Power Cues. Nick Morgan
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 and take charge of her career—without saying a word.
I worked with another person whose shyness was damaging his career and his marriage. He learned to become a more effective communicator at work and at home—and became a CFO.
I helped another client double his speaking fees by making a few small changes in the way he stood in front of an audience.
You’ll learn that what the brain research shows actually happens when people communicate, and how you can use that understanding to become a new kind of persuasive, charismatic leader yourself. You can achieve the same kind of transformation that I have seen over and over again in my work with clients over the past two decades.
How to Read This Book
I’ve sought to make this book as easy as possible to read, given the sophisticated nature of the coaching. Each of the seven chapters describes a particular set of insights derived from my coaching work, supported by a breakthrough in brain research, and discusses the implications for leadership and communications. Each chapter also describes, in very practical terms, a power cue leading to personal communications mastery that builds on the cues before it and overall creates a complete program for your personal transformation. You can jump right to the power cues and skip the research, but I recommend studying it because of the insights it will give you into why people communicate the way they do. It will help you in your pursuit of communications mastery to understand how the brain works and what science is showing us about aspects of the human unconscious.
I’ve tried to anticipate as many of the questions you will naturally have as possible, and answer them in the descriptions of the steps and instructions for implementing them yourself. I’ve also added “field notes” at the end of each chapter that cover some of the issues that may arise as you start to put these ideas into action. Think of them as deeper dives into the practical side of this work.
It’s important to understand that much of this brain research is still in its early stages, and as such I have only included discussion of work that I have personally found to be helpful and practical in my work with clients—a nonstatistical but nontrivial form of confirmation. Where it’s relevant and helpful, I will share stories of my client work to illustrate how the steps work, what pitfalls to avoid, and what you need to focus on to achieve the best results.
This work is going to take some weeks, and it’s not easy. It requires paying attention to aspects of your behavior and others’ behavior that you’ve probably not thought consciously about before. But the results will be worth it. Personal mastery and an opportunity to change your leadership level await you.
When I say mastery, I don’t mean manipulation. These power cues will actually show you how to deal more authentically with your colleagues, your family, your tribe. In seven chapters, you’ll learn how to clear away all the unconscious messages you don’t mean to be sending—and don’t even realize you’re sending—in order to strengthen the messages you want to communicate. You’ll learn to show up as the best version of yourself instead of as a jumble of unconscious fears and distractions. You’ll become more persuasive and more powerful because you’ll become more authentically yourself.
When you’re ready, take a deep breath and turn the page.
CHAPTER ONE
Knowing Your Own Power Cues
Becoming Self-Aware and the Significance of Gesture
This chapter will explore how gesture establishes and regulates relationships and communications