Unlock Your Charisma · Level 0

Measure what you actually do

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0.1 What speaking under load actually costs

Level 0 · 15 min · 2 knowledge checks

Level 0: 0 of 10 gates ticked0 of 7 tasks done

You have an account of how you come across. It was assembled from how you felt afterwards, from a few remembered moments, and from whatever anybody has told you, which is mostly nothing.

This level replaces it with a recording.

Nothing here asks you to change anything, and the reason is not stylistic. Every measurement in this level exists because the corresponding self-report has been tested and found to carry no information. Government executives' self-rated receptiveness predicted their conversation partner's assessment at β = 0.05, which is nothing, while an algorithm reading their actual words predicted it at β = 0.29. Anxious speakers rate their own performance far below what observers rate it. You are about to spend two weeks building the only instrument in this course that does not have that problem.

You will finish holding four things. One recurring professional conversation, fixed. A recorded and transcribed sample of your own speech in it. Three counts from that transcript. And a written note of what somebody else heard that you did not.

Level 0 lessons

0 of 5 done

Replace your impression of how you speak under pressure with a recording, a transcript and three counts.

0.1What speaking under load actually costs15 min 0.2Why your own judgement will not do17 min 0.3The baseline14 min 0.4The statistics you were taught18 min 0.5What the research means by charisma17 min

Level 0 exercises

0 of 2 done

Done against a real organisation you choose, not a case study. The gates below are about what these produce.

Exercise 0.A - The baseline

Record yourself in your named recurring conversation, transcribe it, and take three counts.

Aim for at least eight minutes of your own speech, which usually means recording a whole meeting. Get consent. Where recording is not permitted, write a contemporaneous account within ten minutes, marking every place you remember hesitating or losing the thread, and note in your record that this sample is weaker than a recording.

Transcribe it yourself, or turn off your tool's cleanup setting, or count fillers by ear against a cleaned transcript. This is the step that most often goes wrong: automatic transcription removes disfluencies by default and will show you a speaker who does not exist.

Then count. Disfluencies per hundred words, splitting fillers, repeats and restarts. Words before your point becomes recoverable, for each substantial contribution, marking the ones where it never does. And structure present or absent, as a binary call, for each contribution.

Takes about three hours: one to record, ninety minutes to transcribe eight minutes of speech, and thirty to count. Budget the transcription honestly, because it is four to eight times real time by hand.

It fails in two ways. Recording a meeting where you barely speak, which produces a sample too small to count. And cleaning the transcript, which removes the thing being measured. If your disfluency rate comes out below 2 per hundred words, check the transcript before you believe it.

Exercise 0.B - The outside listen

Give eight minutes of the recording to your named reader and ask four questions.

Do not tell them what to listen for and do not describe the meeting first. Play it, or send it, and then ask: what was I saying, in one sentence. What did you not understand. Where did you lose the thread. And what did I sound like you were feeling.

Write the answers verbatim before you respond to any of them. Then write your own answers to the same four questions, separately, and compare.

Takes about forty minutes. It fails when the reader knows your subject, because they will reconstruct your meaning from their own knowledge and report that you were clear. Two exercises in this course specifically want somebody outside your field and this is the first.

The comparison is the output. Expect your fourth answer to be harsher than theirs: anxiety moves self-rated performance about twice as far as observer ratings across the interview studies, and you are now measuring your own version of that gap.

Level 0 gates

0 of 10 ticked

What you should be able to do after this level. Tick each one when it is true. Nobody marks these. Sign in to tick them.

You have one named recurring professional conversation, fixed for the remaining twelve weeks, in which you speak and are sometimes asked something unplanned.

Not ticked

You have a working recording setup with consent arranged, or a written fallback protocol for where recording is not permitted.

Evidence that shows it: Attach the artefact, or attest with a date if it lives somewhere you cannot upload from.

Not ticked

You have at least eight minutes of your own speech recorded and transcribed without the disfluencies removed.

Not ticked

You can state your own disfluency rate per hundred words, split into fillers, repeats and restarts.

Not ticked

You can state, for each substantial contribution in the sample, how many words passed before your point became recoverable, or that it did not.

Not ticked

You have made a binary present-or-absent call on structure for every contribution, and can state the ratio.

Not ticked

You have had the recording heard by somebody outside your field and recorded their four answers verbatim.

Not ticked

You have written your own four answers separately and can state where the two accounts diverge.

Evidence that shows it: Attach the artefact, or attest with a date if it lives somewhere you cannot upload from.

Not ticked

You have named the one thing you find hardest to explain, and the person who will hear you explain it in Level 4.

Not ticked

You do not describe your speaking problem as a confidence problem, unless your recording shows something your reader also heard.

Not ticked

Tools in this level

Baseline reader

This takes the three counts every later level is judged against, from a transcript of your own speaking with the fillers left in. Write your fillers, repeats and restarts per hundred words, how many words passed before each point became clear, and whether each answer had a structure.

Write it, get automatic feedback

The ten statement check

Ten statements marked true or false about you, before Level 0 and again after Level 5. Write your answer to each with the date, and compare them line by line rather than by total.

Write it, get automatic feedback