If you’ve ever been stuck in a situation where you know that you’ve met the person across from you, exchanged names, but for the life of you can’t recall the person’s name? A likely outcome of this awkward re-encounter would be where you’re simply hoping and waiting for that person to say something, well, anything that will jog your memory. If you don’t mention the person’s name and they remember yours, you can come off as insincere, which probably isn’t a desirable outcome in becoming charismatic. How do you prevent this awkward situation occurring in the first place?

It’s innate in human nature to crave recognition, acknowledgement and acceptance in any social circle a person feels they belong to or want to become a part of. One of the most effective things you can do towards taking that step in becoming more charismatic and generally good in connecting with new people is making the habit of remembering names. Taking a page from Dale Carnegie’s classic on interpersonal skills, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, he says that “A person’s name is to him or her is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Read the rest of this entry »

In Part 1 we covered:

• Making strong offers
• Giving focus and getting commitment
• Listening

For Part 2 I’ll be covering

• Authenticity
• Making the other person look good
• Outcome Independence

Authenticity

According to dictionary.com, their definition of authenticity is:

• The quality of being authentic or of established authority for truth and correctness
• Genuineness; the quality of being genuine or not corrupted from the original.

This is what I was referring to earlier in simply being “real” with people you come across in your social interactions. In improv, by being authentic and improvising with a brutal honesty can really help you connect with your audience because there is nothing being held back. You are expressing yourself from your core and things flow naturally in how you express yourself, your body language, the tonality of your voice, and steady eye contact. Everything is aligned and you’re totally congruent in how you’re expressing yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Note ***(I realized it’s kind of funny that I haven’t written any articles directly addressing cultivating charisma (or leadership) for that matter since I’ve started my blog. After reading a post by Dan over at CharismaTips.com split from Charisma Arts, he has since pumped out a slew of quality posts, I decided it was time for me to write something on my thoughts on directly related charisma. This is the first post of a two-part series)

After over a year and a half of improvisational comedy training at The Second City and The Impatient Theatre Company, along with much thought and experimentation and of course countless conversations with literally hundreds of random strangers, I can see the parallels between being charismatic and using principles founded on improvisational comedy (improv) being: Read the rest of this entry »

We Laugh [out]doors
Originally uploaded by [wicked and lazy]

In any given day, we are given countless opportunities to engage in something we didn’t expect. For one reason or another we are too immersed in our own lives to be aware of opportunities, and if we are aware we consciously block those opportunities rather than accepting them to create joy that arises from the spontaneity in everyday life.

I am deliberately being as general as possible here by using the word “something”, because opportunities or offers can come in any shape or form. It can stem from a smile from a stranger, which can warrant you starting a rewarding conversation to being chosen to be interviewed at random and being asked “do you touch yourself at work?” (I’ll explain this later on… Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, I’ve been thinking and experimenting of the simple yet powerful gesture of smiling in everyday life. I examined this gesture on two fronts; how it effects others and how it affects oneself.

Generally, I’m a pretty happy guy and as such, I smile a lot… well, no.. I smile pretty much all the time. I smile from ear-to-ear with a big toothy grin. I smile until my eyes can’t be seen (I guess I smile with my eyes). I smile with my whole body and an open heart. Read the rest of this entry »