
Act like a king to be treated like one, be royal in your own fashion
The way you carry yourself often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown. Whatever you do, be royal in your own fashion: Act like a king to be treated like one.
Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgement of your own judgement of yourself than to all external precepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the structures of external authority. Come to hold yourself in awe.
Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.
Everyone should be royal after his own fashion. Let your actions, even though they are not those of a king, be, in their own sphere, worthy of one. Be sublime in your deeds, lofty in your thoughts; and in all your doings show that you deserve to be a king.
Be royal in your own fashion
Today, even though we tend toward a world without kings and queens, without omnipotent rulers, the dynamics of power, since the beginning of humanity, never changed. Powerful people may be tempted to affect a common-man aura, trying to create the illusion that they and their subjects or underlings are basically the same, but the people whom this false gesture is intended to impress will quickly see through it. They understand that they are not being given more power, that it only appears as if they shared in the powerful person’s fate.
The only kind of common touch that works is the kind where the powerful shares the values and goals with the common people while remaining a patrician at heart and never pretending to erase his distance from the crowd. Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. Instead, they elicit contempt. They end up uninspiring and vanishing in the night, as if they were never there.
Know how to sell yourself
In re-inventing yourself, always act as if you are descending from royal stock. If necessary, create the myth of your noble background. Fabricate a great story and learn to say it well. By asking for the moon, you will instantly raise your own status. Even though you know almost nothing about what you are preaching or selling, even though you have no qualifications for the journey you propose, and your petitions include no details as to how you will accomplish your plans, just vague promises, if you show and display enough boldness, nobody will ever question your background or credentials and the legitimacy of your requests or propositions.
Never back down
If you have to, bullshit your way to the end. The key in re-inventing and re-creating yourself is to know how to sell one self and to stick to the art. Understand this: It is within your power to set your own price. How you carry yourself reflects what you think of yourself. If you ask for little, shuffle your feet and lower your head, people will assume this reflects your character. Present buoyancy, confidence, nobility, self-assurance, and the feeling that you are worthy to wear a crown, and people will respect and admire you.
The Strategy of the Crown
As children, we all start our lives with great exuberance, expecting and demanding everything from the world. But as we grow older, the rebuffs and failures we experience set up boundaries that only get firmer with time. Coming to expect less from the world, we accept limitations that are really self-imposed. We start to bow and scape and apologize for even the simplest of requests. The solution to such a shrinking of horizons is to deliberately force ourselves in the opposite direction, to downplay the failures and ignore the limitations, to make ourselves demand and expect as much as the child.
The “Strategy of the Crown” is based on a simple chain of cause and effect: If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect the people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident. People who wear crowns seems to feel no inner sense of the limits to what they can ask for or what they can accomplish. This too radiates outward. Limits and boundaries disappear.
Use the Strategy of the Crown and you will be surprised how often it bears fruits. Take as an example those happy children who ask for whatever they want, and get it. Their high expectations are their charm. Adults enjoy granting their wishes. Throughout history, people of undistinguished birth, people like Moses, Jesus, Columbus, Beethoven, Disraeli, Jobs, Zuckerberg, J.K Rowling, believing so firmly in in their own greatness that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The trick is simple: Be overcome by your self-belief. Even while you know you are practicing a kind of deception on yourself, act like a king. You are likely to be treated like one.
The crown may separate you from other people, but it is up to you to make that separation real: You have to act differently, demonstrating your distance from those around you. One way to emphasize your difference is to always act with dignity, no matter the circumstance.
Regal bearing is not arrogance
Regal bearing should not be confused with arrogance. Arrogance may seem the king’s entitlement, but in fact it betrays insecurity. It is the very opposite of a royal demeanor. On the other hand, grace under fire, patience, calm and self-assurance always fascinate. Dignity, in fact is invariably the mask to assume under difficult circumstances: It has if nothing can affect you, and you have all the time in the world to respond. This is an extremely powerful pose.
To reinforce the inner psychological tricks involved in projecting a royal demeanor, there are outward strategies to help you create the effect. First, the Bold Strategy: Always make a bold demand. Set your price high and never waver. Second, in a dignified way, always go after the highest person in the building. This immediately puts you in the same plane as the person or the executive you are challenging or attacking. This is the David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.
Third, give a gift of some sort to those above you. This is the strategy of those of you who have a patron: By giving your patron a gift, you are essentially saying that the two of you are equal. It is the old con game of giving so you can take. Accepting the gift creates a kind of equality between your patron and yourself. The Gift Strategy is subtle and brilliant because you do not beg: You ask for help in a dignified way that implies equality between two people, one of whom just happens to have more money.
It is up to you to set your own price
Understand and remember: It is always up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.
The idea behind the assumption of regal confidence is to set yourself apart from other people, but be careful: If you take this too far, this may well be your undoing. Never make the mistake of thinking that you elevate yourself by humiliating people. Also, it is never a good idea to loom too high above the crowd, you make an easy target. And there are also times when an aristocratic pose is eminently dangerous. Understand this: What you want to do is to radiate confidence, not arrogance or disdain.
Finally, it is true that you can sometimes find some power through affecting a kind of earthy vulgarity, which will prove amusing by its extremeness. But to the extent that you win this game by going beyond the limits, separating yourself from other people by appearing even more vulgar than they are, the game is dangerous: There will always be people more vulgar than you, and you will easily be replaced the following season by someone younger and worse.
Again, remember: What you want to do is to radiate confidence, not arrogance or disdain.
JMD
Owner of Bunkumless.com and King Global Earth and Environmental Sciences Corporation, JMD, a former attorney, is a Columnist for The Futurist Daily News and editor of the Social and Political Blog JMDlive.com Follow JMD @ jmdlive
Save
Save
Save
Save
You must be logged in to post a comment.