The Road from Charisma to Compassion

I've been through an interesting and productive sequence of books lately.  Leading up to the first Jefferson Wheelchair show, I was looking for books that might help our showmanship, which led me to one called "Win the Crowd" by Steve Cohen, a professional magician.  There were a number of useful techniques in there, but the better ones are going to require some practice.  I've put enough of the more straightforward ideas into practice to know that those work.  Might have more on that later, after I get to experiment with the more advanced ideas.  Useful stuff here for people who present themselves in front of a group in any way.  One of the more interesting things I learned was how a stage magician prepares in advance and pays an extraordinary level of attention to audience reactions in order to constantly stay one step ahead of them.

That book led me to "The Charisma Myth" by Olivia Fox Cabane.  Her premise is that charisma is not something people just have or don't have; charisma is a skill set that can be developed.  She also theorizes that there are actually four distinct types of charisma, each involving a different balance of that skill set.  Again, the more basic techniques have shown some promise, and I have some experimenting to do with the more advanced ones.  In particular, I've tried slowing my speech and dropping the pitch of my voice at work to convey greater authority, with some success.  I've tended to speak rapidly in my work out of necessity, because I have a lot of information to convey and very tight time frames, but I thought it might actually save me time if I came across as someone you didn't argue with.  The experiment worked, for the most part.  I have some refining to do.  A key idea again in this book is mindfulness.  A charismatic person is not distracted, and she presents several specific techniques to help you reduce or eliminate distractions from your mind.

From there I moved on to "Self-Compassion" by Kristin Neff.  The link here is far less obvious.  Losing my temper at work has been an ongoing problem for me, though I've gotten better over the last few years because I've been working so hard on it.  It's hard for people who know me elsewhere to imagine me showing anger, never mind having a constant problem with it.  All I can say is that there are things in my work environment that really push my buttons, and I'm coping with that as best I can.

The common link with the other books is an emphasis on mindfulness, on observing what is going on in your own head before it becomes a problem.  Without getting too far into the psychology behind it, when I start feeling overwhelmed in the workplace, there's a lot of vicious self-talk in my head that sends me into a fight-or-flight response.  Not good, because it actually restricts blood flow in the brain and makes it harder to think, just when you really need presence of mind.  One possible solution is to use mindfulness to become aware of it before it gets out of control, and ease up on myself internally before I actually lose my temper at an external target.  I haven't had enough pressure at work in the last week or so to test this any more than superficially, but it shows promise.  It also dovetails nicely with my meditation and spiritual practice, as well as some of the charisma techniques from the first two books.  I may be learning these techniques with different goals in mind, but why not put it all to work across the board to make my life better?