Free The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

swerving into your lane. With your heart pounding and your hands gripping the steering wheel, you stomp on the brake. Not only did this car cut in front of you without signaling, it’s now speeding up and slowing down erratically, nearly causing you to rear-end it. And then it swerves out of your lane again, making the car to your right screech its tires. What an idiot, reckless driver! Anger surges through your veins.
    What happened to your body during this incident? A fight-or-flight response made your heartbeat accelerate, your muscles tighten, and stress hormones flood your system. Now you’re pumped up with stress and anger. You know you need to get back into a charismatic mental and physical state in time for your presentation, but you have only a few minutes, and you can’t get that idiot driver out of your mind.
    Once the fight-or-flight response is aroused, it’s hard to quiet down. Anger is a difficult emotion to flush out of your system—this is why an unpleasant traffic encounter in the morning can stay on your mind for hours and sometimes all day.
    If you aimed to simply suppress the anger, you would pay a high price. When people are induced into a negative emotional state and then asked to
suppress
negative emotions, their internal negative experience often remains unchanged and they sustain elevated stress responses in their brain and cardiovascular system. 3
    But what if you happened to learn that this apparently reckless driver was actually a distraught mother whose baby was choking in the backseat, and she was desperately trying to pull over into the breakdown lane while reaching back to save her baby’s life?
    Would that immediately reduce your anger?
    For most people, it would.
    Deciding to change your belief about what happened (technically called
cognitive reappraisal
) effectively decreases the brain’s stress levels. This came to light through research performed at Stanford using functional MRI machines. The researchers concluded that deciding to change beliefs was a far more effective and healthier solution than attempting to repress or ignore emotions. 4
    In most situations, we don’t know for certain what motivates a person’s actions, so we might as well choose the explanation that is most helpful to us and create a version of events that gets us into the specific mental state we need for charisma.
    Though this suggestion may sound outlandish at first, choosing to rewrite your perception of reality is actually the rational and smart thing to do. It can help you get back into the right mental state to emanate charismatic body language and can improve your performance, too.
    I first learned about the rewriting reality technique during a business school course, ** and it has served me brilliantly in the years since. I always think of one night in Bogotá, when I got a direct experience of how powerful this technique could be.
    It was four in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. My mind was filled with apprehension. In a few hours I would be addressing the three hundred senior executives of a large multinational corporation. The CEO, who had asked me to address his top management, expected his people to come out of my session with both a mindset shift and a practical toolkit. I had ninety minutes to make them more confident, influential, persuasive, and inspiring. And all this, in Spanish. The pressure was high.
    I had already tossed and turned for hours, paced around the soulless hotel room, and stared out the window at the blinking city lights, desperately trying to find sleep. I felt nauseated, exhausted, and emotionally spent. My mind was churning, and I dreaded the hours of insomnia I felt were ahead of me.
    Suddenly, the rewriting reality exercise floated through my mind. Though it seemed far-fetched, I realized that at this point I’d tried everything else, and had nothing to lose by giving the technique a try. I sat down at the desk, pulled out pen and paper and asked myself:
What if