Most of the time people make decisions based on their memories of past experiences. Therefore, it would make sense to begin the influence process based on that data.
What’s interesting though is most people don’t remember events the way they actually happened; they formulate their own memory and accept is as fact.
For example, do you know why companies spend so much money on brand awareness? It’s because they know that once a person subconsciously accepts their brand, nothing else really matters.
You see, once a person develops an acceptance of a certain brand, they will invest (on average) less than 5 seconds of thought into purchasing it. This means the decision to buy is done completely on a subconscious level; there is no conscious thought whatsoever.
Now even though this decision happened in less than 5 seconds, most people don’t remember it that way. In fact, when asked they will truly convince themselves that the decision was the result of conscious thought and weighing of options.
In other words, people often remember behaviors and actions that never actually took place in real life.
They make a subconscious decision to buy something before they even leave their house, enter the store and make the purchase. But when asked about why they did so, most people will recall thinking long and hard about their decision and weighing their options to see which the best course of action is.
So how does this subconscious wiring to accept certain brands come about in the first place? It’s called trust.
Trust is an extremely powerful thing which also breeds loyalty. When you trust someone or something, you have become mentally and emotionally vested in them and it places a huge amount of stress on the mind to begin thinking they are not trustworthy. Therefore, once someone or something earns our trust, it’s actually easier to just keep trusting them then to think otherwise.
This is often why people who discover that their partners are cheating will deny it initially. They don’t want to think about having to retract all of that vested energy.
Trust is the first critical component in true influence. You see, influence mastery is when you have such an influential impact on people that they will comply with you often just because of who you are.
Oprah Winfrey is the classic example of this. Oprah is an extremely influential person which is why each year, tens of thousands of companies send samples of their product to her show with the hope that she will mention it. They realize how powerful even a 30 second endorsement from her can be.
And the best part is, it doesn’t even matter what the product is. Oprah doesn’t even have to be a recognized expert in that market niche. That’s how influential she is. The fact that she is merely related to the product makes the product seem valuable.
This is because of the trust that Oprah has earned from her viewers over the past 25 years.
Because trust in the first critical component in the influence process, it’s vital that you begin “branding” yourself in a way that represents you as trustworthy to others.
There are 2 simple ways to do this. The first is through referrals. If you can get people who - already trust you - to recommend you to those who don’t know you yet, your chances and time frame for building trust will drastically increase for 2 reasons: The first is because connections with others make up 80 percent of the opportunities that you will have access to in life and secondly, because social validation is very powerful. What’s even more powerful is social validation from personal sources.
The second way that you can brand yourself is by creating more awareness about who you are and what you do. You can do this to the extent of trying to publish your own book or by simply getting your own website set up and frequently blogging about your area of knowledge.
That’s exactly what I am doing on this very site. I’m sharing free information with people that they find valuable and in turn, building trust.
Once trust has been established, people listen to and value your message.