go of your preconceptions. Open up your thinking. It’s time to get to know your own mind.
Alice Got Here Before You Did
Welcome to Wonderland. Most of what we think about the way people communicate is wrong, yet the reality is much stranger and more astonishing than we can even imagine. A series of recent breakthroughs in science have overturned the accepted wisdom about how we express ourselves to others, how we interpret what they say to us, and how we decide whether or not to follow another’s leadership. These scientific studies not only allow us to understand communication in a new way, but also reveal how to become much more persuasive and successful without changing a single word we say.
Take the following recent findings from brain research:
You gesture before you think consciously about what you’re doing.
You have neurons that fire when you witness someone else experiencing an emotion—and they give you the exact same emotion.
If you lose your ability to process emotion, you lose your ability to remember or to decide anything.
You emit low-frequency sounds that align with the most powerful person near you through matching vocal tones.
Your measurable nonverbal signals concerning your confidence in a negotiation predict success or failure far more accurately than the relative merits of your position or what you say.
Neurons are distributed throughout your body, not just in your brain, including your heart and your gut.
When you communicate with someone else, the two of you align your brain patterns, even if you don’t agree with the other person.
Each of these findings is surprising, and some truly defy common sense.10 I’ll talk more about each one in the coming chapters. But taken together they add up to a very different view of how people actually communicate and what you should do to connect with other people powerfully and persuasively.
Our Important Communications Are neither Verbal nor Conscious
Here’s the good news. If we can tap into the hidden power that these findings reveal, we can take charge in meetings, dominate groups, and speak in front of audiences with charisma and persuasive eloquence, no matter what the subject or the occasion. We can lead people through the unconscious communication power our bodies give us. We don’t need words—well, only a little bit; mostly, we need gesture and sound.
With the right gestures and vocal tones, virtually anyone can take over a group and lead it, creating an instant tribe with herself at its head. We humans literally want to align our brain patterns through interpersonal communications, and we feel safest and happiest when we’re doing so. You can master group dynamics with your voice, your hands, and your posture. You can learn how to shape, control, and prompt the natural, unconscious responses people have in groups. You can learn how to control your own unconscious mind so that it does your bidding.
You can jump-start your leadership and propel it to the next level with these techniques.
In sum, people crave leadership. In order to be the best leader possible, you need to align your unconscious power cues with your conscious content to be able to lead groups, persuade others, and maximize your personal impact. Then you need to find your tribe.
No one gets led anywhere they don’t want to go. Machiavelli was wrong; leadership is not manipulation, not in the long run.11 It’s alignment, the leader with the group and the group with the leader. But you first have to maximize and focus your leadership strengths in order to be ready when your moment comes.
What Humans Really Want
At the heart of this book is a surprising truth, one that defies most of the previous thinking about body language. People have studied it as a way of reading others, gesture by gesture and, indeed, sometimes as a way of consciously sending secret messages to others—messages of control or sexual interest, perhaps. Most of those early attempts to understand body language are silly and primitive.12
Here’s what is really going on. We humans are much more communal than we realize. It’s something we’ve forgotten, as we tune in separately to our thousand channels of entertainment and news using devices that isolate us even as they offer pseudo-connections to the group through music or headlines or games. We only remember our communality when we get together as a group to hear a speech, attend a concert, or root for a sports franchise.
But when we get together in groups, we become a tribe again, and we instinctively want to have a leader. That’s your chance to take control, consciously using the power of everyone’s unconscious mind.
That’s why an audience is so eager for a speaker to succeed, for example, and so disappointed when one fails. There’s an opportunity that is squandered a thousand times a day in a thousand meeting rooms around the world. Instead of focusing on the group, the emotion, and the need for leadership, speakers think about PowerPoint and content. What a huge amount of wasted effort!
We create a leader to make us feel safe and to give us a group purpose or direction. Because, like a group of fish or birds or zebra, we need and want guidance. As you’ll see, the unconscious signals that the speaker sends out to the audience must create trust and credibility or else the audience gives up, disappointed, and looks elsewhere for another leader.
These group activities satisfy deep cravings that developed during our early evolution in the cave. In our prelinguistic, less individualistic childhood as a species, we depended on one another for survival, and leadership was both essential and instinctive.13
When we lived in caves, we humans were a relatively frail, weak species, below some formidable foes in the food chain—woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and the rest of the menagerie. So we learned to respond instantly to one another in order to stay alive. We could read each other’s emotions, and we could tell who was in charge, without a word being spoken.
Today, most of the dangers to which we were ready to respond then have gone away. But our cravings for leadership and connection remain. Where once we needed to react instantly to physical danger, now most of us face long-term tensions associated with jobs, relationships, and communities. Where once we needed to be ready to act quickly as a tribe to stand united against dangers, now our individual opinions matter more than our tribal loyalties. Where once we found comfort in group rituals around a dim, smoky fire in a cave, now many of us put on ear buds to connect emotionally with our fellow humans through recorded music. Indeed, recent research shows that we respond to new music much as we do to sex and drugs.14 When the baby boomers talked about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they were on to something.
With what you’re learning from the brain scientists, you can begin immediately to make your own communications more effective and powerful by tapping into that ancient craving for connection. You can learn how to overcome shyness, how to increase your charisma a hundredfold, how to control a room, how to get your teenager under control, even how to cure yourself of recurring thoughts, habits, and dreams.
It’s not just brain research. I have lots of practical experience in these techniques through work with clients over the past two decades. For example, I trained one woman, who had always been put down by men in her professional life, to change their perception of her
