Clearly, having the right body language is crucial to charisma. But your body sends out thousand of signals every minute; constantly broadcasting your thoughts and feelings for all to read.

Yes, you can control a fraction of that consciously—but only a fraction. Trying to control the whole thing would be absolutely exhausting. This is why great actors often admit to being completely exhausted after performances, as they’re striving to control as much of this flow as possible. And even with years of training, it’s impossible to control the flow completely.

Thankfully, there is a technique ensuring that these thousands of signals fall in line automatically. Instead of trying to control the entire output, you control just one thing—the source. As we’ve seen, the vast majority of your body language is not something you control consciously. Like so many other aspects of your bodily functioning—heartbeat, blinks, etc—it’s controlled by your subconscious mind.

There’s an interesting quirk about the subconscious: it does not distinguish between imagination and reality. Have you ever felt your heart pounding and your blood curdling during a horror movie? Consciously, you know it’s just a movie. Yet your brain sees blood and guts on the screen, so it sends you straight into fight-or-flight mode, adrenaline rushing through your system.

So if you can get your subconscious mind to imagine the emotions you want to broadcast, it’ll assume “it’s for real” and your entire body language will fall into step. This is what people mean when they say that the best liars are those who actually believe what they’re saying, at least for that moment. Actors call this “getting into the character” or “Method Acting”–Sean Penn is a fan. In sports, it’s called visualization, and 86% of American Olympic athletes use this tool. It’s a real Jedi-Mind-Trick. In fact, you could have any expression you like just by using the right visualization!

There are certain universally effective means of influencing people deeply rooted in the human psyche. One of the main triggers is the use of authority in its various forms. For instance, positional authority comes from simply being in a position of power; whereas experiential authority comes from having “been there, done that” and expert authority from academic sources for instance.

The recent crisis damaged our perception of authority to such an extent that trying to use it as an influence tool can actually backfire. For example, some positions which would’ve automatically conferred upon the person holding them a certain amount of prestige no longer do so—such as being Managing Director of an investment bank.

What impact will this have? How will this affect our allegiance and affiliation tendencies; thus marketing and advertising?  People who realize this will shift the emphasis in their pitches; marketing materials, etc away from authority and towards the other five key influence tools.  This would indeed mean a major shift in many company’s marketing and selling strategies, and probably an overhaul of their marketing materials. But the alternative—keeping their head in the sand and trying to market & sell with the same strategies as before the crisis—will lead to certain failure.

One good basic primer on the various influence triggers, though not specific to the business context, is Robert Cialdini’s bible on the subject.