If you already are a leader, you’re about to or aspiring to climb that career ladder I encourage you to use these three very easy tricks in daily conversations to gain instant charisma:
1. Nod less
A lot of nodding in meetings, business presentations (Q&A session), negotiations is bad news for you. And especially so if you’re a woman. Extensive nodding creates an image of submissiveness and people often see you as less confident. If you add too much and/or too intensive smiling and head-tilting (again, especially in women) your words won’t have the weight they should.
2. Lower your voice at the end of the sentence
As a leader you need to be able to use three different frequencies: auditory (A), visual (V) and kinesthetic (K). In layman terms you need to be able to raise and lower your voice according to different situations. Lowering your voice is typical of K frequency and two most common occasions to do that are when you want to:
- share something important and want people to remember it;
- intervene in conflicts;
Apart from that lowering your voice at the end of the sentence makes the impact we often seek in different business situations: confidence and assertiveness.
3. Pause for no more than two seconds before you speak
This doesn’t only look like you know what you’re doing, it looks like you own the situation. Very often we can hardly wait to let people know what we think and sometimes we’re so eager to share our opinion that we even cut in. Not good. Listen while they’re talking (no nodding!!!), wait for two seconds and then speak. And don’t worry that you might not have your say, you will. And if you do it as suggested you’ll sound persuasive and influential. An opinion leader.