What is Inside-Out Communication?
May 23, 2023
Detecting Bullsh*t
July 22, 2023
Credibility: An Outward View
of Inside Communication
My last blog post addressed inside-out communication—the ground floor of Generative Communication. For our interactions with others to be useful and productive, they must be authentic. And authenticity starts with the conversations we have with ourselves—inside our heads and hearts!
Exploring the essence of our core integrity, acknowledging our vulnerabilities, and examining our unique lifeviews are good ways to prompt the internal conversations that help put us in touch with our authentic selves.
But that’s just the start.
Authenticity is the quality of being genuine or real, believable, and trustworthy as experienced by those with whom we are communicating! Centuries ago, Aristotle talked in terms of ethos—a speaker’s credibility as perceived by his audience—to be among the key elements of persuasive communication. In his view and reinforced by communication scholars since, credibility includes three dimensions: competence, goodwill, and trustworthiness.1,2
- Competence refers to the extent to which others perceive a communicator to be sufficiently knowledgeable about a topic and cites credible sources to back up claims.
- Goodwill refers to the extent others believe that a communicator has their best interests at heart.
- Trustworthiness refers to the degree others perceive a communicator to be presenting truthful information in a balanced, non-manipulative, non-coercive way that follows ethical principles.
In other words, credibility—that is, authenticity on all three fronts: competence, goodwill, and trustworthiness—is how 
one’s inside-out communication is heard and understood by others!
Some scholars3 include a fourth dimension of credibility: dynamism.
Dynamism refers to the degree to which audience members perceive a speaker to be outgoing and animated. Two components of dynamism are charisma and energy. Charisma refers to a mixture of abstract and concrete qualities that make a speaker attractive to an audience. The dynamism of speakers can also be seen through their demonstration of goodwill toward the audience, or whether the audience believes the speaker has their best interests at heart.
Charisma is difficult to develop intentionally. Some people seem to have a naturally charismatic personality, while others do not. I, for one, am pretty darn sure I don’t have one. Though I’m heartened by Stiff and Mongeau’s and others’ findings that although everyone can’t embody this first aspect of dynamism, the other component of dynamism, energy, is something that everyone can tap into. Communicating enthusiasm for your topic and audience by presenting relevant content, and using engaging delivery strategies such as vocal variety and eye contact, can increase your dynamism.
So, there we have it.
IF we want to be—AND be perceived and experienced by others as—credible generative communicators, we must consciously initiate and sustain our ongoing inside-out communication. The conversations we have with ourselves in thought and, perhaps, journaling require us to be honest with ourselves about who we are, what we stand for, and what we intend to accomplish in our interactions with others. With a little practice, doing so becomes second nature.
Questions to reflect upon in a conversation with yourself may include some like these:
- Am I genuinely as well-informed as I think I am or want to be? Or am I trying to convince myself and others I’m in the “know?”
- Do I stop and think about how an action I’m advocating may negatively affect other people?
- Am I stretching the truth in order to get people to agree with me? Or am I deliberately conveying a message that I know will excite people in favor of my view regardless of the facts? Am I being honest with myself here?
But wait a minute! What about the other guy?
What about the people we encounter whose credibility we 
come to doubt? Their claims don’t appear to match the facts as you study them. Their words and actions may seem reactionary: offensive, defensive, incendiary, inconsistent, or even incoherent. Their logic doesn’t seem to hold up even though what they’re saying may appeal to your foundational instincts, your values, and your desires.
How do we communicate generatively with people whose authenticity seems compromised, even as we strive for our own authenticity through our inside-out communication
The answer is: with attentive awareness. We’re all fallible human beings. We say and do stupid things, some unconsciously. To be generative in our interactions with ourselves and others requires us to accommodate and forgive the ordinary contradictions of being human.
At the same time, God (in whatever form we conceive) gave us brains! It’s up to us to use them, which takes us back to our inside-out conversations.
We can guide ourselves toward the practice of healthy skepticism by asking and answering ourselves questions that can inform our interpretations and judgments that, in turn, inform our outside communication behaviors.
The art of healthy skepticism—critical thinking—is a particular kind of inside-out communication that deserves its own blog post. Suffice it to say, our ability to take in, evaluate, and accept, reject or modify information is the natural process of learning we’ve been employing since birth.
1 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203871539-34/measure-source-credibility
2 https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ojpp20120200015_60107254.pdf
3Stiff, James B. and Mongeau, Paul A; Persuasive Communication Third Edition, 2016 The Guilford Press
2 Comments
Thank you Mary..very informative and interesting. Take care.
Thanks for your supportive comment, Cecile!