Unlock your charisma / believing is seeing by Terry McLean

 

 

In this article I am going to link the two talks that I will be giving in the WHAT’S UP! schools in Barcelona and Madrid respectively on the 16th and 23rd October 2014. They are both in fact two sides of the same idea – achieving connection in your communication, mental, physical and emotional. Connection with yourself, what you are thinking, what you say and what you do, and with your audience – whether that be a one to one,  face to face interaction with someone you know very well or an audience of 100-10.000 people in a huge auditorium.

Whoever you are, and whatever context you are in, my contention is that it is all about connection. The talks will cover 3 main topics, which I will introduce in the rest of this article. Charisma, Beliefs and Connection

 1) CHARISMA – Born or Learnt?

The other day in a Presentation Skills workshop I was running for a large pharmaceutical company, somebody asked me “Terry, what is charisma? Is it born or can it be learnt? For a moment I didn’t know how to answer them, and then it came to me, out of nowhere, out of my unconscious came the answer I had been looking for and I remember feeling extremely grateful in that moment to the person who was asking the question. The answer I gave still surprises me and still rings true…..”I firmly believe we are all born charismatic and we un-learn it or more precisely we are educated out of our charisma as we grow. We stop being ourselves and lose our identity, in order to become identical and to ”fit in to society”

 Charisma comes from the Greek word /Kharisma/ whose meaning among others is “ a gift or favour freely given” and carries the idea of service with it too.

 My interpretation in the public speaking domain of this definition of Charisma is that the more you give of yourself to the audience (in terms of your voice, body language and content) the more you put yourself at their service, the more charismatic you will become in their eyes, ears and hearts.

 For most people however a public speaking context is a pressure situation and they find it difficult to “be themselves” in that context…. They often turn into jelly, or stone according to their personality. With that in mind, on the 16th of October in Barcelona I will share with you some tips on How to be yourself and find your own Charisma again. For that is my definition of Charismatic people… those who dare to be themselves!

2) BELIEFS – Why change them?

“We don’t see things the way they are, we see things the way WE are”  Anais Nin

Most of us are probably familiar with the story of St Thomas the doubter, who literally would not believe until he could see…

 Most of us also live our lives like that, only believing what our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and fingers can actually tangibly experience. And at a certain level this seems to make sense and certainly gives us a sense of security and makes our human experience and world seem solid and easy to label and understand.

 But, what if I were to tell you….?

…..that actually there are at least 9 senses

…..that visible light represents only 0,5% of the whole of

     the spectrum of light in the universe

…..that what you can hear is limited to a very small

     bandwidth of frequencies

……the same with smell by the way

……and taste? Forget it, it’s all in your mind-body memory

What if I were to tell you that, actually, most of the time you are simply believing what you see… that what think you know about the world is actually an illusion??

 And that if you change your beliefs you can transform your life in any context you choose?

 What If I could prove that to you on the 23rd October in Madrid? Would you want to know? Do you dare to listen?

3) CONNECTION – How does it work?

Many of you may be asking yourselves just what the concept of connection has got to do with the ideas behind Charisma and Beliefs. Well here’s the answer:

 Our Connection or the absence of it is all about the quality of our relationships. We can define two types of relationships:

 Interpersonal Relationships – which are the ones we usually think about when we talk about relationships. This term also applies to our relationships with the material world, things, jobs, events, nature etc..

IntRapersonal Relationships – which basically means your relationship with yourself, on physical, mental and emotional levels

 Or put another way our relationships with external reality and our relationships with internal reality.

 The most common belief is that it is the external relationships that have a direct bearing on our internal state, affect us and make us happy and/or unhappy. It is however my fundamental belief  that it is the other way around.

 It is the quality of our internal Connection with ourselves than determines our external reality. External reality is nothing more than a mirror of our own internal state of peace/conflict, security/insecurity, trust/mistrust, love/fear.

In other words, if what you Believe, feel, say and do are connected and aligned, then your Charisma will shine through  you will feel a sense of genuine Connection with the world you perceive in this human experience.