Olivia Fox Cabane talks about charisma and why imposter syndrome hits women and minorities harder. She explains how coaches help you break out of old identity cages, and shares practical moves: body language, mindset shifts, and rituals that actually work.
Hi, I'm Olivia Fox. I wrote the book called the Charisma Myth, the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism. And what I do in my day job is I coach CEOs, entrepreneurs, late stage founders, to be the leader that their company needs them to be.
Thank you for being here.
You're welcome. It's a pleasure.
I'm so excited. I myself had these social contracts. I'll just give you a very trivial example which was I believed years ago that if someone emails me I have to reply to every single person. And in fact it was a point of pride. It was part of my self concept. I even wrote about it, I replied to every single person and that's just not sustainable. It's also ridiculous. Why should you be able to own part of my time just because you sent me an email?
Perfect.
I'm independent, I run my life and you don't get to own a piece of it just because you wrote something and click send. I so I changed that. I thought before I made that decision that the world would collapse, that people would be outraged, that they would demand I write back. It turns out most people don't even expect a response when they email me now because they know I get so many emails now. I do tell them I made a compromise with myself. I said I'm going to continue reading every email but I just can't feasibly respond to everyone. What are some examples in your client work where people have these ideas, these self concepts that they hold that they're incredibly big.
This is perfect. I had this conversation last night. One of my clients is in a really tough negotiation and just so I can give a better lay of the land in terms of my client base, I'll have late stage founders but I have the heirs of Saudi Arabian fortunes where they came to me for charisma work originally and of course within two months we're in an inter family war over because the billions of dollars at stake. So one of my clients and I were talking last night for two hours and the parallel I gave him is this. There was this tiger called Mohini and I think it was at the Bronx Zoo who was in a small cage and pacing back and forth, back and forth until the grass had totally worn down and eventually some donor got the tiger a bigger cage and so the tiger was put in a bigger cage but it had gotten so used to that perimeter that it paced back and forth until the end of its life. Don't be that tiger. So being held back by old self images is something that we all do. And the role precisely of a good friend advisor, coach, therapist, you name it, is to get you to see that that old skin, that old shell is something that you need to break out of and shed that skin.
It worked at a certain point in your life.
Yeah.
But now that the situation has changed and you've grown, it may not work now.
Yeah.
We can see this in so many areas. We can see it in keeping the same friends who may not be adding value.
So glad you're bringing that up.
It's a classic one, right? Yes. Friends who kind of drag you down.
Yeah.
And I.
And people have a point of pride of saying, I have the same friends since kindergarten. Right? Yeah.
But we all have these really pedestrian examples in our lives that we use. And I think when it comes to charisma, a lot of it might be something like, I don't wanna do that. Cause I would be fake.
Exactly.
And it's.
That's one of the strongest rationalization.
Yeah. I don't wanna be one of those guys. And ultimately you don't have to do charisma. Doesn't mean you're slicking your hair back and you're walking in using Ramit's style or Olivia's style or anyone's style. It's your own style which accents you. It highlights the best of you. But I just wanted to really take a second and emphasize that because that, that phrase, well, I'm just a skinny Indian guy and I see it in my emails too. People say things like, oh, I haven't bought one of your courses yet. I'm cheap, so da da, da, da. And I always respond. I say, look, I'm happy. If you haven't bought my stuff, that's fine. But never call yourself cheap again. It will hold you back from growing and investing in yourself. We should all take a moment to think about what crippling statements we use that hold us in our own cages.
Anything you say after I am be very conscious of that.
Nice.
Because that's your identity.
Nice. I am X. As if it's unchangeable.
Exactly. So growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Right. And your students, by dint of being in the brain trust, have shown that they have a growth mindset. So congrats, guys. Now, one thing that I do want to mention about the imposter syndrome is that it tends to hit women and minorities more than average.
Why?
Because all of society around them is giving them an image of what one should be that they are not. So where these two uglies show up the imposter syndrome, the inner critic, or fomo. Right. Fear of missing out are of course in presence, but also even more in power.
Yeah.
And so that will show up in your face, in your voice, and especially in your posture. So let's talk about power. So power is something that we kind of make an educated guess, and we assume that if someone looks confident, we kind of assume that he probably has something to be confident about. So really, all you need to do is to emanate power in your body language. So, of course, how do you do that? Well, you've got two ways of going about it, because your mind and your body are a closed system that affect each other. You can start at either end. You can start with the mental work, the visualizations. Right. Knowing the tools, how to handle the inner critic, dismantling the imposter syndrome, all that. You can also start at the body level.
I believe, in that way.
First. First it's. Well, it's the easier way.
It's easy. You do that and then the mind follows once you see the reaction.
And then since the mind follows itself, a certain cocktail of chemicals in your body. And then it's a nice cycle. Right. And we can talk, if we have the time, about rituals and routines and how peak performance athletes get there. Because sports psychology, that's a huge part of what I use with clients, because it. In sports, no one but athletes have that high a focus on real results.
Yeah, Right.
You either win or you don't.
