Chapter 11
In general, people follow passion and energy, not ideas. Don't believe me? Then just take a look at cults. Cults are populated by devoted followers who enthusiastically and staunchly believe in and defend the theories and principles that the cult preaches. They are typically led by a single charismatic leader who, through seemingly sheer animal magnetism, entrances a community of followers to such a degree that the leader's words and beliefs are accepted as gospel.
Now, here is the thing. More often than not those ideas are batshit crazy. From believing aliens are going to come down and take them away on a certain date, or that by the force of group thought people can make themselves invisible, to far more dangerous and sinister ideas, the concepts that cults often follow seem absolutely ludicrous to someone from the outside looking in. So why do perfectly reasonable and intelligent people end up falling under the spell of these shamans?
It ain't the Kool‐Aid. It is the fact that humans respond to and follow energy and passion. Humans are drawn to other humans who create energy and stimulate emotions. We are tribal creatures and are genetically programmed to come together in groups for protection. Most other animals were faster and stronger and thicker‐skinned than our ancient selves, so that meant that they could kill us far more easily than we could kill them.
The only thing we had going for us was our abnormally big brain and our ability to procreate and live together in relatively larger numbers. Our brains allowed us to devise more clever ways to both kill the other animals as well as not get killed by them. The fact that we lived in larger groups gave us strength in numbers and also allowed for the tribe to survive, even if a couple of us got picked off by the occasional lion or grizzly bear.
The tribal members, believing death was around every corner, and it was, needed someone to say, “Hey, man, we got this.” If the leader said it loud enough and with enough passion, the rest of the tribe would be like “Hey, maybe we do got this,” and they would follow the leader until he got himself killed or she got too many other people killed. Afterwards they would all come together and complain about what an idiot the leader had been.
The cycle would repeat itself again and again all the way up until modern times where we have seen a split in the Homo sapien line where a new species, Homo entrepreneurus, identified by the curious trait of believing they can do anything and the ability to somehow get others to believe so, as well.
I know what a bunch of you are thinking right now. Charisma ain't my jam. I am never going to be able to get all Chris Farley “Man who lives in a van down by the river” (younger people, please do yourself a favor and look this up on YouTube) for anyone or anything. You might be saying to yourself I am quiet, I am an introvert, I don't like to draw attention to myself, talking in front of a crowd makes me want to throw up, or any other number of justifications as to why you could never be that kind of leader.
All of these things may be entirely true. What you should also know is that anyone, regardless of their personality type, can tap into passion and energy and increase their charisma.
Charisma, like creativity, is often thought of as some mysterious gift that only the specially anointed have been given. There is the common belief that when it comes to the ability to command a room by force of personality, you either got it or you don't.
I won't blow smoke up your butt and deny that this skill doesn't come more easily to some anymore than math or languages or playing the guitar comes to others. We are not all wired the same, thank God. So clearly some will pick up certain skills and abilities faster than others. Yet just like math or languages or playing an instrument the ability to manufacture energy and passion can be learned.
You may be thinking to yourself “I don't need people to follow me. I'm not looking to be a cult leader. I just have some ideas that I want to move forward. I can do that without being high energy or crazy passionate.”
You are right. You can. It will also be that much harder to have people pay attention to your ideas. If there is no passion or emotion behind your ideas it makes it much more difficult for people to lock in to what you're talking about. There is a very simple reason for this; if there is no passion or energy behind your ideas, they come off as very monotone.
The brain is wired to eventually tune out a constant dull sound that never changes. If you are in a room and quietly observe your surroundings, you will invariably begin to notice certain constant sounds that you had ignored before. The humming of a refrigerator. The buzz in the overhead lights. The whooshing of an air conditioner. You hadn't noticed them before because those sounds are monotonous and steady, and your brain quickly adjusted to them and decided they did not mean much, so you didn't have to really pay any attention to them.
It is the same thing with ideas and the ability to make shit up and move things forward. If you can't project a certain level of passion around your idea when you are talking about it, getting others to execute it, or even executing it yourself, it will become that much harder.
So how does someone become more charismatic and energetic? Is it as simple as jumping up and down on a trampoline, standing in your power pose, or shouting at the top of your lungs “I am awesome!”? Actually, it can be. Those kinds of things work because you are changing your physical and/or emotional state. You are getting your heart rate up, which gets the blood and oxygen flowing and releases endorphins to the brain.
If you are comfortable with doing these things or are in an environment that allows for this to happen, then by all means give them a try. The reality for many of us is that we don't have a trampoline readily available to us at the office, or perhaps shouting “I am awesome!” at the top of our lungs will scare the shit out of our coworkers and most likely land us in Carol from HR's office.
There are other more practical and attainable ways to work on your ability to increase your passion and energy. Let's look at energy first. What I mean by energy is the general mood or feelings you outwardly project. We all know that person who walks into the room and immediately brings everybody down. They are not even trying, yet just by being themselves they immediately bum everybody out. They don't even need to say anything, it is just in the way they carry themselves. Typically it is a low‐energy person who moves extremely slow, has bad posture, and often exhales or sighs before they speak. When they do speak they tend to use words or images that gravitate toward the negative. They habitually point out what is wrong or likely to go wrong as well as highlight the challenges or obstacles that will be faced in doing something. They rarely get excited by other people's ideas, often speak in a low monotone.
This person is an energy vampire and you can't help but not want to be around them. It doesn't matter if they are intelligent, or nice or that they may have great ideas. When exposed to these kinds of people for any length of time, the majority of people will not want to consistently engage with them.
Contrast that with their opposite counterpart. The person who walks into the room and it immediately lights up. The person who everybody wants to greet and say hello to. The individual who seems to fill whatever space they are in. This person is often characterized by having a physical sense of energy. The move just a bit faster than everyone else. They stand erect and often have an open, shoulders‐back posture. They make eye contact as they speak, being sure to use a clear volume. They smile more, laugh more easily, and tend to use more positive words and exclamations. When they are talking they use inflection in their sentences and vary their pace and tone. You don't necessarily have to like them and they may not be particularly nice, but how they present themselves and their ideas tends to grab and hold the listener's attention sooner and longer than the person who is an energy vampire.
Energy can be managed and manipulated in fairly easy ways. We all have a baseline energy that we default to. The speed at which we move during the normal course of the day is what I would call our general baseline energy. A simple way of increasing this energy is by consciously moving just a bit faster than we normally do.
For instance, if I am walking down the hall at my normal unthinking pace, I can easily decide to speed up and move just a bit quicker. This will have the natural result of slightly increasing my heart rate and my oxygen intake as well as send slightly different signals to my brain. Others that are around me will subconsciously pick up on the increased energy that I am exerting and respond in kind.
I am not advocating that you all of a sudden run around like you just drank a case of Red Bull (full disclosure: Red Bull is a client of ours, and I highly recommend you drink as much Red Bull as you can), as manic energy makes people nervous and can cause them to lose confidence in you.
What I am suggesting is that you slightly increase your pace to a level that you can maintain over a length of time. While your physical fitness level will determine to a degree how fast you can move, there is almost always a way to exert just a bit more energy in your day‐to‐day movements.
The same concept holds true with how you speak. Many of us find ourselves in an environment where, without even meaning to do so, we begin to sound alike. I believe there is something in our brain that makes us all want to conform in sound and style of speech. Again, I'm sure it is a defense mechanism that tries to keep from being singled out in a group, which would then open us up to suspicion and ridicule and, eventually, burning at the stake.
We can apply the same techniques to our speech patterns. The first and easiest exercise is to speak louder. I know this must seem like an incredibly trite insight, but I can assure you this, if you consider yourself quiet or shy or an introvert, just increasing your volume a small amount will return great dividends in terms of the energy you exude.
Again, this is not about being loud and obnoxious. Loud and obnoxious people need to tone it the F down. But for those of you who feel that creating energy is a struggle, then the simple act of speaking louder grabs and holds others' attention in a way very low volume can't.
While energy is often a physical manifestation, it can be truly manipulated through the use of passion. Passion can be manufactured; hell, more often than not it needs to be manufactured. Maybe you have a job and every single day you get up in morning and you just can't wait to get your day started and get into the office and live your best life. I applaud and envy you.
While that may be something that I aspire to, the reality is that there are plenty of days I need to artificially create that passion. Much like creating energy for ourselves, creating passion can be done in a similar way. Passion is both delivered and received speech. Slightly changing how we speak can go a long way toward changing how our words are received. Let's take a look at one of the most common places people actually see your passion, or a lack thereof. Public speaking.
I often get asked to coach executives on how to be better public speakers. Fear of public speaking is common and afflicts a huge swath of humanity, from CEOs to teenagers giving an oral presentation on the American Revolution. In a Washington Post survey, the fear of public speaking was the number 1 fear, outclassing such favorites as heights, snakes, drowning, zombies, and clowns.
In an intense immersive training program that I have been codesigning with former Special Forces operators, called Series 18, the activity that caused the most anxiety for the participants was not being hooded and interrogated, not escaping in handcuffs from a blackened room, not rappelling off a cliff, or firing AK‐47s. Across the board, the activity that scared everybody the most was the improv exercise. The fear of looking and sounding stupid in front of other people is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that people feel more comfortable potentially falling off a cliff and dying then looking like a jackass in front of their peers.
By being on stage and speaking to audiences for the last 20 years, I have developed the ability to communicate my thoughts to large groups of people, so it only makes sense that others who want to get better at public speaking might ask me to show them some tricks and techniques. During a break during one of the team trainings I was facilitating for a very large financial institution, one of the executives pulled me aside and asked me if I could give him some tips on improving the presentation that he was scheduled to deliver the next day.
I'm sure he was expecting some deep insights in commanding the stage and mesmerizing the audience through theatrical flair. I looked at him and said one word: “Inflect.”
“That's it?” he responded, incredulous. Yeah, that's it. Inflect. If I could give one piece of advice that will immediately make any speech better, it is to inflect different words when you talk. I don't care which ones you pick to INFLECT. They can be NOUNS or they can BE verbs or any other DAMN word you choose. But by simply inflecting different words when you talk you will automatically be better than 90 percent of the speakers who drone on and on, never once altering how they emphasize words.
I could tell this guy was skeptical and wasn't overly impressed with my simplistic answer. So when we came back as a group from break, I decided it was a good opportunity to demonstrate this technique, not only for him but the rest of the group. I let everybody know the question that I received and the answer I gave. I then looked around the room for some kind of signage. On the wall there was a sign that gave instructions on what to do in case of emergency. It read something like this:
In case of an emergency please exit through the fire doors that can be found at either end of the room. Fire extinguishers are placed in the front and back of the auditorium. Please exit in an orderly fashion and assembled in the designated team area.
First I read the instructions in your typical corporate/10th‐grade oral report monotone. Then I read it again like this (caps indicate inflection):
In case of an EMERGENCY please exit through the FIRE Doors that can be FOUND at EITHER end of the room. Fire EXTINGUISHERS are placed in the front AND back of the auditorium. PLEASE exit in an ORDERLY fashion and ASSEMBLE in the DESIGNATED team area.
Through the simple act of inflecting, adding emphasis to various words to break up the monotonous pattern, I took a simple instructional sign and gave it some life and passion. It perfectly illustrated the point that just by emphasizing certain words, you break up the auditory patterns, and this helps the listener stay engaged and not drift off into another world.
While this certainly works in any kind of speech for public presentation, simply adding inflection to your day‐to‐day speech pattern will help you manufacture a bit of passion in how you sound to others. Take a look at these two lines of dialogue:
· Hello Patty, How are you today?
· Hello PATTY, how are YOU today?
Same sentence, But the second one read with inflection on PATTY and YOU totally changes the energy and passion of that sentence. I'm not advising you to be insane and over‐the‐top, but by simply adding a little bit of volume and inflection in how you speak, you will start to come off as a more effective communicator.
Then start adding in a few positive exclamatory words, and you will begin to sound far more passionate than you probably feel. Compare these two lines of dialogue:
· I got an Italian sub. It was pretty good.
· I got a TREMENDOUS Italian sub. It was FANTASTIC!
Look, I can regale you with all kinds communication theory and intricate improv exercises that will allow you to tap into your inner truth and bring forth your authentic self in such a way that those around you cannot deny your divine being. Or, I can show you a couple of practical, easily executable techniques that can be practiced and applied in real life scenarios. So that is what I've done.
By increasing our energy and passion in how we communicate, we can't help but draw people toward us. And while that may not be the end goal, if we are looking to move ideas ahead, at some point it almost always requires buy‐in from someone else: the boss, the team, your spouse, your kids, or your friends.
Most important, your energy and passion is something you alone have control over. You do not have to wait for someone else to give you permission to raise your energy and passion. When you do, you will find that invariably more positive things will be set into motion in your life.