Power Cues

How can you boost your influence? The first ideas that come to mind are often to work on your network, sharpen your expertise and get people to recognize it, or learn to develop more persuasive sales arguments. However, advances in cognitive and social sciences suggest a different, largely underestimated driver of persuasion: nonverbal language. Indeed, we constantly send a multitude of signals and messages through the body that are received by our audience and have a decisive impact on our credibility and the weight of our words. They trigger the formation of positive or negative impressions that are very hard to change afterwards. These mechanisms are largely subconscious, however. No one involved in a discussion is consciously aware of this interplay of micro-messaging and decoding. Yet, this is why some people manage to persuade and gain adherence at meetings, while others fail to do so despite using the very same arguments. This nonverbal language is also where a large part of a person’s charisma resides. In this book, Nick Morgan describes these subconscious mechanisms and their impact. He provides a nuanced and clear explanation of how they work, as well as how they can be developed to improve your presence and impact. A book which, far from preaching the virtues of artifice, encourages us to become more fully aware of how our conscious and unconscious process are interlocking.