Credibility is a critical foundation for personal and professional success. It is also a currency that affords you the opportunity to be heard, respected, and influential. Short of carrying your résumé around with you, though, how do you express your credibility to others without seeming arrogant or disingenuous?

Fortunately, there are three simple ways to increase your credibility quotient—demonstrating, questioning, and synthesizing. Before we dive in, let’s take a look at what credibility is.

CREDIBILITY DEFINED

Your credibility is the sum total of your expertise and experience in a particular domain. When working with my students at Stanford Graduate School of Business and with my coaching clients, I distinguish two types of credibility: career/college credibility and Costco credibility.

Think of career/college credibility as what you might itemize on your LinkedIn profile. It represents your learnings and time served in various jobs, internships, and relationships. Your credibility comes from association with these institutions and people via connections and acquired knowledge and experience.

Costco credibility demonstrates to others the process you went through to arrive at your accomplishments. Costco convinces customers that its products are valuable via free samples and product demonstrations. Likewise, you relay credibility by your own experiences. For example, walking people through previous successes, testimonials, and case studies. Actual results can ground your credibility in reality.

Combining these two types of credibility maximizes the likelihood others will have confidence in you.

CREDIBILITY DEMONSTRATED

When it comes to displaying credibility, think “show” rather than “tell.” When you show your credibility, you provide a tangible example of your experience. Seeing, as the saying goes, is believing. Three tools to help with this include stories, questions, and synthesis.

• Stories

Imagine you’re a junior team member meeting a new client for the first time. You want to use your self-introduction as an opportunity to establish credibility. A “telling” approach often relies heavily on itemizing elements from your career/college credibility, and might sound like this:

“Hi, I’m Micah and I am happy to be here. Prior to my two years at this company, I interned at consulting company AAA and earned an MBA from Stanford GSB. I hold certificates in program management and design thinking.”

Conversely, “showing” reveals your credibility through story and testimonial. You might say, “Hi, I’m Micah and I’m excited to be part of my third transformation team. Much like with my last project, I see an opportunity to leverage AI project management tools to come up with creative strategies and assess our progress. Last time, our client said she loved how efficient and creative our implementation was, and she ended up recommending us to another division to execute a similar approach.”

In this scenario, “showing” enables the client to immediately see and connect with your expertise and how it can benefit their team.

• Questions

Intentional questions are another way to show your credibility. The quality and insightfulness of your questions can display your level of understanding.

For example, if you are interviewing for a training job and are asked if you have any questions for your interviewer, you might ask how much time developers dedicate to documenting their products prior to courses being offered. This question demonstrates your detailed knowledge of what makes for successful training programs.

• Synthesis

The final way to show credibility is to identify and clearly communicate subtle connections or causes. Revealing these connections allows you to display your nuanced and sophisticated understanding of your topic.

Let’s say you are an investor interested in working with in-demand founders. They’ve stated that trust is a big criterion in selecting their investment group. In conversation with them, you highlight that you believe their new business is not only a platform that offers value, but the foundation for an ecosystem of customers, partners, and suppliers to more deeply connect. Based on this insight, the founders are impressed with your ability to look deeper into their business and provide a unique perspective based on your experience.

Credibility is a critical element for successful relationships of all types and goes beyond simply listing your qualifications. Leveraging Costco credibility—using powerful stories, asking intentional questions, and providing insightful synthesis—will give others firsthand experience of your expertise and competence.