Compelling People by Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger
This book is a unique and powerful look at real science and research to determine the various factors that influence others. The book is broken into two parts. First is “The Hand You Were Dealt” and this section deals with some of the research based facts that surround being a certain gender, ethnicity, have certain facial features, etc.
The second part of the book deals with “Playing Your Hand” and talks about how you can work to become more influential.
I was fortunate to attend a live Q&A webinar with the authors as part of the 12 Books Group. I took a lot of key lessons from this material.
First is that you can't fake it. You can pretend to like people or be interested in what they say. Your motives, feelings, and sentiments have to be genuine as a prerequisite to anything else the book suggests.
Second is that even if you are authentic and genuine your own bad habits or subconscious behavior can undermine you. This book gives the tips and research based ideas that can help us overcome some of those problems.
The book addresses the balance between Strength and Warmth as the keys to compelling people and the need to recognize and balance the two. Through this paradigm any discussion about influence, public speaking, sales, etc can be filtered and addressed.