- expressing emotions correctly to get charisma

Bookmark this Article:
Blink	Del.icio.us	Digg	Furl
Google	Simpy	Spurl	Y! MyWeb

In brief:
A beautiful, resonant voice, is generally judged as part of physical attractiveness and is more persuasive than a high-pitched nasal whine. People listen to your voice as a guide to the way you are really feeling. Learn how to communicate your emotions to build charisma.

Charismatic Communication - Vocal Mastery: Voicing Emotions

The tones you use in your voice to express emotion are known as paralinguistic cues. They are a critical part of communication in that people pay a lot of unconscious attention to them when a mismatch occurs between the words you utter and the tone in which you deliver them. People also listen to them as a kind of guide or map to the way you are really feeling.

You have learned in life what communication researchers have learned through experimentation and observation, and that is that people make serious judgements on the sounds you intone. A beautiful, resonant voice, for example, is generally judged as part of physical attractiveness and is more persuasive than a high-pitched nasal whine.

The paralinguistic cues that really count in communication are those associated with the expression of emotion. The essence of congruous verbal communication is to match tone with the emotional fingerprint contained in your content and to do it with the appropriate energy.

Every issue, event, encounter, idea, thought and action has an emotion attached to it. In fact, it can be said that everything in the world has an emotional value positioned somewhere along an index from agony to ecstasy.

Agony and Ecstasy, the two extremes of human emotion, have roughly the same degree of intensity. There is as much power in heart-wrenching grief and some forms of fear and rage as there is in jubilation, exuberance and unbridled joy. As a rule, levity has more energy than gravity. Loudness, pace, pitch and physical expression are more pronounced. When expressing gravity you tend to speak slower, softer, at a lower pitch and with subdued physical expression.

There is a relationship between the intensity of feelings and the emotional distance that separates you from the person, event or object. This is particularly the case with negative emotions like grief, fear, anger and guilt.

You may laugh at a report of a British pensioner being maimed by a flying cauliflower, but if it happened to a partner, parent, friend or child it would become a terrible tragedy. The dearer something is to your heart the more emotion you can permit yourself to release through expression.

The intensity of positive emotions also has a connection to how close or far the subject matter is to you. You may feel as much elation and triumph when your country's representative wins at Wimbledon as you do when you win your own game at the local tennis club. Yet, a win by your country's team at the International Water Ballet Championships can leave you cold and disinterested if you're not close to water ballet.

Distance/closeness is a good general rule of thumb to apply in public speaking, with some exceptions. The exceptions relate to public expectations, and this is where empathy plays a significant role.

For instance, if during a question and answer session a member of your audience relates a tragic story, there will be a high audience expectation of an appropriate emotional response to it. You may not know the person or care that her husband left her, her children ran amok and her cat defecated on her bed, but your audience may well expect that you care.

Often speakers seek to hide their apparent discomfort at people revealing their inner secrets by distancing themselves from the emotions the stories evoke. Variations of "Yes, err, well we all have our problems in life." and "Have you tried this solution" can be heard by people unskilled in the art of empathy. This can have a profound effect on your credibility.

If you adopt a detached position to something that is said or happens, your voice will take on evenness in pitch, pace, emphasis and loudness. Your physiology will reflect the neutrality or distance of your emotions and your audience will probably interpret your response as dispassionate, cold-hearted or emotionally repressed.

The only way to physically and tonally express empathy is to feel it. Empathy is not difficult to feel, but you may need to make the choice to feel it. It's one of three basic perceptual positions you can take when confronted by an event, person or thing: Internal - detached - empathic

Internal

Think back to a time when you felt self-conscious in your surroundings. The governing perceptual position of self-consciousness is internal. The locus of your attention is directed inward. When doing self-consciousness, you constantly refer to your inner feelings, often hear a clear inner commentary, and see through your eyes how your body is reacting to the situation. Your voice, body, and behaviour will mirror your self-reflection with more intense demonstrations of emotion. In terms of closeness and distance, the internal perceptual position is about as close as you can get.

It's very useful to move in and out of the internal perceptual position to check how you feel, personally, about things. If you are locked into other perceptual positions and rarely visit the internal position, it's extremely difficult to experience a heartfelt attachment to what you're saying. Eschewing the internal perceptual position is the equivalent to depriving your inner being of the right to express itself.

The internal position is one you choose when you need to articulate how you really feel about things. However, if you spend too much time visiting this perceptual position at the expense of the others, people will begin to observe that you are too irrational and emotional, perhaps a bit of a mush-ball, and maybe too into yourself.

Detached

When was the last time you decided to stand back and take a good look at yourself or gave someone else that instruction? As you stand back and look at your behaviour in particular situations, you enter a detached perceptual position. It is characterised by a very low intensity of feeling and expression. The detached state is the favoured state of academia and the scientific method. It makes sense to be able to take a reasonable, logical, so-called objective perceptual position when you're in thinking mode.

When you are confronted with crises and need a cool head, when youre hijacked by your emotions, or when you need to make some serious decisions, it's a very good idea to stand back and look at the situation, including your part in it.

Sadly, some people spend much of their lifetime stuck in this perceptual position. They often come across as automatons, unfeeling, too cool-headed and unresponsive to people and events that occur around them. Are you beginning to gain an insight into one of the favoured positions of those who come across as cold fish? The detached perceptual position cuts you off from expressing deep feelings. This has a subtle numbing effect over time and impedes your ability to communicate openly and tenderly to people.

Empathic

How regularly do you put yourself in other peoples shoes to gain an understanding of how they may feel in a particular situation? We often demand that significant others "walk a mile in our moccasins" because of our need to be understood and validated. It's natural that very significant others, namely your audience or people you need to persuade, will demand similar attention.

When we step into the shoes of other people, we can gain a rough to reasonable understanding of what it's like to be them. The emotions experienced are similarly rough to reasonable. Depending on whether they are positive or negative emotions, the pitch, emphasis, pace and loudness of your expression will register between the middle to upper, or the middle to lower, range of intensity.

People who stay too long in perceptual position number two are more likely to become doormats.

It makes sense to develop the flexibility to visit the three perceptual positions by choice, doesn't it? It makes even better sense to become a frequent and purposeful visitor to all three when you need a broad fix on an issue. It can deliver multiple perspectives on the one issue, which is far better than having only one perspective.

Empathy can only be felt and expressed when you seek to visit the experiences of others. Take a recent situation in which you had a disagreement, and as you go back in time, imagine looking at yourself and the other party having the disagreement while noticing how you felt.

Now please go back to it again imagining seeing the same scene and begin to enter the other party's experience of the event and then enter their body and see yourself as they would see you during the disagreement. Notice what feelings they would have as they engaged in the process of relating to you. Any difference in intensity of feeling?

Finally, go back to the scene seeing you through their eyes and move out of their body and into you own and experience you having the disagreement through your eyes, hearing what you heard and feeling what you felt. If you followed the procedure exactly you would have travelled through the three perceptual positions and noticed feelings of differing intensity along the way.

Charismatic communicators have been observed to go into the perceptual position of empathy (either instinctively or through learning) as a natural course when people recount good and bad news. They picture or imagine themselves in the event described and you can notice their physiology change as they begin to imagine being there. This experience furnishes them with some knowledge upon which they can give an honest and congruous response. The following example illustrates the point:

"Margaret, I'm understanding what it must be like to be deserted by one's partner just as the children are reaching an uncontrollable age, and then, amongst it all, having to deal with an incontinent cat. I can hear in your voice the anguish of your predicament" (Empathic response with congruous tone and physiology) "And I know this may be the hardest thing you have ever had to accept, deal with, and draw on your inner strengths to overcome." (Change of tonal and physiological expression to that reflecting hope, accompanied by a positive suggestion)

The same empathic process can be undertaken to join others in their triumphs and positive experiences. This willingness to enter the experiences of others is one of the hallmarks of influential speakers. It sends the signal "I am like you and would react like you if I were you" - a powerful reminder of sameness.

To sum up, it's important to reflect all perceptual positions when you speak in front of an audience. If you jump in and out of all three as part of your regular communication cycle, you can achieve two significant effects. The first is that you will be matching the preferred perceptual positions of all of your audience some of the time. The second, you will achieve tonal and physiological light and shade in your presentation, giving voice, body, heart, and soul to your content.

You may find it useful to follow the general rules of thumb below:

Internal position: When you wish to recount personal stories or wish people to join a real or imaginary experience. Be into the experience and talk about it. Go back in time and live the experience again. Talk about it as you do, describing what you see, hear, and feel.

Detached position: When you wish to take stock. Stand back to look at situations and describe them. This position is ideal when you wish to talk about concepts, reason something out, use logic as a persuasion tool, or take a non-subjective viewpoint.

Empathic position: When you wish to respond to the experiences of others. Join the experience and talk about it. Imagine being that person, notice what it would be like and describe how you would think and feel.

(c) Desmond Guilfoyle 1998 - 2006

You May Also Be Interested In

⇒ How To Know Your Higher Self In 7 Steps is a massive 200+ page ebook equally backed by quality material gathered from self development kings like Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Deepak Chopra, Jim Rohn, and others.

⇒ Communication Secrets of Making People Like You reveals how you can become a persuasive and charismatic people magnet. You'll learn the inner psychology to know yourself and the 12 communication skills for creating interpersonal relationships, happiness, and success in your life.