Need for Influence

To influence is to have an impact on the behaviors, attitudes, opinions and choices of others. Influence is not to be confused with power or control. It’s not even about manipulating others to get your way. No matter who you are, where you work, or what your professional goals are, achieving more influence is critical for success.

Impact of Influence

A professional speaker becomes a true driving force towards positive change through focused and deliberate effort, by exerting positive influence and building trust. The outdated command and control method in delivering speech is rarely effective (and hardly acknowledged in the current times) and often leads to strong resistance among the audience. Through your ‘Influence’ – the audience will relate with you, listen to you carefully, experience emotional triggers and finally accept what you are sharing with them. May be enough to initiate action for change.

Speaker Behaviour to Influence

Without a doubt-one of the top abilities every professional speaker needs is to truly demonstrate‘ openness to influence’ at all times. Show willingness to listen to ideas of other people, invite and consider alternative view points.

If you’re spearheading the initiative to build the environment of mutual trust and respect through influence–your audience will surely see you as a leader and your opinions will naturally be heard, acknowledged and respected.

Implications on the Business of Professional Speaking

Every professional speaker must have the innate ability to –

• Connect with the audience
• Establish credibility
• Show thought-leadership
• Make the audience feel important
• Bring them to a point of agreement without coercion and create buy-in, and
• Inspire them to take the ‘right’ actions and in turn help them impact and transform more lives

All of the above points are about building your capital of ‘Influence’ over a long period of time in a disciplined, systematic and thoughtful way. The ability to do all or some of the above will create your credibility as an effective influencer and thus fuel the double engine that will drive your business of speaking to newer milestones.

Conclusion

As a Professional Speaker you have a responsibility to ‘Influence’ people with the right message. Before you hit the stage next time – think and dive deep to reflect:

1. How are you being ‘Influenced’ today at work?
2. How much ‘Influence’ do you really have? Can you measure it?
3. How are you ‘Influencing’ your audiences at this point of time?
4. What area of ‘their’ work would you like to ‘Influence’?
5. Why should you increase your sphere of ‘Influence’ to 10x?

Influence – is just one among many important traits but in my opinion, it is ‘The Skill’ for every single Professional Speaker, rather-a way of life.

“If you can speak, you can influence. If you can influence, you can change lives.” ~Robert Brown