How to Be Charismatic - the Daily Charisma Training Plan!
There’s no question that genuine charisma is one of the vital ingredients required to transform yourself into a badass.
Unfortunately, the question ‘how to be charismatic’ doesn’t have a simple answer.
Anyone with a growth mindset knows that they can improve their skills if they have the required knowledge and are willing to put in enough effort. But when it comes to communication, where do you even start?
What should you do if you want to become a charismatic man? Well first, we should look at why charisma is so difficult to develop in the first place.
Why is Building Charisma so Hard?
When compared to other skills, charisma is an area that tends to be much harder for people to improve in, for a few simple reasons.
The first is that it’s much harder to set up practice sessions. If you want to get better at martial arts or coding, you can attend a class or set aside some time for training/practice.
Unfortunately, there aren’t really any classes on how to be charismatic and it’s pretty difficult to practice solo (at least it was… I’ll show you how in a second).
*SIDENOTE - Although they aren’t technically for training your communication skills, I do highly recommend improv classes for anyone who’s interested. They’re one of the closest things out there to communication training, not to mention they’re a ton of fun and a great way to expand your social circle.
The other key reason that people struggle to improve their charisma, is that it can be far too easy to get lost in a conversation with someone and just forget that you’re meant to be practising.
After all, habits take a lot of conscious work and repetition to develop. If you find yourself finishing a conversation only to realise that you never once practised that communication habit you were trying to build, you’re not going to get very far.
On top of that, every time you don’t do that new habit, you’re actually reinforcing something else. Every time you don’t look someone in the eye while speaking, you’re reinforcing that habit and making it harder to break. In that sense, the early stages of changing communication habits can often feel like swimming against the tide.
In order to overcome that, you need a system that allows you to practise frequently and consistently enough to push through the pain period.
Enter the Daily Charisma Training Plan.
Introducing the Daily Charisma Training Plan
We just spoke about the importance of consistently building and reinforcing the right habits, and that’s exactly what this plan aims to do.
It’s made up of a bunch of different exercises that will help you practise and improve your communication abilities, whether that means conversation skills or self-expression. In fact, many of these exercises have been taken directly from improv training classes. As I already mentioned, there’s a lot of overlap between improv training and communication training.
Most importantly, they can be done solo, in under 15 minutes, whenever suits you. After all, to really make progress, you need a plan that can be followed daily, regardless of travelling to new locations or a busy schedule.
So, let’s take a look at the exercises.
What Does the Charisma Plan Look Like?
First up, I want to reiterate that this is designed to be manageable. The training plan that I follow only takes me around 10 minutes each day, with about 2 minutes spent on each exercise. Feel free to lengthen or shorten it to your preference but keep in mind - the more you do, the better off you’ll be.
Aim to do as much as possible but keep in mind that if you try to do 30 minutes a day, it’ll be much easier for you to come up with excuses and miss training sessions. Make sure it’s short enough that there are no excuses.
Now, let’s jump into the exercises:
Word Association
A great place to start and one of the best drills I know for people who struggle with running out of things to say in conversation.
Word Association is simple. Think of a random word and say it out loud - it can be literally anything. Once you have a word, pay attention to what it reminds you of. Where does your mind go to next?
For example, if I say the word ‘coconuts’, my mind then jumps to palm trees, and then beach.
All you’re doing is following the chain from one thought to another. The only catch is that speed is key. Jump from thought to thought as quickly as possible. If you get stuck or your mind goes blank, come up with a new random word and start again.
Once you practice this for a while, you’ll find you have a much easier time continuing conversations because your brain has become better at forming connections and coming up with new things to speak about. This might mean you’re sometimes changing the subject, but that’s way better than saying nothing, right?
In any case, this is an absolute must-have exercise for any charisma training plan. Make sure it’s in yours.
Pointing and Naming
Now, we’re going to kick things up a notch. Instead of practising forming associations, we’re going to do the complete opposite and practise genuine improvisation.
In Pointing and Naming, you’re going to do 2 things. First, you’re going to randomly start pointing to objects around you (totally fine to be alone in your room for this one). As you point to each object, you’re going to say the name of something completely different.
For example, you might point to a water bottle and say polar bear. You can say whatever you want. There are only 2 rules for this:
You can’t say the actual name of the item (E.g - pointing at a water bottle and saying ‘water bottle’)
You can’t say something that’s connected to what you previously said. (E.g - just naming a new type of fruit each time you point at something - this would just be practising association again rather than improvising between random topics)
Just like Word Association helps prevent you from running out of things to say in conversation, Pointing and Naming helps you recover when you do. Practise for a while and you’ll know that even if you have nothing left to say in a conversation, you’ll still be able to improv your way to a new topic.
Random Story
Random story is simple but unlike the others, you will need some assistance. Grab your phone or a computer and head over to Random Word Generator. Get a list of random words and start your timer.
All you need to do is start telling a story and as you tell it, find a way to incorporate each word on the list. Go from top to bottom in order.
Do your best to have the story make sense, but don’t worry too much if it doesn’t. Sometimes you’ll just get a group of words with no logical connection - I’ll often stop halfway through, laughing to myself over how horrible my story has become.
But that’s no excuse to quit! Keep going until you finish the list or it’s time to move on to the next exercise.
This one is great for helping you build those improv skills in conversation. After all, you don’t always know what someone will say next. You’re often going to have to adapt and find a way to make a meaningful story out of it.
Expressive Story
Unlike the Random Story exercise, this one has nothing to do with improv.
The Expressive Story is all about training your self-expression skills, and it’s pretty simple. All you need to do is start telling a story to yourself in the mirror. It can be whatever you want but I find it’s easiest to tell a story you’re familiar with - maybe something that happened to you recently.
As you’re telling the story, you’re going to focus on whatever form of expression you want to improve. This might mean looking yourself in the eyes while speaking, to work on eye contact. It might mean speaking while smiling, if you find yourself a little monotone during actual conversations.
Whatever it is, this is your chance to engage that muscle and build the habit while you’re actually speaking. That way, it’ll be a little easier when you try to bust it out on a date.
Gibberish Monologue
One of my favourites but also one of the most difficult, the Gibberish Monologue will probably put you a mile outside of your comfort zone.
All you have to do is perform a speech, entirely in a made-up language. No English, no other languages, and no stopping until the timer is up.
For most people, there’s typically a lot of resistance here but one small comfort is that it gets MUCH easier with practice. In fact, it’s probably the one you’ll see the most dramatic improvement in, which is great because it’s an incredible training tool for fast-paced improv.
Think about it - in other drills, you aren’t sure what your next sentence will be. In Gibberish Monologue, you aren’t sure what your next syllable will be. It’s a wild ride.
Emotion Story
Finally, we have the Emotion story. This one is almost identical to the Expressive Story exercise except for one key difference.
Rather than telling a story while working on a specific habit, you’re going to tell a story while cycling through emotions randomly.
For example, you might start telling the story while being as happy as possible, but then after 10 seconds, you move to angry, and then sad, and so on.
Just make sure you’re showing it in as many ways as possible, from body language, to facial expressions, to vocal tonality. It’s about embodying the emotion you’re feeling. This is a drill that many actors use to warm up and develop their emotional range.
But you don’t need to be an actor to get the same benefit out of it. This is incredibly useful for anyone who’s a little bit stone-faced in conversation. It busts you out of your prison and gets you expressing yourself.
How to Be Charismatic - Using Your Training Plan Effectively
As advertised, the training plan is extremely effective at building your social abilities over time. Unfortunately, like most improvement, it does take time.
The good news is that it can be a useful tool in the short term as well. In particular, it works great as a warmup before social events, especially for things that you find yourself getting anxious over.
There’s nothing like making a language up on the fly to remind you that you’ll probably be fine when talking to that pretty girl at the bar.
But don’t let the short-term benefit fool you into only doing this when you think you need it. Just like the gym, the best results are seen when you’re religious about your training and get your charisma session in every day.
If you do, you’ll be rattling off witty-one liners in no time. And that’s badass.
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