As a leader, your charisma is a factor that heavily influences how well and how easily people follow you, how they take your ideas, and how able you are to lead. At the same time, most of us aren’t naturally charismatic or even especially outgoing. If you want to lead well, working on your leadership charisma is important for personal development because it will help you in your role.
Why? People are more likely to talk to, listen to, and take advice from someone they like. Charisma will greatly help you in that goal, inspiring others to follow you as a leader, in whatever role you happen to be in.
Build Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is crucial to both leadership and charisma, so it is something you should work on. Most people benefit from coaching to improve physical self-confidence and body-language, giving them a more charismatic and confident demeanor and posing. Taking body-language coaching will also help you to better understand how people around you are reacting, so you can react more appropriately.
You also have to be confident in what and how you are saying things. Confidence is a tool that will get people to follow you, believe what you are saying, and take your advice.
Here, you have to believe what you are saying and trust your sources or thought processes behind what you are saying. If you don’t have confidence, coaching is one way to improve it.
You can also review why you aren’t confident, why you doubt yourself or your decisions, or your ideas. Ask yourself, “Why am I in this position right now, as a leader?”, “what makes me qualifies to say this”, “how am I continuing to improve and learn?” “How have I prepared to be here”.
Most people don’t get into roles without deserving them, and you can be confident that if people are asking you to give advice and to lead, it is because you have shown an aptitude for it in the past. While it’s always good to question your own decisions and ensure that what you are sharing is the right thing, it’s also important to be confident in it once you share it.
Be Honest and Work to Build Relationships
Many leaders make the mistake of either attempting to be as friendly as possible or attempting to be just a leader. The truth is that you need a mix of both. Good, charismatic, leadership is as much about relationship building as it is about making the right decisions under pressure.
Here, you want to learn about the people in your team or teams, be honest and trustworthy, and build relationships with them. When someone comes to you with a problem, you should know the background behind it and what’s impacting it.
Relationship building means that people will trust and listen to you more because they feel like they know you and vice versa. While you can’t force relationships, you can show interest, be genuinely concerned in the people working with you, and ask questions to get to know them.
Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an increasingly valued leadership skill because it allows you to connect to individuals in an empathetic way. Here, emotional intelligence is defined as your capacity, control, and awareness of both your own emotions and your ability to do so with interpersonal relationships. This means that you must empathetically recognize what others are feeling, respond to others with empathy, and recognize emotion as a factor in their behavior.
Why is emotional intelligence important? It allows you to connect with people, to build trust by responding with empathy, and to solve problems at their root, rather than trying to do so logically.
Charisma is an important leadership skill, but it isn’t one that you can build up overnight. Instead, you’ll have to work on elements such as relationship-building, personal confidence, and emotional intelligence, which will slowly turn into charisma over time. As you improve, you will become a better leader.
