Posts tagged expert

How to quickly convince someone to trust you (if you’re not an ‘expert’)

Jun 23rd

Posted by Judy in Posts

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As you probably know, winning a person’s trust is often the first step to persuading them of anything. And it seems that we’re all in the persuasion game these days, ‘selling’ ourselves to prospective employers, friends and partners.

So, how can you quickly convince someone to give you their trust? If you’re a well-known expert in your field, if you’re the author of published books and articles with lots of letters after your name, or even if you have thousands of Facebook ‘friends’, then establishing trust may be easy. The psychological principle of ‘social proof’ is a compelling way of making yourself seem credible and therefore trustworthy.

But what if you’re just… well, you?

How can you quickly and easily become a trusted adviser, someone that people will turn to for help and advice… and perhaps, to buy things from?

There’s another psychological principle you can use to build trust quickly.

People trust people they like. And people like people who they believe are like them.

This principle is not as well known as ‘social proof’ (maybe because it doesn’t More >

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Harnessing the power of your attention

Feb 6th

Posted by Judy in Listening

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I wonder if you realise just how valuable your attention can be? As Nancy Kline puts it: “The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking.”

If you’re an expert in a particular subject, it’s easy to believe that people pay you for your expertise, your knowledge, your advice. But in fact there’s more to it than that – they may well prefer to pay for your expert attention.

  • Yesterday I visited an expert in gait and gait-correction, hoping to resolve a nagging running injury. She paid full attention to the shape and movement of my feet and watched closely as I walked and ran up and down the corridor. But she paid no attention to me – she didn’t introduce herself, asked only closed questions, and actively discouraged conversation. I ended up thinking: “Can I really trust this woman to make intelligent recommendations for my body? She knows nothing about me or my life.”
  • At a Learning Technologies exhibition recently, I led a friend over to a particular company’s stand, knowing that one of their software products could be the solution to a problem he has in his small business. Within seconds we were pounced on by an expert More >
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