If you’ve been to one of my workshops, , you probably felt frustrated more than once when I insisted that you slooooooow down in conversations, and listen far longer than feels natural or comfortable before you offer your advice/opinions/solutions. (Why? Because that’s the key to being influential). And you probably wanted to know how to know when it’s OK to switch gears. Today’s tip reviews the answer.

If you’ve been a Weekly Tip reader for a while, you know that empathy gets a lot of my time and attention. It is directly tied, after all, to the surprising secret to being influential. What fascinates me about empathy is that there is always room to improve. Always.

You may know I was on vacation last month. It was actually more staycation than vacation, marked by a lot of good down time that included some high-quality online binge watching. And wouldn’t you know it, one night I got to see some great trust-building lessons in action thanks to a 12-year-old fiddler from Piney Flats, Tennessee.

This week’s tip is a retrospective on three extraordinary women, each of whom have something to teach us about trust-building:

I’m often telling you about the super-smart clients I regularly work with. (There’s a good chance you’re one of them.) I’m also beating the listening drum a lot. One thing I’ve learned in 10+ years of leading workshops is it’s especially challenging for super-smart people to listen to others when they don’t agree with what’s being said.

I watched a senior leader do something unintentionally trust-diminishing the other day. The hardest part about it was seeing myself in him. I wonder if you might see yourself as well.

A colleague recently sent me a photograph of an ad from a magazine in India (thank you, Sumesh). It’s for a cellular carrier. I was floored by it because it’s rife with compelling trust-building lessons.

“Tough love” is a phrase that comes to mind when I think about trusted advisorship. There’s the love part: traits like compassion, sensitivity, understanding, curiosity, empathy. And there’s bringing a certain toughness, too: a willingness to ask a really provocative question, put a stake in the ground, or put hard truths on the table. Today’s tip focuses on how to do the latter in a way that actually builds trust, rather than breaks it.

I lead workshops to a lot of really smart subject matter experts, most of whom are right a lot of the time—and like others to see it that way. I help them begin to see why this is a problem, which I’ll bottom-line for you with a favorite quote from my co-author Charlie Green: “Being right is vastly overrated. Being right too soon just pisses people off.”

Charlie and I got to share a lot of great stories in The Fieldbook. In fact, for me it was the best part of writing the book. One of my favorite stories is a reprise from The Trusted Advisor. It tells the tale that’s part cautionary, part inspirational, all business. And worth repeating.