because it’s essential to our basic survival. It’s part of how we’re able to act before our conscious minds realize exactly what’s happening. For example, if something dangerous is thrown at you and you duck without thinking, getting out of the way a split second before it could hurt you, that’s your unconscious mind at work. If you move at virtually the same instant and with the same gesture as someone you love, that’s your unconscious mind at work. And if you get a suddenly powerful gut feeling that the person across from you is concealing an important feeling or piece of news, that’s your unconscious mind at work.
In the first instance, the conscious mind would be too slow to react. In the second and third instances, you’d simply have a much harder time relating well with others.
Precisely because all of this mental activity is unconscious, we’re not aware of it until it has already started to happen. Studies show, in fact, that we make most decisions unconsciously and only become aware of them consciously afterward, once we already start acting on that decision. The delay can be as long as nine seconds.6
In short, for most of the things that matter, your unconscious mind rules you, not the other way around.
That should disturb you.
The idea chips away at the sense of personal autonomy you have, the sense that you’re a sentient being in charge of what you think and how you feel. And, what’s most important, the sense that you’re aware of what’s going on with you and around you.
In fact, your unconscious mind is in charge. That part of you that you’re aware of, that you think of as you, is a chip of ice on top of the tip of the proverbial iceberg that is a human being.
But what if you could learn to become aware of the important parts of this unconscious mental activity? What if you could learn to read it in others’ minds? And what if you could control conversations, meetings, and all sorts of interactions among the people around you, using that conscious awareness of everyone’s unconscious minds, including your own?
What if you could walk into a room and effortlessly (or apparently effortlessly) take charge of it? What if you could switch on charisma at will, making all heads swivel in your direction when you walk into that room? What if you could become the natural leader—the go-to person—of most of the groups that you join?
What if you could learn the essential power cues that will enable you to master virtually any situation where you want or need to be in control?
Would that be worth the effort?
Take Control of Your Communications Before Someone Else Does
That’s what this book is about. I’m going to take you through seven important nonverbal power cues that will teach you how our communications really work, show you how to take control of your own communications, and help you learn to guide others’.
Power in human communications and relations is indeed determined largely by the interplay of our unconscious minds. Recent neuroscience has given us for the first time a clear understanding of how that unconscious interplay works. We can now identify a series of specific cues that people exchange with one another to determine how they relate to each other. These seven power cues, if mastered, will allow you to control your own communications and those of the people around you.
By the final chapter, you’ll know how to literally synchronize others’ brain waves with your own. Along the way, I’ll talk through some of the brain science, where it’s helpful, and the experiences of my clients, because their stories will illuminate what’s possible and what has actually worked in the real world.
The Seven Power Cues
Let’s get started. Here’s a quick overview of the seven power cues that will help you signal that you’re the leader of the tribe gathered around you. I’ll begin each discussion of the individual power cues with a question that highlights the opportunity for strengthening your interpersonal communications.
The first power cue is all about self-awareness. How do you show up when you walk into a room?
You need to begin to get some sense of how you inhabit space, what your characteristic gestures are, and how you affect others. So you’re going to take inventory to find out what you’re doing that’s effective and what’s not. How are you showing up in your conversations, your meetings, and your presentations?
In short, what’s your persona when you connect with others? Are you powerful and commanding? Are you friendly and warm? Do people fear you, trust you, like you, avoid you, flock to you? What happens? Do you take charge or take a backseat? These are the sort of impressions you need to understand better in order to begin the process of turning into a charismatic version of yourself.
The second power cue involves taking charge of your nonverbal communications in order to project the persona you want to project—through your emotions. What emotions do you convey through your body language for important moments, conversations, meetings, and presentations?
Most of us are not charismatic most of the time because we don’t manage and focus our emotions. So we meet other people with a hundred things on our minds and a mixed bag of emotions, like our cluttered to-do lists. The result is muddle, not charisma. In step two, you’ll begin the process of learning to manage and focus your emotions when you need to, thus taking charge of your nonverbal communications, your persona, and your charisma, to use it at will.
Because gesture does in some ways help determine thought, you will also spend some time understanding groups of gestures so that you can monitor how you’re doing. In other words, sometimes it does help to fake it until you make it! Or more precisely, you can work from either the inside out, that is, from emotion to gesture, or the outside in, that is, from gesture to emotion. The two approaches complement one another.
The third power cue helps you learn to read others’ unconscious messages. What unconscious messages are you receiving from others?
Because you’re already an expert, but at an unconscious level, this step in particular is all about becoming aware of unconscious messages you’re already sending yourself, making them conscious in specific ways and at specific times, and then making the new habits routine.
Because your skills at reading others involves intent—intent toward you—you’ll learn to shape and phrase what you ask of your unconscious mind in that way. It’s a matter of learning what specific polarities or pairs of questions to ask your unconscious mind.
In this way, you’ll begin to be able to recognize and understand what others are thinking before they themselves know it, in many cases. That’s because emotional attitudes and decisions are made unconsciously first, then gestured about, then brought to the conscious mind. You’ll learn to see the attitude or decision at the gesture stage and, thus, before the other person is self-aware.
With the fourth power cue, on the mysteries of the human voice, you will turn your voice into a commanding instrument for taking charge of a room. Do you have a leadership voice?
The research on the voice is surprising and little known; it will give you an edge over your colleagues and competitors that you will be able to master with some weeks’ practice.7 What’s important to note, however, is that individual responses to this step vary considerably. Some find it easy to take control of their voices; others, less musical, find it more difficult.
But the results can be powerful and life changing, if you undertake them carefully and thoroughly. Your voice is something you likely take for granted and rarely think about except when you have a cold, but it is one of the primary ways in which you connect with and influence people every day. Controlling your voice is worth the effort.
The fifth power cue teaches you how to combine your voice and a host of other social signals to greatly increase your success rate in pitches, meetings, sales situations, and the like. What