What You Don’t Know May Be Jeopardizing Your Influence

Drop me a note to share what you will do THIS MONTH to hold yourself accountable.  Tag me on my Facebook page.

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Stacey’s Pix:

Book:  Listen Like You Mean It  by Ximena Vengoechea

Self-Awareness = Influence

3 Action Steps You Can Take This Week 

After many months working virtual, by now I’m guessing you’re self-aware of how much influence you have virtually? Or are you?

If you haven’t thought about your virtual presence yet, it’s really important to clearly understand the impact and influence you have on others.

Or maybe you HAVE been thinking about your virtual influence but you’re not sure what or how to make enhancements.

Influence comes from how others experience you.

Consider what happens when people don’t perceive you in a positive light. If your customers feel you lack confidence in your product or service, they likely won’t buy from you.

If your team questions whether you authentically care about their work-related challenges, they probably won’t follow you.

Your ability to influence others to act comes from their perception of you, not your best intentions.

Trust, credibility and authenticity have the power to move people to act. You can never completely control what others think about you, but you have more control over it than you may believe when you’re self-aware.

How many virtual meetings have you attended when you were painfully watching someone deliver a message? They may have been taking too long to get to the point, fidgeting or not knowing where to look and disconnecting with you.

Chances are they weren’t aware of how they communicate. As observers, it’s easy to pick apart the communication flaws of others, but rarely do we acknowledge our weaknesses.

Self-awareness is essential to increasing influence both personally and professionally.

To know what our listeners see and hear, we need to become self-aware. Only then can we begin to master communicating with influence.

Self-awareness is SO important it’s the 1^st element of our influence model that we teach. Our thorough research with the University of Northern Colorado indicates how important self-awareness is to increasing overall influence, but it also reveals how difficult it is to achieve.

Our survey results indicated that 48% believe that greater self-awareness leads to having more impactful and influence in the workplace.

To make sure you have consistent influence now more than ever before we need to be more self-aware of our virtual presence.

Action steps to take this week:

1. Eliminate any excuses you may have. Excuses I’ve heard as we continue to work virtually; it’s just my team or it’s just a client who I’ve known forever. They don’t care how I show up.I didn’t have time to prepare.   If I knew what to say I wouldn’t use filler words.  I don’t have time to record myself OR I don’t have time to practice communicating with brevity. Every virtual conversation you have IS an opportunity to focus and practice your communication.  If we don’t make the time to practice while we’re working out of the comfort of our home, we’ll never practice and we’ll never develop.
2. Be the example for others. If you want your team to behave one way, be the example. Avoid excusing your actions or justifying them in any way.  Your title doesn’t give you a free pass from any behavior different than what you expect from others.
3. You probably can guess the final action step…video and audio record yourself as often as possible during personal and professional conversations. Without observing ourselves through the eyes and ears of our listeners, we’re constantly guessing our level of awareness and influence