How to Win Friends and Influence People?

For the past two days, I have been on a training course entitled "How to Argue Effectively."
Actually, I'm deliberately giving you a fairly loose translation of the French course name: "argumenter" in French really means "how to be convincing and structure your speech", rather than simply having a good old rant. But I like the idea that the Firm is paying for me to learn how to argue ;-)
(When he heard I was taking the course, my boss actually grimaced and muttered something sarcastic along the lines of: "are you taking part in the course or giving it?". I took this as a compliment...).

It has all been very interesting and informative, not least because our trainer is an ex-car salesman for Peugeot, extremely dynamic and very much into the "killer sales" jargon. None of it seems especially relevant to my job, in which the most meaningful relationship is between me and my computer (we get along just fine most of the time), but in the wider context of human interaction in general, it's bound to be helpful.
There are things I already suspected but which have been confirmed: did you know, for example, that 93% (93%!!) of our impact on others is down to our body language and the way we say something (as opposed to the actual content of what we have to say).
Amazing if you think about it.

But as the course has been going on, I've been thinking more and more that there's only so much you can learn. Not to be cynical or anything, but I can't help feeling that "you either got it or you ain't". Some people have that natural charisma (or whatever you want to call it) that means you can listen to them talk for an hour about sheep-farming in the Shetlands (or whatever), whereas others are just... well... boring. And uninspiring.
It's not fair, of course, but charisma and good communication skills seem to me to be a "gift" bestowed on some and not others.

Well, I hope this wasn't too much of an unstructured ramble.
If you didn't enjoy the content of this post, take heart in the fact that, had you heard me tell you the same stuff out loud, you'd have been won over immediately by my charm and charisma ;-)