Do you make a good impression?

When entering a room, some people attract attention and easily retain it. They effortlessly establish contact, and their counterparts get readily convinced. These often leave with a positive impression, even when they do not agree with the conclusions of the exchange. Charisma sums up this faculty. Although this is not an absolute prerequisite to lead teams, it provides great advantages. It notably brings more fluidity and comfort in the relationships, helps in getting support, in boosting the teams’ performance and in inspiring trust among prospects. Some find it superfluous, and value expertise or authority. They thus deprive themselves of a lever that could give their actions more impact. Others think it unreachable—wrongly so.

Although it seems innate, charisma can be developed?without betraying our personality, overplaying a character or spending years working upon ourselves. Indeed, charisma relies on the immediate impression we give to our entourage. Thanks to behavioral psychology and neuroscience studies, we have gained a better understanding of how our brain reaches an opinion about someone: in a few milliseconds, it evaluates, mainly through posture and non-verbal language, whether it can trust the person and whether the latter is legitimate.

Of course, it is impossible to control all the signals we send others. Nonetheless, we can spot the main mistakes to avoid and target a few key points that will help our counterpart build a positive idea of our personality right at the onset of the relationship. This first good impression will need confirming thereafter. Nevertheless, it gives the relationship a durable impulse: we know how it is often time consuming and difficult to reverse an effect produced during the first few seconds.

Developing our charisma and enriching the forms it can take are both powerful assets to lead transformation and performance levers for our team.

In this synopsis:
- Combining different forms of charisma
- Four levers to reinforce your charisma
- The keys to successful public speaking