One of the questions I have most struggled with, and see so many other people grapple with, is this: where does my credibility come from? What qualifies me to say or do this? Who am I to stand up and speak?

I think we crave some piece of paper that we hope in our hearts will magically erase our self doubt and fear and allow us to show up and be taken seriously. We hope a credential, or enough credentials, will take away our fear and smooth our way, ensuring people will enthusiastically listen to us.

But this does raise an important and real question – what does give us credibility? In my experience, our credibility can come from seven sources – they are:

1.    Education

To have credibility in a certain field, you may need to have successfully studied and achieved very specific qualifications. In many areas of expertise, academic achievement is essential (there are no amateur brain surgeons, for example)...

2.    Experience

But equally, your expertise might be born directly from your own life experience, for example, perhaps you’ve transformed some of your own challenges and difficulties and achieved a degree of success for yourself?

3.    Visibility

Simply being seen and known and part of your credibility is simply being known by people and becoming visible to them.

4.    Past Results

Equally important is the overall history of tangible results that you’ve been able to help your clients to achieve thus far. 

5.    Active Demonstration

But perhaps the most powerful approach is to actively demonstrate your expertise by directly helping people to get tangible outcomes. When you’re able to demonstrate the benefits that applying your ideas can create, it completely avoids the need for hype.

There are two ways of approaching this -

i)  Free Information

ii)   Paid Products

6.    Testimonials and endorsements

What other people positively say about you has tremendous power either peers or the people you look up to.

7.    Your own character, integrity and personality – your embodiment of your expertise

Much of your credibility will come from your very presence. People will simply recognize that you embody what you teach, you are living the lessons and are therefore someone with integrity that they can trust. This is your beingness, and also comes from your desire to be of service.

Two levels of credibility:

I think credibility works on two levels:

1.               How credible you appear to others

2.               How credible you feel to yourself

Both are obviously crucial – you need to feel a degree of internal integrity with yourself and let your credibility be clear to others, otherwise you won’t each the people you can help. 

Audit yourself

Take an honest audit of these six areas for yourself. Ask friend and colleagues for their feedback. Identify and own your strengths. Identify your weaknesses and see what you might do to increase both your feeling of credibility and your demonstration of credibility.

Love, authenticity and credibility

I think people listen to us because we have something authentic, inspiring and useful to say – and that we showed up and said it in the first place. But I think on a deeper and spiritual level you are a messenger and you are uniquely qualified as such. I love the way that Martin Luther King expressed how we are already qualified when he said, "Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle ...Einstein's theory of relativity ...(or) the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." Each of us has a soul generated by love, even if we are unaware of it. That is how we were created.