Credibility & Influence

In every walk of life, we find ourselves needing to influence people to do something. There is an art and science to influencing people, which is to say influencing behavior. This ability to convince someone to help you with something is at the heart of everything we do, a vital skill.

We could all use some of the wisdom of how to do this well because we spend a lot of our time each day influencing someone to do something, even if it is to do nothing. Doing nothing is one of at least three choices in decision-making.

So what is this art of influence about? The ability to influence others correlates directly with our own credibility influence factor (CIF) with anyone. Think of someone you know that you have high credibility with. Let's call this person Mary. Mary believes in you. Mary recalls past experiences with you that support her belief in you. If you needed to influence Mary to do something, the task would not be difficult because your past experiences with Mary created a high CIF with Mary, let's call it a 10 factor. If you didn't know Mary at all, your CIF might begin as a 2 factor.

In the end, our credibility is the one thing we must build and protect, because it represents our perceived trustworthiness. As they say in the field of public relations: it takes years to build credibility—your reputation, and only a day—maybe an hour nowadays, to lose it. Losing credibility means losing our ability to influence. It's all about truth and integrity. If I knowingly tell someone something that's not true, and they find out I was untruthful, my credibility with that person is lost. My relationship is seriously damaged. I no longer have an ability to influence that person because they are not going to listen to me anymore.

The point here is that no matter what we do, being authentic and truthful is the key to building credibility. That's the art of being an authentic person and having character. The art, though, is a little more than that. The art of influence is more than truthfulness. For example, being completely truthful, but also negative, is not a good approach. Negativity does't get you far. Complaining tends to not build a following.

Approach matters. I read this article where Fast Company talked about words and approaches that tend to not work, like using the word "great" too much in an interview. Or if you're selling an idea, try not to say "It's going to be "Huge", and definitelly not five times during the same interview. Another tip is don't over sell. It is hard to be viewed as credible when everything you profess to be doing is bigger and better than anything anyone has ever done before. So maybe, you know, mix in a little humility.

The science part of influencing is where psychology and social psychology come into play, the behavioral sciences. To be good at influencing people it helps to understand people, like what motivates someone, or what do they like to do, or, well, so many things. We all have some level of these skills, but to be really good at this influencing thing, you have to go deeper. For example, it is quite helpful to understand this social psychology theorm referred to as the Fundamental Attribution Error. This explains one reason people do what they do, and why they sometimes react the way they do, and more importantly, why we make terrible assumptions about why someone did something, over and over. I highly recommend you look this one up and study it until you get it. This is one of hundreds if not thousands of things you will learn in studying the behavioral sciences.

Finally, there is one more important skill when it comes to influencing people, and this is the skill of communication. Please click on my article called "The ultimate skill" for some info about that topic. I hope this helps in getting you started.