You know the person I’m talking about. They walk into a room and the room kind of leans their way. People laugh a little easier around them, deals seem to find them, they say the thing everybody else was thinking, except they say it smooth, and it lands.
And you’re standing off to the side watching it, thinking what most of us think: Must be nice to be born like that.
I want to talk about that one sentence, because it seems true but it isn’t. It’s a lie, and it has probably cost you more than almost any other lie you believe. After watching this play out for years, I’m convinced of something. Charisma is a skill. It’s not a gift you get at birth, it’s a set of behaviors you can learn. And if that’s true, a whole lot of doors you decided were locked were never locked at all.
The Lie That Sounds Like Humility
This lie – that people are born with charisma – is sticky because it doesn’t feel like a lie. It feels like being honest about your own limits.
You’re not bragging when you say you’re “just not a people person.”
You’re not complaining when you say you’re “not a natural on stage.”
You’re not being extra when you say that you are “just not the charismatic type.”
If anything, these things sound humble.
That’s what makes it a cage. Nobody argues with you about it, including you. You said it once, maybe years ago, and you’ve been living inside it ever since, building your whole life around a ceiling you never actually tested. You just took your own word for it. You repeat a lie often enough it becomes true. The honest truth here is that your belief that these things are true has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course you aren’t charismatic! You’ve made it true by believing that it is.
But a limit you never tested isn’t humility. Just because you’ve been treating it like a fact doesn’t make it one.
Even Charisma Is a Skill
The thing that changed my mind was a book.
There’s a woman named Olivia Fox Cabane who wrote The Charisma Myth. She’s an executive coach, and she built a charisma curriculum for the business school at UC Berkeley. Think about what that means: you don’t build a curriculum for a thing people are born with. You build one for a skill.
Honestly, I knew about the book a long time before I read it. I thought it would be arrogant of me to buy a book to learn how to be more charismatic. Stupid, I know, but it is actually what I thought.
I’ve always had careers that required me to be “on” in front of people. When I was a pastor, I had to be open, warm, friendly, and talkative. When I was a teacher, I had to engage with my students to help bring out the best and most capable versions of themselves. As a business owner, I had to learn how to manage, engage, and motivate my employees. As a coach, I have to connect with my clients.
But the truth is, I started realizing a long time ago that being “on” was not my natural state. I could perform when I needed to, when it was expected of me, when the people around me were familiar and friendly. But in scenarios where I didn’t know the people or wasn’t required to be “on”, I would naturally be quiet and reserved. What’s weird about this is that the people who know me best typically would refer to me as extroverted. But I see an introvert in myself more than extroversion. I suppose I live somewhere in between.
But what does this have to do with “charisma”? A lot, as it turns out. This book taught me that.
Cabane’s argument is that charisma, the one trait we’re all most sure you either have or you don’t, is really just a set of behaviors you can learn. She breaks it into three specific aspects:
- Power
- Presence
- Warmth
Power is the sense that you can actually get something done.
Presence is being all the way there with somebody instead of half-listening while you load up your reply.
And warmth is the feeling that you’re on their side, not just your own.
Get good at projecting those three on purpose, and people walk away thinking you’re charismatic. That’s the trick.
And before you tell yourself this is only for the naturally loud and good-looking, it isn’t. A lot of magnetic people were neither. Winston Churchill wasn’t winning any beauty contests. Some of the most charismatic people you can name are introverts who’d rather be home with a book. It was never about what you looked like or how loud you were.
She tells lots of stories about well-known people throughout the book. The story Cabane opens with is interesting. In 1955, Marilyn Monroe walked down into Grand Central in New York City with a photographer, and nobody recognized her. She rode the subway like any other tired commuter. Then she came up onto the sidewalk and, the way the story goes, turned to the photographer and asked if he wanted to see “her.” She fluffed her hair, struck a pose, and within seconds a crowd was forming around the most famous woman in the world.
Same woman, same street, fifteen seconds apart. She turned it on like a light switch. If charisma can be switched on and off like that, then it’s something you do, not something you’re born being. (The book is right here.)
If Charisma Is a Skill, So Is Almost Everything You Wrote Off
And that runs way past charisma.
If the one trait we’re most sure is hardwired from birth is actually a skill you can practice, then what about everything else you’ve filed under “just not me”? Selling. Speaking up in a room. Having the hard conversation instead of dodging it. Negotiating. Asking out loud for the number you actually want.
A psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck spent her whole career on this, and she’s got a phrase I love. When a kid says “I can’t do this,” the fix isn’t to lie and say “sure you can.” The fix is one word. “I can’t do this yet.” Not me becomes not yet, and the thing you swore you weren’t capable of turns out to be a thing you just haven’t practiced.
Let me be honest about my own “not yet.” I was a pastor, and then I taught history to a room full of thirteen-year-olds who’d rather have been anywhere on earth than in my class. If you’d watched me back then and told everybody that guy’s going to own a multi-million dollar business, be recognized in Inc. and Entrepreneur magazines, and write a best-selling book, they’d have laughed you out of the building. I’d have laughed loudest. I was not born a business leader.
None of it came standard from birth. I built all of it, the business and the presence it took to get there, one uncomfortable rep at a time, in front of audiences that were sometimes thirteen years old and bored out of their minds. Nobody handed it to me in the delivery room. I practiced my way into it, the same way Cabane says anybody can.
The Cage You Built for Free
That thing you’ve decided you’re “just not”? You probably decided it for free. It wasn’t true when you decided…it just “felt” true. But now that you’ve said it to yourself a million times, it has become a version of truth you cannot imagine being anything but reality.
One bad experience, one offhand comment from a teacher or a parent, one comparison to somebody who happened to have a few thousand more reps than you, and you wrote a sentence about yourself and signed your name to it: I’m not a numbers person, or I’m not a closer, or I’m just not the charismatic type. Then you spent years defending that sentence like it was hard-won wisdom.
That’s the golden cage of the fixed self. The gold is how safe it feels. As long as you’ve decided up front you’re “just not” good at the thing, you never have to step up and risk being bad at it where people can see. It feels like humility, but mostly it keeps you from ever having to risk looking dumb.
The bars are everything that sentence costs you: the stage you don’t take, the raise you don’t ask for, the business that stays smaller than it had to because the owner decided a long time ago that he wasn’t the kind of person who could grow it.
You weren’t born into that cage. You talked yourself into it. The gold is the lie. (It’s a cousin to the blind spot I wrote about last week, the thing you can’t see about yourself on your own.)
Words of Wisdom
“Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.” – Proverb 9:9
The wise man gets wiser. He keeps learning. Wisdom here isn’t a fixed amount you were handed at birth and have to make last the rest of your life. It grows every time you put yourself back in a spot to learn something. The fool’s problem was never his raw material. It’s that he decided he was already finished. Don’t be finished.
What To Do Now
So this week, go find the sentence. The one you’ve been repeating about yourself for years, the one that starts with I’m just not.
Then go do one small, uncomfortable thing that flat-out contradicts it. Have the conversation you’ve been dodging, or make the ask you’ve been sitting on. You’re not trying to master anything by Friday. You’re just proving to yourself that the door was never really locked.
And if the skill you’ve been avoiding happens to be the one your business needs most from you, the leading, the selling, the getting up in front of the room and casting the vision, then that’s the one to go practice on purpose.
I put together a free training on exactly what to fix in your business before you ever try to step back or sell it. A lot of what holds owners back isn’t the business at all. It’s a sentence they wrote about themselves a long time ago. Go watch it at whattofixbeforeyouexit.com.
And if you want a set of eyes on which of those “I’m just not” sentences is costing you the most, book a call with me, just you and me, over at therealjasonduncan.com/talk.
You weren’t born with it. Good. That means you get to go build it.
– The Real Jason Duncan