The Credibility Code Read online

  Contents

  Praise for The Credibility Code

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Posture: Taking a Stand

  Gestures: Reaching Out

  Vocal Skills: Finding Your Voice

  Eye Contact: Seeing Eye to Eye

  The Derailers: Cleaning up Your Act

  Focus: Making a Connection

  Authority vs Approachability: Striking the Perfect Balance

  Self-evaluation: Creating Your Action Plan

  Conclusion

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Appendix D

  Contact Us

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Info

  Praise for The Credibility Code

  “Cara does something in this book I have never seen before: she demystifies the most elusive quality of business success: credibility. She dares ask the essential communications question we’re all afraid of: ‘Does anyone actually believe in me?’ And then she shows us how to make sure the answer is always ‘Yes.’”

  —Dan Roam

  International best-selling author of The Back of the Napkin and Blah Blah Blah

  “Eye-opening! Vital information for all levels of professionals from junior associates to senior executives.”

  —Ori Brafman

  New York Times best-selling author of The Starfish and the Spider and Sway

  Praise for Cara Hale Alter

  “When it comes to credibility, Cara Hale Alter is the only expert I’ve ever seen who can define it, demonstrate it, and make it actionable.”

  —Lynda Ziegler

  Executive Vice President

  Southern California Edison

  “A true master of public speaking, Cara Hale Alter is not just compelling and captivating; she shows you how to be compelling and captivating. She is the closest thing to a magic pill that transforms you into a leader.”

  —Jeannine Yoo Sano

  Partner

  White & Case, Intellectual Property Litigation

  “After more than twenty-five years in the Training and Development industry every once in a while a gem crosses your desk… Cara Hale Alter provides the complete package to show you how to deliver your message with impact.”

  —Joe Recchio

  Manager of Training & Development

  Dart Container Sales

  “The value of this information is tremendous. I credit a great deal of my success to what I learned from Cara Hale Alter. I continually stress with my students and colleagues that this may be the single most important training of their careers.”

  —David Bangsberg, MD, MPH

  Director, Harvard Initiative for Global Health

  Harvard Medical School

  “Cara Hale Alter is the best consultant I’ve ever brought in. She has the extraordinary ability to build upon the natural style of each individual. My staff unanimously gave her rave reviews.”

  —Jocelyn Quintos

  Department of Public Works

  City and County of San Francisco

  “Cara’s a master at identifying simple behaviors that can, and do, lead to transformational results!”

  —Joan M. Haratani, Esq.

  Past President Bar Association of San Francisco

  Praise for Keynotes, Seminars & Workshops

  “In a nutshell, Projecting Credibility and Confidence has become the highest value learning program among our employees by building more than just presentation skills—it builds self-confidence. Cara is dynamic and engaging—100 percent of attendees rate her as excellent.”

  —Steve Leech

  Director of Training, Human Resources

  Shutterfly

  "Cara Alter is an amazing personal transformer. All levels of leaders from team leads to senior executives have attended Cara’s program and it is consistently the highest rated program we offer though our Learning and Development menu.”

  —Kathy Reddick

  Leadership Development

  Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company

  “Cara is superb! We keep inviting her back to the Leadership Academy every year and she always gets top marks. Her content is excellent and her style keeps everyone engaged. She is simply the best.”

  —Ida Abbott,

  Director

  Hastings Leadership Academy for Women

  “Cara Hale Alter was one of the most interesting and helpful speakers we’ve had in 15 years of programming!”

  —Ben Riley

  President

  Northern California Chapter Association of Business Trial Lawyers

  “Before SpeechSkills, our company struggled to leverage our significant sales expertise. Now, not only can our salesforce effectively articulate the value of our company, we are sought after speakers in the industry.”

  —Tom Bagwell

  Director, Peterson University & Power Marketing

  Peterson Power Systems

  “The feedback and evaluations were unanimously excellent! Thanks for bringing enormous value, relevant insight, and a huge measure of meaningful and productive fun to IDEO!”

  —Tom Stat

  Director of Business Development

  IDEO

  "Cara’s information is game-changing! Never before has anyone described what it takes to look credible in such detail.”

  —Arvin Patel, JD, LL.M

  Global Leader Intellectual Property Strategy and Management

  IBM

  “Before I took this class, I used to think that certain people had special gifts. Now I understand that these are skills that are achievable for everyone.”

  —Adam Rothschild

  Mindtribe Product Engineering

  Foreword

  As a leader in global health, I know that the right medicine is useless without the ability to deliver it to those who need it. The same is true for ideas. Credibility is not about having great ideas but, rather, about saying those ideas so that people will listen.

  It took me a while to figure this out. I used to think technical expertise was the most important ingredient for success until half the audience fell asleep during my first lecture. Then Cara Hale Alter gave me the tools to connect my ideas to people. Individually, these skills seemed deceptively simple: hands in the gesture box, level 4 volume, nose and eyes in alignment. Together, they have become the most powerful tools of my career.

  Suddenly people started to listen more carefully. I engaged their full attention. They began to ask nuanced questions. They wanted more. I was invited to speak to larger and larger groups. My reach went from local to national to global. My ideas hadn’t changed; instead, I was delivering them much more effectively.

  I am blessed with brilliant, dedicated, and tenacious students who are improving people’s health around the world. My students are overflowing with ideas, energy, and idealism. But I tell every student, “Ideas go nowhere if people don’t hear you. If you really want to have an impact, learn Cara’s code!”

  In these pages, you’ll find a step-by-step methodology for building credibility one communication skill at a time. Consider it a toolbox. Carry it with you. Mark it up. Do the exercises. Go on the field trips. It will be the most important investment of your career. It was for me.

  —David R. Bangsberg, MD, MSc, MPH

  Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health Associate Professor

  Harvard Medical School

  Introduction

  Credibility. Personal power. Executive presence. These are not elusive qualities that some people have and some don’t: Specific behaviors trigger these assessments. This book takes an in-depth look at what these behaviors are, how much impact they have on others, and how much control you have over them.

  In today’s business world, being credible is not enough. You have to look credible. It must be observable in all of your face-to-face communications. Many people, however, no matter how passionate and talented, can not move forward in their careers because their credibility is not immediately apparent.

  Here’s what I assume: You are smart, capable, and competent. And I’m sure you want others to immediately recognize this about you. If you want to show people your potential, stand out in a sea of applicants, win that contract, or get that promotion, you’ll have to convince others of your abilities.

  It’s possible that your credentials alone can serve that need; having an extensive resume or a string of letters after your name is very helpful. But if your qualifications on paper aren’t enough to assure your status, you’ll have to project the credibility you deserve.

  The Credibility Code makes the quality of credibility tangible and actionable. It lays out the ground rules, the explicit codes of conduct for looking confident, capable, and credible. By better understanding which specific behaviors raise or lower your status in the eyes of people around you, you can take charge of your own image.

  Who can gain by reading this book?

  Whether you’re meeting one-on-one with a client, interacting with colleagues around the conference table, broadcasting on YouTube, or delivering a formal presentation to a packed audience, gaining control over the image you project will give you a substantial edge. It doesn’t matter if you’re a top executive with decades of experience or a graduate fresh out of college. By helping you understand how your visual and auditory cues are being perceived, The Credibility Code gives you leverage—leverage that can open doors and open min
ds; leverage that can change fixed opinions and strengthen new ones; leverage that can, ultimately, determine the direction and success of your career.

  Split-second assessments

  Nalini Ambady, a social psychologist and leading expert in nonverbal communication, coined the term “thin slicing.” It’s the ability to observe patterns based on only a thin slice of experience. In one revealing experiment, Ambady showed college students video clips of teachers and asked them to choose adjectives to describe the teachers. Initially she showed the students 30 seconds of video. They had no problem forming quick assessments. But with subsequent groups of students, she cut the clips down incrementally until the clips were only two seconds long. Not only were the assessments remarkably consistent regardless of the length of the clips, the evaluations were very similar to those of the students who sat through an entire semester in the instructor’s class.

  People make up their minds about us at lightning speed, without taking the time to analyze why they find us likable, authoritative, confident . . . or “insert-adjective-here.” Their conclusions are based on observable cues, nonverbal signals such as the position of our chin, the width of our stance, the speed of our gestures, or the duration of our eye contact. Together these components form a composite that defines the perceptions others have of us.

  While the study above is remarkable because it shows how quickly this happens, even more astounding is the fact that there is consistency. When we watch a video of a stranger, we all use roughly the same adjectives to describe that person. If this is possible, some kind of ground rules must be governing our observations.

  Many people believe that credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. In truth, very specific behaviors lead us to an assessment of credibility. In the next eight chapters, I’ll lay out explicitly what these behaviors are.

  The ground rules are not as deeply hidden as you may think. Pay attention to the metaphors in your language, and you’ll find your action plan right in front of you. If you’d like people to describe you as having a strong spine and a level head, you must literally have a strong spine and a level head! If you’d like to be a powerful voice in your community, you must literally possess a powerful voice.

  While this book will delve deeply into nonverbal communication, it won’t teach you how to tell if someone is lying or how to flirt at a party. My objective is much more specific: To focus exclusively on those behaviors that affect your credibility in face-to-face interactions. Once you understand the ground rules, you’ll discover your image is within your control.

  A little advice

  In my early days, I worked as the receptionist at a prominent law firm. When I confessed to the senior partner that I often felt intimidated by the high-powered executives who daily approached my desk, he gave me a bit of advice that has stuck with me. “There’s no real trick to looking confident,” he said. “Just be yourself and don’t do anything distracting.”

  That’s simultaneously the best and the worst advice I’ve ever received. I agree with it wholeheartedly, and I’ve spent my career trying to figure out how to pull it off! If you can “just be yourself” in the middle of a high-stakes meeting—when adrenaline is flowing, you’re being hammered by challenging questions, your thinking is growing fuzzy, and several voices in your head are screaming instructions—congratulations!

  For most people, however, when the pressure is on, being yourself is like a roulette game. You don’t know which version of you is going to show up—the intelligent, capable human being you know yourself to be or some lesser version of you.

  The paradox: The more self-conscious we are, the more difficult it is to be ourselves. And we can be distinctly different people in different situations. I’ve talked to countless people who say to me, “I’m fine one-on-one, but as soon as I get in front of a group, I fall apart.” Or, “I’m perfectly competent when I’m with my team, but when I have to meet with the senior executives, I can’t think straight.”

  This book isn’t about coming across at your best during perfect conditions. It’s about being at your best under any conditions. To get there, you’ll need an in-depth understanding of what your best self looks like.

  And this brings me to the second half of the senior partner’s advice, “Don’t do anything distracting.” Here’s another paradox: Our distracting behaviors aren’t distracting to us. We are oblivious to them because no one does distracting behaviors on purpose.

  Let’s face it: We’re all trying our best. If we’re ineffective, it is almost certainly unintentional. We are either unaware of the behavior we’re exhibiting or unaware of the impact it’s having on others.

  We start by swallowing a bitter pill: If others aren’t seeing us the way we see ourselves and if they aren’t recognizing our talents, it is almost certainly something we are doing. This doesn’t sound like good news, but it is, because the more you understand how you contribute to the problem, the more power you have to fix it.

  The camera doesn’t lie

  Have you ever seen a videotape of how you walk? Others can recognize you from behind or at a distance because of your unique stride and gait. However, very few of us are able to recognize ourselves without more distinctive clues. We rarely get an outside view of how we move through the world.

  My workshops rely heavily on the video camera to capture how we look. Most people are amazed at what they see. Nearly all of us have unintentional signals derailing our effectiveness—a bobbing head, the tendency to fidget, asymmetrical posture, weak volume, too many filler words—the list is extensive.

  We all carry habits acquired from years of communicating: Some are good; others are less so. Just as junk can pile up in that proverbial kitchen drawer, extraneous signals can creep into our style.

  It makes sense that we’re relatively unaware of our own mannerisms since there is no way we can actively focus on the hundreds of signals we are exhibiting at once—posture, gestures, volume, pitch, pace, articulation, inflection, eye contact, head movement, and so on. In order to focus on higher-level communication skills, such as forming words into sentences and interpreting reactions, we lock these lower-level behaviors into our muscle memory, our subroutines, so that they run on automatic pilot.

  And thank goodness for the genius of the human brain that makes subroutines a part of our process. Driving, typing, dancing, and reading are all possible because we have the ability to group precise individual steps into fluid subroutines.

  But understanding subroutines also helps us understand why we have unintentional behaviors in our style. Once a bad habit creeps into a subroutine, we pay no attention to it. It becomes embedded in the program. This is why smart, capable people can be oblivious to their own bad habits.

  Accidental messages

  People are frequently unaware of how they come across. And here are just a few examples of how accidental signals can cause a divide between how we see ourselves and how others perceive us.

  • Isabella described herself as extremely timid, so she was dismayed to discover her new coworkers perceived her as hostile and judgmental. When she felt uncomfortable, her unconscious defense mechanism was to retreat. Her posture became rigid, and she shut down all facial reactions. Ironically, what felt to Isabella like “deer in the headlights” panic looked to her coworkers like a cold, aggressive stare.

  • Grant felt ready to take on more of a leadership role in his division, but he was disappointed when he was consistently passed over for promotion. He was unaware that his speech pattern was overloaded with filler words. He would often say “uh” or “um” four or five times per sentence. Internally, he felt confident, but externally he sounded perpetually tentative and distracted.

  • Janelle thought of herself as friendly and passionate but confessed that others often described her as aggressive and pushy. She was totally unaware of how her hands punctuated each phrase with sharp, emphatic gestures whenever she spoke. The harder she tried to make a connection, the sharper her gestures became. She was virtually pushing people away.