Progressing Toward Impact

When we talk about making an impact, in your community, in your own life, or in business we need to recognize that it’s not something that happens all at once. In fact there’s a pretty reliable process that helps to unwrap the topic pretty nicely that I want to share with you, and it goes as follows: Certainty -> leads to Influence -> Leads to impact.

Let’s start at the very beginning with certainty, which is the hardest part of this process to work through. In order to cultivate certainty you need to know at such a deep level what you believe. This means you need to gather experiences and learnings that help you hone in on what you believe to be true. To be certain is to reach such a place in your beliefs that you can share with so much conviction what you think with others. 

Then there’s influence. Influence is the byproduct of certainty because, once you are saying something so confidently, you’re going to be perceived as credible and people will listen. That’s all influence is, an ability to affect someone’s thoughts and behaviors. Your certainty carries a frequency that encourages others to believe what you believe, which enacts that very change within their thoughts and behaviors.

Then last is impact. Once you can influence someone, you have the ability to redirect them and send them on a better path. You have the ability to disrupt the way things were headed and introduce an alternative way that, when you have good intentions, is for the better. And that’s what we’re all working toward - living lives that make an impact.

But you’ve got to start with certainty, and let me tell you a personal example of this. Would you say that I’m an inspirational person? Well it hasn't always been that way. On my college soccer team people would laugh any time I tried to say something motivational before a game. But in the personal development realm I cultivated certainty, I started learning theories to a new depth and tested my beliefs in different ways where now I can say with so much certainty what I know. That belief and confidence in myself has led to influence and ultimately impact. And while it still doesn't feel right to say, many people have told me that I'm inspirational.

To summarize: Certainty ->Influence -> Impact.