3 Ways To Influence Others Without Saying A Word

Allow me a moment to vent.

My team and I recently worked with an incredible client to enhance their team’s executive presence. This company routinely invests in the development of its employees because its leadership understands that when employees receive ongoing training, they are 45% more likely to remain with the company. That is an investment worth making.

The participants were mid-level professionals who’d expressed interest in climbing the company ladder. Most recognized the development opportunity and took full advantage of learning from it—but not all.

Out of the dozens of people we worked with, two were completely disengaged and distracted. They were either late to class, on their phones or emailing from laptops that remained open the entire time. These two participants didn’t want to be there. They never said it, but they didn’t have to. Their nonverbal cues said it all.

My team could see it. Worse still, so could their peers.

How Distraction And Disengagement Reduce Influence

Too often, we only half-attend meetings. We may arrive late, leave the room to take a work call or let our devices distract us from the conversation. Our body attends, but our mind does not.

We hope that no one notices, but they always do. We falsely believe our role as a participant (rather than the facilitator) excuses our behavior. It is simply not true.

Good or bad, our actions have consequences. How we choose to engage directly impacts the level of influence we have with others.

When we fully engage, others perceive us as fully invested. But when we allow for distractions, an array of adjectives fill the minds of those witnessing our behavior: arrogant, distracted, uninvested and dismissive, to name a few. Others believe what they perceive. Their trust in you diminishes, and their respect for you fades. Before long, you are left out of the conversation altogether.

Three Ways To Demonstrate Investment

If you want to influence others, you must earn it. Here are three ways to demonstrate your deservingness:

1. Be all in or all out.

You convey your commitment to the conversation when you choose to be all in or all out. Engaging in interruptions and distractions expresses complacency to those around you. The best-case scenario? Others ignore you and your behavior. The worst-case scenario results in embarrassing feedback and missed future opportunities.

Whether it is a training, meeting or casual conversation, choose to fully invest in the experience or completely divest yourself. Commit to engage, learn and listen, or don’t attend.

2. Maintain perspective.

You are not as important as you think, no matter your title or position. Others will always value their own time over yours. When you fail to fully invest in a conversation, you send a subconscious message to others that your time is more important than theirs. Your behavior degrades their effort.

Consider the costs the next time you are tempted to give in to distractions. You may miss out on a key detail needed to move a project forward, or your visible disengagement may cost you the necessary influence to elicit action on a future topic that’s important to you.

Rarely are there distractions so crucial that they can’t wait. Put down your technology and choose to engage.

3. Value others.

We have all heard the expression, “meet for the sake of meeting.” Despite the fact that some meetings lack the clarity needed to be productive, value the facilitator and those in attendance. Consider the effect your actions have on others in the room. Whether you remain engaged or succumb to distractions, you invite others to do the same.

Before your next meeting, consider the experience you want others to have with your presence. How you engage will influence how others engage as well. So be a good influence on those around you by demonstrating the value you place on others and what they have to say.

Final Thoughts

Influence requires a conscious string of decisions. To earn and maintain the respect of others, you must choose to be all in and fully engaged, no matter how important or unimportant you perceive the conversation to be.

Working on the humans that grow your business | High-performance Human Behavior training – I teach corporations & employees how to hack into humans using Behavior & Persuasion | AI – Language & Behavior Prompt Engineer