How Do You Influence Others?

The definition of influence is the ability to control or affect actions of other people or things. When I hear this, a story comes to mind of a father and son walking by a glassy lake. The father bends down and picks up a rock and skips it across the water. The son watches in awe. “Dad, how’d you do that?” he asks. So the father patiently teaches his son the art of skipping rocks.

After a while, the boy looks at the water noticing something. “Dad, there are ripples all over the water. Where did they come from?”

“They came from you,” the father says. “Every time you skip a rock it leaves little ripples in the water.”

“But,” the boy counters, “the rock didn’t sink there.”

“You’re correct: the rock sank out there. But the rock doesn’t have to sink to create those ripples. It just has to touch the water.”

“Then the rock created all those ripples,” the boy decides.

“No,” says the father as he reaches down to pick up a smooth, perfect rock. “This rock here will never create any ripples if I leave it here on the shore.” He hands the rock to his son. The boy tosses the rock, and it skips several times before disappearing. “The rock only creates those ripples because you gave it power. You created those ripples when you threw the rock and no matter where it touches the water, even for a split second, it created ripples.”

Influence is the ability to affect other people or things. We are like the boy, randomly tossing out ideas, randomly doing an action, and not noticing the ripples those ideas and actions are creating. But also our ideas and actions, alone, don’t make ripples if we just keep them in our mind. When we toss out words, kind or otherwise, we affect others. We even affect people who the words were not intended for.

Influence is the largest aspect of leadership. If you took only one concept of leadership through your life, this is the one to take. You as a leader, with or without a title, influence others. Your ideas, actions, and living, affect others.