Maximise Your Leadership Magnetism.

The scientific rules of magnetism don’t apply in a leadership context. Physics states that opposites attract, but in relationships optimism attracts optimism.

Some people have this aura about them. They exude confidence, rise above the petty squabbles of the day, and breeze through life taking everyone around them along in their slipstream. Being with them is easy, enjoyable and actually quite addictive. The moment they leave the meeting room, you somehow sense a void in the dynamic, a void that others try to fill, but it isn’t quite the same. I bet that you know a few people like this. You admire them, you wonder how they manage it, and you secretly wish that you could be a little bit more like them. Do you really leave that “void” when you depart the meeting room? No offence intended, but for the most of us, I suspect not. Nope, leadership superstardom is unobtainable for most of us mere mortals, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot strive to be that little bit more “magnetic” in everything that we do. The more people we touch in our lives, the bigger impact we are having. Every optimistic word that reaches someone else’s ears will set off a chain reaction – it will make their world that little bit lighter and they may go on to do the same for someone else.

Optimism is addictive. It sets off the feel-good endorphins in your brain, and that is something that is ever more seldom felt in our busy and stressful lives. Just being around a magnetically optimistic leader makes us all feel a few centimetres taller for a little while. It sometimes seems to me that it doesn’t even matter if their optimism is grounded in reality. Just hearing the words “we can” or “let’s do it” or “it will be fine” often enough is sufficient to set down a mental recording in your brain. How often is your language peppered with these sorts of phrases? Do you prefer the more “realistic” alternatives of “maybe”, “probably not” or “who knows”?

You own outer magnetism is dependent on how you present yourself to others. That is always a choice. You choose your attitude, your body language, and your words. You can say the same thing in very different ways: “come on, let’s push through this” or “keep going, it will be over soon” – the former gives you a sense of acceleration, the latter a sense of painful deceleration. If you are positive in your body language, people will automatically feel like “mirroring” you and thus feeling better about themselves in the process. If your default setting to “jump!” is “how far?”, you will engender a positive attitude in all around you.

Of course, everyone is magnetic to some degree. Whether your magnetism is governed by principles of attraction or repulsion is entirely up to you.