How To Be Charismatic No Matter What You Say

I’ve never been good with verbal game. I don’t know how much of it is due to my introverted nature and how much is pure laziness of not taking the time to learn this skill, but the point is, I’m just not very quick on my feet when it comes to the spoken word.

So early in my journey, what I would do when put in a situation where I can’t come up with an answer to a question or just simply don’t have anything interesting (in my mind) to say, is I would start making faces.

These would vary from deep, intense looks into her eyes to silly, fun facial expressions and often just a simple smile without saying a word.

And yes, I’m sure it was pretty awkward at first.

But what happened over time is that I actually got pretty good at communicating with my face and soon enough both guys and girls started referring to me as “charismatic”.

Or as one girl said to a mutual friend: “You know, the best things about Darius are his deep cuts and his charisma.”

Well whoopty-fuckin-doo! And here I was thinking that I was just being shy.

To this day, I use mostly non-verbal communication when it comes to building sexual tension, showing interest, building rapport and occasionally even defusing conflict situations.

The point being is that you can be charming and charismatic without saying much, and if you actually have solid verbal game, adding non-verbal communication on top of it, will take your interactions to the next level.

The problem, however, as far as I’m aware you can’t really fake it. You can’t just mimic the facial expression without the emotion behind it. There are too many tiny facial muscles involved to do it successfully and it will come off as disingenuous and fake if you try.

So how do we go about learning to communicate with our face?

First, review your gratitude routine videos

Take a few of your earlier gratitude routine videos at random and put them on mute. As you view the videos pay attention to your face and hands. Ask yourself the following: Can you identify the emotions you’re going through as you speak: at which points are you excited? Happy? Serious? Sad? Are you smiling in the videos as you speak? How are your eyes moving? Can you just feel the emotion, the passion leaking through as you speak about something? How are your hands moving? But most importantly, as you watch yourself speak (without sound), do you get a feeling that you want to hear what’s being said, because it looks freaking interesting and exciting? Or maybe as you watch the video, you see yourself speaking with deadpan face with no emotion behind the words?

Here is a short excerpt from one of my own earlier gratitude routines

Regardless of your starting point, here are couple of techniques that I found very useful to start improving your charismatic non-verbal communication.

Technique #1 – Uncensoring yourself

A couple of years ago I took a month long theater improvisation class.

It was a fun experience overall, but there were a couple of exercises we did that if slightly adjusted can help you become more charismatic and charming.

The first one was very simple:

We’d all round up in a circle and the teacher set the theme, for example, “animals”. Then she would point at any of us and say a letter, like “L”.

Then, without skipping a beat you must name as many animals you can think of that start with that letter – lion, leopard, llama, etc.

If you stop for even a second, you lose and then it’s someone else’s turn.

I absolutely sucked at this exercise!

One of the reasons why my verbal game is so lackluster is that I tend to get very analytical over the words I say. Like before asking a question I will think through all the possible answers and whether I want to hear them aloud. Similarly, before answering a question, I might think through what a follow up questions might happen afterwards based on my answer and if I want to take the conversation in that direction. It’s like playing a mental game of chess and while it has its place in certain situations, romantic situations are usually not among of them.

The trick, as I learned, to becoming great at this exercise is to start uncensoring yourself. Start speaking before you get a chance to think. The people who did best, where the ones who started saying the letter and only then figured out what they are trying to say. Sure, sometimes they would come up with ridiculous words like “L…iger” but on the whole, they still won more than anyone else.

This self-censorship is also the problem with most guys who are anything but charismatic – they are so obsessed with being seen as cool and smooth that they restrain and censor themselves.

And it’s so obvious on their face!

So our first technique is about unleashing yourself, giving yourself permission to show emotion.

As you do the gratitude routine during the following days, force yourself to show emotion. You can do this during the routine or take another extra minute or two to do some silly, weird, sexy faces afterwards.

Don’t worry about how it looks, you’re not going to share it with anyone anyway. Just have some fun with it.

Uncensoring yourself is a habit that you can practice in private and over time it will start leaking over to your social interactions too.

Technique #2 – Embody the emotion

This one is a bit more advanced and it’s how we go from goofy and silly to sexy and deliberate.

We start by visualizing a certain emotion, a certain scenario and then let it take over.

It’s best explained with an example:

Let’s say you’re on a date with a woman and you want to spike up the sexual tension. You’re sitting across each other and when the conversation slows down, you start looking into her eyes.

You don’t say anything but as you look at her, you start scanning her face. You start visualizing how it would feel to kiss her lips, grab her hair, kiss her neck.

As you do so, your facial expressions will naturally change and while she won’t know what’s exactly going through your head, she will feel the sexual tension rising too.

Similarly, you can visualize to put yourself in a more confident state and your non-verbal signals will change accordingly.

The trick here is that you want this happening mostly on auto-pilot or you risk end-up getting all analytical and in your head, which kind of ruins the whole point.

To get there, it’s a good idea to practice first.

So similarly to the first technique, after you’re done with your gratitude routine, take a moment visualize a particular scenario and see how your facial expressions and movements change.

These techniques are meant to get you started and sometime in the near future I plan on preparing a more in depth article on how we can leverage non-verbal communication to become more charming and charismatic.

For the rest of the challenge, try these techniques whenever you do the morning gratitude routine.