With influencers present all over the world and especially on the internet, one may wonder If the notion of control has changed.

It hasn’t.

With social media, our potential has been scaled. The opportunities to gain influence are massive.

But our ability to influence doesn’t change that other people still have to commit to giving us their attention, to following our ideas, to engage with our offering, whatever it is.

There is no reason to let go of the opportunity to exercise our influence.

But if we become attached to the idea that our influence needs to create the results we look for, we’ve lost our ability to influence others. Either we’ve lost them, and they disconnected from us, or we started deciding for them and disconnected from their reality ourselves.

In both cases, we lost their commitment to the project we wanted to engage them in.

Should they have decided to commit to us, they stepped into a blind trust. That’s when any disappointment in us can make it impossible to repair a relationship. Trust has become too fragile to be easily reestablished.