backgrounds, education, and even values. They feel like part of the same tribe—or, as Rudyard Kipling wrote in
The Jungle Book,
“We are of one blood, you and I.”

Overall appearance is evaluated before demeanor and body language. This may be because clothing can be seen from farther away, and would help us determine more quickly the likelihood of the other person being friend or foe, fellow tribesman or not. Clothing, essentially, is modern-day tribal wear.

Tribal Wear

Can you imagine a U.S. president delivering the State of the Union address in a bathrobe? Of course not. No matter how hard we try to be objective, clothing matters. The exact same speech will be perceived very differently when delivered in a suit versus a bathrobe.

One Danish manager told me: “I’ve found that the more formal my clothing is, the more respect my opinions get!” For him, the difference is striking. Presenting the very same opinion in casual clothing one day and in a suit the next produced dramatically different results. In the first case, he says, “people barely listened.” In the second, “everyone listened and I got my way.”

In the 1970s, when young adults’ dress styles tended to fall into either the “hippie” or the “straight” category, researchers experimented with the effects of clothing choice. They approached college students on a campus, sometimes wearing hippie clothes and other times wearing straight clothes, and asked for change to make a phone call. When they were dressed in the same style as the student, the student said yes two-thirds of the time. When they were dressed in the opposite style, the student said yes less than half the time.
⁶

One company that understood this principle and used it to its advantage was American Express. They made their first good move when they started sending their salespeople to college campuses dressed like college students. They then went one step further. They
didn’t just
dress
them like students, they
hired
students. And that’s when they saw their sales rates soar.