Does Your Web Presence Raise Your Credibility?
View CommentsIs It Time to Get a New Look?
I’ve always been a bit frivolous and uninvolved with fashion. I like nice things, but I don’t like to spend time acquiring them, maintaining them, or thinking about the right thing to wear. Yet, I know that the right look in what I wear can send a message to a roomful of people who’ve never met me. What we wear can quietly and powerfully underscore our identity or lead folks to wonder whether we’re making a statement of some sort.
Some extremes of this might be …
- A woman who regularly attends the jeans and t-shirt geek parties consistently choosing against her fashion jeans to wear a black dress and pearls makes me wonder she might be trying to point out her differences rather than find ways to connect with the people in the room.
- When a guy’s hair is dyed a color so unusual that I have to fight to see the face beneath it, I wonder what he doesn’t want me to see.
- When I’m in a room of highly fashion savvy people, I start shrinking a bit and wondering what other cool things they know that I don’t.
We have a way of knowing which group someone belongs to by checking their t-shirt against our own. If the way someone is dressed looks familiar and to our taste, we immediately credit that person with similar intelligence and like experiences. Those similarities lead us to listen and trust more.
We sort with our eyes before anyone even says a word. We assume a person’s visual presentation reflects his or her choices, values, and intelligence. We gravitate toward people who choose as we expect. People who look like who they are and what they’re saying get our trust more easily. When the clothes and the conversation don’t match, we go with what we see.
Blog Design Communication
Online, we project the same presence and gain or lose the same instant credibility in the way we “dress” and design our blog. A blog design can change the tone and meaning of what people take from our words.
Does a new blog design change my thinking? Of course not. But it does underscore my values before I even talk. In that way, I’m more likely to be seen, heard, and understood. The message people take is more likely to match the message I send.
When your look is working for you, you don’t have to work so hard.
Being congruent in that way makes it easier for folks to trust what we say.
Does your look make communication easier?
Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.
Buy the Insider’s Guide and Get your best voice in the conversation.
