master the use of soft power

You do not have to ask them to repeat themselves, the things they say are meaningful and measured and diminished if you have to ask them to repeat themselves.

So: Speak clearly and loud enough to be heard by your audience.

Further, it is not the quantity of verbage that makes it worth listening to – it is the quality. Take a minute to consider what it is you are about to say and ask wether it bears the effort and volume required to convey it.

All in all speak less.

This individual has some good advice on this subject:look here

I’m posting this link so I can find it when I need to refer back later.

jaCK knows too much information will undermine persuasiveness

A sure way destroy your appeal is to talk to much. It’s a complicated topic with many facets but simply put: talking too much makes communication – and influence, ineffective.

An open book has no surprises, no plot twists, no hidden depths. If you reveal everything there is to know about yourself you surrender the ability to appear to have knowledge, insight or resources unguessed at – you surrender the authority that comes from having a past.

At the same time you must not appear to be guarded. Share when asked, but let your revelations come out in a contained fashion. Use your experience as an anecdote, show that you learned something from an experience, reveal it as something worth sharing. A truly charismatic person is one who generates attraction. Who can be warm and open but at the same time a bit aloof.

and he knows this is the greatest stumbling block on his road to achieving this goal

In order to exercise soft power you need to inspire others to follow you out of admiration rather than by force or incentive. In ancient Greece charisma was thought to have been a divine gift, modern thinking is that it can be learned or taught. I suspect the former is closer truth than the latter but I’m sure anything can be at least improved by applying awareness to it.

From Wikipedia:

‘Professor Richard Wiseman says that a charismatic person has three attributes:

1. they feel emotions themselves quite strongly;
2. they induce them in others;
3. and they are impervious to the influences of other charismatic people'

I tried to find useful tips on the web but encountered limited success

The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks

_{Joseph Nye}