Nick Morgan > Quotes

“The precise form of your fear will be different from everyone else’s, but everyone has those fears, attitudes, and beliefs getting in the way of their leadership potential.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“If you believe that you’re a leader, you’ll get a chance to lead. Not because of magic, but because you’ll send out unconscious signals that will tell the rest of the world what to think about you.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Take charge of your inner leadership life. Tell yourself the story that you want to live. As you develop a new self-story, you’ll find that people begin to react to you differently.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Pick a strong memory, a time when you won an award, let’s say, came in first across the finish line, or perhaps simply were praised before all the other kids in class. Pick any memory that strongly evokes the right emotion in you.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“The unconscious brain apparently never forgets. Everything it has experienced is set somewhere in the 100 billion or so cells that make up our vast internal universe. But the way the mind works is that things that are repeated are strengthened, making stronger and more numerous synapses, so that the memory becomes more and more important to our overall patterns of thinking. We attach emotions to events to create memories. The more intense and more frequent an event is—as it strikes us—the more it looms large in our mental attic.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“With the right gestures and vocal tones, virtually anyone can take over a group and lead it, creating an instant tribe with herself at its head.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“We humans literally want to align our brain patterns through interpersonal communications, and we feel safest and happiest when we’re doing so. You can master group dynamics with your voice, your hands, and your posture.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“If you do have to have an important conversation over the phone, a good tip is to smile, even though the person you’re speaking to can’t see you. We hear emotions in the voice, because facial expressions and emotions both change the shape, length, and therefore sound of the vocal cords. If you smile on the phone, your colleagues will hear the warmth coming through in your voice.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Your unconscious mind dominates your behavior, but you can inject a new idea into the unconscious mind either way. The results are well worth it. If you want to become a top dog, you have to first act like one.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“They understood that any presentation has to begin by answering a key question for that specific audience: Why does this matter? Why is what the speaker is going to say important? When you collect people in an amphitheater, the grandeur of the setting demands an immediate answer to that question of why.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“How then do you increase your own charisma? First, increase your authenticity. That means being absolutely aligned in what you say and how you say it—content and body language. You can’t be authentic if those two modes of expression are not aligned.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“THE ONLY REASON TO GIVE A SPEECH IS to change the world. An old friend of mine, a speechwriter, used to say that to me. He meant it as a challenge. It was his way of saying that, if you’re going to take all the trouble to prepare and deliver a speech, make it worthwhile. Change the world.”
― Nick Morgan, Give Your Speech, Change the World: How To Move Your Audience to Action

“The first power cue is all about self-awareness. How do you show up when you walk into a room?”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“You need to gesture. If you don’t, you’re making your brain work much harder.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Powerful people talk differently than weaker people, interrupting more, taking more conversational time, and using longer pauses. They get to control the tempo of the exchange with other people, deciding whether to make more or less eye contact, employ more or less touch, and take more or less time.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“The fifth power cue teaches you how to combine your voice and a host of other social signals to greatly increase your success rate in pitches, meetings, sales situations, and the like. What honest signals do you send out in key work and social situations?”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“In our 24/7, warts and all, YouTubed world, leaders have to be willing to show up with an authenticity that goes well beyond anything demanded of leaders in the past. This book will help you on that road.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Instead of focusing on the group, the emotion, and the need for leadership, speakers think about PowerPoint and content. What a huge amount of wasted effort!”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Great leaders are great storytellers. These leaders know that they must tell powerful stories to engage and enlist their followers. They know that storytelling is the only effective way to create the kind of transmittal of ideas and values that allows a leader’s message to be heard and carried out over time and with many people. They know that the best storytelling taps into deep patterns in the human brain so that the stories fulfill the needs and expectations of the listeners and also create the right sets of messages for the leader’s agenda.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Why should leaders tell stories? Because stories are interesting, they help people remember what you say, and they are a good way to convey information and emotion memorably. And they are so deeply ingrained in our thinking that they are the way we interpret reality.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“During successful communication the speaker’s and listener’s brains exhibit joint, temporarily coupled, response patterns.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“What we’re learning is that the human body is an assemblage of systems that have a surprising degree of autonomy from one another, and that are all busy managing various aspects of your mental and physical lives. Nonetheless, they do communicate with one another, and that’s why the human assemblage works pretty well most of the time.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“So when we communicate with someone else effectively, we do something that has been described colloquially for a few generations: we get on the same wavelength. Literally. Our brain patterns match each other.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“With the fourth power cue, on the mysteries of the human voice, you will turn your voice into a commanding instrument for taking charge of a room. Do you have a leadership voice?”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“subtler ways, powerful people may show their ability to come and go by leaning back during a meeting and putting their hands behind their heads to show temporary withdrawal or superiority over everyone else. It’s arrogant but effective. You will know when you are in the presence of someone who believes she is powerful because of the signals I’ve described as well as others, such as your own tendency to be obeisant in front of the person.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“We get caught up in the moment when someone is selling us with true passion, enlisting us into a cause with passion, or merely coming on to us with passion.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“the normal sequence of your brain: emotion leading to gesture and body language leading to conscious thought.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“Your voice is something you likely take for granted and rarely think about except when you have a cold, but it is one of the primary ways in which you connect with and influence people every day.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact

“That’s what happens in the virtual world. There is an emotional void, which is precisely the problem. The virtual world is inherently uninteresting because it takes survival out of the equation. It takes human interest out of the equation. And it takes emotion—the basis of pattern recognition—out of the equation. What’s left no longer engages our deep connections with other people. A virtual conversation is not important to our unconscious minds (survival), it’s not engaging (human interest), and it’s not moving (emotion).”
― Nick Morgan, Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World

“In another study Goldin-Meadow conducted, children whose teachers produced “grouping” gestures while explaining an algebra problem were more likely to talk about that idea later, even though the teacher hadn’t discussed it at all. Concepts introduced via gesture are picked up by the unconscious mind and can be vocalized later even if the speakers are not aware of the concepts consciously.”
― Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact