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.

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top, I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long time. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve heard the stirring speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the night before he died. Comparing himself to Moses in the Bible, King felt he would be denied entrance to the world of racial harmony and social justice that he had devoted his life to creating. But though he wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land, he didn’t express any bitterness about that fact – and I don’t believe he felt any.

I believe Martin Luther King, Jr. really did feel unworthy to take part in the completion of his dream. For many years, he had taken upon himself an almost impossible role. He was the leader of one of history’s great transformations – following in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi in India and laying the foundation for Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Yet he was not a perfect human being. He was not morally impeccable. He knew he was not at the top of the spiritual ladder. Yet he accepted the challenge of striving to be what people needed, though he knew that wasn’t always who he was.

During the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a target for enemies both inside and outside the US government. He was threatened by racist enemies ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to radical African American organizations – and he was the subject of an unrelenting surveillance effort by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. He was accused of Communist sympathies, financial improprieties and personal misconduct. At the same time, he subjected himself to even more intense scrutiny. Was he really worthy of leading a massive movement for social change? Was he the perfect symbol that such a movement demanded? Was he someone who could survive under the microscope he was put under by the world and by himself as well?

The answers that King gave to those questions may not always have been in the affirmative, though he never shirked the leadership role he had taken upon himself. But there was a degree of inner tension – a pulling in two directions of the spiritual ladder – that led him to believe he would suffer a martyr’s death – and perhaps to accept that destiny as well. As he said, “Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. As a child he loved both reading and public speaking and he enjoyed watching his minister father deliver weekly sermons. When he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of 16, King was considering a career in medicine, law, or teaching and he majored in sociology. But in his junior year, he decided he would enter the ministry like his father. On the subject of education, he once wrote, “Its function is teaching us to think intensively and critically. But education that stops at that point may prove a great menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but deprived of morality.”

After graduating from Morehouse College in 1948, King entered a theological seminary. While there, he attended a lecture on the Indian pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi. That lecture set the direction of King’s life. “The message was so profound and electrifying,” he said, “that I immediately left the meeting and bought a half dozen books on Gandhi.”

King graduated from the seminary and entered Boston University as a doctoral student. He received his degree in 1955, and then became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama. There he joined the supporters of Rosa Parks, a black woman who had been arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.

On January 14, 1957, King’s home and his church in Montgomery were bombed during a campaign of violence against black activists. After this bombing, King began to sense that he might someday have to die for the cause he had chosen. Like anyone else, there were times when he found this very difficult to accept – but he also worried about what he regarded as inadequacy for the destiny that God had given him.

Though he himself was a nonviolent person, King was surrounded by violence and by allies who preached violence on his part. In Harlem, he was stabbed while autographing copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom. He was frequently jailed, but he regarded this as a way of expressing his willingness to suffer and sacrifice for the common good. “Nonviolence may mean going to jail,” he said. “If such is the case, the resister must be willing to fill the jail houses of the South. It may even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price a man must pay to free his children and his white brethren from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more important.”

King’s life was filled with confrontations. He was always ready to rush to a city or a scene where he could help demonstrate the power of nonviolence. He was the most watched civil rights leader of the time and the one from whom the most was expected. Again and again, he used stirring oratory to insist on nonviolence, “If you don’t go,” he said of one proposed march, “don’t hinder me! We will march nonviolently. We shall force this nation, this city, this world, to face its own conscience. We will make the God of love in the white man triumph over the Satan of segregation that is in him. The struggle is not between black and white, but between good and evil.”

Gradually his language began to grow more visionary. At the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, he spoke the words for which he is best remembered, “….I have a dream that my four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character…. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient ever. In the next few years, he led marches and protests all across the country, from Selma, Alabama to Chicago, Illinois. His efforts were not always successful and at times even his closest friends began to feel that King was becoming so visionary as to be ineffective. His wife, Coretta Scott King, once said, “My husband was what psychologists call a guilt-ridden man. He was so conscious of his awesome responsibilities that he literally set himself the task of never making an error in the affairs of the Movement.” In the spring of 1968, King was in Memphis to support a strike by garbage workers. He had once said, “If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony outside his motel room.

But while King was assassinated, his movement lives on; its resonance hasn’t lost its meaning. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s genius transcends his lifetime to continue to affect his movement decades later.