The Top 7 Charisma-Killing Mistakes For Men

Charisma is day-changing and impossible to ignore.

Everybody wants it, but nobody knows how to get it.

Most guys live their lives like a brick in the face, killing their attractiveness, charm, and influence without even realizing that they’re doing everything in their power to self-sabotage their own happiness.

More often than not, charisma is about what not to do.

Here are the top 7 charisma-killing mistakes for men:

1. Playing it cool

Guys, you don’t need to be cool for women to like you. You do need to be human, though. That’s what women are into. Well, most of them.

A lot of men are trying to play this cool like a cucumber character, not showing any emotion or interest in anything around them, unbothered by the existence and actions of what seem like mere unimportant mortals.

First of all, that attitude doesn’t show you’re tough and unbothered. Quite the contrary. It shows that you’re trying to keep away from your own feelings because you can’t handle them, which makes you look weak. And if you’re one of the guys who are trying to look tough, I know that’s one of the last things you want to do.

It’s one thing to be in control of your emotions and another to pretend you don’t have them. It doesn’t look cool, it looks insecure.

Charisma is about connection and you can only connect through emotions.

2. Being too stiff

The same rigid attitude towards your feelings will transfer to your body language and will make you look like an ironing board with legs, stuck inside a telephone booth.

You know those gym guys who have limited their body movements by developing their arm muscles too much? And now they have to turn their whole body just to look at 10 o’clock? Yeah, that’s not sexy. Unless you find a girl who’s into moving closets.

You need to move your body more. Charismatic people are almost fluid. They’re not afraid to inhabit the space they are in with their body movements, with gestures and moving from one foot to the other from time to time.

Now you don’t need to be Michael Flatley in Lord of the Dance to be charismatic, but let’s not forget how impressed women are with dancers. And you know what they say, good dancers are good … well, I’ll let you fill in the rest of that sentence yourself.

3. Playing the nice guy

There are two types of good men in this world. And the nice guy is neither of them.

What is the nice guy? He is a man who appears to be kind, compassionate, and caring. The key words: appears to be. But he is actually a man who doesn’t think he’s good enough by being himself, so he tries all sorts of tactics to endear himself to women.

How can you tell who’s an actual good guy and who is just pretending?

The good guy is kind and compassionate to everybody, not just the women he has an interest in. Also, his nice attitude doesn’t stop the moment the object of his desires rejects him.

The nice guy attitude won't get anybody anywhere because the nice guy is stuck in his own head, failing to notice what the woman truly wants right then and there. He puts on the show whether she wants it or not.

Charisma is the result of being truly present, engaged, and engaging — Not pretending to care about her when you truly only care about yourself.

4. Telling women what to do

This should be a no-brainer, but people don’t like to be told what to do.

Sure, there are those guys who don’t consider women to be people, but commodities — but they weed themselves out through that very attitude.

For the rest of the men, telling women what to do, what’s right and wrong for a woman to be, feel, and act is a huge turn-off and can make even the most interesting guy suddenly feel like an obnoxious potato with a big mouth.

Men who want to endear themselves to a woman need to offer opinions on her choices and lifestyles only when directly asked. Even then, proceed with care. People usually only want you to validate their own choices.

Charisma is not about your opinions, but about understanding and appreciating the other’s opinion.

5. Making everything about you

I have a guy friend who has had a huge crush on me for years. He’s handsome — I mean very handsome, male model level. He’s a software engineer with a 15-year career behind him, so needless to say this shows that he’s stable, dependable, and he makes a lot of money — first world top earner level money.

He is also open-minded, smart, and generous and I kick myself every time I remember I’m not attracted to him. And then we meet and I also remember why.

It’s all about him. He is incapable of talking about anything else but his own interests. Also incapable of listening to mine.

I had to flat-out tell him several times that unless he listens to what I have to say I’ll be walking out on him in the middle of the street. He understood, stopped, and patiently waited for me to finish my story without listening to a word I was saying, and then cheerfully went on with his story as if no air had even come out of my mouth.

So … no, thanks.

Charisma is about the other, not about you. You can be perfect from any other point of view but if you can’t be there for somebody else, it’s useless.

6. Trying too hard to impress

Guys bend over backward trying to impress girls. Unfortunately, girls are not into acrobatics.

And, for the most part, guys are doing it wrong. They’re trying to impress women with what they have in the garage, the bank, or in their pants. And while that will grab a woman’s attention for a day or two, that’s all it can do.

We all know some rich boring dude with a yacht the size of Manhattan who has to pay escorts to date him, while some poor wide-eyed art student who can’t even afford to go out on a coffee date has women lining up around the corner to bring him warm soup.

7. Not knowing how to listen

You constantly interrupt. You offer unsolicited advice. You wait for them to start talking to immediately swoop in with your opinion. You tell them how wrong they are every chance you get. You talk over them and belittle their opinion.

Do you know who hates being interrupted? Everybody on the planet. Do you know who appreciates unsolicited advice? Nobody on the planet. You see where I’m going with this, right?

But you might be wondering — so what can I say, how can I interact if everything I say is wrong?

First of all, there’s no need to be so dramatic. If everything you say can be fitted into the sentences above, then yes, everything you say is wrong, but it doesn’t mean you need to stop talking altogether.

All you need is a change of perspective. From competition to collaboration, from what you have to say to what they have to say, from scratching people’s eyes out to holding their hand.

Charisma is about making the other feel understood and appreciated.

Charisma is not about you. It’s about them.

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Mona Lazar is a writer, unconventional relationship coach, and wild dreamer with words published in Better Humans, Medium, Illumination, The Soulciety, Newsbreak, The Startup, Hello, Love, The Good Men Project, Curious, and others.

This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.