Most Replayed Moment: How To Be Charismatic and Gain the Edge in Any Room - Charlie Houpert

Do you want to be the kind of person everyone enjoys being around? Charisma might seem like an inborn trait, but it’s actually a set of skills and behaviors anyone can learn. Here are five micro-habits that make you more likable and engaging.

Personal charisma and likeability are important for many different areas of life, from career success to navigating family and relationships. And at times, it can feel like you’re either born with it or without it—but this isn’t true. In reality, charisma is a skill like any other. In How to Become a People Magnet, motivational speaker and life coach Marc Reklau explains how you can improve your charisma and social abilities. His lessons are based on one main principle: People are mainly interested in themselves and what they can get from you. If you keep this in mind and tailor your conversations around it, you’ll start getting along better with others.

This guide covers Reklau’s main strategies for making positive first impressions, forming deeper connections, and persuading people. In our commentary, we’ll cover some of the psychology behind his advice and offer alternate perspectives on charisma and social success.

Do you feel like you go unnoticed or underappreciated in your personal or professional life? According to Vanessa Van Edwards in Cues, this could be because you lack charisma—the quality that makes others pay attention to you. Without charisma, you can’t communicate or connect with others efficiently, which can hold you back in life. The good news is that even if charisma doesn’t come naturally to you, you can learn to convey charisma by adopting charismatic cues.

In our guide, we’ll explore Van Edwards’s definition of charisma and explain how verbal and nonverbal cues reinforce or undermine your charisma. Then, we’ll discuss which cues you should adopt or avoid to project a charismatic image. In our commentary, we’ll explain why head tilts are cuter in dogs than in humans and why steepling your fingers can make you seem like a diabolical mastermind. We’ll also explore social and scientific perspectives on charisma and discuss how marginalized people, people with communication disorders, and actors can use cues to their professional advantage.

Most people communicate from their own perspective, but great communication comes from understanding and connecting with other people. Written by communication expert Jay Sullivan, Simply Said is a blueprint for effective business communication. Top-notch communication skills are essential to success in any professional field—after all, you can only get clients, colleagues, and audiences to buy into your ideas if you’re able to communicate them clearly.

Sullivan argues that you can deliver a clear and compelling message by focusing on what others hope to get from the exchange and communicating in a way that serves them.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Sullivan’s advice on how to:

• Create and deliver memorable presentations
• Write documents and emails that people will actually read
• Navigate communication in specific business scenarios

Our guide will compare Sullivan’s ideas to insights from other communication experts and suggest how to adapt communication to other cultures.

Career expert Richard Bolles shares his revolutionary “parachute approach” to finding a job. This approach is twelve times more effective than sending out traditional resumes and doesn’t simply get you a job, it gets you a job you’ll love.

The parachute approach starts with self-reflection⁠—who are you, what do you like, what are you good at, and what do you value most? By figuring out what you want, instead of what the job market wants, you’ll set yourself on a path to career satisfaction and personal fulfillment.

In Power, management expert and business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer explores the nature of power and explains how you can gain and use it effectively. He says power is an essential part of success: Whether you’re trying to get promoted at work or change the world, the more power you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Because of this, it’s important to know how power works and how to increase your own power.

In this guide, we’ll explore Pfeffer’s definition of power and explain why you should seek it. We’ll then share his advice on how to gain power, including where to start, how to network effectively, and how to appear powerful. We’ll also look at how to deal with the failures and conflicts that come with seeking power and the negative consequences power can bring. In our commentary, we’ll dive deeper into the dynamics of power and compare Pfeffer’s advice to that of other self-help, business, and leadership experts.

Have you ever felt anxious about a new social situation, an interview, a performance, or another environment where you lack confidence? In Presence, social psychologist Amy Cuddy explains how to navigate these stressful scenarios by embodying “presence”—a self-assured confidence that’s not arrogant but allows you to comfortably express your true self. She says you can achieve presence by leveraging the body-mind connection to change the way you feel about yourself rather than worrying about what others perceive.

In this guide, we’ll explore Cuddy’s popular research on how “power poses”—like the superwoman stance—and other body language shifts can boost your confidence and improve your performance in high-pressure situations. We’ll also explain how research on this topic has evolved since the book was published and include tips from other experts on how to navigate stressful experiences.

Most of us assume that charisma is something you’re born with: an indefinable “star quality” that makes some people irresistibly charming. This is a myth—charisma is nothing more than a set of habits and behaviors that anyone can learn. In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane offers specific skills and tactics you can use to become a magnetic presence wherever you go.

In this guide, we’ll break down the mysterious quality of “charisma” into three simple components and explain how to integrate each one into your personal relationships. Along the way, we’ll explore how influences such as Buddhist mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy inspire Cabane’s vision of charisma.