5 reasons you need to go back to charm school

What do we mean by charm school? We know what we mean by “charming”. Someone who’s “charming” usually has beautiful manners and is generous in what they say and do. Although we don’t use “charmless” nearly as much as we tend to use other equally derogatory words, we also know what we mean by that word.

Someone who’s charmless is someone who rubs us up the wrong way. Someone we don’t particularly like and would not cross the room for. Someone who isn’t the type of person you want to hang out with. If you think you’ve been in that latter category as result of your behaviour, these tips might be useful to you.

• 1.Keep Things Simple
  An old adage is that we come into the world with nothing and we go out with nothing. What we do between birth and death is to complicate life. If you want to lead an unstressed life then keeping things simple is a fantastic mantra. What you notice about people who do keep things simple is that they are very natural, uncluttered, with clear thinking. They have the space to just be OK with their world. In a sense that’s the platform for becoming charming.
• 2.How Do You Engage?
  You probably need to go back to charm school if you behave in an overbearing way. Perhaps you’re in a supervisory or management role where you treat your subordinate colleagues like kids. You tell them what to do and you don’t suspect for a second that they’ve got their own brain. It’s possible you allow your emotional side to come to the fore too often. You get petulant, frustrated and irritated and show symptoms of childishness in the way you behave in the workplace. You need to go and address these things if they pertain to you in any way at all. A professional workplace is based on adult to adult conversations and adult to adult behaviour. It is when we depart from that kind of relationship with one another that we leave ourselves open to all types of trouble. Trouble leads us to conflict, to disciplinary procedures and the like.
• 3.Downsize Your Ego
  You may need to go back to charm school if your ego is too large. Any individual who sends the signal that “it’s all about me” is going to be hugely off-putting for anybody that works for them. This is somebody who’s going to talk about themselves all the time. Somebody who never asks a question of a colleague like “how are you?” let alone any supplementary ones like “are you feeling better?”, “how’s the cat?” Somebody who’s completely and utterly wrapped up in themselves and gives no room or inclination or space for anyone else in their thinking. These people are difficult to like.
• 4.Don’t Go it Alone
  You can’t do much in this world on your own. As somebody once said, there is no “I” in “team”. There are some people who just find it impossible to operate within a team environment, possibly for the reasons we’ve discussed above. If you take yourself off to charm school, one thing you’ll learn to appreciate is that you only get things by working with and through other people. The prerequisite of that is to understand that you are not the most important person in the room. Even those who are the ultimate leader of their organisation understand their effectiveness is predicated on this very simple concept.
• 5.Mind Your Ps and Qs
  In a recent speech to an academically-minded audience, the speaker, who themselves is a very a highly successful businessperson but with very few academic credentials, advised the young people in the audience that to say “thank you” and “please” would take them a long way in life. Furthermore, if they could do that with a smile, they would be hugely impressed by the effect it could have on the recipients. These are simple human behaviours. They are predicated on respect for other people and they are very simple to do.

If you have found that you are perhaps guilty of one or more of the negative behaviours that we mention here it is not too late for you to change your ways. Everybody always has a place at charm school ready and waiting for them.

About the Author

Simon North is the Founder of Position Ignition and the Career Ignition Club. Position Ignition is one of the UK’s leading career development and career planning companies. The Career Ignition Club offers a range of career support tools, advice and e-learning materials for its members. Follow Simon North and his team on twitter @PosIgnition and get more advice from him on their Career Advice Blog.