Making a good impression is vital when it comes to influence. Most people hope they have made a positive impact on those they meet. As covered elsewhere, the more positively people are thinking about you, the more likely they are to be amenable to your influence.
Investing time thinking about how you are creating an impression is valuable. Just by thinking about it you will automatically begin to make a better impression. Usually, subtle changes begin to happen, and it also offers the opportunity to discover specific actions you can take to improve the impact you are making.
Begin by considering who you wish to make a better impression with. This could be an individual or a group of people. If you focus on an individual, you are likely to gain significant short term improvement, however, you may miss out on longer term and broader opportunities to improve your impression. If you are focusing on a group of people, the impression you wish to create is usually referred to as your Personal Brand.
Regardless of your focus (individual or group), once you have clarified who you want to improve your impression with, you can move on to clarifying the actual impression you wish to make. This is where it becomes a little more difficult. Until you start to think about it, the chances are high that you will have some pretty vague notions of what you want them to have in their minds when they think of you.
When I’m running workshops on this topic, most people initially want to create an impression of being a professional person who is trustworthy and has high integrity. Everyone wants people to recognise their skills, knowledge and expertise. These are all good, but are they enough to gain the influence you wish to have with the people you want to impress?
To answer this question, you need to step back a little and think about what you want to influence them to do differently. How do you want them to respond to you? What do you want them to do with the information you share with them? How do you want them to feel about you? What impression do you need to create in order to maximise the possibility that they will do what you want them to do?
To make this easier, take a five minute pause and fill a page with the examples of what you would like to hear them saying (about you) after you have left the room, or before you arrive at the meeting. Persist with this, it will benefit you.
Now, what have you got to do differently in order to maximise the probability that they will be saying these things about you?
Generally, the actions or adjustments will fall into one of three different categories:
- Content/Substance. This comprises your technical knowledge, experience, and skills — the tools of your trade.
- Vision/Direction. These frequencies provide the energy and focus for your content. What key values drive your work?
- Communication/Style. This is the way you express yourself, in all its forms. How do you look, sound and move? What words and expressions do you use? How do you structure your communication?
Keeping your impression goal in mind, and being conscious of the audience you want to get this impression, brainstorm action ideas in each of these areas. Make your lists as long as possible. Don’t worry too much about overlaps, just fill as much space with as many ideas as you can.
If you are focusing on impressing an individual, make sure and reflect on them as a person and what impresses them. Which of the ideas that you have come up with will be most likely to instil the desired impression?
When building your personal brand, you cannot be certain about what will impress all of the people in your audience, so you have to make some intelligent assessments on what will make the right impression with most of them.
Once you have begun to isolate specific things you can do, make a firm decision to implement your ideas. There is little point in getting this far and then taking that final step. Actually, the thinking is often harder than the doing.
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