Awareness refers to a continuously heightened sensitivity to what is going on in both your internal and your external environment. It has two separate but closely related ways of expressing itself. You must be aware of what is outside you — aware of the subtle behaviors of the people around you. In addition, you must be aware of your own reactions and inclinations.

It can be as simple as noticing when someone is getting bored, or tired, or stressed. It is recognizing the right and wrong moments for introducing new ideas. It knows when to speak and not to speak, when to act and not to act. Attentiveness is also the ability to tune into a problem and come up with its essential components. “What’s really going wrong here?” That insight provides the basis for envisioning something that will truly work better.

Attentiveness means you are open to more information coming in through your eyes, your ears, and your sense of touch — as well as your kinesthetic sense. It is better known as intuition, or gut feelings. It is how your muscles and the organs of your body react. Empathy is putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. Intuition gives you access to a person’s feelings when they are mirrored in your own body. For some reason this is especially useful with negative emotions such as fear, sadness, or doubt.

Effective communicators and leaders are good people-watchers. They look for the little signals that reveal what others are thinking or feeling. An especially important key to people watching is eye contact. It may not be a startling revelation, but people’s willingness to make eye contact says a lot about how comfortable they are with themselves and with you.

As you become an educated observer of what is going on around you, you will be able to evaluate your gut reactions from a more informed perspective. You will be able to know the world around you because you know yourself extremely well.

How do you know whether your intuition is right or wrong? Well, if you are often mistaken in your intuitive judgments, it is probably because you are being overly safe and overly protective. It is largely a matter of practice, because fears, wishes, negative thoughts, and ego needs can masquerade as intuition. When your ego is involved, it cancels out the gut. Your intuition will often point out possible problems, but your ego just adds to your problems.

A good way to develop you intuition is to start keeping track of your hunches. Write them down and then see what happens. By monitoring which come true and which do not, you will not only see what your record of accomplishment is, you will learn to recognize how true intuition feels. With practice, you will begin to see how genuinely intuitive feelings carry the most power and conviction. You will learn to recognize your fears and wishes, so you will not confuse them with your actually sixth sense.

There’s a story about a very educated English gentleman visiting a great Buddhist master. The holy man poured a cup of tea for the Englishman and kept pouring and pouring until there was tea all over the floor.

Finally, the Englishman could not sit silently any longer and asked: “Why are you overfilling the cup?” The Buddhist master replied: “This cup is like your head. It is so full of your own thoughts that nothing else will go into it. You must empty yourself first in order to learn anything new from me.”

Attentiveness is a lot like that. In order to be attentive, we need to empty ourselves of other thoughts and set ways of seeing things. When we use our senses to take in all we can about other people, we can much more accurately adjust our behavior to the needs of others. When we are attentive to situations, we have the power to make positive changes for others and ourselves.

One of the interesting things about great leaders is the degree to which they’re tolerant of people who are very different from themselves. Under the most difficult circumstances in the Second World War, Dwight Eisenhower managed to create a coalition including the egomaniacal Viscount Montgomery, the self-effacing Omar Bradley, and the gifted but totally bizarre George F. Patton – and the result was success in the Normandy Invasion.

In fact, Eisenhower’s ability to deal with different kinds of people may have been his greatest asset as a leader. After the war, he made the somewhat unlikely switch from leading a huge army to being the president of Columbia University. The transition wasn’t without a few bumps in the road. At that time, there was a Professor at Columbia named Isidore Rabi, who had worked on the development of the atomic bomb and who subsequently won the Nobel Prize. At a faculty ceremony in honor of the professor’s achievement, Eisenhower made a brief speech. It included a remark about how it was always good to see an employee of the university get recognized. At that point, Professor Rabi interrupted him and said, “Excuse me, sir, but the faculty are not employees of the university. The faculty are the university!” This was a witty and somewhat confrontational remark – and Eisenhower might have taken offense. But he loved it! Rabi became his closest friend on the faculty – and when he became President of a somewhat larger organization than Columbia, he appointed Rabi to a number of influential positions.

As you learn to access leadership genius, you’re bound to find yourself in some difficult conversations. Here’s a technique that cannot only express tolerance, but can also clarify people’s thinking in a very productive way. In my listening programs, I call it the Monk’s Feedback Exercise and it works like this: Person A states a position. Person B restates A’s position, and then states his or her own position. Person A has to restate B’s position before replying to it, and so on. I guarantee this exercise lowers the intensity of emotional conversations and helps each side see the other’s points of view. Use it and I also guarantee it will enhance your credibility as a leadership genius.

I’ll see it when I believe it!
It has been estimated that we each have upwards of 50,000 thoughts per day. How many of yours are negative? Sometimes you have to do a mental spring-cleaning to get rid of those negative thoughts that have become ingrained attitudes. Stopping self-destructive thoughts is like stopping any other bad habit – it takes time and effort.

Among the most effective ways to do this are visualization and affirmations. Affirmations are positive statements about yourself that you repeat over and over in your head until they are programmed into your subconscious.

Visualization is mentally picturing yourself the way you want to be. You’ve heard the old saying “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Well, the reverse is also true: “I’ll see it when I believe it!” Affirmations and visualizations may not feel true at first. They may not even be true! However, they can become so.

Consider what happens when you tell yourself repeatedly, “I’m lousy at remembering names.” There will never be any improvement there. Therefore, if you catch yourself saying it, stop and immediately say to yourself, “I’m good at remembering names.”

Consider the effect of telling yourself, “I’m feeling pretty good today.” Or “I can lose ten pounds.” Or “I am good at getting people to see things my way.” Anything you say to yourself repeatedly will actually influence your reality.

Writing down your affirmations and putting them in some handy place – above your desk, on your bathroom mirror, on the dashboard of your car – will help keep them in mind as well as in sight. Use affirmations and visualizations to project what success will feel like and look like. Imagine, in as much detail as you possibly can, how you feel as the boss singles you out for exceeding your quota, or how the audience hangs on your every word during your speech, or how your confident presence causes heads to turn everywhere you go.

To enhance your charisma and persuasion (while making others feel good about themselves), you can apply the very same techniques by turning them outward. Begin thinking positive affirmations about people you work and live with.

For example, “Bob seems much calmer and patient of late. I wonder what has changed in him.” During your next interaction with Bob, you will most likely remember your positive thought about him and start your conversation with, “Bob, I’ve noticed a change in you. You seem really kind and patient while counseling your new employees recently and I admire that. How did you acquire this wonderful characteristic?”

Bob would likely respond with a smile and a story about a book he found, a consultant he hired, or a seminar he attended. Regardless of his reply, you have sincerely complimented another person, put out a positive thought, and begun a new habit of approaching others using “appreciative inquiry”… finding the good in another person or situation first, instead of finding fault or flaws.

Criticizing is easy and sometimes becomes habit, but re-training your mind to find the positive attributes in yourself and others will win you friends, increase your income, and make you feel better about being a better you.

Adapt your connections with people!

When you are speaking with someone, how well do you speak the other person’s language? How well you get on that person’s wavelength? There are some people, as professional as they are, as knowledgeable as they are, as helpful as they are, that simply just rub you the wrong way. They are just not your kind of people.

It is important that you learn to vary your presentation, to vary your pace, to vary your language based on the type of people you are speaking to. I mean, if you’re calling on somebody who’s a bottom-line, time-disciplined, fact-oriented, busy, results-oriented individual, are you going to go in, spend ten or fifteen minutes “chit-chatting” or socializing trying to get to know that person? Obviously not!

If you’re calling on somebody who is a very friendly, outgoing person who likes to talk about sports and family and just various things about business and wants to get to know somebody first and you walk in and bottom-line everything with little or no social talk, do you think that might irritate that person? Definitely! Therefore, you have to size people up and get on their wavelength to create chemistry so that person will say, “Hey, you’re the type of person I want to do deal with on a long-term basis.”

This whole approach is called adaptability – your ability to change your approach, to change your strategy, depending on the situation or the person you are dealing with. That’s how you really connect with people quicker, deeper, and longer.