Suddenly You are a Brand

A client started our session today expressing great distress about a development plan conversation in which it was suggested he could “greatly” benefit from “Build Your Personal Leadership Brand” training. He asked how come he woke up in the morning to suddenly become a brand. Well, in all fairness, the concept has been around for quite some time. When we talk about building a personal brand, it’s about establishing a good professional reputation. Just as having a strong corporate brand works to build business and customer recognition, building a strong personal brand opens up professional opportunities in getting better jobs, getting on the “fast track” to advancement, and gaining greater influence.

Businesses create vision and mission statements. Creating a personal brand begins much the same way by creating a personal vision. Even if you haven’t consciously cultivated a personal brand, it exists nonetheless. It might be an interesting exercise to conduct your own 360 review asking friends, colleagues and former bosses how they would describe you and what qualities they associate with you. Creating a brand is mostly about clearly identifying what drives you, your strengths, and the qualities that make you unique. Try and create your own personal tagline, a short and clear message that defines who you are and what you do. This should be your LinkedIn headline. Once you create your brand, you can start taking action to deliver on your brand promise.

Our personal brand is the image we project to the world. The connections we form are based on that image. Forming connections is a two-way street; we need to be strategic about the opportunities we work to attract, and once our reputation precedes us, we start to attract the opportunities we seek.

There are 3 key elements to having a well-defined personal brand:

Defining Yourself

Self-definition starts by answering 3 timeless question “who am I?” This question encourages the next questions “what do I really want?” to be followed by the third in the set “what do I have to offer?” There are no wrong answers. It might be possible to build a brand around a “fake” self, but it is never sustainable in the long run. Our brand should be founded on authenticity. It should be about who we are, what our work-life purpose is, and what we bring to the table. As a starting point to develop your brand, you need to brainstorm a list of all the things you are good at; your areas of expertise or those you are interested in. Circle the items that you are most passionate about. If you’re having difficulty narrowing the list down, pretend you are packing for an important business trip. What must you have in your suitcase? Remember that the list should be re-visited periodically. Things are changing rapidly; we must stay current and relevant in our chosen field. Maintaining a personal brand entails lifelong learning. If you are not learning, you're not growing. If you are stagnating, you’ll be left behind.

Projecting Yourself

Self-projection is about answering the question “what do I want to be known for?” It’s about visibility and credibility. Once you define your best self, it’s time to highlight it for the world to see. We all have variations of ourselves. Creating our brand is choosing how we present ourselves positively in our interactions with others and online. Nowadays social media is the engine that drives our personal brand. Make sure your personal media profiles are consistently aligned with your brand. In the cyberspace, we are what we post. Many hiring managers review candidates’ social profiles before making a hiring decision. Be sure to have a presence and be a participant. If you are nowhere to be found, employers may question whether you have the required skills to keep current with the latest trends. It’s always interesting to see what pictures come up when doing a simple Google search. Be careful not to post anything you don’t want your current employer or potential employers seeing. But most important, you must make an ongoing effort to manage and maintain your brand and online presence. You never know when the next opportunity will present itself or from what source.

Extending Yourself

Self-extension is the key to growing your personal brand. It’s about being generous in keeping the balance of “give and take.” Networking should be an ongoing activity, not only when you are looking for a new job. Extending yourself to others is the process of building personal and professional connections on the basis of mutual benefits and as a strong pipeline with a steady flow of referrals for professional growth opportunities. But truly, the primary reason to connect is to learn. Engage with others in your field and anyone who can enhance your knowledge. Attend networking meetings. Join the conversation. Find a mentor. Networking requires the investment of time and energy to fully enjoy the benefits of a strong professional network.

Building a personal brand is like planting a garden. Your work is not done once you lay the groundwork and plant the seeds. It takes time and dedicated effort to grow and expand a garden and to prevent weed invasion. Creating and building your unique brand is an organic and ongoing process. And we are all a work in progress.

Mental Rest & Brain Breaks

In running any race: racing to the top of a mountain, racing to the top of the corporate ladder or when racing through the day managing a busy schedule, it’s a good strategy to try and find the rest stops along the way to be able to continue to run with perseverance and endurance. The good news is that such opportunities are easy to find and are available all around us. We just need to remind ourselves to pause and take intentional breaks to let ourselves recharge, re-energize and get re-inspired.

I’ve always struggled to embrace the idea of rest, or taking a break. Yes, I am that person who always has to be doing something being constantly busy and working on many different projects simultaneously. I do my best thinking and get my best ideas through movement and physical activity. My relaxation time is when I’m running, hiking, dancing, kayaking, stretching, or doing my hula hoop. But I get my mental rest and inspiration when I interact with other people. Inspiration comes to me in many forms: having a great conversation, reading a great book or an article, listening to a TED Talk, and scrolling through my LinkedIn and Facebook newsfeeds. Everyone has a story; some stories make me think, some will put a smile on my face, some will move me, and some will truly inspire me.  Stories about people overcoming adversity and doing extraordinary things leave me spiritually uplifted and strengthen my belief in human potential for creativity and greatness.

I just took a short break to watch a YouTube video about Jessica Cox, an inspirational woman who is doing extraordinary things achieving what seems to be the impossible. Jessica was born with no arms. She uses her feet to perform not only day-to-day tasks but also anything and everything from gymnastics and tap dancing to martial arts and flying planes. She is the first woman without arms to earn a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and is the first licensed pilot with no arms. And she is doing it all with a big smile and a great sense of humor. There’s a great moment in the video when she is about to take a flying lesson wearing a T-shirt that says “Look ma, no hands.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd2JGzuAfl4

Break over! I am in awe and feeling inspired. With a positive attitude, creativity and determination even the sky has no limit. Taking a break from our work, even if to click through photos of singing dogs, is not procrastinating. We need breaks to boost our productivity. Like any other muscle, our brain tires from repeated strenuous mental activity. Breaks following focused concentration allow us to recharge and gain a fresh perspective on complex work problems. And it’s been scientifically proven:

https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/205427

OK, so now we know that even brief breaks improve our focus. Just like it’s necessary to take breaks from physical activity to recuperate and prevent injuries, taking breaks at work to rest and relax is equally important. Embracing the downtime to refresh, we’ll become more energized, engaged, and efficient. And there’s a simple technique to do it – The Pomodoro Technique. All you need is a timer. How to do it? Break your large projects into a series of tasks and your work day down into timed intervals (called “Pomodoros”) with scheduled short breaks in-between. The method calls for a concentrated work period of 25 minutes and then a 5-minute break. At the end of a “pomodoro” you mark your progress. After 4 “pomodoros,” which equal 100 minutes of work time and 15 minutes of break time, you earn a 20 minute break.

To learn more: http://pomodorotechnique.com/get-started/

It’s my experience that in a real-world office environment with calls, meetings, and constant interruptions, it may not be feasible to fully follow the method and time intervals. However, modifying and adapting the process to what works best in any given day, the technique trains our brains to focus and helps improve our concentration over time. To go back to the analogy of running, we need to learn how to work optimally in short sprints to be able to finish a challenging long-distance race.

Less is More

A client has sent me this link to Grant Blakeman’s 3-minute speech and asked for my thoughts about the concept of “negative spaces.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES_u5b1CAr4

Well, it just so happens that I am currently working on creating a logo to represent my growing business. Up until now, I took the DIY approach in creating my website and business cards, embracing the concept of “imperfect but good enough.” But growing is about knowing when it’s time for a change. A client who is a corporate and personal branding expert gave me a good talking to explaining why I need a great logo to represent my company (a website overhaul is next in line...). He went on to explain that a great design work takes into account the used (positive) and unused (negative) space. The negative, or white, space is often more critical than the design itself because it brings the design into focus. With any piece of design you must have a negative space. In his opinion, the more negative space, the better. It brings balance and symmetry to the design and draws people in. Less is more!

And this idea is so true when living in a world of choice overload. Most of us could probably use some negative space to gain clarity about what matters most to us and what we need in order to achieve a greater balance. Our minds run through endless loops of worry, fears, and wants, creating an “empty space” will allow us to take a break and quiet the mind to gain perspective and focus. It’s about creating the “me” time to ponder the meaning of our life whether by running, hiking, reading, gardening, or any  pastime activities we enjoy doing to reflect on who we are, what we want, and where we’d like to go next. It reminds me of the story about the businessman and the fisherman. This story is often told in “finding a purpose” –type workshops. I will go with the version told by the most passionate speaker claiming it originated in Brazil.

A successful businessman on vacation is sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village observing a fisherman unloading his boat. Since it is still early in the day, the businessman asks the fisherman why he doesn’t stay longer at sea to catch more fish. Confused by the question, the fisherman replies that he has enough fish to feed his family. Intrigued, the businessman asks what the fisherman is planning to do for the rest of the day. The fisherman responds saying that his daily routine is to wake up early every morning to go out to sea to catch a few fish, to spend the day with his family and to get together with his friends in the evenings to drink, play music and dance throughout the night. Now it is the businessman who gets confused feeling compelled to offer the fisherman advice on how to become more successful. He instructs the fisherman that he needs to spend more time at sea to catch more fish to then buy more boats until he has a fleet of boats, at which point he’d need to move to Sao Paulo to manage the growing business. Puzzled, the fisherman asks what would happen then. The businessman gets really excited explaining that if the fisherman works really hard for about 10-15 years he’d be able to either sell the company or go public. And then he would be very rich. “And then what?” The fisherman asks tentatively. The businessman answers triumphantly: “then you can go fishing in the morning, spend the day with your family, and party with your friends all night long.”

When we fail to incorporate negative space into our complex lives, we may end up losing sight of what’s really important and why we do the things we do, our purpose. We need to make sure we never get too busy making a living that we forget to make a life. But getting the balance right is tricky. There’s no formula to help us simplify our life and make things easier. Simplicity has a different meaning and a different value for every person, and it changes at different times in our life. At the core, it means spending most of our time doing what is important to us and learning to eliminate the non-essentials.

For me, this is the year of simplifying my life by taking the leap to start my own business. I had to let go of my anxieties and fears about money and learn to create the negative space in my life to bring to focus all that I have to offer. It’s still a work in progress….

But to keep with the theme of “less is more,” here’s the short list of how to simplify your life in just 2 steps:

• Identify what’s most important to you
• Eliminate everything else

Choice Overload

I was coaching a client who was looking for a new job in marketing and communications or business development. She worked really hard and followed a thoughtful and effective job-search strategy, which resulted in 3 job offers from her top 5 list of prospective employers. She should be over the moon, jumping for joy and on cloud nine, right? Wrong! She seems paralyzed by the number of options and feels stuck at a career crossroads with three great but very different options. Friends and family keep telling her that “it’s a great problem to have” and seem to find it hard to believe that this can be a hard place to be in. She is struggling to make a decision and is torn between three career paths to consider. She truly can’t decide what to do and is terrified of making “the wrong” decision.

Before getting to the “how to” approach to the very fortunate position of multiple offers, I’d like to talk about the core idea that when we have an abundance of choices it can actually make decision-making more difficult and very stressful. Too many choices can be overwhelming. In fact, there’s a name for it – choice overload. Psychologist Barry Schwartz offers great insights about how the freedom of choice hasn’t made us freer but rather more anxious and less satisfied. An overload of options, choices, and possibilities, especially when dealing with decisions that have significant implication such as which career to pursue, may cause analysis paralysis in decision making and be emotionally exhausting.

In his book “The Paradox of Choice: WhyMore Is Less” Schwartz explores decision-making in the context of consumerism and how having more choices actually makes shopping harder. But he also discusses a much wider range of difficult life decisions about family, leisure time, and career choices. Today, more than ever before, it is much harder to make these decisions. The more choices we have our confidence about our choices decreases, and our anticipation that we’ll be disappointed and regret our choice increases. With more options, we develop higher expectations and thus become less likely to be satisfied with what we choose and the things we have.

 

If you don’t have the time for a 300-page book, Schwartz’s 10-minute TED Talk will give you the general gist of his book.

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice

It is unfortunate that with the freedom of choice come the tyranny of “what if.” Often when we accomplish a goal: snag a new job, get a promotion, lose those last 10 pounds, the glow of achievement is short-lived. We then start experiencing that nagging feeling that we could have done better: asked for more money, could probably lose 5 more pounds, etc. Chasing better things to come is a never ending vicious cycle: the perfect body and the elusive dream- job, home, soul mate. No matter what we achieve, we tend to beat ourselves up over perceived mistakes and missed opportunities. We desperately try to grasp for more, live up to an ideal, to chase happiness.

BUT

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Isn’t it truly what we want? It’s not about the dream and the outcomes, it’s about the happiness and satisfaction we imagine we’ll find when we “get there.” But no one and nothing is perfect, and the grass is NEVER greener! Let’s stop chasing the “better” future and focus on what is right in front of us.

This is the secret to decision-making: being honest and clear about what we need to be happy. When logical reasoning and the careful consideration of the pros and cons don’t yield any clarity, we need to find the courage to listen to our inner voice, our intuition, our “gut feeling.” Since we can’t predict the future, we need to learn to get comfortable with imperfect choices and uncertain outcomes and trust that no matter what the future holds, we will be strong enough to find our way and be okay.

Give yourself a deadline and permission to make the best decision you can and start committing to your imperfect choice. The outcome is not a result of the decision you make but rather what you make of it and the actions you take as you move forward. You can always course correct later on. Every day is an opportunity for a new beginning. Be courageous to change what you can and be patient to keep positive as things unfold.