What is the single most powerful way to increase your persuasive connection with an audience – and your charisma at the same time?

Listening. 

Why is this the case? Why should focusing on someone else’s emotional state add to your charisma? Technically, the outward focus that you must adopt will contribute to your stillness, which, when it is combined with energy, is charismatic.  More than that, as you establish and maintain a connection with the others in the room, they will experience this as a heightened interest in you.

This is the kind of magic that candidate Bill Clinton exhibited on the campaign trail during his two runs for the White House. He would establish strong eye contact with a questioner and, holding his whole body still as he focused on the person, raise his eyebrows, open his eyes, and nod. All the while, he’d be moving as close as he could to the questioner. The effect was powerful, partly because of Clinton’s technical mastery of all the details of gesture but mostly because of the quality of his listening. The strength of the bond that he would establish with one questioner would, by proxy, be felt by all of the people in the room.

That’s charisma.

Think of it this way. Your job as a persuasive leader communicating with an individual or group of people is most often to move them to some kind of action. To do that, you have to change their minds. You’re taking them, in effect, from point A to point B. That movement is not only intellectual but also, and more fundamentally, emotional. So your job as a listener is to figure out what your audience’s emotional state is at the beginning of your communication and then monitor the progress of that emotional state as you move them on the journey to action.

To put it as simply as possible, where are they emotionally when you first meet with them, and where are they when you’re done? If you’ve been persuasive, you’ve moved them from passive acceptance of the current condition, or anger at it, or frustration with it, to a refocused energy about changing it. The act of listening to your audience, whether of one or one thousand, is monitoring that progress from passive to active, from why to how, from emotion turned inward to emotion turned outward.

What you’ll find when you do the work of listening hard to the people you communicate with is that you will quickly become more attuned to others’ emotional states and they will soon become more enthralled with you. They will welcome you showing up because you will be the leader who pays the most attention to them, and that commodity is as scarce as platinum in this information-saturated but emotionally distant age.