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I’m excited about this topic, simply because I’m currently in the trenches of learning and mastering this myself. This has made huge, unbelievable changes in my life: it helped me build more meaningful relationships and make a positive impact on people!
What I’m talking about is building influence through emotion. Tying this into your skillset and expertise can really put it all together and take you to the next level of influence. It doesn’t just increase your influence exponentially; it also makes it more significant and meaningful.
So how does this happen? What do you need to do to get to a level of influence that can completely transform you, your emotional capabilities, your relationships, and your influence?
When you really want to make an impact on someone, you can’t stay on the surface. Getting to the heart and making emotional connections is the key to powerful influence.
To get there, the first step is to create a deeper level of trust with people. How exactly do you start doing that?
Vulnerability builds trust
Being vulnerable means we share a story or a part of ourselves with someone that we don’t want anyone else to know. It could be something as simple as an embarrassing moment, or telling someone you’ve had a rough day. Nothing is too small when it comes to vulnerability.
When you become vulnerable to someone, it helps determine how much trust you give them. So if they abuse it or use it against you, that’s a sure way to cut off a relationship. But if they honor that
The same goes for influence! Sharing from your heart lets you build trust with someone you want to have an impact on. So if you have a personal experience that you think might help them, it’s important to go deep into your emotions and talk about what you learned from it.
If they’ve been going through something similar, your story just might encourage them to open up about their own feelings and struggles. It’s a two-way trust bridge: you let them know you trust them well enough to tell them your experience, and in turn, have them trust you because you understand exactly what it’s like.
Influence is about progress
Of course, influence doesn’t stop at them letting out their emotions to you or making them feel good in the moment. That’s a very important part – and we’ll get to that later on – but it’s not enough.
How do you know if you’ve really influenced someone? It’s when you motivate or inspire them to take action!
There’s nothing more magical than when someone takes your advice, acts on it, and gets the results they want. This means you gave them a skill set for life and now they own it. So they trust you even more with their challenges in life. That’s influence!
The important thing is that they know you’ve gone through the same things and you want to be there for their own journey.
At this point, you’re probably wondering: so where and how does it start? What takes temporary motivation to lasting, meaningful influence? How does casual friendship become a real lifelong friendship?
My answer is simple: Influence begins with authentic conversation!
Emotional Awareness
Before we get into what authentic conversations are and how to carry them out, there’s one important thing to remember: you can only have authentic conversations when you reach a certain level of emotional awareness.
Emotional awareness is all about discovering your own emotions and putting a name to them. It sounds pretty elementary, but you’ll be surprised how challenging this can actually be.
I myself am still in the process of learning how to do this. My mentor taught me that the more words I have in my emotional vocabulary, the more powerful and active I can be in taking charge of my emotions.
Since then, I’ve been really hungry to learn more about emotions and master them in a way I never have or even considered before.
So I researched on how to access that full spectrum of emotion. I found this emotion chart that’s basically a circle of the 7 basic emotions we have: happy, sad, disgusted, angry, surprised, bad, and fearful. Each one breaks down in to many more complex emotions.
Let’s say you’re feeling happy today. Are you feeling interested? Content? Playful? Proud? Optimistic? Powerful? If you’re feeling angry, are you feeling humiliated? Let down? Bitter? Aggressive? Frustrated? We can dig even deeper into that. If you’re frustrated, are you simply annoyed or actually infuriated?
What’s the point of having all these words? There’s a saying that goes, “Human beings are animals but animals are not human beings.” One of the most important things that separate us from animals is that we can think about our thinking.
When you have a rich emotional vocabulary in your arsenal, you can pinpoint exactly which emotion you’re feeling. This allows you to self-examine, so you’re able to act on that feeling = or even those feelings – with clarity and good judgment.
Having a therapist is a good way to increase your emotional awareness. I have a really amazing one that I go to regularly, and it took a couple of awful, meh, and good therapists who weren’t the right fit for me to find her.
Enriching your vocabulary and becoming more skilled at emotional awareness doesn’t just help you; it strengthens your relationships with loved ones, friends, and even strangers!
Why? Because then you can actually hold authentic, meaningful, intimate conversations with them.
Authentic Conversation
“Hey, how are you?”
“I’m fine! Business is doing well, kids are great. How about you?”
“I’m pretty good myself. Couldn’t be better!”
How many times have you had this kind of conversation? You’ve probably had one today! Now there’s nothing wrong with chitchat, but when you want to build influence and create meaningful connections with people, you can’t stay at shallow or casual conversation.
So how do we go from this to having authentic conversation?
The important distinction that makes a conversation authentic is that it focuses on emotion rather than on circumstance. Here’s a good example to help you understand this better.
Let’s say you went to a conference. When a friend asks you how the conference was, you’ll probably tell them it was great, we heard from this speaker on Day 1, this event happened on Day 2, another speaker taught us a couple of principles on Day 3, and so on. You’ll probably even talk about what your lunch was and how the hotel accommodations were.
But imagine if that friend asks you, “Well, how do you feel about that experience?” That would probably catch you off guard, but you’ll also have the chance to think about the emotions you felt or any breakthroughs you might have had from the conference.
And because your friend specifically asked you how you feel, that’s already an open invitation to authentic conversation.
I have to admit, though: I’ve been pretty bad at this. I’ve had good moments, but most of the time, I’ve really held things back. And in the process, my friendships suffered. At one point, I even questioned whether I really had friends. I didn’t have a best friend.
What really changed my friendships and connections with people in just a short amount of time is authentic conversation. It takes surface-level friendship to a real, lasting, purposeful friendship.
Taking opportunities
Here’s my challenge for you: take every conversation as an opportunity to create authentic conversation!
Start going to emotion even in casual conversation, whether you’re with friends or even just running into someone in the elevator. It’s also a good way to gauge which people in your life you want to get closer to and have regular authentic conversations with.
When someone asks how you are, don’t just focus on successes. Focus on your challenges. Reach into your emotional vocabulary and talk about feeling bad – and dig deeper! Talk about whether you’re stressed, overwhelmed, or feeling out of control.
Now if that person tells you, “Oh, that sounds rough. Talk to me about it”, that means they’re holding space for you to talk about your emotions or even just admit that you’ve had a bad day.
You know they really care about you and they’ve got your back. More importantly, you know they’re at a better emotional level because they know what you need in this moment is to be heard, to be given the time, space, and attention to talk about how you feel. This can strengthen your relationship with them in ways you probably haven’t even thought of.
Of course, you run the risk of someone telling you your emotions are wrong. For instance, if you tell them, “Well, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed today,” and they immediately shoot you down with “Oh, don’t be overwhelmed!”, that person is telling you your emotion is wrong or that it’s easy to dismiss. These are people you might want to keep at the chitchat level of friendship or – if you’re up to it – work a little harder to involve in your life.
You’re never wrong about how you feel
Dr. Paul Jenkins, my friend who’s a renowned positive psychologist, always says, “You’re never wrong about how you feel.”
Our knee-jerk reaction to people telling us they have negative emotions is to “fix it”. When they tell us they feel lonely, we usually say “Hey, I’m here! You shouldn’t feel lonely.” Or maybe they feel powerless, and we say “Don’t feel powerless, you’re a fighter!”
We might think we’re helping and getting them out of an emotional funk. But that’s actually a way of shutting down their emotions and telling them how they feel doesn’t matter.
Emotions aren’t the problem; they’re the key to connection! Give them the space to feel how they feel and invite them to talk about it with you.
So if you’ve started opening up about your feelings instead of your circumstances, you can also encourage people to tell you about theirs. With friends and family, you’ll want to ask, “How are you feeling?” instead of “What happened to you today?”
Even when you ask emotion-focused questions, people usually respond with circumstances. So after they go into detail about that, ask again: “So, how are you really feeling about that?”
It takes asking about emotions a couple of times to let them know you’re willing to go there, that you’re sincere about listening to how they feel.
From my experience, their answer is usually surprising. We assume we know what emotion they’re feeling because we base it on how we would feel in those circumstances ourselves.
But what they’re feeling might be completely different from what you expect. It changes the whole conversation because then, you can really connect and understand from their perspective.
You might sometimes think they’re wrong or they shouldn’t feel that way. It’s important to acknowledge your thoughts about it, but it’s also important to remember that it’s not your place to dictate how they should feel.
One of the things my mentor taught me is that you don’t really have to know why they’re feeling a certain way. My mentor taught me I don’t really need to know why they’re feeling a certain way. They’re feeling an emotion, and I can hold space for that.
That’s why silence is an amazing and powerful response. It’s hard and it can get uncomfortable, but sometimes just sitting there silently is the best thing you can do for them. When you show them that you’re paying attention, they’ll feel comfortable enough to elaborate more knowing you’ll stay there with them.
It’s a journey
Discovering your emotions and helping others with theirs is a journey. You’re going to make mistakes. Trust me, I’m still on that same journey and I’ve gone the wrong way a few or so times.
When you want to build meaningful relationships by having authentic conversations, you might notice you’re slipping. For instance, you might instinctively go to circumstance instead of emotions when you’re talking to someone important in your life.
When that happens, pause and reflect. Think about how you feel, and try talking about it at length.
This goes both ways! You also need to open up space for other people to talk about their emotions. A good way to do this is by asking some hard questions:
“How are you feeling about our friendship? Your life? Your work? Your family? Connection with God? Success?
You might think, “But what if it gets awkward?” Let it get awkward. Anticipate uncomfortable emotions; don’t worry, it’s part of the process! once you get to that deeper emotional level with someone, it’ll be really worth it.
This really changed my life. It helped me improve my relationships with friends and family and make effective connections with new people. Sometimes we have no idea what’s going on in people’s lives, even the ones most important to us. So it’s important to check up on them and make sure they’re confronting and dealing with their emotions.
Imagine how much you can affect a person with one simple but powerful question, “How are you feeling?”
How do you feel right now about this article? Have you had an authentic conversation with someone in your life recently? How do you think it went? Share some of your stories in the comments!