Building reputation is one of the most important practices of being successful. It could make or break you. It may hamper or stagnate your growth if you develop a bad one. People with the best reputations often skyrocket to the top of both the business and social world. In business, if your reputation is positive, business will grow due to word-of-mouth referrals, and people lining up to work with and for you. In the social sphere, a person with a genuine and kind reputation may very well connect with more people and have better relationships than those who don’t. Why is reputation so powerful in the first place, and how do we establish ourselves as someone who is deserving of a good reputation?
First impressions
Your reputation proceeds you. Many people will make judgements about you before they even meet you based on what they hear. One of the most common phrases in the world today is “don’t judge a book by its cover”, meaning don’t judge someone by what you think when you first see them or hear about them. This is impossible due to human nature of making preconceptions about people before getting to know them. This is why developing your reputation is so important. People want to talk to and associate themselves with dependable, confident individuals and if you don’t have that reputation, you have a pretty deep hole to dig yourself out of. Perceptions are hard to change once they are established, so it is important to have your positive reputation proceed you.
Reputations stick And People Talk
In both the business and social world, what you do sticks with you and becomes how people perceive you. If you treat your clients bad, you are unlikely to have others work with you. If you are miserable all the time during social life, people will not want to be around you. It is important to always put your best self forward at all times. When getting started in a business, it can be difficult and overwhelming to build your reputation. You may miss tasks, be unorganized, and not perform for your clients, customers, or boss. You have dug a hole for yourself and the deeper you go, the harder it is to escape. Holding yourself accountable and making sure you are organized and on top of everything will quickly build you as a person people can rely on. Once you gain the notoriety you have initially sought out, things move much more smoothly from there on out. People feel as though they can count on you more for the things they need to get done. In turn, your business and or social life will flourish, and your life will run like a well-oiled machine. People who have that kind of high-end reputation get people to come to them without having to seek it through word of mouth. This is how you take your life to the next level. When people tie a name to something about you whether it be a quality you have or something you do, you will be the first person they think of when that thing comes up in their lives.
Real Life Reputation examples
In my career of real estate, reputation goes a long way. The real estate business is tough to build yourself up in, but once you reach the pinnacle of reputation and track record, people will seek you out to ask for your services rather than you seeking them out. Reputation building allows for businesses, including my own in real estate to scale. If I do a great job for a wide variety of clients, chances are they will tell their friends, neighbors, family, co-workers, etc. about me and the job I did for them. This will likely lead to some of them reaching out and asking for my services based on my reputation. An endless funnel of recurring business stems from this because everyone knows someone and reputation by word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire.
Creating your own path
Your reputation is in your control. This is so important for both business and personal life. When you are building yourself up, make sure you are always putting your best foot forward. Once you get a reputation for something, it’s hard to get rid of if it is something that affects you negatively. Don’t let this fact get you on edge because that may lead to making a big mistake. Simply do the best you can and be the best person you can. You may make some mistakes here and there but that is expected and you should learn from them. Your reputation proceeds you always, it is under your control that you make that first impression count!