There was a study done a few years back that asked audiences what they looked for in a speaker.  What came up at the top of the list was trust and credibility.  Over the years, I’ve studied how best to create those good feelings in the minds of audience members, and observed both good and bad speakers with these ideas in mind.  Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Both trust and credibility have a verbal (content) and a non-verbal (body language) component.  Credibility is established by showing audiences that you understand their problems.  Trust comes from showing audiences how to solve them.

In non-verbal terms, trust is built up with physical openness to the audience.  The opposite body language – all the forms of closed behavior that speakers are prone to exhibit – creates the inverse feeling, distrust.  I’ve seen that happen over and over again with even experienced speakers who wrestle with the urge to protect themselves from the gaze of hundreds of pairs of eyes – by closing off their body language, even if only partially.

Credibility is created with authoritative body language and with an authoritative voice.  Stand tall, holding your head high, with good posture, and you’re half-way there.  To go the rest of the distance, use pitch properly, going up to show emotion, and coming down at the ends of phrases to show certainty.

In terms of content, credibility is best established by someone else – the person who introduces you.  If you don’t get a good introduction, then demonstrate your expertise with carefully selected statistics and factoids from your field of endeavor.  I say “carefully” because you don’t want to overdo it.  Audiences resent know-it-alls who bury their listeners in useless, hard-to-recall data. 

Trust in content comes from taking your audience on a journey that changes their view of the world in some meaningful way.  Take them from “why” – the question they ask at the beginning of a speech (why am I here, why should I care) to ‘how’ – the question they’ll be asking at the end if you’ve done your job right.  I say much more about this in the new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.