The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism [Hardcover]

Olivia Fox Cabane (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 29, 2012

What if charisma could be taught?

For the first time, science and technology have taken charisma apart, figured it out and turned it into an applied science: In controlled laboratory experiments, researchers could raise or lower people's level of charisma as if they were turning a dial.

What you'll find here is practical magic: unique knowledge, drawn from a variety of sciences, revealing what charisma really is and how it works. You'll get both the insights and the techniques you need to apply this knowledge. The world will become your lab, and every person you meet, a chance to experiment.

The Charisma Myth is a mix of fun stories, sound science, and practical tools. Cabane takes a hard scientific approach to a heretofore mystical topic, covering what charisma actually is, how it is learned, what its side effects are, and how to handle them.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fox Cabane's distinct writing style...makes reading each chapter both informational and fun. Each exercise is practical and easy...If you are interested in increasing your ability to be charismatic in your unique setting or employment, this book will give you direct skills to use"

(PsychologyToday.com )

"Charisma Myth is an easy read, effectively integrating stories and research, strategies and applications, techniques and practices."

(New York Journal of Books )

"Practical and groundbreaking: Cabane combines a compelling analysis and breakdown of the key elements of charisma, with practical and easy to understand advice and exercises for developing one's own charisma. Highly recommended to anyone seeking an easily approachable and engaging guide to developing their own charismatic skills"

(Blog Business World )

"Cabane has done a masterful job of pulling together scientific findings and personal insights to present a coherent and compelling view of charisma. This book is engaging, clear, and chock-full of wisdom, practical recommendations, and uncommonly good sense."

(Stephen Kosslyn, director, Center for Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford )

"Cabane has done us a big favor. She's woven solid science and engaging narrative into an instructive treatment of the role of charisma in leadership-a topic that (until now) we only poorly understood."

(Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: Science and Practice )

About the Author

Olivia Fox Cabane has lectured at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT, and the United Nations. As an executive coach to the leadership of Fortune 500 companies, her clients include Google, Deloitte, and Citigroup. She is a regular columnist for Forbes and has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The Wall Street Journal.

For more information about the book, please visit: www.CharismaMyth.com

For more information about Olivia Fox Cabane, please visit: www.AskOlivia.com.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (March 29, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591844568
• ISBN-13: 978-1591844563
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (147 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

An expert in the fields of charisma and leadership, Olivia Fox Cabane has lectured at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT and the United Nations. As a frequent keynote speaker and executive coach to the leadership of Fortune 500 companies, she helps people become more persuasive, influential, and inspiring. From a base of thorough behavioral science, Olivia extracts the most practical tools for business; giving her clients techniques she originally developed for Harvard and MIT.

In addition to being a columnist for Forbes, FastCompany and The Huffington Post, Olivia is often featured in media such as The New York Times, Bloomberg or BusinessWeek. She has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal as well as NPR's Marketplace show.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#64 in Books > Business & Investing

#71 in Books > Self-Help

#83 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

#64 in Books > Business & Investing

#71 in Books > Self-Help

#83 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

137 of 139 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book of its kind I've ever read May 15, 2012

By Brian Sharp

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I read a lot of books in this genre - call it "professional self-help." I've spoken professionally a few times now about leadership and communication, and for my most recent one just a few months ago I did a ton of reading research and a lot of it was books like this one. Most of them are mediocre. I began reading The Charisma Myth expecting more of the same, frankly: platitudes, some common sense stuff, the kinds of advice that will only make sense to people who don't need it. I was just hoping for a tidbit or two that would be useful.

I don't really gush about things. If anything I tend to be very demanding and therefore very critical. Like I said, I think most books in this genre are essentially useless.

The Charisma Myth is a truly phenomenal book. It's so good that I have recommended it to several of my colleagues and it has already changed the way I manage my team and relate to my coworkers. In fact, my first gut reaction when I read it was "I guess I should stop speaking, now, because everything I'd want to talk about is covered in here."

Here's the thing: most of these kinds of books give you a few things:

1. Platitudes: useless, pithy sayings.
2. Random Anecdotes: stories that don't really offer any takeaway you can act on.
3. Abstract Imperatives: things like "be a good listener!" If you're not already a good listener that's kind of like saying "Roast Beef Recipe: Get some beef and roast it." It's not helpful - it doesn't tell me what actual specific actions to take.

Here's what this book gave me:

1. Extremely concrete, specific actions: Every piece of advice about conduct or mindset is accompanied by direct actions to take.... When you're in a conversation and find your mind drifting, bring it back to a physical sensation in the present, like the feeling in your toes. That's just one example of many, but they're all things you can actually DO, not abstract imperatives like "be a better listener" or pithy-but-vapid stuff like "smile more!"

2. Visualizations: I've never seen anyone push visualization like Olivia does. She makes the compelling point that visualization is something top athletes and actors have known about forever. In my talks I've always felt slightly uncomfortable urging people to do visualizations, but not anymore, not after reading this. She runs through a lot of specific visualizations, and they're immediately useful practices.

3. Taxonomies: Of the most useful business and management blogs I read, some of their most useful posts (I'm thinking of randsinrepose.com, for example) are taxonomies. "The five kinds of meeting attendees." "The four kinds of firefighting." Or whatever. These are helpful to me because by enumerating a problem space as a handful of distinct categories they help me crystallize my own thinking about it. Olivia does this when she enumerates the four kinds of charisma. Look, I think I'm a good manager and leader, an empathetic guy and good at my job, I'm not gonna lie, but I'd never thought about it in this way. This was pretty eye-opening to me. I read this part and thought, oh yeah, I've got the "focus" and "kindness" charisma but less of the "authority" and definitely least of all the "visionary" charisma. And that gives me specific things to work on, and a way to understand why I'm better at motivating people in certain circumstances rather than others.

To anyone who wants to be more charismatic: to be more successful at work, more able to positively influence those around them, more able to open up and make real connections with others, and just more able to lead a rich and happy life - and I know how this sounds, I swear I don't usually gush like this! - this book tells you everything you need to know. Everything! No other book I've read does that.

To be clear, that's like saying Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" tells you everything you need to know to be a very good, extremely strong weightlifter. You still have to do a ton of really hard work! This book doesn't make you magically charismatic. But it gives you direct, specific, applied practices that, if you do them, will make you more charismatic and enrich your life. Of all the pop psychology, management, leadership, and professional self-help books I've ever read, I cannot say that about a single other one.

I give this book my absolute highest recommendation. It is absolutely superb. I don't say that lightly. Read more ›

125 of 132 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book helped me land my new job! May 10, 2012

By Celtic Phoenix

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this book to help me during a job application with a company I really wanted to work for. The final part of the application process was a series of onsite interviews with different staff members, I was looking for something to help me with this section and fortunately came across this book through hearing the author being interviewed.

There is a wealth of great information in this book, and what I really appreciate is the many references to concrete academic studies which have proven the points being made in the book.

If you are going to benefit from this book, do the exercises and try to internalize as much as you can to keep applying it to your everyday life.

The first thing I tried to apply was being present in conversations to be a better listener. The first time I tried this on somebody they spoke for almost 2 hours straight about their day. They were happy because they were truly being listened to and I was enjoying seeing how uplifting it was for them to have the spotlight shone firmly on them.

To start focusing on the interview I spent ages practicing handshakes with a partner, there is so much more to a good handshake than simply a firm grip. Once you have your own handshake down, you can't help but begin to accessing somebody you meet by observing their handshake.
I found on my interview day, as I shook hands with people, I felt more in control when
they had limp handshakes, as if I knew they had just given me an upper hand so to speak, like a poker playing reading tells.

On my interview day I made sure to speak slowly and lower my tone at the end of sentences and threw in many, many random pauses and waited two seconds to speak before responding.... All of these are some of the early tips in this book to increase your charisma.

But being charismatic isn't just about outward things such as good handshakes and controlling how you speak, it is mostly skills with dealing with internal things, because these internal things control how you are presented to the world, which in turn controls how charismatic you are.

The responsibility transfer worked really well, I continuously did it in the days leading up to the interview, so much so
that when I had the interview I was as calm as a tibetan monk. I didn't need to do it on the day, because by the time I went there
I had psychologically absolved myself from responsibility.

Even the stuff on Impostor Syndrome helped me, on the way to the interview I found myself negatively telling myself that I wasn't
good enough for the role and that the interviewers would take me to pieces. I just stepped back, looked at the thoughts as if I were
an observer rather than trying to fight them, and I also reasoned that everybody has these feelings and feels like they are impostors
when pushed out of their comfort zone.

Before each of the interviewers walked I followed the tips on warmth, so that I could greet each one with a real level of warmth and I then found every
interviewer was really warm and friendly the whole way through in response to this.

I gave this book 5 stars, because it made a measurable difference in how I carried myself going into a tough interview. If you want to get ahead in today's world you need to have great soft skills to compliment your hard skills. This book will seriously raise the bar on your soft skills. Read more ›

104 of 113 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Charisma is a Trainable Skill April 19, 2012

By J. F. Malcolm

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

We all admire and envy those individuals that have it: the ability to walk into a room and captivate the attention of everyone. Imagine how much easier your life and your work would be if you had that natural quality. Everyone would want to be around you, would hang on every word that comes out of your mouth, and would want to do what you want.

In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane makes a convincing argument that you can have that ability, because charisma is the product of a certain mindset and behaviors that are trainable. In short, if you read this book, and practice and apply its techniques, you too can be the lightbulb instead of one of the moths.
When you come across a book like this, you may be reminded of the old ads in comic books when you were a kid, that promised to turn you from a 98-pound weakling into a musclebound stud who ruled the beach and got all the girls. The reality is that you can make the change--just don't expect it to happen overnight or without a lot of hard work. You have to work at the exercises even when they get hard.

Here's an example: One of the components of charisma is presence, which is a great thing to have but hard to define. In one of those aha! moments that seem obvious only in retrospect, presence is defined as the ability to be fully present in the moment, to be so focused on the person you're talking to that you can make them feel like they're the most important person in the world at that time. It's a skill that Bill Clinton is said to have in spades. That's great advice, and you will definitely see a difference if you work on it--but you can also imagine how hard it is to do. You may easily be distracted, be thinking ahead to what you want to say, have personal filters or biases against the person, etc.... Yet, with practice and constant reminders, it is a skill that gets easier with time.

One way to make the skill easier to use is to have the right mental state, and the section of the book that deals with that topic is one of the best. You can't fake the body language and behaviors that make you charismatic; with a few exceptions, the psychology has to precede the physiology. For example, it's hard to project confidence when you're tormented by doubts, and it's tough to project warmth when you don't feel much compassion for the person you're talking to. If you can get into the right mindset of gratitude, goodwill and compassion, most of the behaviors and body language will take care of themselves.

The book itself is excellent: it's evidence-based, filled with useful information and practical tips, and well-written. If you read it carefully, do some of the exercises and work on applying some of its tips in your work and personal relationships, you should definitely improve the quality of your interactions and increase your influence.

The book does a good job of explaining the components of charisma and then suggesting ways to increase each factor, both in general terms and in specific situations. In general terms, you want to focus on improving your presence, power and warmth. The specific situations are first impressions, speaking and listening, presentations, and difficult situations.

One of the reasons that charisma seems so mysterious is that so many different types of people can display it: it's hard to find similarities between Marylin Monroe and George Patton, for example. It's easier to understand when you see that there are four types of charisma, focus (Clinton), kindness (Dalai Lama), visionary (Steve Jobs), and authority (Gates). It's also helpful because you can tailor your approach for the best fit with your own personality.

One quibble I have with the book is that an overreliance on using well-known people as examples can sometimes confuse cause and effects. For example, there is a quote from an executive raving about fact Bill Gates: "If it's the quality that draws people towards you and makes them want to listen to what you have to say, then Bill has that, too." That may be true, but having nine zeros in your net worth and controlling the fate of so many people just might have something to do with it. Did Steve Jobs sell a lot of products because of his visionary charisma, or did the success of his visionary products make him charismatic?

We're hardwired to respond differently to high-status individuals. When a person surrounded by Secret Service agents takes the time to really focus on us, we feel special and it leaves a lasting impression. The same behavior by a lower ranking person can seem overly deferential and submissive. That's why the sections that describe Cabane's successes with ordinary folks are the ones that resonate the most and are the most credible.

And that's the main point you should take from this book: everyone can learn to be more charismatic--if they're willing to work at it. Charisma is not a quality--it's a set of practices. Read more ›