Rijn Vogelaar

Enthusiasm is the active ingredient of charisma

Scientific research shows that charisma does not stem from technique or superficial display, but from visible and genuine enthusiasm. Leaders who demonstrate this are perceived as more charismatic and often become the driving force behind positive change. Rijn addresses the most recent insights into enthusiasm and charisma and demonstrates what happens when enthusiasm is shared authentically: people perform better, take initiative more often, and feel more strongly connected.

Where does your enthusiasm come from

Participants examine their own source. Where does your enthusiasm come from, how do you maintain it under pressure, and when do you lose it without noticing? Because authenticity is the prerequisite — forced enthusiasm is immediately seen through — the work begins with yourself before it concerns others.

Recognizing and awakening in others

Next, the translation to your team: how do you recognize enthusiasm in others, how do you awaken it, and how do you ensure it spreads rather than fades away? The training takes place in a small group of leaders, creating plenty of space to learn from each other's experiences and perspectives. The setup is customized for your organization.

Mission and vision without enthusiasm are dead letters

For too long, companies have determined their mission from an ivory tower. Such a slogan sets nothing in motion: it hangs on the wall and changes nothing about how the organization behaves. Rijn turns this around. The shared enthusiasm of management, employees and customers is the wind in the sails of a strategic course — and with it, the foundation on which you build your mission, vision and core values, rather than the decoration you put around it afterwards.

Flame, Flow, Flood

The training follows the three steps from the Enthusiasm Trilogy. Flame: where does the existing enthusiasm of customers and employees lie, and which mission, vision and core values truly stem from it? Flow: how do you ignite that fire within the organization? Flood: how do you ensure it spreads to customers and continues to propagate? This way, the dynamics of enthusiasm becomes not a theme alongside strategy, but the engine beneath it.

Tailored, with preliminary research

Prior to the training, an intake interview is conducted and a preliminary assessment is performed; the scope depends on the information already available. Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, the trajectory takes one or two days. The result is a mission that functions as a compass toward sustainable success, carried by the people who must bring it to life.

Without story, no spread

Humans are natural storytellers. Storytelling and the dynamics of enthusiasm are inseparably linked: without enthusiasm, a story lacks persuasive power, and without stories, enthusiasm cannot spread. Rijn demonstrates why this mechanism works the way it does, and why a message on an intranet is fundamentally different from a story that is passed along.

From Aristotle to Obama, and what the brain does with it

The idea for this training emerged during interviews with enthusiastic clients and employees. They had wonderful stories to tell that received hardly any attention within their own organizations. Rijn then immersed himself in the technique of storytelling, from classical rhetoric to contemporary masters, and combined this with recent insights from neurology and psychology to develop his own approach.

Telling your own story, and letting others tell theirs

Participants receive concrete tools to become a convincing storyteller themselves and to help colleagues do the same. Because storytelling only gains value when stories have impact and circulate throughout the organization. The in-house training has been provided to, among others, employees of Stedin and the management of Canon Europe in London.