Let’s Rethink Our Communications

It’s time to rethink how we communicate. We now have a much clearer understanding of what people are up to when they commune with one another. Thanks to significant advances in brain science, we can piece together most of what goes on when people attempt to inform, cajole, persuade, amuse, enlighten, control, tease, infuriate, impassion, or lead each other. We don’t have the whole picture with complete certainty, of course, but we now have enough to go on.

We have enough to understand what it takes to get an accurate picture of your own communications profile, to inspire other people, to understand them better, to lead them, to persuade others, to captivate other people with charisma, and to share your vision by becoming a passionate storyteller. These are the specific mysteries of communications I’ll be focusing on in this book. Each of the seven power cues are specifically chosen to help you in these areas.

Before starting, you need to let go of your current ideas about communications. Whether they’ve come from high school debate training, a college course in public speaking, something your mother told you, or just your common sense, most of what you think you know about communications is wrong.

For example, one common misconception is that when giving a speech, you should “tell ’em what you’re going to say, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you said.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with repetition, but the problem is that the world has sped up since that advice first came down the communications grapevine, and we no longer have the patience to listen to something someone tells us three times.

When was the last time you paid attention when someone went through an agenda slide? You didn’t, right? You were on your smartphone checking your email one last time. How about when a speaker says, “In conclusion, what I’ve covered today is …” You were back on the smartphone or packing up your stuff. (Of course, if you’re really Type A, you paid attention only during the opening summary or the ending summary; the rest of the time you were surreptitiously doing email.)

The point is that that sort of bald repetition no longer works because it moves too slowly for us in our attention-deficit-disorder (ADD) world. Repetition has to be artful, disguised, or impassioned like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for it to work on our harried minds today.

The Bad News about PowerPoint

Another misconception that I frequently hear as a speech coach is the idea that PowerPoint helps because all people are one of the following: visual, kinesthetic, or aural learners. Neither idea buried in this generally accepted, appalling misconception is true!

First of all, we’re all visual learners.¹ As I indicated in the introduction, we can handle up to 10 million visual bits of information per second, far more than anything else our minds can process. We’re also all kinesthetic and aural learners. We get information in those other ways, too. Just not as much. Of course, there are individual variations, but most of us are average, and that means we’re mostly visual beings. Unlike, say, cats and dogs, which have vastly more developed senses of smell. For us, it’s visual.

Second, PowerPoint doesn’t help; it distracts. All the research on multitasking shows that we can’t do it.² We first pay attention to one thing, and then another. Moreover, the research on how our brains process visual information, as I alluded to in the introduction, indicates that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us, but rather an approximation of it that our brain matches to reality based on its memory banks.

So what really happens when we’re confronted in a meeting or a presentation with a speaker and a set of slides is that we look at the speaker—because we’re inherently more interested in people than pictures—and when our attentions start to wander, then we look at the slides. Now, reading slides and looking at people occupy two different parts of our brain, and there’s a lot of inefficiency in switching back and forth. So when we’re looking at the speaker, we’re getting one set of cues. When we look at the slides, we get another set. When we switch, we lose a bit of either information stream.

So the result is two incomplete sets of information. That’s tiring and indeed annoying for us, so we get cranky and tune out.

That’s what PowerPoint (and any similar slideware or presentation program) does. With some exceptions, it adds to our information load, overwhelming it even faster, and causing us to tune out.

Don’t do it.

It’s All about the Handshake, Isn’t It?

You’ve probably been told a thousand times that any good meeting with someone new begins with a firm handshake. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a firm handshake, but in fact the important part of a meeting has nothing to do with the handshake and everything to do with the attitude that you bring to the meeting.

Before you say anything or even reach the other person, you telegraph, with a thousand subtle cues, how you’re feeling about yourself, and how you feel about the other person. Indeed, the relationship has largely already been set by the time you’re close enough to shake hands. Hand shaking just seals the deal. How you stand, how you move your arms, what your posture conveys, the expression on your face, the way you’re walking, and yes, what you’re wearing all affect the relationship more powerfully than that poor overstressed handshake.

Finally, generalizing from all the bad communications classes you’ve taken and coaches you’ve worked with, there are no secret power gestures or ways to position your hands or face so that strong men salute, women swoon, and everyone runs to do your bidding.

Individual gestures simply aren’t that powerful. Really. Let that one go. Lose the steepled fingers or the enigmatic smile or the T-bar move. None of those do much more than occupy your conscious mind a little too much, distracting you from what you should be thinking about.³

So it’s time to let go of the old rules and learn what’s really going on. Let’s begin with those much misunderstood gestures.

Two Conversations at Once

Every communication is two conversations. The first conversation is the one you’re aware of—the spoken content. The second conversation is the one that we’re all unconscious experts on—the nonverbal one.⁴

When the two are aligned, you can pay attention to the words, because the body language supports the content and so you can hear it. But when the two are sending out different messages, you believe the body language every time. That’s why it’s important. The body language always trumps the spoken content.

Moreover, these two conversations always go together. They are so integral to one another that most people tend to gesture with their hands and face even when they’re talking on the phone. Think about it. No one else can see them, yet they keep gesturing regardless. Why do they do it?

Is it just habit? No, there’s a profound reason why people gesture when they attempt to communicate, even when they can’t be seen.

We tend to think that the second conversation is merely an accompaniment to the first. We talk, and we wave our hands in the air, as a poor substitute or stand-in for content. We believe, if we ever think about it, that the gestures are just follow-ons: something to do with our hands, or something that clarifies the meaning, emphasizes whatever’s being said, or helps keep the other person listening. Or something that follows the words, perhaps—a physical flourish to enhance our sometimes less-than-thrilling (spoken) content.

That’s not what’s going on. In fact, gesture can convey meaning independent of words.

Try the following experiment. Sit in a public place, say, a restaurant where the tables are close together and the conversation is lively. Sit with your back to a pair of people who are having one of those animated conversations. Listen hard. Try to get as much of it as you can.

You will be surprised at how hard it is to follow the conversation. You will hear broken phrases, agreement to something you haven’t caught, simultaneous talking, abrupt changes of topic you weren’t expecting (but, for some reason, the speakers were), and apparently incoherent exchanges of information. If it’s an average, reasonably equal exchange, you will be astonished at how fragmentary and elusive the communication is.

Why is that? Because we communicate first with the gesture for some things, and only second with the word. Because the “second conversation” is really the first. For certain kinds of communications, indeed most of the ones we really care about, we communicate first with the gesture and second with the word.

What does that mean? It means that when people communicate topics of great importance to them, they gesture what they intend a split second before the word comes out.

Why should we care about that? Because it turns the commonsense way we think about word and gesture upside down, and because those interesting implications flow from that inversion of common sense.

Gesture comes first.

You can confirm this for yourself if you go back to that restaurant, this time keeping your eyes firmly trained on those two people in conversation and listening very closely. Focus especially on gestures that accompany the noun phrases.

How did you get there?

I took an airplane.

Let’s say that’s one of the exchanges you hear and see. Watch the gesture associated with the word airplane. Depending on the information being conveyed, the gesture will start before the entire sentence or just before the word airplane itself.

If there’s strong attitude, such as, something like, Of course I took an airplane; it’s three thousand miles away over water. How else would I get there, you idiot? then the gesture may convey all the emotional freight in the communiqué—all the Of course it’s three thousand miles away over water how else would I get there you idiot part.

The person might shrug and turn her palms upward, while raising her eyebrows and looking hard at the interlocutor. She might shake her head and offer a half-smile. Those facial and hand gestures would get across all the emotional meaning she wished to convey to her friend. Maybe not in precisely those words, but close enough for both parties to get the message.

It’s the nature of most of our communications that they unroll like this one; we use surprisingly few words and convey the emotional colors and tones of the conversation mostly through gesture.

The Language of Love

When two people know each other well, the words are even less important.

Why? Because when two people know each other well, gesture can take up a larger part of the communications between them. In this regard, gesture becomes a kind of shortcut that allows the two to alert one another to important shifts in the conversation or strong feelings or topics to avoid. When two lovers meet, for example, not the ones in movies who have just fallen in love, but those who have had an intimate relationship for a long time, a touch, a few murmured words, and a kiss may convey all that needs to be said about a day, a meeting, or an important issue that has been pending between them.

Love is expressed primarily through gesture. A look, an arch of the eyebrow, a touch, a kiss. You get the idea.

Many of our dialogues with others—and most of our important ones—take place nonverbally. Large portions of them are unconscious.

So gesture comes first, and it conveys most of the emotion that a communication intends. In addition to emotion, certain other basic things are conveyed. Relationships, spatial distances between people, physical motion and place in general, basic needs like food, shelter, sex, and so on—all of these are first gesture conversations, then only secondarily and later content conversations. Think of it as everything that a smart caveman and -woman would need to get along on a typical busy day defending the hearth, slaying woolly mammoths, raising the kids, and creating those cave paintings in the few minutes at the end of the day that a cave person can call his or her own.

What else is going on? Unconscious thought is faster and more efficient than conscious thought.

As a species, we’re always trying to articulate our feelings and telling people to get in touch with them, and so on, but in fact our feelings are doing quite well unconsciously. Unconscious thought is faster and more efficient, and may have saved your life on more than one occasion. It’s just that it isn’t conscious.

Here’s the next implication. Two people—or a leader and her audience—can have an unconscious communication, one that is entirely composed of gestures of various kinds, and only realize it consciously later on or not at all. The two conversations don’t even have to be connected.

When I say every communication is two conversations, both verbal and nonverbal, I mean that precisely. They don’t have to have an immediate, obvious connection. They often do, but they don’t have to. Think about the exchange between two people where one is bearing very bad news to the other. The bearer may gesture strong signals of comfort, love, and solidarity while quietly stating the shattering news in a simple, unadorned way.

There, the two conversations, though of course connected, are proceeding along two parallel tracks, and it is easier to see how the gesture is not merely an afterthought to the words. That kind of communication usually begins with the reassuring gesture or the look, which is what alerts the recipient that bad news is coming.

Or think about when two people are carrying on a flirtation under the noses of their colleagues while talking about meeting second-quarter quotas, for example. There, the two conversations are unrelated, to the great private amusement of the flirters.

What Gestures Really Mean

We haven’t always understood the importance of this second conversation. Not so long ago, scientists didn’t study the gestures with which we humans accompany speech because they were considered meaningless and obviously less interesting than so-called “emblems”—gestures with specific meanings, like the peace sign or the upraised middle finger.

So scientists studied emblems and downplayed the importance of gestures, because they didn’t consider them to be as thoughtful and important as those few gestures every culture has that are really hand signals—a kind of code.⁵

That approach hobbled scientific progress for most of the twentieth century, but researchers finally shook it off and came at gestures from the opposite direction: that they can have meaning, just not the same sort of coded meaning as words.

Now we understand that gestures actually precede conscious thought and can even shape and guide it.⁶ So important is gesture that we find it hard to communicate if we are unable to gesture.⁷ Try speaking for any length of time with your hands tied behind your back, either literally or figuratively. You’ll find it surprisingly difficult.

Gestures are an essential part of the communications process, because they signal directly from your unconscious to everyone’s else unconscious mind what you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, and what you’re intending toward those other people.

The first thing we want to know when we see people coming toward us is, are they friend or foe? We unconsciously evaluate their stance, their posture, where they’re putting their hands, and what they’re doing with them, in order to ascertain with astonishing speed whether we’re about to get a punch or a kiss.⁸

There are two essential points here. The first is that you’re always signaling, and so is everyone else, about your intentions and feelings. The second point is that most of the time you don’t pay conscious attention to all those signals—either the ones you’re putting out or the ones others are sending to you. Your unconscious mind handles all that.

Why Gesture Matters

Our minds are constructed to attribute intent to the gestures, attitudes, and postures of other people. We’ve evolved to be able to do that effortlessly, for the most part, by pushing the activity down to our unconscious minds, which are faster and more powerful than our conscious minds. So that’s a good thing.

Except when we want to understand what it is that we’re reading so effortlessly. What we’re actually doing is monitoring the thousands of minute adjustments in body language that the people around us are constantly making. They do so to express their unconscious attitudes, intents, and emotions. We do so in order to understand what they’re saying. The whole process probably preceded our ability to vocalize as a species.

To understand why this counterintuitive situation might exist, it helps to learn a little about how the brain works. It’s not what we think. Most of us have this idea that we can call the “Mr. Spock Theory of the Brain,” after the Star Trek character known for his logic and ability to keep his emotions under control. So, for example, we imagine that we get a thought, such as, “I’m thirsty,” and then we direct our bodies to act on that thirst, reaching for a glass of water. Neat, logical, and very Spockian.

But it turns out that our bodies don’t work that way. What actually happens is that we get an unconscious intent or desire—like thirst—and then our bodies start acting on that intent or desire. Only after that—entire nanoseconds later—do our conscious minds catch on to what’s happening. In effect, our conscious minds say, “I just noticed that I’m reaching for water. I must be thirsty. Yes, that’s it. I’m thirsty. Good thing I’ve got a drink of water heading my way.”⁹

That’s counterintuitive, and it probably makes you a little uncomfortable. But that’s the way it is. Our conscious minds are just along for the ride, like one of those birds that sits on a hippopotamus, picking off the bugs that swarm around the beast.

How Our Minds Really Work: Not So Much

We’re barely in control of our simplest, most basic needs, let alone our higher-order wishes and desires. Again, one of the purposes of this book is to give you far more control over what’s happening to you and your body as you go through your daily life.

Now, let’s be clear that most of the time unconscious control of moments, like that of thirst, is a good thing. If you were aware of everything your unconscious mind took care of, from keeping your heart beating and your body temperature relatively constant to monitoring your surroundings for incoming hazards, you’d quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer tediousness of it all. There’s a good reason why most of that stuff is run—beautifully—by your unconscious mind. It does it really, really well, so you don’t have to.

That frees up your conscious mind for more interesting things and important moments. But the problem with the arrangement is that it leaves you largely helpless in those moments when you do want to take control of a room, a meeting, or a negotiation. You want to do it subtly, without everyone else becoming aware of your sudden wielding of power, because it’s far more effective that way.

So what I’m going to do is to show you how to learn to become conscious of those aspects of your unconscious behavior that are most important for confidence, intuition, charisma, and leadership. You’re going to learn to control them and then you’ll be able to bring them to conscious awareness when you want to and leave them to your unconscious mind when you’re not trying to take charge.

That’s mastery. And it begins with the conscious control of your own hitherto unconscious gestures, and the conscious reading of others’ gestures, something you have also left to your unconscious mind until now.

What the Research Says about Your Hands: They’re Smarter Than You Think

Let’s go a little deeper into the language and meaning of gesture and its use. You need to know what’s really at stake. And it will surprise you.

Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow kept noticing something strange.¹⁰ One of the prime tests psychologists use to determine how advanced a child is in her development is what is known as the “conservation test.” This test has a child pour liquid from a tall, skinny glass into a squat, fat glass. Now, because the second glass is shorter in height, very young children will tell you that there is less water once they’ve poured it into the second glass.

But once a child reaches a certain point in her development, she realizes that the liquid is conserved—that it’s the same amount. That’s conservation, and it’s an important breakthrough in everyone’s development, as a child growing up.

Goldin-Meadow noticed that when you asked children to explain their rationale for figuring out whether the liquid is conserved or not, they gestured a lot. In fact, sometimes they gestured things that they didn’t say. Kids who understood the concept might, for example, flip their hands back and forth to indicate that the two amounts of water were the same. Some of the kids who couldn’t yet verbally explain the idea would also make that flipping gesture, as if their hands knew something their brains didn’t.

This was surprising, because the dominant view about gesture until pioneers like Goldin-Meadow taught us differently was that gesture was a meaningless accompaniment to speech, which was really the important stuff.

You Don’t Say What You Mean—You Gesture It

What Goldin-Meadow was noticing was that gesture and speech were different, and things were being said by the children with their gestures that they didn’t say with their speech. As she notes, “It’s hard even to think about gestures separately from speech. We (coded) them separately. So we’d code the speech without the picture, and then we’d turn the sound off and code the gesture.” The accidental result was that Goldin-Meadow and her fellow researchers noticed that speech and gesture were not the same.

You don’t normally notice this phenomenon in ordinary communication. As Goldin-Meadow says, “That’s not how our brains process it. Our brains just glom it all together and integrate it.” So it took an expert to notice that our gestures have meaning, and meaning different from what we’re saying.

You don’t notice this phenomenon consciously, but your unconscious mind is keeping track of it. Goldin-Meadow says, “We did some brain imaging studies that show that when there’s different sets of information, we do pick up on it … We’re just beginning to look at how people process those differences. We’ve got evidence that people will respond to a mismatch differently, because we’re seeing different brain patterns for matches and mismatches” between words and gestures.

So our gestures sometimes convey different information from our words, and our unconscious minds take note of those differences and process them. If you think about it from your personal awareness of the world, it makes perfect sense. We’ve all had the experience of conversing with someone who says one thing but gestures another, and we get what they mean from the gesture.

Goldin-Meadow worked out a very elegant, simple test for this. She had subjects listen to a story that involved a stairway. The researchers made the gesture for a spiral staircase, but didn’t verbalize that idea. Yet when they tested the subjects, they got the spiral staircase idea.

In another study Goldin-Meadow conducted, children whose teachers produced “grouping” gestures while explaining an algebra problem were more likely to talk about that idea later, even though the teacher hadn’t discussed it at all. Concepts introduced via gesture are picked up by the unconscious mind and can be vocalized later even if the speakers are not aware of the concepts consciously.

But Goldin-Meadow is honing in on a further aspect of gesture and speech, one that has fascinating implications for why we gesture. As she puts it, “If you gesture, it lightens your cognitive load.” By that, she means that it takes less mental effort to speak while gesturing. She goes on, “We don’t really know why that is. We just know that it is.”

It’s a mystery, but the implications are important. You need to gesture. If you don’t, you’re making your brain work much harder. So those power gestures you’ve been taught, where you in effect limit your natural gesturing to some spider-doing-pushups-in-a-mirror gesture because some coach told you that makes you look intimidating, actually make it harder for you to think on your feet—leading to a less intimidating you.

Goldin-Meadow sums it up: “Gesture isn’t just a reflection of speech.” One theory is that gesture predated speech in our evolution. We spoke with our gestures before we learned to vocalize. But whether that’s true or not, those gestures are important to our thought processes, to helping us communicate.

Let’s Go to Harvard

I’ve observed this phenomenon at work in a small-scale experiment I ran on some Harvard midcareer Fellows a couple of years ago. We had a group of about seventy of (very) high achievers. I wanted to see the effect of gesture on how they presented themselves to each other.

The experiment was very simple. I asked them to introduce themselves to each other. So, one by one, the Fellows stood up and took a minute or two to speak about themselves. I gave them no guidance beyond asking them to “introduce themselves.”

Then, after each one had finished, I took the speaker aside and asked him or her to adopt a specific gesture and then give exactly the same introduction again. I was curious to see the effect of open gestures on the thought processes and verbal patterns of people speaking in front of groups like these. The gestures I asked them to adopt varied, but mostly consisted of some form of open arms, exposing the torso to the audience.

Most of the speakers, before I coached them the second time around, in fact clutched their hands nervously in front of their stomachs, behind their backs, or at their sides. So the effects of my instructions to them were to greatly increase their openness to the audience.

The results were astonishing. In every case, the amount of personal information the speaker divulged greatly increased on the second try, when he or she was forced to be open through the open gestures.

I’ll never forget one student in particular, who, on his first introduction, stated his name, in a flat, unemotional way, and then proceeded to identify his year in the program, the courses he was taking, and how much longer he had to go.

Then I coached him to open his arms out at his sides like a preacher at an altar, what I call the “Jesus gesture,” with the palms upturned, just a little above waist high, and about twelve inches out from his sides. Try it yourself. Stand up and adopt the posture. Then imagine yourself talking to a group of seventy people, holding that gesture, for two minutes.

The student’s second introduction was extraordinary and transformational. He said, “I’ve just come back from spending two years in Iraq, working with children. I saw atrocities committed that should never be done to anyone, let alone children, and I’ve made it my life’s work to try to improve the lot of children around the world. Please join me in working to save children from the terrible mistakes adults make in war zones and other trouble areas worldwide.” That was the gist of it; his speech was more impassioned and eloquent than that.

The audience rose to its feet and spontaneously gave him a standing ovation. A number of people came up to him afterward and asked how they could help. When I asked those in the audience to describe the difference between the two introductions, they spoke passionately about the second introduction and how it had moved them. The first one had failed to move them at all. When I asked them if they had noticed the Jesus gesture, none had!

Recall that I had instructed the speaker to give the same introduction. When I debriefed the speaker, he remarked that the first time he had been nervous and hadn’t said much. But the second time, he felt inspired to share his heart with the audience more directly.

It was an extraordinary demonstration of the power of gesture and how we present ourselves to others to affect our interpersonal communications.

Gestures Determine Thought—and How Other People Take You

We’re “read” unconsciously by the people around us. We convey our attitudes through our nonverbal signals much more powerfully (and directly to the unconscious) than we do through our speech. So when we try to get a sense of our personal presence—how we’re showing up—we need to understand that our physical actions and presence are what convey our persons or our personality to others. It’s all the more powerful because it’s unconscious.¹¹

As Goldin-Meadow has found, important information is communicated unconsciously through gesture even in normal conversations. Listeners tested afterward don’t know which information comes from gesture versus speech. Some studies show that if a listener copies the gesture a speaker makes, the listener is more likely to like the person and attend to what he or she said.¹² I’ll talk more about that phenomenon in chapter 2.

Goldin-Meadow says, “Gesture is a powerful tool. It can be used for good, or it can be used for evil.” She’s found that you can implant ideas in people’s heads through gestures. They won’t be aware that you’ve done so, but later on, they’ll start to talk spontaneously about the ideas you’ve gestured about earlier. I’ll talk more about that aspect of the power of nonverbal communications in chapter 6.

You think consciously about someone else’s signals only when they’re really strange or alarming or the person is really important to you and you’re actively wondering what his or her state of mind is. But that unconscious activity determines an extraordinary amount of the effect you have on other people, the relationships you have with them, and your influence upon them.

As a first step, then, it’s essential to get a handle on these unconscious cues.

Body language is crucial to today’s leaders because it tells us what we think about other people. People decode emotions primarily through gesture (and tone of voice). The emotional component represents a separate, nonverbal conversation that goes on parallel to the verbal one and typically a split second before the verbal one.

So leaders must master both conversations, but especially the second.

That conversation will make or break you as a communicator. Again, you may be entirely unaware of it, but it may confirm you as the top dog, sabotage your authority, connect you with your mate for life, get you in a fist fight (or out of one), win you a game or lose one, blow your chances at getting a raise, get you the big sale, lose you the prize or win it—and so on and on through most of the big moments in life.

How can you become more aware of this conversation that your body is having with the other bodies around you? Is it worth the effort? Will you become self-conscious and inauthentic if you do? Can you monitor what everyone else is “saying”? Is that helpful? Will it get you to places you won’t otherwise reach?

Understanding the second conversation is key to leadership, because it’s not something that you can leave to chance or the unconscious. There are simply too many decisions to be made, too many inputs to weigh, too many players to manage and lead. In the twenty-first century, the pace of leadership has accelerated, the flow of information has exploded, and the sheer physical and intellectual demands on leaders have intensified. You can’t rely on common sense or instinct or winging it as you once might have done.

The first step to mastering your personal communications, then, is to figure out what you’re saying in this second conversation. You’ll need to take inventory of how you inhabit space, how you stand, how you sit, how you move, and how you interact with others. When you’re sitting alone, do you slouch or sit straight? When you stand, are you taking up all of your space, or do you shrink into corners? When you move, do you move confidently or do you slink—or do you careen?

What do your interactions with others look like? Do you come alive when other people are in the room with you, or do you go on the defensive?

In the next chapter, you’ll learn ways to control those gestures. In this first step, you’re just learning about how people naturally present themselves through posture, gesture, and motion.

As you work further on emotion, gesture, and your presence in chapter 2, you’ll delve into the connection between these aspects of communications. But for now, I just want you to get a sense of your gesturing style, frequency, and intensity as part of the complete self-inventory.

When you have a moment, fill out the questionnaire at the end of this chapter to help you begin the process of gestural self-awareness.

Keep a Body Language Diary: Try to Catch Yourself Being Yourself

Try to catch yourself in unconscious behavior. You need to know how you’re behaving when you think no one’s watching—especially you. Try not to judge yourself. Choice and change can come later. For now, just be compassionate and nonjudgmental, and try to get a picture of how you inhabit space.

Your body is the physical embodiment of your unconscious attitudes, intents, and desires. As the old saying goes, in your youth, you have the face—and body—you’re born with; by the time you’re middle-aged, you have the face—and body—you deserve. So take the sting out of that saying and simply observe yourself and learn what those observations tell you about your attitudes, intents, and desires.

Be nonjudgmental. Just notice what you do.

If you have a hard time catching yourself unawares, then think about setting up a video camera when you’re in a meeting or undertaking some routine chores. At first, you’ll be self-conscious, and your behavior will be distorted from your usual mode of being, but after a few minutes you’ll forget the camera is there. So be patient and use the video for what it can tell you about your habitual behavior, beginning a few minutes in.

As you watch, ask yourself, how am I showing up? Expressive or bottled up? Happy or sad? Active or passive? Strong or weak? What kind of person do I look like—to me? Someone who would be fun to meet? Someone imposing, or a wallflower? A nerd or a leader? And so on.

Keep a daily diary of your physical presence and emotional attitudes. Try to stick to this faithfully for about a week. Stop yourself once an hour or so and simply note what you’re doing physically—sitting straight, slouching, fidgeting, smiling, frowning, and so on. Try to be as objective and nonjudgmental as you can. The process might take a few weeks, depending on how easy or difficult it is for you.

How do your gestures show up? Do you gesture a lot? A little? Are your gestures strong or weak? Are they expressive and fluid, or rigid and limited?

If you can take personal inventory in even a moderately detached way, you can take the first step to understanding yourself as an active presence in the world and decide what you want to do about it.

If you’re having trouble being objective about yourself, then ask trusted (and supportive) family and friends to help. Ask them to rate you on a scale of one to ten for basic confidence, mood, charisma, leadership—how you show up. It’s better to ask them specific questions like, “On a scale of one to ten, how normally cheerful would you say I am?” If you ask them, “How do I show up?” they probably won’t have a helpful answer, because they’re not used to thinking consciously in this way.

Ask your friends and family, but don’t take too much stock in particular answers. Look instead for patterns. It’s very hard for us to be objective about our closest friends and family, so don’t expect too much. If you get a consistent pattern of comments across a number of people, then those observations are more likely to be accurate.

If you’re lucky enough to be a rising executive in a company that regularly conducts 360-degree evaluations, they may be extremely helpful in this regard. Once again, don’t put a lot of stock in particular comments; rather, look for patterns of comments about your usual mood, attitudes, or mode of being toward employees or colleagues. Remember, people are very good at unconsciously reading the emotional attitudes of people they know well daily.¹³ We recognize when Bob comes in for work in a lousy mood, or Jane is excited about something. So look for patterns where people say that you’re tough on colleagues, strong with employees, warm toward everyone, or the like. Those repeated patterns of estimations of your attitudes will tell you a lot about your physical presence, because it’s from that physical presence that people figure out your attitudes.

How Big Are Your Butterflies?

Once you’ve completed this first step, becoming more aware of how you inhabit space nonjudgmentally, then it’s time to begin to analyze your own body language more closely and definitively. Try it this way first. Ask yourself, am I a confident person? Note how many times you’ve rated yourself as nervous or self-conscious in your diary: any time you’re behaving less than optimally because the pressure is on you in some way or you feel like you’re performing.

Performance anxiety is probably the most common social fear that humans have. But people experience widely different degrees of this anxiety, and it’s good to get a sense of where you are along the spectrum of normal behavior. Do you get nervous for most meetings or only the ones where something important is at stake? Do you get butterflies when you have to present to a team of six people or fewer, or only when you’re presenting to a hundred people or more? Do you get nervous just for the first few minutes of your presentation or does your heart hammer for the whole session?

It’s common to begin a presentation with butterflies in your stomach. Most people settle down after a few minutes; if you stay nervous for all or most of your talk, then you’ve got above-average anxiety. Similarly, if you get nervous even for routine meetings with small groups, then you’ve got above-average anxiety. It’s normal to experience some nervousness for high-stakes meetings and large, special gatherings, but you’re at the high end of the anxiety range if you get nerves when the stakes are lower and the numbers modest.

How Well Do You Understand the Second Conversation?

Once you’ve determined where you are on the confidence spectrum, then analyze yourself for your level of intuition. Do you generally know what other people are thinking, or do they regularly surprise you? Do you easily read other people’s moods, or do you have trouble doing so? Do you notice a difference in the ease with which you read people in your intimate circles—family, close friends, coworkers you’ve known well for a long time—and people you know less well?

It’s normal for us to be able to read people we know intimately, but not less close acquaintances. If even those in your closest circles of family, friends, and coworkers are often a mystery to you, then you have below-average intuition.

Men tend to be less intuitive than women, but on the whole most of us are not very intuitive, especially with people we haven’t known very long. That gives those who are an edge over the rest; one of the purposes of this book is to show you how to increase the strength and precision of your intuition. I’ll cover that in more detail in chapter 3.

When You Talk, Do People Listen?

Once you’ve estimated your intuitive abilities, then it’s time to get a rough sense of your charisma quotient. The danger of self-deception here is very real, but do the best you can. Look at your diary and notice yourself when you’re with others. How often are you the center of attention? When you speak, like the E. F. Hutton TV advertisement from the 1970s had it, does everyone listen, or not so much?¹⁴ How often do you dominate a meeting, without much apparent effort, just feeling in the zone as you put your ideas across?

Do people hear you out, or do they stop listening before you’re done? Here, it may be useful to imagine a range, where ten is some guru whose disciples hang on his every word, and one is a crazy homeless person in the street whom few people actually listen to. How do you rate yourself?

How about your own emotions? Are they close to the surface and easily accessed, or are you slow to ignite? Do your emotions mostly leave you alone, or are they constantly nagging at you, demanding your attention and reaction?

Most of us are not actually the center of attention most of the time. Those of us who do command attention more than occasionally belong to that select group of people the rest of us think of as charismatic. Most of us have charismatic moments, but those special few are “on” virtually whenever there’s a group around them—and that’s most of their waking hours. Most of us keep our emotions in check most of the time.

You may not have realized that there’s a connection between those two sets of behaviors; there is. You can learn how to turn on charisma. It’s controllable; it’s not magic or something given to a select few at birth. Charisma is focused emotion, but I’ll talk much more about that later. Showing you how to control your own charisma, so that you can turn it on and off when you want to, is another one of the purposes of this book.

Confidence, intuition, and charisma. These are the raw ingredients of mastery. Oh, yes, and one more: leadership. What kind of natural leader are you? Again, just try to note your behavior without judgment in these first few weeks on the road to mastery. You need to have a realistic sense of who you are and how far you have to go in order to get the most out of this book. So study yourself and your behavior when you’re with your colleagues, family, and friends. When you make suggestions, do people generally go along with you? Do your plans, ideas, and feelings generally get implemented, acted on, and acknowledged, or do you feel ignored and misunderstood?

Natural leaders, by definition, are few and far between. Most of us are listened to occasionally; natural leaders effortlessly dominate the meeting, the occasion, or the party most of the time. Again, this dominance is something you can learn to switch on, augment, and create in yourself so that you can lead when you want to and follow when that suits you, too.

For now, you’ve completed your personal inventory, and you understand the connections among a complex of communications tenets: how you show up, how you create and transmit thought via your gestures, and how other people read you. You’re ready for chapter 2.