When you’ve been referred by someone you know to someone you don’t know, your reputation is what goes in front of you. “I’ve been working with her for many years and she’s really great at…”

Your reputation is what builds trust and helps people decide to work with you. It’s what gives them the confidence to call you, book you to speak, or ask you to run a training session for their organisation.

You can do all the marketing in the world, throwing stacks of money at social media or printing glossy brochures, but if you don’t have a good reputation, all that money and effort will be wasted.

Who Creates Your Reputation?

Given that your reputation is so important, it stands to reason that you should dedicate a lot of time and energy to building a really good reputation – one that will encourage other people to recommend you and to ask you to work with them. There is just one problem here. You can’t build your own reputation. You can do everything in your power to give your clients a fabulous service, at a great price with stacks of value. You can always answer the phone and always be on time and always smile, even when you feel like shouting at someone. And even then, you can’t build your own reputation.

Why not? Because it is your clients who define your reputation. Your reputation is defined by the way your clients feel when you’re working with them. It is how they feel during a coaching session; how they feel when they hear you give a speech; how they feel during one of your workshops. And to make life even harder, you can’t make someone else feel anything! You can’t make anyone else feel happy, or sad or inspired – no matter how hard you try. Emotions are strange beasts and we all feel differently. I can make a joke when I’m speaking to a group of people. Some of them will laugh and they will feel happy. Others will feel a bit miffed if they don’t get the joke. Some others might even feel offended. I cannot control the emotions of anyone else I speak to and neither can you.

How Can You Build Your Reputation?

So, if your reputation is built by how your clients feel as a result of your actions, and you can’t control how they feel, how on earth can you, as a coach, speaker or trainer, build the reputation you need to easily promote your business?

The trick lies in understanding the positive emotions that your clients feel when they are working with you or hearing you speak. When you understand what they are feeling as they hear your words, you can build on those emotions to ensure that they feel more of what they want to feel. If a client wants to feel like they are being looked after by someone with a safe pair of hands, do more to give them that certainty and those feelings of safety and security. If an audience wants to feel excited and hopeful about their future, make sure that you do whatever you can to encourage them to grow and develop.

These are just two examples. The research I’ve been doing over the last couple of years shows me that there are five different ways that your clients might want to feel. Over the next five months, I’m going to write about each of them in the next five issues of Scribbles. You can then decide which one works best for your business. I’ll give you tips on how to work out what your clients and your audiences are feeling when they work with you; and advice on how to deliver more of the positive emotions that your clients want to feel.

That should help you to build a great reputation!