Set the right knowledge foundations

Clearly, to get a message across and be really believed you need to know something about what you say - but not a lot! The fact that you know what you are talking about helps, but it is not a significant contributor to credibility. In fact, only 10% of your credibility is due to the knowledge you have and the content of your message. Research shows that audiences rely on two factors to determine what they think about your knowledge. The first is your personality and the way you communicate, the second is what is called 'status' or 'authority'. This is actually given to you by your audience and it varies. For instance, say you are the Chief Executive Officer of a company. Your status and how it relates to your credibility is vastly different when you are talking to your staff than when you are talking at a meeting of other CEOs. Your status and therefore your knowledge appears to vary, even though it doesn't. Each different audience ascribes different knowledge states to you - you can do nothing about it. Different audiences make assumptions about your knowledge depending upon your authority to speak to them.

Luckily, your knowledge is of little importance. Except for one, fundamental fact - if you expose any lack of knowledge about your topic your credibility is shot to pieces, no matter how well you have done with care, enthusiasm and focus. Hence the right knowledge content for your speech or presentation is the foundation on which you base everything else. However, far too many speakers, presenters and communicators concentrate most of their efforts on getting the content right. This is a complete waste of time when trying to gain credibility.

Practical steps you can take

1. Be single minded - look through your material and reject everything that is not directly related to your message. Trim your content and strip out unnecessary detail. Not only does this help with focus, but it enables you to make sure you really know your subject matter inside out.

2. Don't waste time - when preparing your material, remember that you only need to invest 10% of your allocated time to getting the content right. The rest of the time should be devoted to setting up a caring, enthusiastic, focused delivery.

3. Store the background - put all the background information you have in some accessible place (such as a set of notes). You can then call on these if needed when asked questions. No one expects you to know all the answers to all the questions.; you are at perfect liberty to check your notes without reducing credibility. But your believability will be reduced significantly if you have to try to answer but fail as you will not convince your audience you know what you are talking about.

© 2002 Graham Jones info@thecredibilitypyramid.co.uk