The Difficulty of Paying Attention to Everything

So you’ve successfully taken a personal inventory of your own characteristic body language and developed a sense of how you look to others. That means that you’ve completed power cue number one and you’re ready for number two. The good news is that, in some ways, the second cue is easier than the first—at least many people will find it so.

If you spent a few weeks getting to know your own body language, as I recommended in the first chapter, then you probably realized how much brain wattage it takes just to notice consciously something that’s normally handled by your unconscious mind. The moment you started noticing yourself and your actions, you probably lost the flow of the conversation, became less aware of what was going on around you, or bumped into the furniture.

We normally don’t think at all—at least, in the casual sense of the word think—about where we are in space, how we’re gesturing, or what kind of impression we’re making on the people around us. Most of that activity is left to our unconscious minds most of the time. So when we do think consciously about such things, it’s very distracting. Precisely because these chores are normally left to our unconscious minds, when we make them conscious, they tend to drive out other thoughts.

It’s virtually impossible to monitor where you are in space, keep track of all your hand gestures, focus on the people around you, and keep up a steady flow of witty and to-the-point conversation, all at the same time. We may think consciously about body language on rare occasions, noticing when someone touches us or suddenly moves very close to us, but that kind of awareness is intermittent and brief and created by unusual body language, rather than the ordinary stuff. Constant self-monitoring is simply too difficult for most of us to manage. As the neuroscientists say, it takes too much cognitive load.¹

But is it necessary? Why can’t we leave that monitoring to the unconscious where it usually resides? Unfortunately, the answer is that we do have to develop some way of consciously creating the right kinds of body language in ourselves, especially in moments of great importance, because leaving it to chance won’t work. We’re far too likely to make two critical mistakes if we leave things to the gods.

Here’s How You’ll Go Wrong

First mistake? You’ll project your nervousness and fail to command at the key moments of opportunity. Say you’re heading into a key meeting, one on one, with your boss. The topic is your salary and, particularly, whether or not it should be raised. Let’s say, not to beat around the financial bush, you need the money. You’ve moved to a new town when you took the new job, and the expenses of the new burg are proving to be higher than you expected.

There’s a lot riding on the meeting, in short, so you’re nervous. If you just leave your body language to chance, then you’re going to convey your nervousness to your boss. Unless she’s completely clueless and lacking in negotiation skills, she’ll register that nervousness, read it as weakness or perhaps that you don’t think you deserve the raise, and act accordingly. You’ll be far less likely to get the money you were hoping for.

The second mistake you’re likely to make, if you leave your body language to chance, is that you’ll just convey a typical person’s typically distracted state of mind. When you let your mind wander on an ordinary day, you might think about your to-do list, picking up milk on the way home, the TV show you saw last night, how sleepy you are, how you’re not making any progress on your New Year’s resolution to lose fifteen pounds, how annoying your office mate’s voice is—all in the space of a few seconds.

If you walk into your boss’s office thinking about all of that, your body language will reflect that mental list and it will be as diffuse as your mind. You will not be charismatic, powerful, or focused. Once again, your chances of getting the raise will be small to nil.

But if it’s too hard to monitor body language consciously, and it doesn’t work to let nature take its course, what’s left? How do we solve this critical problem?

We need to find another way.

The Method behind Method Acting

Fortunately, the acting world stumbled on the solution at the turn of the past century in the form of Constantin Stanislavski. The Russian actor and director developed an approach to acting that involved identifying with the emotions of the character in the play so that the actor would feel the same things as the character and thus embody that character.² The goal was to bring the character to life in a way that seemed real, far more real than the highly stylized acting of the day.

To accomplish this feat, the actor strove to experience the called-for emotions by using sense memory exercises, conscious memories of a time when the actor had naturally felt that emotion. At the same time, Stanislavski urged the actor playing, say, a deckhand, to observe the mannerisms of real deckhands and copy those. The actor would work both from the inside out, from the emotion to the gestures that naturally followed as expressions of the emotion, and the outside in, from the typical gestures of someone in the situation the actor was trying to bring to life.

Now, it’s important to understand that, in effect, real life was suspended for these actors, thus limiting what they had to achieve in the way of concerted gesturing. They had many weeks to prepare a play, and that play would have a limited number of scenes and emotions demanded of the actor. So the actor didn’t have to learn how to behave spontaneously, but rather in certain limited, specific ways—ways that would be repeated night after night.

Your job is at once more difficult, because you typically don’t get many weeks to prepare a scene where you want to show up powerfully in a certain way, and easier, because you’re playing yourself. Just yourself in a particular mood.

How to Ace That Salary Review

Let’s go back to the meeting with your boss. You want to make the case that you deserve the raise. You want to impress your boss with how worthy you are. You want to walk in exuding confidence and radiating control and power. In short, you want to walk in with the air of a winner—someone who has already got the raise.

So instead of trying to program every single gesture you’ll use in the next thirty minutes or leaving all that to chance in order to focus on your verbal arguments (which is what most people do most of the time), you’re going to spend a few minutes beforehand recalling a time when you felt like a winner. Pick a strong memory, a time when you won an award, let’s say, came in first across the finish line, or perhaps simply were praised before all the other kids in class. Pick any memory that strongly evokes the right emotion in you.

Then use all the five senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste—to put yourself back in that scene. What did it look, sound, smell, feel, and taste like? Especially focus on sights and smells, because those will evoke the strongest memories and emotions for most people, but use all five senses as best you can.

For some people, this is an easy, natural exercise. For others, it feels weird and uncomfortable. But even if you’re in the latter camp, practicing the exercise will make it come easier with time. With practice and time, you’ll be able to think “confidence” or “I’m a winner” or whatever code words describe the emotion and moment for you and quickly focus yourself on that feeling.

Once you’re able to do that, the rest will come easily. If you let your body feel the emotion through all the senses, you’ll soon find yourself standing, gesturing, and acting like the winner you were and will be now. You’ll stand straighter, pull in your stomach, breathe deeply, smile, pull your shoulders back—you’ll do everything, in short, that telegraphs to other people that you’re a winner. But you won’t have to think about specific gestures, just invoking the feeling. Your unconscious mind will take care of the rest, because that’s how you naturally express your emotions. That’s the normal sequence of your brain: emotion leading to gesture and body language leading to conscious thought.

Indeed, the research shows that if you simply adopt the pose of a strong, confident person, your body will respond by making more of the right kind of hormones, the hormones consistent with good kinds of excitement and stress, and less of the negative ones. So working up a whole regimen of sense memory will create an even more powerful state and focus.³

Don’t Focus Solely on Your Body

I don’t recommend merely relying on adopting a confident physical pose without the mental work. The reason is, as I’ve described, as soon as you start thinking about other things, like the interview itself, you’ll lose track of your posture and forget to stand like a winner. Very quickly your posture will revert to whatever it was previously, because it doesn’t have the emotion to back it up. Controlling your own mind—your own emotions—is an essential part of projecting charisma.

A few more good things—happy by-products, in this sense—will happen as a result of this exercise, which you should get in the habit of performing before you undertake any kind of conversation, meeting, or presentation where the stakes are sufficiently high. Does it seem like too much work? It shouldn’t. It’s what successful athletes and performers do routinely every day for important races, meets, shows, and so on.

The first good by-product of this pregame activity is that you will become more charismatic. There’s a lot of mystery and nonsense surrounding charisma. It’s popularly supposed to be something that certain lucky individuals are born with—just a few great actors and politicians—or perhaps learn at some secret Charisma Camp somewhere that the rest of us are not privy to. But charisma is quite simple. It’s focused emotion.

You know this in your own private life. Let’s say you get some news, either very good or very bad, at work, and you go home brimming with it to your significant other. He or she is waiting in the kitchen for you and as soon as you see each other, he or she asks, “What happened?”

The question comes because you are focused, naturally, on the news and its emotional impact. The power of the particular feeling has driven out virtually every other thought. The result is that you’re simply exuding excitement or devastation. For a rare hour or two, you have clarity of emotion and focus of thought.

How to Develop Everyday Charisma

That focused emotion is charismatic, and everyone around you will pick it up. We probably evolved to be able to do this because it was important to pick up quickly on strong emotions—like danger—in our early tribes. We can imagine life depending on everyone fleeing instantly when one of our gang came into sight full of the news that a rival band was on the other side of the hill, bent on destruction.

Now, beyond the cave, when we say someone is charismatic, that’s what we mean. We mean that they’re focused in some sense. Anyone who has met a charismatic politician will tell you that “she focused entirely on me for the whole thirty seconds!” or words to that effect. So whether the focus is on us or on an emotion, focus is charismatic. We feel it because we’re wired to respond to strong emotion and strong purpose. Strong emotion sweeps everything and everyone else before it in human situations. We get caught up in the moment when someone is selling us with true passion, enlisting us into a cause with passion, or merely coming on to us with passion.

That’s the secret of charisma: focused emotion. That’s how great actors turn it off and on at will. They’ve trained themselves to first feel an emotion and then to focus on it to the exclusion of just about everything else. The result is that you can’t take your eyes off them. It’s not magic, but it is a technique that takes practice and hard work to master.

Start with the sense memory of a strong emotion that you naturally felt at some key moment in your life. Work at putting yourself in that moment, using all five senses. As you practice this exercise, you will gradually become better and better at focusing, with more fluency and more speed. I’ll explain more about what to do before and during key meetings in the field notes at the end of this chapter.

I’ll never forget, from my student acting days, watching a well-known Broadway actor demonstrate his ability to conjure up tears in a few moments. He was leading a class in working with emotion, and we students were complaining that it was hard work. He simply turned his back to us for perhaps a minute, faced us again, and revealed the tears that were streaming down his cheeks. He told us—his abashed students—through his tears, not to make such a big fuss about it, but just do it.

He had a whole retinue of emotions available at a moment’s recall. Think about that ability for a moment. Does it make that actor inauthentic? It certainly made him a force to be reckoned with, for a reason that I’ll get to—one that I didn’t understand in my student days. But did it make him inauthentic? Is the ability to conjure up emotion at a moment’s notice real or fake?

Why Do We Find Emotion So Compelling?

We don’t ask the question of why we find emotion so compelling about somebody who is able to speak eloquently about a range of subjects, do we? So why reserve the suspicion for those able to be emotionally quick and facile?

It’s because most of us are less able to manage our emotions, precisely because they’re normally managed by our unconscious minds. They feel like something beyond our control and beyond our ken. They just well up inside us, like tsunamis. They’re natural; they’re not something we control. We put actors on pedestals and make celebrities of them because they can do something—manage this flow of human emotion and focus it—that the rest of us can’t.

We make celebrities of them because the experience of emotions is powerful. The power comes because of a surprising ability of the human mind. To understand what that is and why it’s important, we need to discuss mirror neurons.

Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team of researchers were working on research into the functioning of the brain, using monkeys as test subjects, back in the nineties, when one of the researchers noticed something odd.⁴ The monkeys were hooked up to machines that registered their brain activity. As a reward for the various things the humans were getting the monkeys to do, the monkeys received peanuts, a food they love. When you give a monkey a peanut, he grabs it, and the pleasure centers of his brain light up like Christmas.

One day, the researcher absentmindedly—or perhaps with malice aforethought—ate one of the peanuts himself rather than feeding it to the monkey. The researcher was astonished to see that the monkey’s pleasure centers lit up, just as if the monkey had eaten the peanut himself.

What was going on? After lots more investigation, the team discovered that monkeys and humans both have mirror neurons that mimic both actions and emotions of the simians and people around them. Our sense of empathy with our fellow humans, then, is real; when we see someone experience joy or sorrow, we experience that emotion with them. It’s not that we appreciate the emotion or understand it intellectually from a distance. We actually experience it. We are an empathetic species.

Mirror Neurons Make It All Possible

As Rizzolatti explains, “The instantaneous understanding of the emotions of others, rendered possible by the emotional mirror neuron system, is a necessary condition for the empathy which lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships.”⁵ What Rizzolatti is saying is that most of human relations would not be possible without mirror neurons, because we wouldn’t be able to understand our fellow humans. And understanding is a first step in most human interaction.

This was an extraordinary finding with huge implications for communications and, indeed, most human relationships, including how we lead others. Rizzolatti says, “The mirror neuron systems … provided us with a base from which to investigate the cerebral processes responsible for the vast range of behavior that characterizes our daily existence, and from which we weave the web of our social and inter-individual relations.”⁶

What are some of the ways that the mirror neuron system matters for communications and leadership?

Before getting to that, I need to discuss decision making briefly. Most people think of decision making as something that Mr. Spock, the logical Vulcan on Star Trek, does very well, and the rest of us, we humans, do not do so well. He keeps the emotions out of it, our thinking goes, and so he more rationally weighs the pros and cons and comes up with an optimal decision.

But that’s a distortion of the essence of decision making. At its heart, decision making involves emotions, because emotions give us the ability to weigh the relative import of all the factors involved. If we’re trying to decide what kind of new car to buy, for example, emotions don’t just color every aspect of the decision-making journey; they make it possible. Let’s say you’re the cliché, a man in his mid-forties looking at a little red sports car, and your wife wants an SUV. Emotion, to put it very simply—how much you care about your wife versus how deep into your midlife crisis you are—is what makes it possible to weigh the merits of those two very different desiderata.⁷

Most of life is like that. The decisions we make in real life involve weighing different amounts of attachment and importance. Do you take the new job, which will involve moving to a new area, where you don’t know anyone? Your feelings for your friends and family where you’re currently living will guide that decision.

Don’t Have a Stroke

We think that this sort of constraint makes decisions difficult, but in fact it’s the opposite. There’s a famous case in the neuroscience literature of a man who suffered a stroke that disabled the part of his brain, the hippocampus, which has a big role in handling emotions. The result? To everyone’s surprise, he could no longer decide on anything. Why? Because he had no basis for choice. No emotions tugging at him to say, choose this one, because it reminds you of your mother’s eyes. Or, choose that option, because it will make your boyfriend happy.⁸

So emotions make decision making possible. Mirror neurons make it possible for us to understand other people’s emotions. As Rizzolatti notes, that makes empathy possible. But think about it. Without empathy, communications of virtually any kind become, if not impossible, at least far more difficult. People who suffer from autism experience something very like this. It’s what I experienced for a few months when I was seventeen, as I described in the introduction.

If communication becomes possible thanks to mirror neurons, then leadership becomes possible too, because what is leadership without the ability to communicate with your followers? Mirror neurons also help us understand why we find someone who is charismatic so compelling. By focusing on an emotion, the charismatic person is allowing us to feel it too. When President Bill Clinton famously said, “I feel your pain,” he was absolutely right; he did, and so did everyone else. We all feel the pain, the joy, the fear, and the excitement that other people feel, and the more so when it’s powerful, focused, or both.⁹

Mirror neurons make it possible for us to understand and entertain another point of view or another person’s pain. Without mirror neurons, negotiating successfully with other people would be difficult, if not impossible, because no one would be able to engage in sympathetically understanding another person’s emotions—the source of human connection, agreement, disagreement, conflict, and the rest.

Take Charge of Your Emotions and You’ll Be Able to Take Charge

Which leads me to the second good by-product of learning to focus your emotions: once you take charge of your own gestures with the right techniques, you’ll be well on the way to controlling the emotions and reactions of the people around you, thanks once again to those mirror neurons. That means that, for the first time, we’re able both to understand how and why we can deliberately induce emotions in other people in order to fire them up for a difficult task or share a strong feeling with them that enables them to work together with a group they had been suspicious of before, and to create trust quickly with a group by creating specific emotional responses in its members without them being consciously aware of the manipulation.

Most of us usually go through the day with a cacophony of emotions roiling through our heads and hearts. We’re panicked getting ready to go to work. We’re furious at the guy who just cut in front of us on the freeway. We’re overwhelmed by the emails waiting for us when we get to the office. We’re intimidated by the meeting with the boss, where we have to explain how far behind the project is.

These emotions are reactive and (usually) counterproductive. They’re certainly useless for leadership. Instead, you need to gain mastery over your emotions by consciously focusing on one emotion at a time, so that both you and the people around you find your presence calming, inspiring, or motivational, every day.

Does this emotional control seem Machiavellian? You prepare the content of a speech, a meeting, a negotiation. You wouldn’t go into an important meeting and just babble about everything that was on your mind—your to-do list, your relationship issues, your golf handicap, your unresolved problems with your mother. No, you plan your remarks, at least at some level. You don’t say everything that you think. You make strategic verbal choices. Why not do the same with emotions?

Most of us don’t radiate a lot of charisma because we’re not authentically present, right there, in the moment, and because, as I’ve discussed, even if we are present, we’re not expressing much in the way of emotion. Either we are split in focus, nervous, thinking about something else, distracted, or we’re bottled up, afraid to show what we really feel.

How then do you increase your own charisma? First, increase your authenticity. That means being absolutely aligned in what you say and how you say it—content and body language. You can’t be authentic if those two modes of expression are not aligned.

Second, increase your passion. Focus in yourself on how you feel about the moment, the people you’re with, the situation you’re in, and then express that.

Focusing on both these steps will create a virtuous cycle that will increase your charisma quotient as you get more and more practiced at expressing emotion authentically.

While consulting with an executive on body language, charisma, and presence, I noticed something odd about the way he was standing as we worked on a mock interview. I was playing a high-status person, because one of the issues the executive wanted to address was showing up well with his peers—other executives, similar-status colleagues, and so on. The executive was essentially freezing in place as soon as he started conversing with me. That reminded me of studies of conversations between different-status people. One finding is that when a lower-status person is talking with a “superior,” he or she tends to freeze in place.

So I halted the role-play and asked the executive what he was thinking about. He reported that he was working very hard on thinking about what he was going to say next. Was it that the mental effort required was causing him to freeze up, or was it his feelings of lower status?

Either way, the unconscious effect on me was to elevate my status and to signal to me that this client was low on the totem pole. The important point is that it didn’t matter what the executive was consciously thinking about; what mattered was the way he showed up. To anyone else in the room, he looked like a peon, not a player.

So we worked on loosening up this executive’s body language and getting him to think like a Jedi master. As I’ve said, either you can work from the inside out, on your emotional intent, or you can work from the outside in, on freeing up your body to look and feel like a top dog.

Either way works; if you can do both at once, you’ll get there even faster. What happens if you start with both is that you get a good feedback loop going; your mind says, “I’m a player! And yes, I must be a player because I’m standing like one.” If you start with the mind, it signals to the body what to do. Your unconscious mind dominates your behavior, but you can inject a new idea into the unconscious mind either way. The results are well worth it. If you want to become a top dog, you have to first act like one.

Your New Premeeting Ritual

To focus your emotions in preparation for a big meeting, work on what actors call the “offstage beat.”

What is the offstage beat and why do you need it as a businessperson? Actors divide their scripts up into beats, basically short sections of the script when they’re feeling one emotion or have one thing they’re trying to accomplish—an “objective” in actor-speak. So, in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo has exchanged insults with Tybalt and starts dueling with him, the beat might be something like, “I’m angry at Tybalt and want to kill him (despite my promise to Juliet not to fight with members of her family).”

The offstage beat is the emotion and objective you go on stage with. The idea is that a character doesn’t just spring into life when he or she starts uttering lines, but comes from somewhere, wanting something, doing something, and so on. When an actor comes on stage with something already going on, she is much more interesting to watch than if she’s just making an entrance in order to start speaking. Look for it the next time you’re in the theater. You’ll be able to tell actors who come on with an offstage beat, and those (if there are any) who don’t. The difference is huge.

So as a businessperson, you’ll be much more interesting to your colleagues if you start with an offstage beat before an important meeting. While you’re breathing before the meeting, get an objective and an emotion into your head. It might be something like, “I can’t wait to tell these people about my special new idea and I’m thrilled to the max to see them.”

The other advantage to this activity, besides making you a far more interesting person right out of the box, is that you will spend less time making yourself nervous, which is otherwise the offstage beat you will have. The difference is absolute. A person with an offstage beat comes into a room focused, ready, energetic, and interesting. A person without one comes in … nervous. Not a pretty sight.

Do you find it difficult to focus your emotions? Try modifying your gestures—working from the outside in. You’ve got a much wider range of expressive options that perhaps you realize. Most people hold their elbows close in to their sides protectively and wave their hands from the elbows on down. I call this the “penguin gesture,” and it’s not very expressive. It signals to everyone around you that you’re nervous, feeling exposed, or shy.

When you use the penguin gesture a lot, it will restrict your gestures in other ways as well, because of the way the body signals mood and intention to the mind. So, you’ll tend to stand or sit in one place and gesture less effectively with your face as well. In other words, the whole second conversation of body language shuts down. The result? You’ll signal to the world that you’re trapped and narrow-minded, and what’s more you’ll increasingly act that way.

Don’t get trapped by limiting your hands to a tiny retinue of gestures. Gesture from the shoulder, using the whole arm. Talk with your hands, to the extent that you can do it tactfully and appropriately for who you are.

Keep your gestures open. Don’t fold your hands in front of your chest or crotch or put them behind your back. All of these are defensive gestures and will not inspire trust with your colleagues. Keep your gestures open and reaching toward them.

Projecting Charisma in Front of a Crowd

It’s one thing to focus your emotions for a meeting with a couple of colleagues, but for many of us, this feels almost impossible to do when we’re speaking in public. I’ve written at length in two earlier books about how to get better at public speaking, but here’s a brief primer in public speaking success and charisma.

Public speaking is hard to do, and very hard to do well, because it requires you to embrace something that you’ve evolved never to embrace: recklessly rejecting the urge for self-protection. Yet, that’s what you have to do to become more charismatic and thus successful as a speaker.

The whole weight of the history of our species leads us to value self-protection. When you stand up to speak, in front of a crowd, if feels as if you’re risking that.

Now, you are risking something. You can fail to engage the crowd, you can make a fool of yourself, or you can attempt too little or too much and miss the mark. While the risk is almost always greater in your own mind than in reality, it is a risk.

Naturally enough, that’s what’s on most people’s minds at the moment they begin to speak. They’re thinking to themselves, “Why did I agree to do this? It could all go horribly wrong! People are going to think I’m an idiot!” or something along those lines.

The result of that emotional self-talk is a series of behaviors that, alas, tend to increase the likelihood that precisely the feared result will occur. People who fear failure in speaking are defensive, and that defensiveness shows up in a variety of ways, all bad. They may pace nervously—the familiar “happy feet” of some speakers. They may clutch and unclutch their hands in front of their stomachs. They may cross their arms, hide their hands behind their backs, or keep their arms firmly fixed to their sides, only waving their forearms in the penguin gesture.

All of these gestures and others signal nervousness to the audience. But more than that, they signal that the speaker is trying to protect himself. The speaker, in fact, is shutting off part of herself from the audience.

As you’ve learned in this chapter, if you radiate nervousness to the audience, it will become infected with that nervousness. Thanks to mirror neurons, you’ll reduce the entire room to a state of abject terror. Imagine how well that will support effective communication!

And there’s the rub. The whole point of presentations, from the audience’s point of view, is to see the speaker whole, to gain insight into this person who has the authority to stand up and speak to an assembly of fellow humans. If the audience senses that the person is holding back, its judgment is that the speaker is ultimately dishonest and so can’t be trusted. That’s not of course (usually) what the speaker intends, but that’s the tough luck of public speaking.

If you’re speaking, try to begin right away avoiding self-protection. Get over yourself and your nerves. Put your focus on the audience. Be open to the audience. If you can manage that, they will carry you and give you back far more energy than you put out. The irony is that the best way to protect yourself in public speaking is to give up any thought of self-protection at all.

Play the Top Dog to Be the Top Dog

If focusing your emotions and moderating your gestures is proving difficult for you, back up and return to the first power cue for a minute. Videotape yourself again and see if you’ve made any progress. See if you can tell the difference physically when you’re more focused mentally.

Recently I was working with another executive who wanted to show up with more charisma. As the day progressed, we tried some role-playing of the situations in which the executive typically found himself. One was a one-on-one conversation with a potential client—a high-status client. The executive often became tongue-tied in these sorts of half-social, half-business situations and wanted some help in figuring out what to say.

I played the high-status client, and the executive played himself. The conversation was indeed a bit stilted, but as the role-playing continued, something else began to catch my eye. The body language of the executive was far more important to what was happening than his chitchat.

So we stopped the scene and showed him the replay. He was astounded. He said, “You look like a CEO; I look like an analyst!” In his lexicon, an “analyst” meant a lower-status person.

I had to agree. He looked like an analyst. How did he telegraph his lower status? His body language was partly closed; he was holding his hands defensively in front of his stomach. But more important was his posture: a slight slump in his shoulders, sagging inward and collapsing his chest. The executive was giving up all his authority by closing off and failing to take up the space that a CEO or high-status person must take. He simply wasn’t taking charge, in physical terms.

He could see it immediately; that’s the power of video. We talked through what he was seeing and what he could do to change it. In this situation, you change either your posture or your thinking. I always prefer working on both and begin with the emotional side of things, but some people get faster results from focusing on one or the other.

In the next role-play, the executive concentrated on feeling and standing like a CEO; the result was astonishing. He was transformed; his persona opened up with new authority and his chitchat even improved. The problem was not that he couldn’t think of anything to say. The problem was that he hadn’t figured out how to inhabit the role of a CEO. Once he saw what he was doing physically, he freed himself up to fill the role both emotionally and physically; the difference was immediate and profound.

Remember, every communication is two conversations, the spoken content and the body language. The body language always trumps the content when the two are in conflict. So in planning your content and failing to think much about your emotions, which drive your body language, you’re leaving that to chance—the more important of the two conversations.

It’s time to put the focus on the more important of those two conversations, the body language. To do that effectively, you’ve got to manage your emotions, because, as you’ve seen, it’s too difficult for most people to consciously manage their body language. Step two in the journey to mastery of communications, then, is to begin to manage your emotions before important communications.

Remember Who’s in Charge

If you’re like most of us, you think about body language as follows: I’m pretty much in charge of my body. I direct it, from the control tower in my head. I tell it what to do. “Make coffee,” I say, and it goes through the motions. “Now drink it,” I say, and it obliges. Sure, there are activities like breathing that I let it handle on its own, but that’s mostly low-level stuff I don’t think much about. In short, I live in my body, my brain rules it, and that’s the deal.

But actually, as we know now, it’s much more complicated than that. In certain realms, like the realms of emotion, relationship, and personal safety, just to pick three, your body literally thinks faster than your conscious mind and rules the roost accordingly. In other words, the older, lower part of your brain, the one beneath the cerebral cortex, “thinks” nonverbally. And it thinks faster than your conscious cerebral cortex.¹⁰

So many of those things that you do, like hugging your spouse when you see him or her at the end of a long day, you do because you’ve had an emotional or physical thought first and a conscious Nice to see you, honey thought only afterward. The body is in charge, in some significant areas of human expression.

What I’ve found in working with many clients over the years is that whatever your body does under adrenaline in high-stakes situations, so your mind begins to think. So, for example (and this is important), if you’re one of those people who tends to freeze under stress, the kind of person who sits in one position or stands in one place, speaks in a monotone, and gestures minimally if at all, then gradually your conscious thought will become more and more restricted as well.

You will experience the phenomenon I’ve seen again and again where the executive under stress becomes verbally limited, getting tied up in word knots and using the same few words over and over. Or you’ll miss an obvious answer to a question or forget to make an important point.

The body rules, especially under adrenaline. It’s just trying to keep you alive, so pay attention to it. What can you do about this phenomenon? If you find yourself getting stuck in some way, climb out of the rut. Force yourself to move, to change the subject. Take a short break, walk to the back of the room, or ask everyone to stretch with you. Anything that’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening and that gets you doing something different. You’ll find that your conscious mind and your verbal facility will come to life once again when you do.