How Your Phone Kills Your Charisma

Picture someone who is really charismatic.

A wide variety of images might come to mind, but there’s one thing they all have in common: You’re not picturing someone checking their phone.

Smartphones kill charisma.

There, I said it.

For all its utility, your phone is undermining your ability to be well liked and influential. To understand why smartphones have this effect, we need to unpack what charisma really is.

In her excellent book, The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane teaches that charisma is actually the combination of three distinct skills that all of us are capable of developing: presence, power, and warmth.¹

Presence

This means staying focused on the present moment. In terms of social interaction, it means keeping your attention on the other person and whatever you’re doing together. Make eye contact, listen carefully, and if you’re doing something together, give that activity your full attention.

Presence is essential for charisma because it communicates to the other person that you care about them and value your time with them. They’re important enough to be given your full attention. It’s often said of charismatic people that, when you’re speaking with them, they make you feel like you’re the only person in the room.

Power

This means having the ability to affect change in the world. We naturally gravitate toward people with the power to make things happen; we want to please them and are more easily influenced by them. You can demonstrate power by appearing confident, taking action, or both.

Of course, power can be used for good or ill, so your intentions also matter, which brings us to the third component of charisma.

Warmth

This means making it clear through your appearance and your actions that you’re a kind, well-meaning person. Smiling, making friendly eye contact, and using a gentle tone of voice are all ways to communicate warmth. Doing nice things for other people without any expectation of reciprocation is also effective.

If you send me signals of warmth, it means we’re on the same team; it means you’ve got my best interests in mind. When this positive intent is combined with your full attention and the power to get things done, you’ve got charisma.

So how does your smartphone kill your charisma?

First and foremost, your phone takes you out of presence. The sounds and buzzes of incoming calls, texts, and notifications interrupt your interactions with other people. Each time you take your eyes off of the other person to look at your phone, it sends a signal that says, “I’m not really listening to you.” Each time you pull out your phone in the middle of a shared activity, it undermines the quality of that interaction.

Second, your smartphone undermines your power. Although it is a powerful tool, the way you use this tool takes away from your power. Constantly checking your phone makes you appear nervous. Plus, when you’re looking at your phone, you tend to fall into what’s known as the “iHunch” – a collapsed pose that is basically the opposite of confident body language.²

And allowing a device to take control of your attention actually makes you less powerful. You should not live at the beck and call of notifications. Furthermore, research has shown that having a smartphone nearby actually makes you less intelligent.³

Lastly, your smartphone makes you appear less warm toward others. Anytime you’re looking at your phone, you’re not making warm eye contact or smiling at the other person. And anytime you interrupt the interaction to check your phone, you’re effectively saying, “Whatever’s going on with my phone is more important than you.” This makes people feel like you don’t care about them.

What can you do to prevent your phone from killing your charisma?

Well, you can’t just throw your phone away, but you can reclaim some of your freedom from it, and you’ll increase your charisma as a result.

As much as possible, do the following unconventional things to keep your phone from undermining your charisma:

• Keep your phone out of sight. Just having a smartphone visible, even if it’s off, undermines the interaction.⁴
• Keep your phone in do-not-disturb mode or airplane mode, so it doesn’t grab your attention with notifications and buzzing. Even if you don’t check it when it vibrates in your pocket, it still steals some of your attention.
• Keep your phone out of reach. Think about how often your hand gravitates toward the phone in your pocket or purse. Each time that happens, you’re slipping out of presence.
• Turn off most notifications. Do you really need to be alerted each time you receive an email?
• If you do need to keep your phone on during a conversation with someone (because you’re waiting for an urgent call or message), let the other person know why. And when that call or message comes, explain what you’re doing, so they know that you’re not just impulsively checking social media.
• When you forget to do these things, and your phone interrupts a conversation, apologize, put it in airplane mode, and refocus. This reassures the other person that they are, in fact, your top priority at the moment.

We can’t ditch our smartphones, but we also don’t have to let them kill our charisma. We just have to be more strategic and mindful about how we use them.

¹ Cabane, Olivia Fox. The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism. Penguin, 2012.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHunch

³ Kristen Duke, Adrian Ward, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten Bos. “Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking.” Harvard Business Review. March 20, 2018.

⁴ Ryan J. Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. “Smartphone use undermines enjoyment of face-to-face social interactions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 78, 2018, Pages 233-239, ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.10.007.