(upbeat music) - So we talked a lot about meetings, in-person, conversation, verbal. Does a lot of this also apply to written communication, whether that's, you know, emails or text messages? - Yes, so why don't we talk about the four different aspects of the book? Obviously, if we're in-person, we can use all four, right?

We can use imagery, the colors we're wearing. We can use vocal, non-verbal, and verbal. In email, we're just limiting the amount of communication modes that we can use to pretty much just verbal and a little bit of imagery. I mention imagery 'cause I think it's also a forgotten one, is even fonts have personality.

There are researchers, real researchers, who have looked at the personality of fonts. For example, Chris, you wanna do a little game? - Yeah, I love games. - What do you think is the least funny font, according to the research? Least funny font. - I'm gonna go with Times New Roman.

- Okay, that was my guess as well. Nope, it is ironically Comic Sans. Comic Sans, called Comic Least Funny Font. They found that when people write things in Comic Sans, people do not find it funny, even if the joke's funny. So even our font can come across in our emails, including colors, including images that we might be using in our, like, either graphics or icons.

So sometimes in email, we can have imagery, too, not as much as in person or on a Zoom background. Like, I'm very purposeful about the props I use behind me in my videos, but you can have some of those in emails. In emails, you have to be cuing people constantly, right?

An email is so few, it's only one mode of communication, so you have to be really purposeful with it. You wanna make sure, and this is not just about making your emails longer. The biggest mistake that people make is they try to be charismatic by adding. And I don't think that being verbally charismatic is additive, it's about being purposeful.

So it's using words that trigger something. I think a lot of our verbal communication has become sterilized, right? So we send emails that are like, "Hi, I'm following up the proposal. "I'll send it to you next week. "Thanks for the meeting, bye," right? Like, super, super sterile. Can you swap out even a couple of words with something that are gonna change people's perception?

And the way that they tested this, the reason I know that even just a couple of verbal cues matter, this isn't additive, it's just being purposeful, is what the researchers did is they had people come into their lab and they split them up into two different groups. The first group got a set of basic directions and they had to complete some tasks, like math problems and some basic intelligence tasks.

The second group had the exact same quiz, the exact same questions, but in their directions, they swapped out three or four words with achievement-oriented words. So achievement-oriented words are words like win, succeed, master, achieve, right? Those are achievement-oriented words. They just sprinkled them in, just a couple swaps, three or four of these words.

They found that the group that read the achievement-oriented words did better on the task, which is insane. If three or four words can make people do better on an intelligence test. They worked harder and longer on the problem set and they had more motivation. So they actually enjoyed that problem set more.

The reason I share this is because if three or four words swapped out in a subject or your profile, like your LinkedIn profile or your calendar agenda, or the slides behind you in a presentation, if that can make your folks, your listeners feel more motivated, wouldn't we want to give them that gift?

Like what a gift that we can give to the world with our charisma actually makes them more charismatic. - So what I'm hearing is that you can actually have a charismatic email if you have the right balance of words. Is it the same thing? Add a little warmth, add a little competence to an email?

- Exactly, so here's the hack. In your subjects, your greeting and your sign-off, I want you to match the words with your charisma goals. If you want to be warm, use warm words, right? Hi partner, good morning team. So happy to see you all, best, right? Signing off best, best is a very warm word.

If you want to be competent, use competent words in your opener and your sign-off. Onwards, you know, let's do this. Can't wait to work together. You know, like those are competent openers and words. So yes, you can match your charisma goals in your emails. - And if you want to kind of come off more charismatic, as you say, is the goal to balance what's natural for you with those words?

So if you kind of, at the beginning of this conversation, you reflected and said, wow, I'm probably more the competent person, let's add a little warmth. Or is the goal to put both of them out there to kind of have a balance in the email? - Okay, so this is where we get into the advanced, the advanced tips.

So level one, balance. So if this is all new to you, I want as balanced as possible. So a little bit of warm words, a little bit of competent words. Same thing, a really easy hack that we can use here is like on your LinkedIn profile, look at your headline.

Look at the first two sentences of your LinkedIn profile. Count the number of warm words versus competent words. Now this is more art than science. So we'll get a little bit more creative here, but warm words, when I say warm words, I mean warm words kind of make you feel the warm and fuzzies.

Worms like words like collaborate, team, best, both, together, happy, great. Those are warm words. They have more warmth in them. Competent words are words like efficient, streamline, chart, data, science, right? Those are all more competent words. So a little art, not necessarily science. Actually, I have a glossary in the book if you want a more specific list.

I want you to look at your LinkedIn profile and a way to count how many warm words, how many competent words you're using. And level one goal is to make it a mix. So try to have an equal amount of warm words and competent words. So even when I was writing the book, I tried to have a balance of warm and competent words on the pages that mattered, right?

So in the introduction, in the description behind the book, in the description on Amazon, 'cause I know that I wanna hit both warm readers and competent readers. I try to have a balance of both in any and all public-facing things, including like my slides. So I give a lot of keynotes.

I have an exact equal balance of warm slides and competent slides. My competent slides are graphs and data and research. And for every single competent slide, I have a warm slide, a personal story, a funny gif, a joke, right? So those balance out. So I try to have that balance.

Level two, and this is for my advanced learners, is if you are with a VIP, if you're with a boss or an important client or important customer, and you really want to respect them charismatically, you can dial up into their warmth or their competence. So for example, I have some VIPs in my life that are super high in competence.

And so to respect and honor them, when I am engaging with them, I also dial up my competence. I still use warmth, but I just sort of edge more into the kind of words and nonverbal that they use to honor and respect where they're at. So that's kind of level two.

That's the ninja level. - I actually, I have a practical application that I'm now gonna apply this. I'm probably more of a warmth writer with an exclamation point at every end of thing, always signing off best, smiley faces and everything. But my takeaway is I'm gonna go read like the LinkedIn profile or the bio on the website and try to figure out, okay, is this person that I'm about to email who I don't know?

It's really easy if it's your boss. You know, is your boss the person that hugs you when you come in the room that's super, you know, always talking about life or are they very, you know, matter of fact, competent. But I imagine I could go read the tweets, the blog posts, the LinkedIn profile, identify who this person is and they probably are gonna be less excited about an email filled with exclamation points and smiley faces if their entire writing on the internet is very, you know, charts, percents, data, science.

- Exactly, so like watching their YouTube video, watching their TED talk, looking at their profiles, matching them as a much, it's a way of literally saying, I wanna be on your page. Like I respect you so much that I wanna use your language. You also made a very good point.

So exclamation points, emojis, and words like yay, fab, whoop, those are all warm, so they count as one warm point. In fact, every exclamation point I count as one warm point. So if you have three exclamation points, that's three warm words. And for my data heads, charts, percent, numbers, or data, those count as one competent word.

So just consider that when you're doing your little audit on your profiles. - Yeah, you can just score an email, plus one, minus one, and see where you end up. - And so I love people to do a little audit where I ask them, and you can do this after this call, is print out your last five important emails that you sent out.

Whatever five important emails you sent out, print 'em out, yellow for warm, blue for competent, and count 'em, right? Like how are you coming across? If you have a mostly yellow email, you are coming across as too highly warm, right? If you have a mostly blue email, you are overwhelming them in competence.

And remember, the research shows competence without warmth leaves people feeling suspicious. That is literally what they found, that people who are super smart but don't have enough warmth they are less likely to believe your competence. So all blue is too much competence. And if you have none at all, so no yellow, no blue, it means you're under-signaling.

- Okay, I'm gonna do that after this call. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)