How to Increase Your Virtual Charisma

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Host Sheila Boysen-Rotelli is talking about increasing your career visibility, that being, the number of people in your company and field that know you the skills that align with your career goals!


Episode Highlights: 

  • Zoom fatigue has taken over the world with everyone moving to online work all day

  • Learning how to command a Zoom room is completely different than doing the same thing in-person

  • Physical charisma is very difficult to directly translate over a computer screen

  • Many people surround themselves with visual stimuli, stand confidently, and dress professionally to display charisma

  • Stage presence can be transferred over the screen in a variety of different ways

  • Your face needs to take up roughly ⅓ of your screen, especially if there are multiple people on the screen

  • Expensive lighting isn’t needed, but making sure you are in the best light possible will work to your advantage

  • Nodding and smiling come more naturally in-person, but also need to be emulated virtually

  • If you tend to be more expressive with your hands, move the laptop back a little bit to capture that

  • Try to avoid an unengaged face by consistently keeping a light smile throughout

  • Investing in a decent microphone or headphones with great microphones is a great way to make sure your voice displays charisma

  • Emphasize points and make the conversation more engaging by varying your pitch and speech patterns

  • Making eye contact via video is difficult, especially if you have a large screen and multiple documents to look at

  • Make an effort to look at the camera more often rather than have your eyes moving all over the screen

  • Acknowledge what others said by paraphrasing and saying it back to them

  • Making others feel seen and heard through paraphrasing makes them more likely to listen to what you have to say

  • Meetings can lose impact by asking too many questions and focusing on too many things

  • Use the power of 3 to tighten up communication in virtual meetings

  • Make 3 points at a time, only ask 3 questions, etc.

  • Personally address individual people by spotlighting their video; this will make them feel more important

  • Email, text, and social media are great tools to enhance our virtual substance

  • Being intentional with words, questions, and tones in your virtual meetings is vital to your perceived charisma

3 Key Points:

  1. It takes a completely different set of skills and attributes to display e-charisma, that being charisma over the computer, then it takes to display in-person charisma.

  2. Nodding, smiling, great lighting, and appropriate distance from the camera are a variety of ways to display charisma over the screen.

  3. Eye contact goes a long way in person, but even more over a screen, given how many screens and documents there are to look at during a virtual meeting.


Tweetable Quote

“How can we translate this idea of commanding and captivating a room virtually?” - Sheila Boysen-Rotelli

“When we are in-person, we are so used to receiving and giving those visual clues...that’s very difficult to do in video.” - Sheila Boysen-Rotelli

“A smile can do wonders in communicating things like charisma.” - Sheila Boysen-Rotelli


Resources Mentioned:

Sheila Boysen-RotelliComment