Researchers at MIT have discovered that, for example, the success of a venture capital pitch meeting can be predicted with astonishing accuracy by tracking a few aspects of body language.8 You need to know what those are and learn how to use them to your advantage in high-stress, high-stakes situations.
As with the second power cue, either you can learn to control the gestures that signal these messages or you can control the emotions that control the gestures. As you work your way through the seven power cues, you’ll find that while the idea of taking emotional control of your life may at first appear strange or daunting, in the long run, you’ll find it by far the easier, more natural way to project powerful leadership and the communications that go with it.
The sixth power cue shows you how to use the power of your unconscious mind to make decisions, rid yourself of phobias and fears, and create a new, more successful persona. Is your unconscious mind holding you back or propelling you forward?
You’ll apply insights top athletes have used for decades to your personal and work issues in order to redefine your approach to the world, as you wish to design it. You’ll use these techniques to remove your unconscious story lines that say, “I always go blank under stress,” or “I tend to choke when the boss is pressuring me to speak up,” or “When I get in front of a crowd, I get nervous and can’t seem to do my best.” All it takes is a memory of a bad experience to throw you off your world-class game.
You’ll work at replacing the mental maps that are currently holding you back with winning ones. If it all sounds too “New Age” to work, take comfort in knowing that the technique was developed by top Soviet researchers during the Cold War in an attempt to dominate the Olympics—and it worked. It garnered the Soviets an extraordinary number of gold medals. The results are real, even if the actions are all in your head.
Finally, the seventh power cue helps you put it all together to become a master storyteller who actually synchronizes brain waves with your listeners to enhance your natural leadership capacity, increase your charisma, and move others to action. Are you telling powerful stories?
Good storytelling creates a sense of anticipation in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, and the experience is a pleasurable one for the participants. We humans like that kind of anticipation and confirmation. It’s part of our deep-seated desire for communal experiences and tribal connections.
Great leaders are great storytellers. These leaders know that they must tell powerful stories to engage and enlist their followers. They know that storytelling is the only effective way to create the kind of transmittal of ideas and values that allows a leader’s message to be heard and carried out over time and with many people. They know that the best storytelling taps into deep patterns in the human brain so that the stories fulfill the needs and expectations of the listeners and also create the right sets of messages for the leader’s agenda.
The last power cue in this process involves becoming one of those master storytellers and learning how to create stories that will convey the essence of your leadership, your mission, and your passion.
I will argue that powerful storytelling is the only possible road to the radical authenticity demanded of leaders. In our 24/7, warts and all, YouTubed world, leaders have to be willing to show up with an authenticity that goes well beyond anything demanded of leaders in the past. This book will help you on that road.
Take Your Time
These concepts are easy to master, but mastery of your unconscious communication systems takes time. After all, it took a million years of evolution to put all that activity management into your unconscious mind. Most of it should stay there, with good reason. The unconscious mind handles chores like regulating your breathing, heartbeat, and skin temperature, and that’s a good thing. You don’t want to have to think about all the stuff that keeps you alive and healthy.
The aspects of unconscious thinking that I’m describing have to do with your so-called intuition, your reading of others’ attitudes, emotions, and intents, and your control of your own body language, broadly defined to include your voice and posture as well as your mannerisms and gestures. These aspects turn out to be the most important for communication.
They do take time to bring to the conscious mind, master, and then send back down to the unconscious mind for retrieval when you need to. These are not simple changes; you’re reengineering a finely tuned, incredibly complex organism with more synapses and connections than there are stars in the Milky Way.9
If some parts turn out to be more challenging for you, then take it slowly. Make sure that you’re comfortable with each power cue before you move on to the next. For the most part, each step builds on the ones before it. So practice each concept for a few weeks until you’re comfortable with it and then move on to the next step.
Above all, don’t rush the process. You need to get into the habit of listening to your own unconscious mind in ways you most likely haven’t before, and that takes time and patience.
Let go of your preconceptions. Open up your thinking. It’s time to get to know your own mind.
Alice Got Here Before You Did
Welcome to Wonderland. Most of what we think about the way people communicate is wrong, yet the reality is much stranger and more astonishing than we can even imagine. A series of recent breakthroughs in science have overturned the accepted wisdom about how we express ourselves to others, how we interpret what they say to us, and how we decide whether or not to follow another’s leadership. These scientific studies not only allow us to understand communication in a new way, but also reveal how to become much more persuasive and successful without changing a single word we say.
Take the following recent findings from brain research:
You gesture before you think consciously about what you’re doing.
You have neurons that fire when you witness someone else experiencing an emotion—and they give you the exact same emotion.
If you lose your ability to process emotion, you lose your ability to remember or to decide anything.
You emit low-frequency sounds that align with the most powerful person near you through matching vocal tones.
Your measurable nonverbal signals concerning your confidence in a negotiation predict success or failure far more accurately than the relative merits of your position or what you say.
Neurons are distributed throughout your body, not just in your brain, including your heart and your gut.
When you communicate with someone else, the two of you align your brain patterns, even if you don’t agree with the other person.
Each of these findings is surprising, and some truly defy common sense.10 I’ll talk more about each one in the coming chapters. But taken together they add up to a very different view of how people actually communicate and what you should do to connect with other people powerfully and persuasively.
Our Important Communications Are neither Verbal nor Conscious
Here’s the good news. If we can tap into the hidden power that these findings reveal, we can take charge in meetings, dominate groups, and speak in front of audiences with charisma and persuasive eloquence, no matter what the subject or the occasion. We can lead people through the unconscious communication power our bodies give us. We don’t need words—well, only a little bit; mostly, we need gesture and sound.
With the right gestures and vocal tones, virtually anyone can take over a group and lead it, creating an instant tribe with herself at its head. We humans literally want to align our brain patterns through interpersonal communications, and we feel safest and happiest when we’re doing so. You can master group dynamics with your voice, your hands, and your posture. You can learn how to shape, control, and prompt the natural,