WRAPPIN’ IT UP
Why is connection so important? Because our species literally needs your gifts to survive.
In addition to the survival component, connection is a prerequisite for safety, a necessity for collaboration, a cure for apathy, and a lubricant for joy. Trust me, you want it.
The next three chapters will guide you through the cultivation and spending of your charisma currency. I will share with you exercises to help build new patterns in your daily life, working towards the goal of connecting authentically with others.
Here’s a sneak preview into one of the ways it all works; charisma’s three powers will often interplay like this:
1. When you activate your confidence by knowing your value,
2. You show up to life in a way that magnetizes others to you, and
3. Once people are magnetized to you, you are in a prime position to use The Charisma Code’s global communication tools to establish powerful connection.
Charisma does not dictate what you will do with connection once you have it. You and the person with whom you are connecting decide that. Charisma simply opens the door for the connection to occur.
Once you are abundant with charismatic currency, The Charisma Code will show you how to spend it in the way that best serves your unique gifts and desires. Whether you are looking to get laid, paid, or start a revolution; whether you are more like Marilyn Monroe, the Dalai Lama, Einstein, Oprah, or Martin Luther King Jr. (you are more like one of them than you know!); you will be replete with charisma currency, and it will burn a hole in your pocket until you spend it well!
Charisma spending takes a little effort on your part, but once you get the hang of it, I guarantee you will find it challenging to stop. Each time you spend a little, you will infect someone else, and making someone or something light up is habit-forming.
This final step of The Charisma Code is rarely taught in charisma manuals or charm schools. It’s the real deal.
Let’s face it: Being attractive and refined is not really what you’re after. What you want is what comes from attracting engagement: the possibility of true love, a promotion, or, if you’re the Ché Guevara type, revolution. You will achieve none of the above if you attract but do not connect. To remedy that missed opportunity, let us see you, listen to you, love you, worship you, orbit around you. Then, when you’re ready, turn the tables a full 180 degrees and see us.
However, know this: the Charisma Coin is round for a reason. You can start by developing what this manual calls “Step One, Confidence: Know Your Value” or you can start by developing “Step Three, Connection: See Others’ Value.” Although it’s comforting to imagine you can follow three steps in order and 1 + 1 will equal 2, as you read The Charisma Code you will discover that more often, 1 + 1 equals 3. Logic is comforting but logic is rarely all there is.
Charismatic currency will rush into your bank account when you employ all three steps simultaneously. For some of you, the three steps to charisma will ignite into a burst of singularity when you start by activating charisma’s electric mixture with “Step One, Confidence: Know Your Value.” While for others of you, the spark will emit from your eyes when you begin developing your charisma by focusing on “Step Three, Connection: See Others’ Value.”
My suggestion: read this baby through and let it sink into your sinews. Then go out in the world and practice following your own lead with regards to which part of the Code to implement in any given circumstance. For many of us, knowing our value is the most heroic challenge we face. If that’s you, you can take the back door to confidence by training yourself to see others’ fabulousness first.
Don’t want to wait to finish this book before activating your charisma code? You’re my kind of Homo sapiens! The following figure goes out to you. It outlines a charisma hygiene practice that, as your charismologist, I recommend you perform daily—if not hourly. Follow the arrows like you are following the golden-brick road—you will not be disappointed.
a The term “superorganism” is most often used to describe a social unit of eusocial animals, in which division of labor is highly specialized and individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time. Eusociality is considered the most complex social structure in the animal kingdom, defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and nonreproductive groups.
CHARISMA RULE
Know you are made of great stuff.
We cannot fight war with war, but we can entice war to lay down its guns. Charisma disarms with charm.
As a little girl, I remember disarming my grouchy, old, sick grandpa, my Popo, with hula dances and surprise hugs. I put gel in his bangs till they stood tall like 1980s Cosmopolitan models. Then we’d go to the mirror and laugh together. He barked this or that and I just giggled. I knew he loved me.
Because I was one of the few who didn’t get offended by the armed grouch in him, he enjoyed being with me. He gave me stuffed animals and “ahhrng juice” (what any genuine East Coaster calls their breakfast beverage).
Before my Popo died, he took me to the collection of medals he’d earned in World War II as a bombardier. He opened their glass case and told me to take good care of them after he passed. Oh, my Popo knew how to fight all right. As a New York orphan, he also knew how to survive.
I loved making my Popo happy. And I think he loved me most because he loved who he was when he was with me. Not the fighter. Not the survivor. Just the grandpa whose granddaughter giggled when he got grouchy. That is how charisma disarms. Its grace forgives curmudgeons their lack of grace, and suddenly, they find it.
I was twelve years old when my Popo died. When I got the call, I ran outside to the top of the big, wild hill behind my house, threw off my clothes, and played my blue ocarina clay flute. I knew only one song, and I played it over and over again. In my own rain, sun rays through cloud, wind on my skin, I played this song to him:
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.”
JOHN NEWTON
[S]uddenly, a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ . . . Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing. And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. (Acts 9: 3-9)
After this experience, Saul became known as Paul. His three days of blindness and fasting were extremely somatic and must have been physically trying, yet he recounts them as a mystical experience with God. So much so that Paul went on to write about this event in the epistles, describing it as “a gift of God’s grace.”1
How