I had that all-too-rare authorial experience late last week:  I got to hold my new book, warm off the presses, in my hands.  It’s probably as close to Nirvana as an author gets.  Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma is out in advance form, and because the Internet has changed everything, it’s already available on Amazon, too.  Here’s a link:  (http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Steps-Authenticity-Charisma/dp/0470404353/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229113611&sr=1-1)

I’ve been waiting to blog on the material in the book because Jossey-Bass told me to, but we’re good to go now.  So let’s get started.  I’ve been sitting on these ideas for a while.

There’s a lot of recent neurological research that has implications for perception and communications – and therefore public speaking.  The first idea that is of interest to communicators is that we’re apparently not the rational beings we think we are.  That is, we think that we get an idea in our conscious brains – I’m thirsty – and we direct our bodies to act on that idea – pick up the water bottle and drink. 

But in fact, it turns out that it works like this.  We get an emotion, or an intent – thirst – and that leads to a gesture – reach for bottle.  Then, and only then, we get the conscious thought about it – I’m thirsty; I’ll drink.  After that, we might say something.  So the process is:  intent – gesture – thought – speech. 

We actually spend a fair amount of time explaining to ourselves why we did what we just did.  A good number of our actions are driven by pre-conscious intents, or urges, and only followed nanoseconds later by explanatory thoughts. 

That’s tough for some people to grasp, and it’s counter-intuitive.  What are the implications for public speaking?  Every communication is two conversations, content, and body language.  We can see now that the so-called second conversation is more important than (and prior to) the first in many instances.

That means that we have this whole conversation going on with others (because these pre-conscious gestures are important precisely in interactions with other people) that happen unconsciously, in the blink of an eye, and that dominate how we feel about one another. 

Most of what we call charisma (or not) happens here.  The whole game of communication – well, many of the important bits – is over before you even open your mouth. 

Authenticity?  That’s a non-verbal, unconscious activity, too.  I’ll talk more about that next time.