Archives for posts with tag: Brand You
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How Are You Celebrating “Evaluate Your Life Day?”

October 19, 2012 //
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I haven’t been to the Hallmark store to see if there’s a card for it, but today is apparently “Evaluate Your Life” day. Being reminded to reflect on your life – where it is, where you want it to go – can be a valuable exercise. In the spirit of that thought, here’s a repost from an earlier series called “Brand You.”

Very Old New Job Security

Tom Peters was one of the early leaders of the “Brand You” movement. First writing about it in Fast Company magazine, he soon expanded into a series of books. Writing in “The Brand You 50”, Peters has the following comments about job security:

Job security – as we have known it – is vanishing.

So…what now?

My answer: Return to Job Security. Actually, it’s Very Old New Job Security.

It’s what job security was all about before – long before – Big Corporations. Before Social Security. And unemployment insurance. Before there was a big so-called safety net that had the unintended consequence of sucking the initiative, drive, and moxie out of millions of white-collar workers.

I’m talking about job security in the Colonies and in the first century after our country was founded. Which was:

  • Craft
  • Distinction
  • Networking skills

Craft = marketable skill… Determination = Memorable. Networking Skills = Word of Mouth Collegial Support.

It’s about being so good and meticulous and responsible, about what you do (and making sure that what you do is work that needs to be done) that the world taps a speed path to your laptop (or mobile phone – or iPad).

My modern-language term for this ancient, self-reliant, networked, word-of-mouth-dependent, distinguished craftsperson: Brand You.

What are you doing to create “Brand You?”

 

Other Brand You posts you might be interested in:

 

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Categories Brand You

2 Questions for Your Consideration

June 27, 2012 //
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Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and author of the book “Rules of Thumb“, thinks every leader needs to keep 2 lists:

  • What gets you up in the morning?
  • What keeps you up at night?

There is a lot for leaders to think about in those two sentences. Here is a summary of  Webber’s challenges:

Some people just have jobs. Others have something they really work at.

Some people are just occupied. Others have something that preoccupies them.

It makes all the difference in the world.

Consider this: you spend at least eight hours a day working, five days a week. A minimum of forty hours a week for at least forty-eight to fifty weeks a year. That’s a minimum of 1,920 hours a year. For how many years? You do the math.

What gets you up in the morning?

The level of energy put out by an organization’s people is one of the things that you are aware of as soon as you enter their space. There’s a buzz in the air (sometimes literally) created by people who are working  hard and working together. They want to be there – they came in ready to go.

What keeps you up at night?

This is a chance to be honest with yourself. Many times leaders rarely get a chance to reflect on the things that really matter to the organization’s goals. Most of the time, day-to-day urgent concerns crowd out broader issues that are the really important ones. The things that often keep leaders up are the things that never seem to find the time or place for serious engagement in the course of an ordinary workday.

We all want to do work that excites us. We want to care about things that concern us. So, about that list…

Take out a stack of three-by-five cards. Use one to write down the answer to the question “What gets you up in the morning?” Keep it to one sentence. If you don’t like your answer, throw away the card and start over – it’s only a card. Keep doing it until you’ve got an answer you can live with.

Now repeat the exercise for the question “What keeps you up at night?” Work at it until you’ve got an honest answer.

Now read your answers out loud to yourself. If you like them – if they give you a sense of purpose and direction – congratulations! Use them as a compass, checking from time to time to see if they’re still true.

If you don’t like one or both of your answers, you have a new question to consider: What are you going to do about it?

Whatever your answers are, you’re spending almost two thousand hours a year of your life doing it.

That makes it worthwhile to come up with answers you can not only live with but also live for.

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Categories BookNotes, Brand You, Personal Development

What’s Your Stock?

February 3, 2012 //
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Stock…

…the foundation for all classical French cooking.

At the CIA (that’s Culinary Institute of America), you start off your three-year education by learning how to peel vegetables and prepare a basic stock. You don’t do it once – you do it every day during the three-week rotation of the first class. Students move on after the first three weeks, but will continue to use the stock prepared by the next class of new students. Every three weeks, a new rotation of prospective chefs learn how to prepare stock.

A great stock is judged by:

  • Flavor
  • Clarity
  • Color
  • Body
  • Aroma

The perfect stock has what is referred to as a “neutral” flavor. This is a kind way of saying it doesn’t taste like anything you’re used to eating or would want to eat. But you can do a million different things with a great stock because it has the remarkable quality of taking on other flavors without imposing a flavor of its own. It offers its own richness and body anonymously. When you reduce it, it becomes its own sauce starter. You can add roux to stock and create a demi-glace, and with a demi-glace, you can make over a hundred distinct sauces that define classic French cooking.

What’s your stock?

Personally. Organizationally. However you want to define it.

What’s that basic “thing” you are, have, or do that makes everything else come together to make things happen?

Learn to make a basic stock, and the possibilities become endless.

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Categories Culinary, Personal Development

Expanding Your Capacity

September 8, 2011 //
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Earlier this summer, I reintroduced some thoughts on “capacity.” You can read them here.

Last night in our community group, the concept of capacity came up in our discussion of the current series our church is in. Entitled “The Prodigy in Me,” it’s all about discovering the invaluable gifts God has placed in each of us.

Picking up where the earlier post left off, our group realized last night that being emptied by serving and therefore being able to be filled again was only part of the understanding.

God wants us to have MORE capacity over time.

 If we are growing as disciples, our capacity to be filled AND to serve others should be growing as well.

How’s your capacity?

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Categories Brand You

Developing Your Creative Rhythm

August 3, 2011 //
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A lot of leader conversations I’m having these days center around the concepts of innovation, creativity, and ideation. The past two days’ posts here and here dealt with the concepts found in the book “The Idea Hunter.” Continuing in the same vein but with a little different focus is the book “The Accidental Creative” by Todd Henry.

The author’s quote from the book flap sets the stage perfectly:

“You go to work each day tasked with (1) inventing brilliant solutions that (2) meet specific objectives by (3) defined deadlines. If you do this successfully, you get to keep your job. If you don’t, you get to work on your resume. The moment you exchange your creative efforts for money, you enter a world where you will have to be brilliant at a moment’s notice. (No pressure, right?)”

To attempt to be perpetually brilliant and increasingly productive, without changing the basic habits and structure of your life to accommodate that undertaking, is a futile effort.

Henry develops the following elements as a structure to guide your creative potential, providing you with the stability and clarity to engage your problems head-on.

Focus – in order to create effectively, you need a clear and concrete focus

Relationships – if you want to thrive, you need to systematically engage with other people, in part to be reminded that life is bigger than your immediate problems

Energy – to make the most of your day, you need to establish practices around energy management

Stimuli – if you want to regularly generate brilliant ideas, you must be purposeful about the kinds of stimuli you are putting in your head

Hours – you need to make sure that the practices that truly make you a more effective creator are making it onto your calendar

Practices in each of these five F-R-E-S-H areas provide the foundation for a life that is prolific, brilliant, and healthy.

Wait a minute – you’ve got a problem with the “creative” label? Call yourself anything you want, but if you’re responsible for solving problems, developing strategies, or otherwise straining your brain for new ideas, you are a creative – even if you end up being one accidentally.

- Todd Henry, “The Accidental Creative”

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Categories Brand You, Innovation

Brilliance Not Required

August 1, 2011 //
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Idea work is a vital asset for leaders today. It is highly learnable, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a creative genius because most high-value ideas are not created. More often than not, they are already out there, waiting to be spotted and then shaped into an innovation.

It’s time to become an Idea Hunter.

High-value ideas come to those people who are in the habit of looking for such ideas – all around them, all the time. It’s a search for ideas that’s open-ended, ongoing, and always personal – dialed into who you are, what projects you are pursuing, and where you’re going in your career and life.

Brilliance is optional. Idea Hunters are not, as a rule, geniuses. They are just idea-active. They have a voracious appetite for acquiring ideas, and they are skilled at setting those ideas into motion.

Ready to go hunting?

 

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Categories Brand You, Innovation

What’s Your SHAPE?

July 19, 2011 //
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I am not referring to body shape here – but actually, I am.

an occasional post in the “Brand You” series…

Popularized by Willow Creek Community Church and Saddleback Community Church in the 1990s, SHAPE is often depicted as an acronym of the following:

  • S – Spiritual gifts: a set of special abilities that God has given you to share His love and to serve others
  • H – Heart: the special passions God has given you so that you can glorify Him on earth
  • A – Ability: the set of talents that God gave you when you were born, which He also want s you to use to make an impact for Him
  • P – Personality: the special way God wired you to navigate life and fulfill your unique Kingdom purpose
  • E – Experience: those parts of your past, both positive and painful, which God intends to use in great ways

Churches who used assessments, interviews, and other discovery techniques wanted members to understand themselves – and what God was calling them to do in service to Him. Starting out as primarily document or paper-based, the process quickly migrated to the digital world. Countless churches now use some variant of the SHAPE acronym to help people focus in on their own irreplaceable, richly detailed personal design.

When trying to determine your “Brand You,” understanding your SHAPE would be a great place to start.

The Body of Christ – the church – is made up of many members, like you. Understanding your SHAPE will help the Body be in better “shape.”

Do you know your SHAPE?

Would you like to know more about SHAPE?

 

 

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Categories Brand You

You’re an Original…

July 18, 2011 //
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… a unique, one-of-a-kind!

an occasional post in the “Brand You” series…

All of us start out as one-of-a-kind originals, but too many of us end up as carbon copies of someone else.  -Mark Batterson, “Soulprint”

You are unique – Ephesians 2:10 says that “We are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”

Uniqueness is God’s gift to you, and uniqueness is your gift to God.  You owe it to yourself to be yourself. But more importantly, you owe it to the one who designed you and destined you.

So what is your “Brand You?” How do you find out?

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Categories All Because of Books, Brand You

Who Am I & How Did I Get Here?

June 28, 2011 //
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You are today what you experienced yesterday. You are a function, today, of all of the life experiences you have had to date. These include, but are not limited to, your major accomplishments and significant setbacks.

Jerry Wilson and Ira Blumenthal, authors of “Managing Brand You,” have contributed a very helpful body of work to anyone wanting to explore the Brand You concept more thoroughly. Subtitle “Seven Steps to Creating Your Most Successful Self,” it draws on corporate and product branding techniques and applies them to becoming the person you want to be, with the life you want.

Step One of their process is to conduct a Brand You audit. In order to conduct an effective audit, the authors suggest that you take a methodical approach to understanding more about yourself – by looking into your past memories, feelings, and experiences in various stages of your life. Specifically, they suggest you imagine your life as a series of five distinct phases. Each phase is rich with experience and learning that influence your life.

Phase One comprises your childhood from birth to 12 years of age. The key word here is “memories” – your earliest memories and experiences shape your development in profound ways.

Phase Two covers your teen years from age 13 through age 17, and can best be characterized as years of “change.” The high school years are when you faced enormous challenges of acceptance and rejection, and more than likely include periods of confusion. Though only four short years, this time has played a big role in shaping who you today.

Phase Three encompasses your young adult years – from ages 18 through 22. It is in this time period that you first experienced “independence.” During these years, it is what you learn and reapply that will really matter to understanding a new you. What you learn from your experiences is  what you do to continue moving forward, to continue growing.

Phase Four is the period from ages 23 to 30, when you have reached adulthood. This is the “proving ground,” the period of establishing yourself as a real adult. It is a critical time for you: to be viewed, treated, and respected as an adult. The name you make for yourself will be a strong part of who you are becoming.

Phase Five is the longest phase, encompassing age 31 through your present age. This entire phase is about “adaptation.” By now, you are a fully functioning, full-fledged adult with all the responsibilities that go with adulthood. This longest phase represents the highest potential for growth and fulfillment. Looking at this phase with a opportunisitic and positive mindset will ensure that you continue to develop your Brand You.

Now it is time for you to dive into your own Brand You audit. Using the five phases of your life described above, the authors developed a worksheet designed to guide you through the process of a comprehensive survey of your life experiences, without regard to importance or relevance. Then, you identify the core themes from each life phase. Finally, you develop thee core themes into life-learning.

Want to know more? Check out page 49 for a blank audit form, with the following pages giving a real-life example.

If you are going to create the best Brand You possible, you’ve got to start with the experiences that made you, well, you!

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Categories Brand You

When Was The Last Time You Asked: What Do I Want To Be?

June 27, 2011 //
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You know why parents keep asking their kids “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The parents are looking for ideas.

Seriously.

Tom Peters, one of the most well-known and respected business thinkers since the early 80s, was probably the first to coin the phrase “Brand You.” In a ground-breaking article in Fast Company magazine, and then in several books since then, Peters drives home to point that a revolution is underway, and those who survive will have to adapt and reinvent themselves – quickly and often more than once.

In today’s wild wired (and increasingly wireless) world, you’re distinct – or you’re extinct.

Peter’s solution? Survive, thrive, and triumph by becoming Brand You!

Brand You is a pragmatic, commercial idea. It’s about how to survive when the stuff hits the fan (especially the white-collar fan). But it’s also about opportunity. And liberation. and self-definition.

What do I want to be?

What do I want to stand for?

Does my work matter?

Am I making a difference?

Feel free to ask yourself these questions regularly!

Over the next few weeks (or more!) I want to drop in a couple of times a week and take a closer look at Brand You concepts. I hope you will join me!

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Categories Brand You
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