A lot of people think that charisma is a mysterious quality that people are born with. Personal charisma is composed of emotional and social skills. Emotional skills include spontaneous emotional expressiveness, the ability to read the emotions and nonverbal cues of other people, the ability to enact emotions on cue, and the ability to regulate and control emotions. Meanwhile, social skills include verbal speaking skills, impression management skills, an awareness of how a person’s social behavior affects others, and more.
There are different components of charisma including the following:
The Ability to Express Emotions
This refers to the ability to express emotions to other people. An emotionally expressive person can easily enact emotions and make feelings known to others.
The Ability to Control Emotions
A person with the ability to control their emotions can hide felt emotional states and use a different emotional expression like a mask. A charismatic person is quite skilled at controlling their emotions looking calm, collected, and cool.
The Ability to Maintain Emotional Stability
This refers to a person’s ability to read the subtle emotional cues of others. It is associated with empathy. Those with emotional stability are considered caring and sensitive. This component of charisma lets people connect with others at a deep emotional level.
The Ability to Express Socially
This is a representation of both verbal speaking skills as well as the ability to engage with other people in conversations and social interactions. Those who possess this charisma tend to be outgoing and extraverted. These charisma skills let a charismatic person be a good public speaker and engage with people in a room on a meaningful level.
The Ability to Control Social Situations
People who have high levels of social control can feel comfortable in just about any social situation. Thus, they can easily become a part of a group.
The Ability to Maintain Social Sensitivity
This includes listening ability, especially the ability to pick up on the subtleties of conversations and social interactions. People with personal charisma are poised and tactful. They can easily analyze people and social situations.
Although having more of each of the components of charisma can enhance your charisma, the different skill dimensions must in balance. Thus, being too high in one dimension and too low on another can be a problem. For instance, a highly emotionally-expressive person who lacks emotional control can have trouble turning it off and toning down the emotional expression when it’s appropriate. Likewise, too much emotional control, without expressiveness, results in the person becoming emotionally cold and distant.
