Want People To Trust You MORE In Your Videos Then Do LESS Of This One Thing

Videos are being used more and more to screen job applicants. How trustworthy you appear on video is critical.

How do you rate your KLT factor in real life? That’s your Know Like Trust factor. The more people know, like and trust you:

• the more likely they are to want to be a part of your circle of influence, 
• the more likely they are to follow your directives if you are a leader, 
• the more likely they are to want to do business with you. 

Video is great for building KLT because it lets human interactions happen when you’re not there. It’s convenient. Both for the maker and the viewer. 

The problem can be that our desire for convenience as the maker can get in the way of the effectiveness of our message.

Here’s one simple thing you can do to mimic the trust we have in face to face meetings that can sometimes be lost in the artifice of video.

Stop hand holding your smartphone

Hand holding is comfortable. It’s easy. It’s convenient. It feels almost natural. But if you have a choice, don’t. Steady your camera. Rest in on something. Hang it on something. Prop it against something. Google what-to-use-when-you-don’t-have-a-tripod. 

You benefit in four ways.

Avoid the Vertical Trap

Stops you videoing in vertical format. It might be easier and convenient and comfortable to hand hold your smartphone this way but as soon as you get into any sort of post-production and editing, you limit what you can achieve.

The technology may change to adapt to this, but it is a long way from it, so don’t.

Leverage the Triangle

In artistic composition, there is a technique called triangular composition. A triangle is inherently interesting. It worked for Joe Rosenthal in his raising the flag at Iwo Jima, one of the iconic photos from World War 2. And it worked for Leonardo Da Vinci with Mona Lisa. It’ll work for you.

The easiest way to make triangular composition work for us when we are presenting videos is to include our hands. Immediately we have a triangle weighted by our hands beneath, with the apex of the triangle being our face, our most valuable communication tool. We have created a visually appealing image. Barack Obama understands this intuitively. It worked for him. It’ll work for you.

Punctuate Your Prose

You free up two very valuable communicating tools: your hands. Our hands are expressive and they are brilliant for when you need to:

• underline a point, 
• contain an argument, 
• show precision, 
• expand the enormity of your idea.

Satisfy The Caveman In Us

Your hands say trust me. Try this. Next time you meet someone for the first time keep your hands behind your back. You’d weird them out of course but they’d be thinking after a while, ‘what are you hiding back there?’

There is a behavioural theory that as caveman we were distrustful of someone who didn’t show their hands empty. They could be hiding a rock that with one hit could end badly for you. We still respond to this at a deep subconscious level. 

We wave a friendly wave with an open palm facing the recipient. We protest “It wasn’t me” or “Back off” with two hands raised, palms out to show our lack of ill will. Open palms build trust.

So next time you are thinking ‘I’ll just knock out a quick video’, next time you are sending in a video application for a job, if you have already given some thought to ways you can simply support your camera, then you can free your two wonderful hands and put them to work for you.