Charisma is A Gift, Not A Skill

Years ago you decided what you're just not. Not a people person. Not a natural up front.

You've been paying for that one little sentence ever since.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast.

Today's episode is a Wednesday Special Edition. Every week I write a newsletter called What's Real? where I expose the lies most people believe and reveal the truths they were never taught. And every Wednesday, I bring that week's edition to you in audio, right here.

Because the most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like golden cages. They look like success. The most successful people are the most deceived, because the lies that trap them look like achievements. That's what this whole show is about.

On Mondays I sit down with somebody who believed one of those lies and discovered the truth the hard way. Wednesdays, like today, I bring you the Wednesday Special Edition. Either way, the mission is the same.

Go to therealjasonduncan.com/articles and subscribe for free to get the What's Real? newsletter delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles - link is in the show notes.

This week's post is called "Charisma Isn't a Gift You're Born With. It's a Skill You Can Build."

You know the person I'm talking about. They walk into a room and the whole thing kind of leans their way. People laugh a little easier around them, deals seem to find them, and whatever they say just lands. And you're off to the side watching it happen, thinking what most of us think. Must be nice to be born like that.

I want to talk about that one little sentence, because it feels harmless and it isn't. It has probably cost you more than almost any other lie you believe. After years of watching this play out, I'm convinced of one thing. Charisma is a skill, not a gift you were handed at birth.

The reason that's so hard to swallow is the lie doesn't even feel like a lie. It feels like being honest and humble about your own limits. You're not bragging when you say you're just not a people person, or you're not a natural on a stage. It sounds modest. Self-aware, even. Which is exactly why it's so easy to live inside. But a limit you've never actually tested isn't humility. It's a guess you've been treating like a hard fact for years.

The thing that finally changed my mind was a book called The Charisma Myth, by an executive coach named Olivia Fox Cabane. She actually built a charisma course for the business school at U C Berkeley, and that alone tells you something, because you don't build a curriculum for a thing people are born with. You build one for a skill. Her whole 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 learnable behaviors. Being all the way present with somebody. Carrying the sense that you can actually get things done. And making the other person feel like you're on their side.

But the story she opens with is the one I can't shake. In nineteen fifty-five, Marilyn Monroe rode the New York City subway with a photographer, and not one single person recognized her. Just another tired commuter in the crowd. Then she walked up the steps onto the sidewalk, 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 flipped it on like a light switch. And if charisma can be turned on and off like that, then it's something you do. Not something you were born being.

Now here's where this gets bigger than charisma. If the one trait we're all surest is hardwired from birth is actually a skill, then so is most of what you've written off as just not me. The selling. The speaking. The hard conversation you keep dodging. That I'm just not sentence is the cheapest cage there is to build. Because as long as you've decided up front that you're no good at something, you never have to risk being bad at it where people can see. And it even feels like humility while it does it.

But the bars are real. They're the stage you never take. The raise you never ask for. The business that stays smaller than it should, because the owner decided years ago that he wasn't the type who could grow it. And the gold is the lie.

There's a researcher named Carol Dweck who spent her whole career on this. She found that when somebody says I can't do this, the fix isn't some pep talk. It's adding one word. Yet. I can't do this yet. That little word moves the thing from a permanent fact about who you are into a skill you just haven't built so far. From not me, to not yet.

Let me be straight about my own not yet. People see a TED stage and figure you're either built for that or you're not. But whatever presence I've got, I built it. Thirteen years as a pastor, up in front of people every single week. Then years after that teaching history to a room full of bored teenagers who'd rather have been anywhere else. I bombed plenty. I slowly figured out what worked. Nobody handed me a thing. I practiced my way into it, one rep at a time, exactly the way Cabane says anybody can.

So here's what I'd actually do this week. Go find your own I'm just not sentence, the one you've been repeating for years, and do one small, uncomfortable thing that flat-out contradicts it. Not to become a different person. Just to prove to yourself that the door was never actually locked.

There's a proverb that cuts right through the born-with-it myth. Proverbs nine, verse nine. "Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning." Read it again, because the wise man here gets wiser. He keeps learning. He increases. Wisdom isn't some fixed amount you were handed at birth and have to make last your whole life. It grows, every time you put yourself back in a spot to learn something new. The fool's problem was never his raw material. It's that he decided he was already finished. Don't be finished.

Read the full post at therealjasonduncan.com/articles. Link is in the show notes.

This whole episode is about the stuff you assumed you were just born without, and finding out you can actually build it. And honestly, the same thing is true of money. Most people never question the one story about wealth they grew up with, never once find out there was another way to do it. Which brings me to this week's sponsor.

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My financial advisor is Mark Willis at Lake Growth Financial. If you want to find out what this could look like for your situation, you can get a free consultation with Mark by going to therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself. That's therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself. Link is in the show notes.

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That's a wrap on this Wednesday special edition. If today you caught yourself in one of those I'm just not sentences and realized it was a cage instead of a fact, send this episode to one person who needs to hear that the door was never locked.

The gold is the lie.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.