How to Be More Charismatic — With Neuroscience

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One thing that my clients and potential clients almost never ask me — at first — is how to become more charismatic. I guess that’s because asking the question involves not one but two embarrassing admissions. One, that you care about charisma, as opposed to the grand exchange of ideas. And two, that you might be less than prodigious on some charisma scale.

So let me save everyone embarrassment by admitting for all of us: we all want to be more charismatic. Yes, we care about it. And that’s not wrong. Charisma helps get and keep attention, and that’s a challenge in this era of distraction. So of course you can and should care about charisma. And you can improve.

Here are four tips drawn from neuroscience:

First, speed is more important than accuracy. Any rocker will tell you that, to hold an audience, you’ve got to deliver at least some up-tempo numbers. And the more up-tempo numbers you do, the better. It’s just a question of how long the fingers of your guitarists can manage not becoming shredded. An interesting exception is Adele, who holds her audiences enthralled in other ways, as we’ll see.

Part of charisma is speed. The neuroscience shows that we rate people as more charismatic the faster they respond with a comment, a quip, or an answer, not whether they’re correct with those…