Your results are on the way!
Check your email to find your IQ (Influence Quotient)!
Influence is more important today than ever. Your ability to influence determines whether:
- Your team listens to you and takes action
- Leadership backs your initiatives or approves funding
- A high-stakes conversation blows up on your or results in mutual benefit.
- Your voice gets heard
- You can deliver a clear, concise, engaging message in any setting
What does your IQ (Influence Quotient) number mean?
After retrieving your score that was sent to your email, locate the segment below that contains your score. Click the triangle toggle on the left side of your score number to expand the section and read more.
If your score was 1 - 3
- An indifferent response when you share an idea in a meeting, but when someone else shares the same idea it is enthusiastically received.
- At times you feel prepared for a conversation or presentation and then repeatedly lose your train of thought.
- An immediate stress response at the thought of giving a presentation.
- A tendency to over-prepare in an effort to build confidence.
Where do you go from here?
Focus on impact over content: All too often, people focus on getting through talking points, or worse yet a script when they think of presenting. They measure their success by how much of the content they delivered. This leads to over preparation, which ultimately inhibits the ability to connect with listeners and influence.
1. Change your focus
Influence isn’t as much about what you say, as about the impact you have. When you focus on the effect you want to have, you’re more likely to clearly deliver your message, make an emotional connection with your listeners, and ultimately influence.
2. Manage your perceptions
Your perceptions have a significant impact on your stress level, so managing perceptions is a great first step toward reducing stress and increasing your confidence. What is important to understand is that perceptions drive emotions and emotions drive behavior.
Perceptions are often automatic and not always accurate. Negative perceptions, such as viewing a leadership team as intimidating or your team as difficult will hold you back. Reminding yourself that leadership is a group of direct communicators who want to save time can reframe your perception.
Perceiving the team not as difficult, but anxious about a change can help you focus on giving them the information they need to feel more confident. Identifying the perceptions that may be holding you back and changing them can give you the confidence and focus you need to influence.
If your score was 4 - 7
- Frustration with not being heard. It’s common for people who score in this range to say that when they share ideas, present, or engage in one-on-one conversations, they don’t feel like others are really listening.
- Missed opportunities to influence because you focus on presentations as the only situation in which to influence. Thinking of influence only in the context of more formal situations like presentations causes you to miss other opportunities to have an impact.
- An imbalance in your approach to manage stress when influencing. You may focus on mitigating the negative impacts of high stress but miss the opportunity to mitigate the negative impacts of low stress.
- Positive feedback on a presentation, but people still don’t take action.
Where do you go from here?
1. Learn to use nonverbal to get and keep attention.
The words you use when influencing are one part of the message, and often not the most important. Nonverbals including body language and tone convey emotion, impact the meaning of the words, and significantly impact whether people listen. Get feedback on your nonverbal to increase awareness of blind spots and practice using them more effectively to get the results you need.
2. Clear purpose:
Always start with a clear purpose when influencing whether you’re presenting, facilitating a meeting, or influencing one-on-one. When your purpose isn’t clear, you’ll be more likely to ramble, and your message will get lost. Your purpose should include how your want to affect change in how people think, feel, or behave. It could include one, two, or all three of those. It is important to determine your purpose before you influence because everything you include should lead you toward achieving your purpose. If it doesn’t take it out, or it will be a distraction.
If your score was 8 - 10
Influence is a strength of yours, and you likely feel confident in most situations and with most audiences. You have an opportunity to build on your strength by developing advanced strategies to engage listeners and quickly affect change. You may experience…
- Positive feedback after a presentation from people saying they enjoyed listening to it, but you have opportunities to “tighten up” your message.
- Comfort in most influence situations, but you’d like to increase your influence with executives, during hight-stakes conversations, or with resistant audiences.
- A desire to decrease your preparation time and get results faster.
- An opportunity to adapt to listeners with a greater ease and effectiveness.
Where do you go from here?
1. Tie-downs
A tie-down is a valuable technique to make sure people understand your point. Whether it’s the main point or the point you’re trying to make with an attention grabber, people may miss it for a variety of reasons. It could be that they are still thinking about your last point. It could be that someone walked into the room and distracted them. It could be that they drifted off. Whatever the reason, a lot of information gets missed. To make matters worse, we forget a great deal of what we hear. Tie-downs make it more likely that people will hear and remember the key points that you need them to take away. Three examples of a tie-down are to state the inverse, to ask questions, or to paraphrase the key take away. People who master the use of the tie-down increase their effectiveness exponentially.
2. Stories
Stories have been used for thousands of years to motivate and inspire others. Research suggests that we not only enjoy stories, we are hard-wired to listen to them. According to cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, facts are up to 22 times more likely to be remembered when they are part of a story. Decision-making requires both data and emotion. It is well established that even the simplest decisions have an emotional component. Stories trigger emotions that make a personal connection, motivate action, and enable effective decision making. Find opportunities to incorporate stories to connect with listeners and drive home your key points.
Once you know your IQ (Influence Quotient), you may have additional questions:
- What are my strengths and weaknesses within this score?
- How can I leverage my IQ to maximize my influence?
- How can I increase my IQ?
Schedule a FREE 30-minute consultation!
- Answer questions regarding influence
- Share your IQ results broken down more specifically into 3 areas
- Help you identify your top strengths and growth opportunites to influence
- Give you at least three practical strategies you can use to increase your influence immediately.
You Can Learn To Increase Your Ability To Influence!
Master the Fundamentals of Influence
Unleash Your Influence: The Master Class
