There are three paths to building charisma as a college freshman:

1. Tricks
2. Self-Improvement
3. Spirituality

The big mistake is thinking the first two paths are sufficient to negate the third. Don't get me wrong. The first two are important. But they address only the surface aspects of charisma, not the internal.

I know because I chased the first two paths throughout my first two semesters at Cornell University. I bought charisma books like How To Win Friends And Influence People, The Art of Witty Banter, and Charisma University. And they worked! For a few months. Then someone point blank asked me to my face while having dinner if I'd read How To Win Friends And Influence People. Apparently it was that obvious.

This happened because the first two paths only work temporarily. Truly sustaining charisma means pursuing the third. To understand why, we must first uncover what the first two charisma paths are and the value they bring.

The First Charisma Path: Tricks

Tricks in the charisma world are the equivalent of decking out your study calendar with stickers, doodles, and half baked thoughts, but missing the substance underneath called studying. They work, and learning a few of the most essential is invaluable for building our charisma skills. But they should be the frosting on top of our cake, not the cake itself.

For example, one of my favorite tricks I ever learned is a deceptively simple phrase: "That reminds me..." This is the ultimate conversation prolonger. Stuck on what to ask the person next? Confused about how to directly respond to what they asked? Got a spontaneous thought which absolutely must be spoken now lest you forget it forever? That reminds me is the ultimate phrase for solving all the above.

Another series of "tricks" which have been invaluable for me is learning the principles of humor. Many students see humor as an art, but there's actually a lot of science to it. Benign violation, misdirection, hyperbole, and more are all things I learned through my time doing stand up comedy, a skits comedy group, and After Dinner Speaking (ADS) in Speech & Debate (See my video on becoming more humorous to learn more).

If I went through every other trick I've learned over the years, you'd have yourself a book to read. And I need you to have time to read my actual book (when I write it). So let's move onto the second charisma path.

The Second Charisma Path: Self-Improvement

Unfortunately charisma tricks can't hide financial insecurity, or a lacking exercise habit, or poor fashion. This is where self-improvement comes in: building your self up to build charisma.

This works for three reasons:

1. Builds many external factors of charisma like attractiveness, dress, and articulation
2. Grows alignment, including both purpose and integrity
3. Fosters agency, in both self-efficacy and self-responsibility

Let's look at each briefly to understand what I mean.

External Factors Of Charisma

My brother met me in the Netherlands after our first year of college. He hadn't seen me in six months physically and the first thing he did was look at my clothes up and down and say: No.

I was wearing neon orange shorts and a under armor teal athletic shirt. I was not exercising. My brother was exercising, exercising his patience looking at my fit. I bought a bunch of new clothes with him and it did have a large affect on how charismatically people perceived me.

As much as I hate to admit it, your external clothing, attractiveness, hygiene, and more all have a big affect on your charisma. So the first part of self-improvement involves working on those. The other two aspects of self-improvement are a balance of external and internal.

Alignment

Alignment is made of purpose and integrity. It's the why behind what you're doing and the trust built from actualizing it day to day. Without alignment, charisma becomes a mask. With it, charisma has a spine.

Purpose is your sense of what you're doing both short and long term and why you're doing it.

It's how consciously you're living. You're going to classes, but why? You're hanging out with X friend, but why? Without purpose, college feels dead as a doornail. And it's hard to feel radiant in spreading our influence onto others if we don't even know what we're spreading.

Many college students I've talked to about purpose say the same thing: "I have no idea what I want to do. I can figure it out later."

No. Don't figure it out later. If you don't define your own purpose you will spend your whole life working on someone else's. This IS the time to be figuring it out, because it's the time of your life you can most explore with capitalism's working chains holding you to the floor. Sorry, little dramatic.

If you don't know what your purpose is, then your purpose is finding out your purpose. It doesn't have to be career only. It can involve relationships, clubs, and defining your values. All of these are things I handle in my free Cosmic Journaling Kit, a gamified journaling system for developing your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose in just 15 minutes a day.

The second part of alignment is integrity: how well you follow your purpose through your words and especially actions.

Without integrity we simply don't trust ourselves. We don't trust we will follow our word, commitments, or values. And a person who doesn't trust themselves has a very hard time radiating the kind of ease that makes others trust them.

This tends to show up in two polarities. Either we retreat from commitments, or we over commit fearing any shuddering will reveal the house is made of toothpicks. One missed workout and suddenly our identity crashes like it's 2008.

Why does this happen? Because we are made of many parts, all trying to help us in their own ways. The issue is most of these parts battle each other like it's the hunger games. Integrity comes from learning to integrate them so they collaborate rather than compete (something I discuss more in this article on Internal Family Systems).

Agency

If alignment answers why you're doing something, agency answers whether you actually believe you can do it and whether you're willing to own the consequences when you don't. You can have a beautiful purpose and zero agency and end up spiritually enlightened... and still miss every deadline.

Self-efficacy is your ability to grow and navigate life's challenges.

It's deeply contextual. We can feel wildly confident socially and completely helpless academically. Or competent in the gym and terrified in relationships. What matters for charisma is whether we know how to build self-efficacy when we don't have it. It grows through experience paired with reflection, not just experience alone. And it shows up as calm assertion, not arrogance. The kind of person who can say "I don't know yet" without their soul leaving their body.

Self-responsibility is the degree to which you take ownership of your life, externally and internally.

Without it, life feels like it's happening to you. With it, life feels like something you're participating in, even when it's messy, unfair, or deeply inconvenient.

Most college students stop at external responsibility: schedules color-coded, Notion dashboards pristine. But charisma requires something deeper. Internal responsibility means taking ownership of our emotional reactions, thought patterns, attachments, and resentments. In essence, our shadows.

A person who hasn't taken internal responsibility radiates that too. It comes through as defensiveness, people-pleasing, or that subtle tightness when someone says something that hits too close. Others feel it before they can name it.

This does not mean self-blame. It means acceptance, as we'll get to in the last path.

Building external charisma, alignment, and agency through self-improvement is very important. But just like the first path, there's something both miss.

What The First Two Paths Miss

After a couple years of building charisma through tricks and self-improvement I reached a bottleneck. It seemed no matter what I did, nothing changed my root charisma levels. My first reaction was to rebel. To do more work on my self through 30+ dates, going to more stand up comedy events, and creating more content for my channels. This made some progress, but not much.

The problem in building charisma through the first two paths is exactly that: they build charisma.

They assume charisma is something that exists out there through ingraining one more trick, going to the gym, or even becoming that much more purposeful. In the process, we build more and more of a false self, the finite character we attach to in order to navigate college. Paradoxically, this creates a bottleneck in which nothing we do can solve our root charisma issue.

That's because charisma at its deepest is an internal matter of being less your self. Less your false self, that is. This is where the third path comes in.

The Third Charisma Path: Spirituality

Spirituality is the art of transcending your false self.

Whereas alignment and agency were about building your false self, spirituality is about learning to lovingly transcend it. You might be thinking: this sounds terribly counterintuitive. Why do I need to build charisma by transcending the self that wants to build it?

The answer lies in thinking about the most deeply charismatic people you know. They're completely comfortable in their own skin, completely secure, and therefore completely welcoming to accepting other people where they are and flowing with their vibe. They're so free of their false self, they can meet everyone else exactly where they are.

Unfortunately, most students, particularly if you go to an elite college, have been raised in a system and world which is all about building the false self. It's all about getting good grades, building your career potential, and looking good. Even things that sound healthy, like building great friendships, journaling, and meditation, can be corrupted into pillars for the false self.

The more you identify with your false self, the more it colors your interactions with others.

Instead of welcoming the other person in, being comfortable in your own skin, you're constantly thinking about your self and how it's coming across. Of course you are. That's the thinking the first two paths train you into.

What's the solution?

The best place to start is self-acceptance. Before we can transcend our false self, we must love it. Alignment is the orientation toward what matters and why. Agency is the belief you can actually do it. Acceptance is the compassion of not being there yet.

Acceptance is the art of becoming our own best friend by loving who we are right now, without any changes.

That's right, exactly as you are right now, insecurities and all. I often hear students remark when I say this: "But there are things I want to change!" Acceptance doesn't mean you won't change. It means you change without hating yourself along the way. You can fail, stall, spiral, and still belong to yourself. It means loving your resistance when you push back against where you actually are.

That means loving the part of you that procrastinates, that has imposter syndrome, even the parts you'd rather not name.

So what does this look like in practice? Begin witnessing yourself interacting with others. What thoughts and insecurities come up? Perhaps you're annoyed at not knowing what to say. Or not being funny enough. Non-judgmentally let them pass, without controlling.

Acceptance is seeing yourself as building a castle out of life, not filling a hole. There isn't some fundamental lack in you to make perfect. There is something already in you worth building around. And if you experience resistance while loving yourself as you are now, then you love that resistance, until it learns to let go.

Where My Charisma Journey Has Led Me

This is where my charisma journey has led me. I still follow the first two paths. I wrote this article inspired by watching a two hour Charisma University video.

But I understand the first two paths are rooted in the last. Without spirituality, tricks become performances and self-improvement becomes a treadmill. We get better and better at playing a person instead of being one.

The three paths aren't a hierarchy you climb and leave behind. They're more like roots, trunk, and canopy of the same tree. Tricks give you social dexterity. Self-improvement gives you the substance to back it up. Spirituality gives you the freedom to stop performing altogether, which, paradoxically, is when people start leaning in.

If you're a college freshman reading this, start wherever feels most alive. Learn some tricks. Build your purpose. But don't be surprised when, a year or two in, the deepest shift comes not from something you added to yourself, but from something you finally transcend.

If you found this post interesting you would love my free College Freshman Cosmic Journaling Kit (CJK). ✨📚

It's a gamified journaling system that helps you grow your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose with over 1,000+ journaling questions in just 15 minutes a day.