Olivia’s Blog

Here are some of the most useful:

For a quick boost of confidence, simply visualize one of your greatest triumphs. To be effective, visualization must be precise, vivid, and detailed. When this technique was used with the 1976 Olympic ski team, skiers visualized the entire course, mentally experiencing each bump and turn.

To counter anxiety and worry, try gratitude. You know that nothing ruins a job applicant’s chances faster than giving off a vibe      of desperation. Desperation, anxiety, worry, are caused by focusing on how things should be—but aren’t. Whereas gratitude focuses you on things you already have and are happy with. You’ll instantly feel more confident, and an immediate change will sweep over your body language.

To broadcast empathy, try putting yourself in their shoes. There, but for the grace of God, go I—What if you had been born in their circumstances, with their family and upbringing? Now focus on how you might help them. Have you ever been with someone who truly and completely had your best interest at heart? Doesn’t that give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling? Well, it turns out that this feeling can be read across your face, too. Not only will feel more connected to the person you’re speaking to; you will be perceived as more trustworthy.

Clearly, having the right body language is crucial to charisma. But your body sends out thousand of signals every minute; constantly broadcasting your thoughts and feelings for all to read.

Yes, you can control a fraction of that consciously—but only a fraction. Trying to control the whole thing would be absolutely exhausting. This is why great actors often admit to being completely exhausted after performances, as they’re striving to control as much of this flow as possible. And even with years of training, it’s impossible to control the flow completely. Even when we control the main expression on our face, our true feelings will often show up, albeit for a split second. These split-second “micro-expressions” are what people pick up without even realizing it. On a subconscious level, they’ll get the feeling of a “mixed message.” It’s a gut-level feeling that there’s something off, something that doesn’t quite fit.

Thankfully, there is a technique ensuring that these thousands of signals fall in line automatically. Instead of trying to control the entire output, you control just one thing—the source. As we’ve seen, the vast majority of your body language is not something you control consciously. Like so many other aspects of your bodily functioning—heartbeat, blinks, etc—it’s controlled by your subconscious mind.

There’s an interesting quirk about the subconscious: it does not distinguish between imagination and reality. Have you ever felt your heart pounding and your blood curdling during a horror movie? Consciously, you know it’s just a movie. Yet your brain sees blood and guts on the screen, so it sends you straight into fight-or-flight mode, adrenaline rushing through your system.

So if you can get your subconscious mind to imagine the emotions you want to broadcast, it’ll assume “it’s for real” and your entire body language will fall into step. This is what people mean when they say that the best liars are those who actually believe what they’re saying, at least for that moment. Actors call this “getting into the character” or “Method Acting”–Sean Penn is a fan. In sports, it’s called visualization, and 86% of American Olympic athletes use this tool. It’s a real Jedi-Mind-Trick. In fact, you could have any expression you like just by using the right visualization!

Did you know that over 80% of your interactions come down to your body language? In fact, an MIT study found that the outcome of negotiations could be predicted with 87% accuracy just by analyzing participants’ body language—completely ignoring words & negotiation tactics. And few things impair your body language more than stress, anxiety, and low self-confidence.

Let’s say you’re in the middle of a conversation; and you suddenly remember something you forgot to do at work. What’s going to happen to your face? You may wince at the memory; your expression becoming tense. No matter how brief that negative expression, the person facing you is going to catch it, because people can catch your expressions within less than a second—as fast as 17 milliseconds, to be exact. And if they see negativity in your face while you’re facing them, what are they going to think? That it’s about them—what you think about them, or what they said or did.

Not only is that bad for that particular interaction; but worse—if this happens often enough, the Pavlovian reflex will set in; and they will come to associate you to these negative feelings.

And now, just when you thought it couldn’t get worse…
Stress, worry and anxiety are in fact only the second-most-powerful charisma killers. The first is lack of self-confidence, most often caused by internal self-doubts & self-criticism.

Have you ever felt as if only half of your mind were present in the conversation; while the other half was busy beating you up? Your face may have tightened in reaction to this internal attack, making you appear cold and distant. They may even take this tense expression personally, as a reaction to them. When in fact, it was just the outside manifestation of internal turmoil.

On the other hand, if you appear confident, people will assume you have something to be confident about; if you seem to like yourself, they’ll assume there’s a good reason for that, too. In short, people will accept whatever perception you have of yourself.

There are certain universally effective means of influencing people deeply rooted in the human psyche. One of the main triggers is the use of authority in its various forms. For instance, positional authority comes from simply being in a position of power; whereas experiential authority comes from having “been there, done that” and expert authority from academic sources for instance.

The recent crisis damaged our perception of authority to such an extent that trying to use it as an influence tool can actually backfire. For example, some positions which would’ve automatically conferred upon the person holding them a certain amount of prestige no longer do so—such as being Managing Director of an investment bank.

What impact will this have? How will this affect our allegiance and affiliation tendencies; thus marketing and advertising?  People who realize this will shift the emphasis in their pitches; marketing materials, etc away from authority and towards the other five key influence tools.  This would indeed mean a major shift in many company’s marketing and selling strategies, and probably an overhaul of their marketing materials. But the alternative—keeping their head in the sand and trying to market & sell with the same strategies as before the crisis—will lead to certain failure.

One good basic primer on the various influence triggers, though not specific to the business context, is Robert Cialdini’s bible on the subject.

There are countless currencies in this world—money of course, but also time and attention. Whenever people spend either one of these on you, you can bet that they are (at least subconsciously) measuring the returns of their investment. You surely know this too: when you like to spend time with someone, or time and attention listening to something, it’s because you’ve decided that what you get out of it makes this worth your while.

Every time you open your mouth,  you’re asking people to spend both their time and their attention listening to what you’re saying.  A high ROI would mean delivering high value (information, entertainment, etc) in return for a small investment (a short amount of time.) A low ROI would naturally mean the reverse; such as making long-winded, repetitive sentences costing your listeners much in time and attention; yet delivering little in terms of value or entertainment. The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay, so the higher the value ought to be.

Low ROI has always been frowned upon in certain environments, be it geography (New York) or industry (finance.) But it’s even worse today; when both time and attention are at the highest premium. So—what’s your ROI?

In these turbulent times, key business relationships are more important than ever. Who can afford to lose the goodwill of clients, colleagues, or superiors? Yet the  anxiety-laden climate can lead people to make more mistakes than usual. And if you’re the one who has to point this out to them, it can be a true minefield— in a threatening environment, we tend to react defensively to any accusation.

When attempting to justify themselves, people will often turn on the accuser instead, because if you indicate something they’ve done has hurt you, they have two choices:

1. I’ve done something bad to a good person. Oh, how terrible of me!
Now, how likely do you think it is that they’ll want to stay in that mode? Not very. So instead, they’ll quickly switch to:

2. They say I’ve done something bad to them. Well then they must’ve deserved it, otherwise I wouldn’t have done that!

So how can you indicate the problem without emphasizing that it’s their actions which hurt/displeased you? Defuse and depersonalize.

Let’s take an easy example from home: you surely know to avoid out-and-out blame such as the accusatory, personal, and generalized “Why do you always leave your clothes on the floor?”

Indeed, you could more accurately say “When you leave your clothes on the floor, I feel upset” because let’s face it, it’s our decision to become upset. And best of all would be to not mention their actions at all: “When I see your clothes on the floor, I feel upset.”

And of course, tell them the corrective action you’d like to see, depersonalizing that too: I’d greatly appreciate if the clothes could go in the hamper. You can even offer to help with the solution (Would it help if you had your own hamper in your room?)

I’m often told after my keynotes– “Great presentation, really useful techniques, but it’s just  common sense after all!” Yes, and that’s exactly why they’re so valuable.

Common sense can be worth a lot–Warren Buffet has made billions from what he calls “simple common sense.”

I coach executives whose titles include Global Chairman and CEO. Sometimes, the most valuable thing I can tell them is that they need more eye contact and pause before they answer; or that their behavior comes off as arrogant and condescending. None of it is rocket science. What’s valuable is my ability to diagnose the problem, and my confidence in calling them on it.

In times of crisis, our natural survival instinct is to become very goal-oriented, task-focused. When an earthquake hits, you focus on staying alive, not staying polite. Problem is, our nervous system can activate the same tunnel-vision focus whenever it senses elevated levels of anxiety– such as many of us are experiencing right now. Which means that many of us are feeling a strong urge to tunnel-vision and task-focus right now.

Unfortunately, focusing so intensely on a goal can take the focus off people and relationships in its periphery. Everything can be subsumed to getting the task done– and  if that’s the attitude we have, people will perceive it. And can feel resentful of being put second, or even feel as if they were a means to an end. So although we often do reach that short-to-medium-term goal, it can be at the cost of damage in the long run.

When in fact, by focusing first on the relationship, and second on the goal, you often end up having the goal better accomplished, sometimes even faster in the end– and strengthening your relationship in the bargain.

When I first started out as a volunteer sailing instructor, the hardest lesson I had to learn was: “Forget the curriculum. Focus on the student” This felt incredibly frustrating at times, as I hated to omit any part of the curriculum–but is it better to cover the whole curriculum, with students not assimilating a word, or is it better to cover less, but with them actually absorbing the whole?

Have you ever felt worried that someone was envious of you, resenting the position or project you’d been given?

Not only is this rather unpleasant; it can also make life more difficult, and even sometimes lead to either active or passive sabotage–which is not something most of us can afford in precarious times. So how can you defuse the situation?

Feelings of jealousy are generated when someone feels that you have reached a higher status than they. To dissipate that feeling, they must feel that you are once more level– or better yet, that they have now reached the higher spot.
Hence two options:

1. Lower yourself. Have you ever noticed how people tend to make self-deprecating comments when given a compliment? This is one of the reasons why– they’re attempting to prevent envy by not  being “raised to high” above the others hearing the status-raising compliment. The problem with attempting to lower yourself is that it doesn’t always work, and can even be counter-productive at times.

2. Raise them.  If you can find a way to express you respect for their thoughts and opinion; if you can find a way to express your sincere admiration (yes, it must be sincere– most people have a pretty effective lie detector) they will feel boosted, and their resentment will vanish.

I’m often asked, “what’s the worst conversation mistake one can make?” Well, aside from the obvious–ranging from looking over people’s shoulders, scanning the room for more important people, to spluttering one’s drink all over their suit (one of my mentors actually did this), one is rarely mentioned: not being emotionally present.

Have you ever felt this? Answering questions on autopilot–you’re intellectually present, maybe even focused–your brain is engaged, but your emotions aren’t. In those cases, the conversation can feel pretty dead.

Now contrast that with times when you feel excited, engaged–an “emotionally present” conversation. Which one do you think will be more memorable? Exactly.

So how does one become more emotionally present? One way is to talk about something that either one of you is passionate about. Another, more effective but more uncomfortable way is to take a risk. This could be by revealing something about yourself (a risk of honesty); to take a stand, to say what you’re really feeling (a risk of interaction).

Essentially, anything that feels risky will immediately make you more present, more engaged, and your conversation partner will immediately feel the effect.