What is influence? Better yet, what does it mean to have a positive influence on others and how do we harness that? Being a person of influence helps to foster healthy relationships between managers and employees, coaches and players, parents and children and more.
Becoming a person of influence might not be something that is on your mind now, but once you read about the benefits of having a positive influence on those around you, you will soon understand how central this is to your quality of life.
Dr. Maxwell teaches readers how to make use of his model for successfully connecting with others and how to be a person of positive influence. The steps are as follows:
- Model
- Motivate
- Mentor
- Multiply
John Maxwell’s book Becoming a Person of Influence: How to Positively impact the Lives of Others should be your first stop to learning this skill. Dr. Maxwell teaches readers that if your life in any way involves interacting with others, then you are in fact an influencer. However, it is what you do with that influence that determines if it is positive or negative. Of course, Dr. Maxwell’s book encourages and teaches us how we can utilize our influence on others to be positive and beneficial for everyone. Believe it or not, having a positive influence on others actually increases your personal and organizational success.
John Maxwell the co-author of the book Becoming a Person of Influence asserts ten attributes for increasing influence on others.
Integrity:
When people begin to trust you, your level of influence increases.
if you want to become a person of influence choose the path of integrity
Nurture other people:
Commit to them,
believe in them,
be accessible,
give with no strings attached,
give them opportunities,
lift them to a higher level.
Faith in People:
Faith is belief in action -
Believe in them before they succeed,
emphasize their strength,
list their past successes,
instill confidence when they fail,
experience some wins together,
visualize their future success,
expect a new level of living.
Listen to people:
Listening shows respect,
builds relationships,
increases knowledge,
generates ideas,
builds loyalty.
Develop Listening :
look at the speaker,
don’t interrupt,
focus on understanding,
determine the need at the moment,
check your emotions,
suspend your judgement,
sum up at major intervals,
ask questions for clarity,
always make listening your priority.
Understand people:
Everyone wants to be somebody,
Nobody cares how much you know until he knows how much you care,
everybody needs somebody,
everybody can be somebody when somebody understands and believes in her, anybody who helps somebody influences a lot of bodies.
Enlarges people:
See the potential
Cast a vision for their future
Tap into their passion
Address character flaws
Focus on their strengths
Enlarge them one step at a time
Put resources in their hands
Expose them to enlarging experiences
Teach them to be self-enlargers
Navigates for other people:
Identifies the destination
Plots the course
Thinks ahead
Makes course corrections
Stays with the people
Connects with people:
Don’t take people for granted
Possess a make a difference mind set
Initiate movement toward them
Look for common ground
Recognize and respect differences in personality
Find the key to others’ lives
Communicate from the heart
Share common experiences
Once connected move forward
Empowers people:
How to empower others to their potential
Evaluate them
Model for them
Give them permission to succeed
Transfer authority to them
Publicly show your confidence in them
Supply them with feedback
Release them to continue on their own
Reproduces other influencers:
Moving from maintenance to multiplication
Scramble
Survival
Siphon
Synergy
Significance
These ten chapters in Becoming a Person of Influence discuss concepts such as how people of influence have integrity with others, nurture others, and navigate for other people.
The goal here is to be a role model for the type of positive influence you want to be in an effort to MOTIVATE others. In the end, you will have the ability to MENTOR others about how to be a person of influence with the hopes of MULTIPLYING the success you have had.
For more information on Dr. John Maxwell and his philosophies surrounding influence, take a moment to watch him speak about how leadership is influence.