The "L" Factor

Tim Sanders is a Christian business man who I first learned about when I read his book, Love is the Killer App. At that time he was the leadership coach at Yahoo who used Christian principles to help Yahoo.com grow and prosper. Tim has also written the book, The Likeability Factor. How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams. Although this book is not about evangelism, there are some very important principles that do relate to how we successfully practice our evangelism.

According to Tim, “talent and timing are very important in life, but the likeability factor is the tie breaker in life. The L-factor is your capacity to consistently produce positive emotions in the lives of other people.” This does not mean you tell people what they want to hear, rather it means you practice all of the four critical personality traits:
1. Friendliness: The ability to communicate, “I like you.”
2. Relevance: The ability to communicate, “I relate to you.”
3. Empathy: The ability to communicate, “I can see things from your point of view.”
4. Realness: The ability to communicate, “I can be trusted, I will do what I say.”

A person can be trained in all the evangelism methods and strategies and would thus be very talented in the area of evangelism. A person of evangelistic talent is very good, but talent is not enough. A person can also be available at all the right times to do evangelism and could be said to have good timing. A person with evangelistic timing is also very good, but this is also not enough. What we need to add to talent and timing is the likeability factor.

Too many times I have seen Christians neglect evangelistic talent and timing resulting in them not witnessing to others about their faith in Jesus Christ. I have also seen fellow Christians use their talent and timing in ways that communicate to the prospect that they have encountered a person who sees them as a conquest for the sake of Jesus or as just another evangelistic notch in the evangelism belt. Either way, these encounters usually do not result in successful evangelism.

I believe the likeability factor has enormous implications for those who want to be effective in leading others to faith in Jesus Christ. If we desire to become more effective in our personal evangelistic efforts, I suggest we begin with the L-factor. When we are friendly toward others we prove to them that we really like them. We then begin to have influence with them. When we show others that we are relevant to them and can relate to them, we have opened doors in our relationship with them that will help them listen to us. When we empathize with the other person, we not only show them that we can see things from their point of view, but we also earn the right to speak to them in their times of need. When we prove our realness and our trustworthiness to others, we have become important to them and thus have earned to privilege to not only share our faith but to be taken seriously about what we believe.

When we take seriously our relationships with non-believers, we begin to see them with the eyes of our Savior. As we invest our lives in the lives of those whom God has given us access, we are also given opportunities to influence them toward God’s Kingdom. When we become “likeable” it reaps evangelistic opportunity and success. Let’s all work on our “L-factor.”

David Sundeen
Director of Evangelism
Minnesota Wisconsin Baptist Convention