Excerpt from "The Power of Charm"
By: Brian Tracy

Fully 85 percent of your success in business and personal life will be determined by your ability to communicate effectively with others. "Social intelligence," or the ability to interact, converse, negotiate with, and persuade others, is the most highly paid and respected form of intelligence you can have, and this intelligence can be developed.

You can learn to be a warm, friendly, likable, and charming individual just by practicing some of the communication methods and techniques used by the most influential and effective people in our world today.

The "secrets" of great communicators are not secrets at all. They are simply proven methods of interacting with others in a way that makes them open to you and receptive to your message. As a result, they are more willing to be influenced by you, to buy from you, to enter into business and personal relationships with you, and to think of you in positive terms.

Your Ideal Self and Life
By: Brian Tracy

Your self-concept is made up of three parts, each of which affects each of the others.
Understanding these three parts enables you to put your hands on the keyboard of your own mental computer. When you learn to take charge of the development of a new and positive self-concept of selling, you can then control your sales destiny for the rest of your career.

Determine Your Direction
The first part of the self-concept is the "self-ideal." Your self-ideal largely determines the direction in which you are going with your life. It guides the growth and evolution of your character and personality. Your self-ideal is a combination of all of the qualities and attributes of other people that you most admire. Your self-ideal is a description of the person you would very much like to be if you could embody the qualities that you most aspire to.

Strive Toward Excellence
Throughout your life, you have seen and read about the qualities of courage, confidence, compassion, love, fortitude, perseverance, patience, forgiveness and integrity. Over time, these qualities have instilled in you an ideal to which you aspire. You might not always live up to the very best that you know, but you are constantly striving to be a better person in light of those qualities that you value so highly. In fact, everything that you do on a day-to-day basis is affected by your comparing your activities with these ideal qualities and your striving to behave consistently with them.

Three Skills to Improve Conversation
By: Brian Tracy

One key to becoming a great conversationalist is to pause before replying. A short pause, of three to five seconds, is a very classy thing to do in a conversation. When you pause, you accomplish three goals simultaneously.

The Benefits of Pausing
First, you avoid running the risk of interrupting if the other person is just catching his or her breath before continuing. Second, you show the other person that you are giving careful consideration to his or her words by not jumping in with your own comments at the earliest opportunity. The third benefit of pausing is that you will actually hear the other person better. His or her words will soak into a deeper level of your mind and you will understand what he or she is saying with greater clarity. By pausing, you mark yourself as a brilliant conversationalist.

Ask Questions
Another way to become a great conversationalist is to question for clarification. Never assume that you understand what the person is saying or trying to say. Instead, ask, "How do you mean, exactly?"

This is the most powerful question I've ever learned for controlling a conversation. It is almost impossible not to answer. When you ask, "How do you mean?" the other person cannot stop himself or herself from answering more extensively. You can then follow up with other open-ended questions and keep the conversation rolling along.