Passion and energy are contagious. Speaking with charisma will help you to inspire and excite your followers and call them to action. But if your speaking style is flat and unengaging, people will stop paying attention, and they won’t remember what you said. Perhaps you are shy or get nervous when presenting to a large audience. Perhaps you are not passionate about the topic or you don’t care about the company’s vision. Or perhaps you often feel stressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed, and you come across to others as having no energy.
At work, speaking with charisma will help you to connect with your team members, keep them focused and engaged, and inspire them to complete projects on time. If you appear disengaged and unenthusiastic, you cannot expect anyone else to be excited about the team’s work and the company’s direction.
Speaking with charisma means communicating with energy and passion, often using stories, similes, and metaphors to make your message more powerful and memorable. In our extensive research and testing of nearly 800 executives for my book “The Leader Habit”, my team and I discovered the micro-behaviors that effective leaders do when they speak with charisma:
- Communicate with energy, excitement, and passion throughout the message or presentation.
- Ask people to imagine a different future and use vivid, engaging, and high-impact words like assert, emerge, enhance, escalate, manifest, proclaim, strengthen, unveil, etc.
- Use stories, similes, and metaphors to convey ideas.
Once you understand that these behaviors are the key to speaking with charisma, you will need to internalize them for yourself, turning them into habits. Based on our finding that it takes 66 days to turn a behavior into a habit, here are three steps to take:
Show your excitement
Ask people to imagine
Use similes and metaphors
Next week, I set out how to put these steps into action.
For more information, or to order a copy of Dr Martin Lanik’s book, contact carolyn@thescalagroup.co.uk