Which is more important to you – authenticity or charisma?  Do you perhaps yearn for charisma and settle for authenticity?  Charisma is the X factor every leader wants, even if some won’t admit it. These are the ones who often say something like, “I’d rather just be me. That’s more authentic.”

“Just being me” is sometimes a cover for the unwillingness to risk putting yourself out there and learning the craft of public speaking – and the craft of charisma.

Because charisma is something you can learn.  It’s not innate, at least not after childhood. As a child, you come home from school (perhaps pre-covid) and you are full of the excitement of the day.  Perhaps your teacher has praised you or you won a prize.  Whatever the reason, you burst onto the home scene bubbling over with enthusiasm, and your report on the day explodes out of you, details piled on one another breathlessly.  It’s as if your whole being was consumed with the feeling.

That’s what charisma is.  Focus on one strong emotion.  To be sure, there are some body language tricks you can learn that will get you most of the way there, if you’re willing to do the work.  But to take you the rest of the way, focus on a strong emotion is essential.

To accomplish that you have to learn two techniques.  First of all, you have to learn what that emotion looks like when it is expressed.  Every culture has different forms of the various emotions.  Some culture go still and suppressed with grief, others throw themselves around in abandon over it.  And so on. So, you need to learn what it looks like, because your individual variation may be too out of step for the rest of us.

Second, you need to connect with that emotion, and then amplify and focus it.  As an actor, I had to learn how to express concentrated grief in one scene I was playing in which I learned that a dear friend had died.  I focused internally on some sad moments in my life, then intensified them until I was weeping.  It was all about re-creating the feeling, making it fresh and real in the moment, to the exclusion of any other feeling.

Once you achieve that focused, concentrated state, you will be charismatic.  Strong emotion pulls us in, both in person and on virtual connections.  The human eye, and the camera, both crave emotion and don’t look away easily when it is present.

Learning this set of techniques remains a craft that takes some precision and practice, because it is easy to go too far or not far enough on a particular emotion and leave the audience feeling either unmoved or embarrassed for you.  So there’s an inevitable calibration involved as you hone your emotional expressiveness.  Begin with one or two that will be most useful for you, and then branch out once you’ve mastered the basics.

What you’re doing it getting in touch with your unconscious emotional processes – the ones that you tapped into effortlessly as a child.  Few of us survive childhood without having tamped down most of those emotional responses, learning how to delay gratification, conceal our hurt, and suppress our anger.  All of that is necessary to function as an adult, but it is tough on your natural charisma.

In some ways, learning how to be charismatic is learning how to get back in touch with your inner child and bring it back to life.