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Let’s get started. Here’s a quick overview of the seven power cues that will help you signal that you’re the leader of the tribe gathered around you. I’ll begin each discussion of the individual power cues with a question that highlights the opportunity for strengthening your interpersonal communications.

The first power cue is all about self-awareness. How do you show up when you walk into a room?

You need to begin to get some sense of how you inhabit space, what your characteristic gestures are, and how you affect others. So you’re going to take inventory to find out what you’re doing that’s effective and what’s not. How are you showing up in your conversations, your meetings, and your presentations?

In short, what’s your persona when you connect with others? Are you powerful and commanding? Are you friendly and warm? Do people fear you, trust you, like you, avoid you, flock to you? What happens? Do you take charge or take a backseat? These are the sort of impressions you need to understand better in order to begin the process of turning into a charismatic version of yourself.

The second power cue involves taking charge of your nonverbal communications in order to project the persona you want to project—through your emotions. What emotions do you convey through your body language for important moments, conversations, meetings, and presentations?

Most of us are not charismatic most of the time because we don’t manage and focus our emotions. So we meet other people with a hundred things on our minds and a mixed bag of emotions, like our cluttered to-do lists. The result is muddle, not charisma. In step two, you’ll begin the process of learning to manage and focus your emotions when you need to, thus taking charge of your nonverbal communications, your persona, and your charisma, to use it at will.

Because gesture does in some ways help determine thought, you will also spend some time understanding groups of gestures so that you can monitor how you’re doing. In other words, sometimes it does help to fake it until you make it! Or more precisely, you can work from either the inside out, that is, from emotion to gesture, or the outside in, that is, from gesture to emotion. The two approaches complement one another.

The third power cue helps you learn to read others’ unconscious messages. What unconscious messages are you receiving from others?

Because you’re already an expert, but at an unconscious level, this step in particular is all about becoming aware of unconscious messages you’re already sending yourself, making them conscious in specific ways and at specific times, and then making the new habits routine.

Because your skills at reading others involves intent—intent toward you—you’ll learn to shape and phrase what you ask of your unconscious mind in that way. It’s a matter of learning what specific polarities or pairs of questions to ask your unconscious mind.

In this way, you’ll begin to be able to recognize and understand what others are thinking before they themselves know it, in many cases. That’s because emotional attitudes and decisions are made unconsciously first, then gestured about, then brought to the conscious mind. You’ll learn to see the attitude or decision at the gesture stage and, thus, before the other person is self-aware.

With the fourth power cue, on the mysteries of the human voice, you will turn your voice into a commanding instrument for taking charge of a room. Do you have a leadership voice?

The research on the voice is surprising and little known; it will give you an edge over your colleagues and competitors that you will be able to master with some weeks’ practice.⁷ What’s important to note, however, is that individual responses to this step vary considerably. Some find it easy to take control of their voices; others, less musical, find it more difficult.

But the results can be powerful and life changing, if you undertake them carefully and thoroughly. Your voice is something you likely take for granted and rarely think about except when you have a cold, but it is one of the primary ways in which you connect with and influence people every day. Controlling your voice is worth the effort.

The fifth power cue teaches you how to combine your voice and a host of other social signals to greatly increase your success rate in pitches, meetings, sales situations, and the like. What honest signals do you send out in key work and social situations?

Researchers at MIT have discovered that, for example, the success of a venture capital pitch meeting can be predicted with astonishing accuracy by tracking a few aspects of body language.⁸ You need to know what those are and learn how to use them to your advantage in high-stress, high-stakes situations.

As with the second power cue, either you can learn to control the gestures that signal these messages or you can control the emotions that control the gestures. As you work your way through the seven power cues, you’ll find that while the idea of taking emotional control of your life may at first appear strange or daunting, in the long run, you’ll find it by far the easier, more natural way to project powerful leadership and the communications that go with it.

The sixth power cue shows you how to use the power of your unconscious mind to make decisions, rid yourself of phobias and fears, and create a new, more successful persona. Is your unconscious mind holding you back or propelling you forward?

You’ll apply insights top athletes have used for decades to your personal and work issues in order to redefine your approach to the world, as you wish to design it. You’ll use these techniques to remove your unconscious story lines that say, “I always go blank under stress,” or “I tend to choke when the boss is pressuring me to speak up,” or “When I get in front of a crowd, I get nervous and can’t seem to do my best.” All it takes is a memory of a bad experience to throw you off your world-class game.

You’ll work at replacing the mental maps that are currently holding you back with winning ones. If it all sounds too “New Age” to work, take comfort in knowing that the technique was developed by top Soviet researchers during the Cold War in an attempt to dominate the Olympics—and it worked. It garnered the Soviets an extraordinary number of gold medals. The results are real, even if the actions are all in your head.

Finally, the seventh power cue helps you put it all together to become a master storyteller who actually synchronizes brain waves with your listeners to enhance your natural leadership capacity, increase your charisma, and move others to action. Are you telling powerful stories?

Good storytelling creates a sense of anticipation in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, and the experience is a pleasurable one for the participants. We humans like that kind of anticipation and confirmation. It’s part of our deep-seated desire for communal experiences and tribal connections.

Great leaders are great storytellers. These leaders know that they must tell powerful stories to engage and enlist their followers. They know that storytelling is the only effective way to create the kind of transmittal of ideas and values that allows a leader’s message to be heard and carried out over time and with many people. They know that the best storytelling taps into deep patterns in the human brain so that the stories fulfill the needs and expectations of the listeners and also create the right sets of messages for the leader’s agenda.

The last power cue in this process involves becoming one of those master storytellers and learning how to create stories that will convey the essence of your leadership, your mission, and your passion.

I will argue that powerful storytelling is the only possible road to the radical authenticity demanded of leaders. In our 24/7, warts and all, YouTubed world, leaders have to be willing to show up with an authenticity that goes well beyond anything demanded of leaders in the past. This book will help you on that road.