J D Fuentes - Basic Arousal | Page 9

arms and your
chest, the more confident and powerful you seem. Don’t worry
about seeming grandiose; with practice, your expansive gestures
will become ever more closely synchronized with what you
want to express, and therefore, more and more persuasive.
Ultimately, you should think of your body, as well as the space around
your body, as a whole, a unit. This unit should be completely aligned,
completely involved in the expression of a particular emotion. Your
body is a tool—you should allow yourself to let the emotions you choose
dictate the movement, stillness, and variation of this tool’s every part.
Every part of you that does not reinforce your verbal message
dampens and deadens that message.
We call these nonlogical, nonverbal distinctions nuances.
Charisma, energy, and magnetism are associated with rich nonverbal
nuance, as is risk-taking. If you want to avoid notice, avoid nuance; if

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you want to be in the spotlight or accumulate authority, cultivate it.
Again, the more emotion you exhibit to others, the more emotional
response you can elicit from others.
Additional tips:
When you want to suggest a black-and-white, no-options
situation, use a chopping gesture. When you want to suggest a range of
options and possibilities, use smoother, flowing gestures—a sweep of an
arm, for example.
To project confidence and openness, keep your chest exposed
and perhaps your legs spread.
To project wariness or vulnerability, swing an arm or wrist
across your body, or cross your legs or ankles. A momentary gesture
should be enough.
Adjust your voice along a variety of parameters: don’t just make
it loud or quiet, but experiment with varying your tone (harsh or soft),
tempo (fast or slow), and timbre (full or thin). The more range you
display, the more impact your voice will have. And remember, the
slower you speak, the more impact each word has (though it is possible
to go overboard on this).
When you smile, begin with the muscles around your eyes.
Use your hands to depict what you are describing.
EXERCISE
a)Spend a day noticing how different people respond to your
usual communication patterns. Pay attention to their
communicative nuances--watch the regularity and intensity of
their gestures. What physical postures and poses do they
assume, and in response to which particular words, gestures, and
shifts in vocal tone on your part? What tones do their voices
take? How quickly or slowly do they talk? How animated are
their faces?
b)Spend a day communicating very crisply. Use no gestures.
Minimize your tonal variation. Leave your facial expression
composed and unchanging. Notice the effects on your listeners
this time around.
c)Spend a day using very elaborate gestures. Raise and lower
the pitch of your voice dramatically. Speak very quickly, and

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then slow down your speech tempo drastically. Adopt a variety
of postures. In some conversations, use nuances that dramatize
and reinforce what you are saying; in others, use nuances which
contradict the force of the point you are making with your
statements. For example, in one conversation, when saying
“You and me,” gesture toward yourself and the other; in
another, when saying the same thing, point vaguely to your left
and then to your right. Or say Yes with a deep and resonant
voice, nodding vigorously, and then compare this with saying
Yes with a pitch that goes up toward the end, while shaking your
head from side to side. Experiment with pushing whatever
nuances you choose to the point of caricature, and also to some
point only a marginal distance beyond the bounds of the
behavior you’re used to.
Again, notice the effects.
d) Think of a time you felt some strong positive emotion--awe
or love would both work here--toward the person with whom
you were talking. If you can’t remember such a time, pretend
you’re someone else experiencing the feeling you’ve chosen.
When talking to someone, secure rapport through
Matching. Then, while saying nothing out of the ordinary,
employ the paralinguistic behaviors, the nuances, appropriate to
the emotional state you’ve chosen. Concentrate on expressing
the emotion with consistency rather than with overbearing force.
As ever, notice the responses.
The more emotion you exhibit, the more emotion you elicit.

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13. Turning it up to Eleven, or Channels and Dials:
How to Turn Up the Impact of Your Words
As we’ve suggested, words are only a fraction of the total
message—rather, the messages—you, as a speaker, convey. The other
channels convey a huge amount of information about what you feel
generally and what you feel about what you’re saying. Moreover, they
offer a great deal of information not only about what kinds of emotions
you feel but how strongly you feel them.
You can therefore use these channels to dramatically increase
your emotional impact.
It can be helpful to think of each of these channels as
individually having a dial with settings ranging from 1 to 10.
Most people, in communication, keep their channels’ dials set
between the 3-5 range.
The people we label charismatic know how and when to go
down to 1 and up to 10. That, in fact, is what much of charisma comes
from.
Following are some dimensions along which your voice can be
modulated.
Tempo
Fast tempo suggests both nervousness and excitement.