Boooorrriinng!!!

So how do you act with the kind of absolute conviction that makes others follow you? Think of making a toast at a friend's wedding. All eyes are on you. And all of those stares, all of that attention, all of that expectation makes you feel diminished. You say all the right things, but your voice still sounds fake, small, and tinny -- like that of a B-movie actor. You have big words and big feelings to convey, but you are not their equal. Your words lack the right combination of comfort and conviction. How to change that?

" Expressing your conviction and position by just being you, by being natural, is great," says Anderson. " But if you're so natural that you're not in a heightened energy state, then you may as well be boarding people on a bus. Gaulier's work is about being bigger than your image of yourself, not just different from it."

Reaching a " heightened energy state" is what Gaulier teaches. In order to lead, you have to command people's attention -- and steal their hearts. Simply setting out to be more interesting won't fix the problem. Racking up real-life experiences or winning awards to put on your résumé may give you more to talk about, but neither of those things will lessen your chances of being boring. The reason that people are boring is because they follow a bad script.

" People begin a conversation with an aggressive tone," says Anderson. " The first instinct in communication is 'I'll show you!' The hidden script that most people bring to every contact is a confrontational one -- a tacit 'prove it-prove yourself' attitude. We do this instinctively; we're not even aware of it. Because we are self-conscious, we enter a conversation anticipating rejection, conflict, or a need to protect ourselves. Those emotions constrict us. Self-consciousness creates a barrier between people."

Moreover, self-consciousness stops all action. It isolates people, and, worst of all, it is boring. Bore people, and you lose their attention -- and permission to lead them. Gaulier tries to draw what's not boring out of a person. " It's a shame that we walk around being so boring," laughs Anderson, " when we have the potential not to."

A boring leader is never more than a manager. A boring Nelson Mandela could not have freed South Africa from apartheid. A boring Jack Welch could not have inspired General Electric's businesses to assume first or second stature in their industries. A boring Steve Jobs would have meant the death of Apple Computer long ago, rather than its birth or rebirth.

Says Gaulier: " Theater is the extension of life. The same laws govern one and the other."

Open-Heart Surgery of the Soul

To train athletes, you make them run. To train leaders, you do -- what exactly? Teach them management? Teach them the numbers? Teach them confidence? Or perhaps you teach them how humanity really works: how to tap into what goes on beneath sophisticated human surfaces; how to find the connection that makes perfect strangers identify with an idea, a project, a vision, even the unknown. Isn't leadership, after all, a higher form of selling, where what you're selling is the future? If you want to sell shares of the future, you need more than off-the-shelf business skills.

What triggers that connection, what overrides anyone's tendency to be boring, is the language of complicity. It is the language of agreement, cooperation, and communication that connects leaders to their constituency of listeners, followers, and customers -- striking deeply and directly at their emotional core.

Pleasure is the great glue stick. When performers are having a great time -- when they're in control of their own power, and they have access to the power of others -- everyone knows it. If a performer is struggling or distracted or unhappy, you sense it instantly. You distance yourself from everything that performer says. There is complicity between leaders and their followers, the same complicity that exists between actors and their audience. " In a great performance, no one is outside the experience," says Gaulier. " Everyone shares in it. It's intimate and joyful." A great performance is sharing a secret, a wink, or a joke with the audience. It's the moment when you connect with your followers. Once that connection has been made, you can ask for whatever you want -- and get it. And out of that, says Gaulier, will come an action, a future.

How do you learn to speak the language of complicity? By finding the fixed point, the true character, the real you in all of the roles that you play. You'll know that you've found it when you feel totally at home no matter where you are.

To help you find that point, Gaulier strips you of seriousness. Under all of those responsibilities, fears, and instincts for safety is your real character. He knocks his students back to their basic identity, mocking their appearance in order to reach the source of their raw energy -- the fixed point, the truth from which they derive the greatest pleasure. " A lot of this work throws your identity into the mixing bowl," says Anderson. " That raw energy that Gaulier searches for is who you are and who you have the potential to be."