The Best Things In Life Aren’t Things

So, by all means, seek to increase your charisma. Try to become the most effective person you can be. Work at making a good first impression and projecting a positive image-but also try to retain self-awareness.

Look around you; think how you appear to others; be alert to the impression you're creating, or trying to create. If you try too hard to impress, or make a big to-do of the grand gesture, or come on too strong or too insensitively, you'll often end up creating a negative impression.

The best impression and the surest way to charisma often just means putting others first. It's been reported that one New York cab driver, for example, makes $30,000 more a year in tips alone than other cabbies. Why? Because he offers passengers a choice of several newspapers, cold drinks, or fresh fruit. He asks them what kind of music they'd prefer, and otherwise does his best to make his customers comfortable. In hectic, brusque Manhattan, his small acts of decency make him stand out.

Thus, folks with the most effective images often are those who are the least obtrusive about it. In fact, sometimes it's a simple act or gesture of courtesy-like announcing your first and last name when you see someone who may possibly have forgotten them-that burnishes your image, that really sets you pleasantly apart. Or maybe it's a short note of thanks for some favor. Or saying something nice and genuine about someone in front of his or her boss.

If never made, these gestures probably wouldn't be missed; that's why they're so obvious when you make them. In other words, being a genuinely good person, who cares about others and who does things because they are the right things to do, may be the ultimate key to increasing your personal magnetism, or charisma.

Always do right because, as Mark Twain said, that will gratify some people and astonish the rest.


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Tony Alessandra. All right reserved. For information contact Frog Pond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@frogpond.com.