A huge part of your success or failure as a speaker in front of an audience is determined before you even open your mouth. Your posture and your body language begin an unconscious conversation with the audience that either creates the possibility of a positive exchange, or its opposite.

President Obama’s posture and body language signal all the right things to his audience – openness, confidence, a positive attitude, and a take-charge authority. Obama stands tall, with a still central core, and relaxed shoulders and arms. It’s that combination of stillness and relaxation that so powerfully radiates confidence, authority, and ease at the same time.

How can you achieve a similar effect?

Thinking too hard about what your body is doing will make you self-conscious and awkward. Instead, you need to work at the unconscious level of intent that governs human non-verbal communication.

Here’s how you do it.

As I describe in detail in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, you need to break the kind of effect that Obama achieves into four steps, steps that you layer one on top of the other as you become practiced at ‘taking the stage’ with the confidence of a leader.

The four steps in brief:

Step One: Being Open

Your first task is to approach an audience, a meeting, or an interview as if you were comfortably at home talking to a loved one or a friend with whom you’re very relaxed. The point is to imagine the encounter, practice it, note the nonverbal gestures that go with it, and then use this same body language when you’re in the less intimate setting. The overall idea is to relax and achieve an open stance so that you look at least as comfortable as the new President.

Step Two: Being Connected

Now you focus on your audience, whether it’s one person or many. Your nonverbal posture orients toward them, and you zero in on their issues and problems. As with openness, this is at once a question of message and body language – content and delivery. Continuing the role play from the first step, you might imagine you were trying to get the attention of your four year old, who is engaged with some TV show. What would you say? How would you act? Would you draw nearer to your child? Get down at her level? Grab her arm?

How can you translate that strong connection into the lukewarm one you have with, say, your direct reports at work? This step will give you the urgency that Obama has when he begins to speak – and everyone pays attention.

Step Three: Being Passionate

Here, you concentrate on your own feelings and emotions. How do you connect with the subject matter at hand? What do you want or feel toward it? What’s your underlying emotion during the encounter – not the irritation you might feel about a direct report who’s giving you excuses about why a project is going to be late, but rather your passion for the project itself? Once you know what that underlying emotion is, how do you show it? What’s your repertoire of emotions at work? Can you imagine expanding them?

Emotions are interesting; it’s why we watch TV avidly when disaster happens even though we know we shouldn’t. And it’s why we watched Obama when he cranked up the emotion in describing the challenges we need to face (and overcome) as a nation and a world in his inaugural address.

Step Four: Listening

Finally, authentic and charismatic communication requires that you listen to your audience. What is the underlying emotion of the person in front of you? Do you know what it is? If not, why not?

During the course of the meeting, the event, the conference, or the speech, what’s the journey you want to take that person or persons on? Where do they start, and where do you want them to end?

Obama has that rare ability among speakers to watch the audience and listen to them as he’s speaking. Paradoxically, it gives him huge charisma, because it leads to that feeling in members of his audience that ‘he was talking directly to me.’

If you practice these four steps until you can (almost) automatically work them into your preparation before an important speech, meeting or conversation, you will be able to approach President Obama’s ease and authority in similar settings. The trick is not to make it a conscious effort, but rather to work directly with your unconscious, because that is the level where most of your physical behavior originates.