by RedpoleQ – July 27th, 2013.
In Part 2, I covered how the resources you have determine the amount of value you can bring into your relationships; in Part 3, I talked about reading people to make instant connections at a deep level so you could deliver just the best value you have to offer. In this part, I’m going to tell you how to deliver it for maximum impact.
Good communication skills involve several components including facial expressions, gestures, posture, voice tonality, eye contact, word choice, and sentence structure …just to name a few. Instead of seeing the value of mastering these elements of communication, the vast majority of people just fail to see how much of an impact they can have on their own life. In fact, most of these are critical to what we call charisma.
A lot of people will look at the above features of charisma and automatically assume that it would take a lot of work to successfully bring all of these traits out. Utilizing these features is a lot easier than most people realize, though. In, The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, Olivia Fox Cabane writes that, “in order to be charismatic, we need to choose mental states that make our body language, words, and behaviors flow together and express the three core elements
of charisma”. Doing so makes our live a lot easier because instead of trying to control all the tiny, minute aspects of ourselves, we can simply adopt the right mindset and our body will automatically adopt the right behaviors.
Cabane goes on to describe three key parts to projecting charisma: presence, power, and warmth. Most of the information out there about meeting women is geared towards, projecting power in terms of good open body language, speaking in a loud and strong voice, and using other non-verbal behavior that projects confidence. These are important but talked about everywhere so I won’t spend time on them here. Most guys learning to get better with women are usually strong in warmth, as well, which is why they come off as “nice guys”. Warmth without power seems like ingratiating weakness and power without warmth seems like arrogance. Arrogance will get you laid far more than warmth, but then you have to be a prick. Balancing the two is key. It’s not that you can’t be warm and kind to women, though a lot of pickup gurus out there will tell you that you shouldn’t be… it’s just that power has to stand behind it. The two – warmth and power – should go together and balance each other out. Now, since most of those are taken care of elsewhere, I want to focus on where most people are weakest: presence.
To be present is to be fully in the moment and to be fully focused on the other person. John Grinder and Richard Bandler in their seminal book on NLP, Frogs Into Princes, calls presence, “up time”:
[uptime is when] we’re completely in sensory experience and have no consciousness at all. We aren’t aware of our internal feelings, pictures, voices, or anything else internal. We are in sensory experience in relationship to you and noticing how you respond to us.
Most people are so busy self-monitoring, worrying about how they feel, what they think, and what they want to say that they are incapable of being truly present with the person right in front of them. People sense this. It’s easy to tell when someone on the other 
end of the phone isn’t really paying attention to you. In this world of smartphones and high mobility, it’s especially difficult for people to focus since they are constantly being distracted by interruptions and a mess of conflicting commitments.
The half listening parent is so common that it’s become a cliche. But just like that parent’s child, adults also yearn for singular attention – even if it’s only just for a few moments. This brings us right back to Asian women living in their home country. Put yourself in her shoes for a moment. Most of her life, she is consumed by trying to satisfy the interlocking web of duties and demands other people make of her while at the same time trying to create a bit of space for herself. Giving her that space free from doing anything for anyone else or having to be something she’s not provides her with a rare and powerful experience.
Now, this may sound like spiritual garbage and a lot of the people who discuss this stuff definitely come across as having their head filled with flowers but uptime is really a powerful tool since it lets you be much more flexible when interacting with women, not to mention people in general. It takes away the nervousness and gives you a stillness that projects strength because it shows that you are fully open to experiencing the good, the bad, and the ugly in others without judgement. Not filtering other people through your own biases, interests, and desires is so rare that it makes you stand out like an oasis in the desert. And isn’t that what charisma is all about?
