我也有话要说（十五）做一个值得信赖的人

讲者的名气在整个讲演过程中起着巨大的作用。名人做讲演的时候，甚至在他尚未到场之前，抑或听众还在路上之时，听众已经“准备好鼓掌”了。听众对“想当然的精彩”充满了期待。

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20111113105204/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/9742.html

I Have Something to Say Too (15): Be Someone Worth Trusting

> By Li Xiaolai · 2010-07-16 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113105204/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/9742.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

A speaker's fame plays an enormous role throughout a talk. When a celebrity gives a talk, even before he arrives, or while the audience is still on the way, the audience is already "ready to applaud." The audience is full of anticipation for "the brilliance taken for granted." In psychology there's a special term describing this situation, "**Pre-persuasion**" (translated as 预先说服?). That is, before the speaker opens his mouth, the audience has already in a sense been "won over"...

It's very hard for an ordinary person to achieve this. Or, to put it bluntly, it's simply impossible to achieve. (If) you're an ordinary person, before your self-introduction (or the host's introduction), the audience doesn't even know who you are (some audience members may not even have noticed the title of the talk, even if the title is hanging on the stage). So "Pre-persuasion," that wonderful state, simply doesn't exist when an ordinary person speaks.

So what to do?

A fairly effective strategy is (since you're not an authority) to **make sure all the information you cite (evidence, arguments and so on) comes from reliable sources.**

You must not only make sure all the information you use to prove your conclusions is "from reliable sources," but also show these sources to the audience. In fact, sometimes we even need to prove to the audience "why the source itself is reliable."

Actually, this isn't only something to do on the podium; it's a principle to carry through in life from beginning to end: doing things, speaking, writing articles... whatever you do, there must be a basis. Don't do things without a basis, and don't say things without a basis.

This seems a matter of course, but if you open your eyes and observe the world around you, you'll find that people who strictly follow this principle are very few. Why? This principle is easy to state and hard to practise.

Many years ago, when I'd just started working in English teaching, I often had to prove to [Translator's note: the original writes 像, literally "like"; 向 ("to") is meant; translated by the intended sense] the audience that "taking the TOEFL doesn't require as large a vocabulary as legend has it." Legend had it that you needed a vocabulary of twelve thousand words, while my conclusion was that around five thousand was already enough. However, at that time I wasn't yet widely recognized; I was a nobody. I stood on stage, and below the stage there was no "pre-persuasion."

What I had to do was very hard, and also very simple. It was very hard because people wouldn't necessarily believe what I said; it was very simple because I only needed to take out all the evidence and show it to the audience. Every time I had to tell everyone on stage how I'd turned twenty-odd years of real test papers into electronic form (typing them in by hand myself), then what software I used for the statistics (WordSmith), what the statistical method was (occurring more than once and fewer than seventeen times), what the statistical results were like (in fact, the Tokens that appeared in twenty-odd years of real tests totaled only a little over 9800), how to understand this result (go, goes, went, gone could only count as one word; interest, interests, interesting, interested perhaps couldn't be counted as one word), and what the significance of this conclusion actually was (the difficulty of the TOEFL had in fact merely been artificially inflated; many students had merely been scared off...)...

I set myself a few principles:

> - Use only **authoritative** materials as a basis
> - Use only **public** authoritative materials as a basis (that is, what I can obtain, others can obtain too)
> - Make sure the reasoning process is **simple** (only this way can it be kept easy to understand)

Every time, I could clearly observe on stage the change in the audience's attitude. From suspicion to acceptance, from acceptance to understanding, from understanding to sudden enlightenment, from sudden enlightenment to anticipating new surprises...

In fact, in the end, it's hard to say whether life habits seeped into work habits or, conversely, work habits seeped into life habits. But in the end it becomes a habit. Keep it up over a long time, give it time, and in the end you'll be regarded by the people around you as someone "worth trusting"—this is in fact the so-called "pre-persuasion."

If one day your "reputation spreads far and wide" and everyone knows you're someone who "absolutely doesn't talk nonsense," then "pre-persuasion" will no longer be something you can look at but never reach.