How NOT to be Charismatic

I’m no expert on charisma, so I can’t teach you to be the next suave slick scooter, but I can at least showcase a few pitfalls I’ve watched people barrel-roll into when spending time with me.

What’s your passion? Oh, I don’t care 🔗︎

This is such a huge charisma-killer, everything else seems like small optimizations, so if you only take away one thing please make it be this. Here’s the trick:

• Ask me questions, ideally about something I care deeply about. Get me excited, make my internal monologue say “Wow! They asked me about 8th-century Roman saucepans, hot dog let’s tell them all about X, Y, Z….!”
• Now that the speaker is starting to talk about their passion… pay attention to anything but what they are saying. Ideally you look completely disinterested and bored, like you’re waiting in line at the DMV.
  • Bonus points: Look around the room, at anything but them.
• Deflated. If the speaker is anything like me, they’ll feel deflated at the response, and eventually trail off when they notice that you don’t a shit. They’ll feel very unsure, because they got mixed signals of “yes tell me” and then your body language saying the complete opposite.

Other pitfalls 🔗︎

• Show no curiosity in what people have to say, give off an air of “i know everything, as the expert let me tell you….”.
• Use every conversational doorknob to bring up something relevant from your life and clobber over anyone else with a story. I believe this can be co-morbid with Main Character Syndrome.

Fin 🔗︎

Congrats, if you’ve successfully learned these tools, I never want to interact with you ever.