Be Sexier in Person
The next time you’re at a conference, and if you haven’t met me, I want you to try something. The rest of you who don’t intend to meet me, have already met me, or who just want to know what I’m getting at, stay tuned. Here’s the thing: you’ve gotta work on how you present yourself. There’s so much value inside you (okay, MOST of you). You’re really loaded with interesting things, and sure, maybe some of us have to pare down some of what we want to share, but let’s just look at this a moment together. You’ve gotta be sexier in person.
Disclaimer
None of this is meant towards any particular person that I’ve met in the last several years. Instead, it’s meant towards me, some of you, and some people I observe in social settings. If you’ve recently met me, I don’t mean you.
Confidence
If I stopped this post now, that’d be enough. If you don’t present yourself as confident, you’re already off on the wrong foot. It’s that simple. Why? Because I need to believe that you have value as you’re coming up to talk with me at the event. I have to feel that you’re pretty comfy with who you are as a person, and you’re looking to reach out and make new relationships to further develop your capabilities and ideas.
If you don’t have confidence right off, here are some tips: think about the three things that someone who’s really proud of who you are would say about you. Don’t tell ME these things, but have them in your mind. If you’re worried how the other person might receive you, stop. Instead, believe with all your heart that you deserve to be there, that you’re smart, that you are just as important.
And you know what? If the person you’re meeting you, after all that, STILL treats you like crap, then you smile politely, walk away, and flush that out of your head as fast as you can, because it’s definitely not you.
Be Brief
Here’s a spot where pretty much everybody could learn a lesson. I need reminders of this all the time. What happens is something like this: we make connection, we talk with someone we like, and we accidentally worry that the other person won’t know we’re smart, funny, useful, whatever. It’s almost like we’re drowning and we have to say everything, in case we never meet again.
Stay brief. Don’t ramble. Be confident that your small elevator pitch as to who you are, what you’re into, and why you’re happy to connect is enough. Believe with all your heart that you’ll have time to unpack what it is you need to say.
Finish Strong
Sometimes, everything goes great, but then people don’t know when to break off the conversation and go meet new folks. Why? Because maybe that’s all there was. If the person wants you to stay, they’ll usually give you indications of that. If they are all done with the conversation, and pay really close attention, they will give body language that says this. Truly. Just keep your eyes open, and you’ll get a sense of when to scram. Don’t scram earlier than that (unless you have to go). That’ll show a lack of confidence.
Some Bonus Round Material
A few more thoughts:
- “What do you do?” isn’t as sexy a question as “what are you working on that’s fun?”
- Yes, your breath matters.
- Dress how you want to be perceived. (I dress in what I call “rockstar casual,” half because I like it, and half because I’m too broke to dress the way I might.
- If you’re not sure what conversation is appropriate, practice with friends ahead of events and gatherings. (I say inappropriate things all the time).
- Remember that there are still boundaries between what’s too personal and what’s not, and yet, please try to be human.
- Remember that conversation is about more than one person. Breathe. Leave room.
What advice to you have? For me, for others? What have you noticed about your fears to meet others, or maybe we should talk about success stories and horror stories?
The Real Power of Personal Branding
Here’s the secret to personal branding in a nutshell: be consistent. Try your damnedest to be true to the things that make you who you are, and try your best to improve upon those gifts you have, and compensate for the ones you lack. If you learn nothing else from this post, snip everything off below these words and focus on the first part, because that’s really the nugget, and that’s really what needs your focus and attention. The rest is just support.
In Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online part 1, I showed you a small version of the answer to the question, “WHY have a personal brand?” In personal branding part 2, I shared a few tools you can use. In Connie Bensen’s personal branding bonus round, she shared with you a story about building community. Now, let’s finish it off by talking about what gets done with branding.
Brands Can Be Stories, and Thus, You are A Living Story
By saying this, I’m invoking a powerful promise, the the storyteller’s promise. Simply, tell the story you told your audience you’re going to tell. Think for a moment on this as it applies to you. I tell people daily that I’m here to help you understand how these tools develop community, improve your communications, and do a host of other things better than previous tools were doing them. I promise through my stories that you, too, can figure out how to build influence, develop relationships, and be more useful to your organization (be that a business, a nonprofit, or a circle of friends).
If I let you down, I’m not keeping the promise of my story. It’s pretty simple, really. And not so much touchy feely. I could say the same thing a different way, and a manager would write it on an annual review. Integrity is another word for this.
Improve On What You Have, Not Lament What You Lack
I sat in a woman’s office the other day, and she had a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath on her desk. I’d read the book as well. It’s a follow on to the popular Now, Discover Your Strengths. These books resonated with me because they gave a different set of advice than what we’re accustomed to learning. They taught me about moving forward with what I’m really good at, and finding ways to work around my weaknesses.
We’ve been taught since childhood that we have to be well-rounded, that we have to improve on our weaknesses, that we should strive to fix what’s broken. Not me. I’m done. I’m focusing on what I do best, and you know what? It’s impressive how that changes not only my perspective and abilities, but also the perspective of my colleagues. It turns out that they’re just as willing to accept the parts of my job that I’m not very good at accomplishing, and they either encourage me to get it done some other way, or when they can, they pitch in.
Why work hard to be what you’re not? Build and deliver power through those parts of you that are already your best gifts. I’ve heard this echoed through several other works. In fact, I could give a bibliography of about 30 books without breaking a sweat that will give you the same advice. Don’t ignore what you might need to do but aren’t so great at accomplishing. Instead, find the way that you’re going to handle those parts of your life, deal with it, and focus even harder on the parts you do well.
The Last and Biggest Secret
Confidence. One word. That’s it. If you can learn to nurture your confidence, you will accomplish FAR more than with any piece of software, nifty logo, or perfect slogan. You will do more through empowering your belief in yourself than through ANY other possible tool or method or strategy.
I believe that everyone can recover from a waning self-confidence. It’s not easy by any stretch, but if you learn (or get help to learn), you can uncover ways to strengthen your confidence, and that power will give you energy and ability and an ability to persist, even when things are not in your favor.
Confidence (not arrogance) is the secret sauce to everything you do with regards to personal branding.
Did You Think It Would Be Tricks and Strategies and Repeatable Methodologies?
There are plenty of ways you could approach this. You could develop the strategy of ubiquitous presence: “I’ll be everywhere, and thus people will get to know me.” You could build a strategy to provide “just in time service,” maybe through using the best listening tools, and having resources enough to provide answers and assistance.
But would any of that work without the parts I mentioned above?
What Would You Add to the Branding Story We’ve Told Together?
Do you have more to say? Would you share your personal branding experiences with us? How might you recommend someone take the four parts (including the bonus) of this series and apply them to their online presence efforts to build up a personal brand of value? What are the benefits of all this work? Have you thought of that one, yet?
Your conversation, as always, is greatly appreciated.
The Social Media 100 is a series of posts written about social media and social networking tools by Chris Brogan. If you’d like to receive every post, please subscribe for free to my blog. There’s also a free newsletter with completely different content, if you’d like to receive that as well. Thank you for your attention.
The Power of Personal Leadership
In 1995, I made my first big shift in my personality and perspective. I went from being an employee and letting life live me, to being the CEO of Me, Incorporated, and choosing to live my life as close to my own terms as possible. The exact moment this happened is etched in stone. I was laying on the couch, facing the TV sideways, and it was tuned to PBS, which was in the middle of a fund drive. Les Brown was talking about personal power and promoting his book, Live Your Dreams. That was the start of me realizing just how much power we all have, beginning with myself.
Since then, I’ve learned that there are many challenges tied to choosing to live your life like a leader. There are plenty of times where I’ve fallen down on the job, and several more where I’ve come out okay, but maybe at a different point than I’d originally intended. In the song “Nobody Told Me,” John Lennon sings, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans,” and boy, that describes lots of moments in my professional life. I set goals, and life helps me accomplish totally different ones.
Because of all this, I have a few thoughts from along the path. I hope these are useful to you in your own journey.
Start with Yourself
I could recommend the book Self-Esteem, by Dr. Matthew McKay every day of the week, and it wouldn’t be enough times. Of all the many books I’ve read and all the various ways I’ve worked towards developing myself, this one book gave me the most payoff for the effort I put into it. Basically, the book teaches you how to look to yourself for validation, look to yourself for responsibility, and look to yourself for a center of power. I feel that without this base, most everything else will eventually crumble.
Looking outside yourself for validation is a weakness that crushes most of your potential for achieving big things. Starting with making yourself your core cheerleader sets you up for success right away. Oh, and the #1 thing I learned from the book: fire your inner critic. This one piece of advice alone was worth the book.
Build a Supportive Network
Beyond yourself, it helps to have intelligent supporters who will both challenge you and lend you strength for those rare moments when you use up your own. This comes after building your own inner self-esteem, but before going out to take on the world. Why? Because having a nice base of friends (and they don’t have to be family) who support you, challenge you, and who believe in you, and give you perspective beyond your own is like having your very own superhero team at your back when you set out to take on the world.
And nurture, nurture, nurture that network. Be friendly, helpful, giving, and forever as interested in their pursuits as you are your own.
Be Responsible
I mean this in two ways. First, assume responsibility for everything that you CAN impact. Meaning, if you have a team working with you and they fail to meet a goal, when the boss asks what happened, assume responsibility. In the details, it’s your job to fix what went wrong and try to ensure it doesn’t happen the next time, but to the boss, just own it. Excuses are lame. Just accept what comes next, and try to make it better next time.
Sometimes, we try to own too much. I do this a lot. When we own too much, we feel like we fail too often. Sometimes, we’re not ready to take on as much as we thought. Other times, we’re overloaded, and practically no one could handle what’s on our plate. Recognizing this and adjusting is just as important, because burying yourself in the weeds doesn’t help anyone, either. Fix this as soon as possible, and do it as cleanly as you can. Try to hand off or delegate or give back the responsibilities that are flooding you, and see if that helps.
Look for Small Victories at First, But Then Think Big
Small victories are a great way to build your self-confidence. Take on little tasks and succeed. Even if their personal challenges, take them on. Every little success helps. For example, one goal I set for myself recently was to lose 10 pounds within a month. I have plenty of weight to lose, and I have a fitness program to rebuild into my life, but by setting this goal, I’ve got something small and tangible to observe. Once I hit this goal, I will feel much better about my efforts, and this will spur me on to bigger goals.
The caution, however, is that sometimes, we stay mired in the small things in life. If you’re on the road to personal leadership, take a bigger swing. Look at the larger story. Look beyond your current job. Look past your role. Ask yourself big questions about what you might be able to do to help a larger chunk of the world. The answer to this question is often startling, and sometimes quite rewarding. But if you don’t ask, you never will know.
At work, thinking a bit bigger than everyone around you, and then working backwards from those ideas to be helpful, is a great way of contributing in a meaningful way.
Be Helpful
Perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about personal leadership is that it’s a much more rewarding path when you focus on being helpful to others. Stay true to your own guiding principles and the goals you’ve set for yourself, but try to view these goals with a community in mind. Can your path to success be complementary to others? Will your victories bring others up to a better path with you? How will you give back to people along the way, and not just when you’re on top of the world?
What’s YOUR Advice?
You’re successful. You’ve done some great things. How have you developed yourself? Give us some ideas to build upon, and to develop our personal leadership along the way. And if you’re extra brave, tell us about some of your shortcomings that you eventually overcame, and maybe what you know about how you did it. I’d love to hear from you.
Acknowledging All You Know About Social Media
You probably don’t give yourself credit for all you DO know about social media:
- You know about YouTube, that it’s more than dogs on skateboards.
- You know about Facebook, that it’s not just for kids any more.
- You know about blogs, and at least two places you can blog for free.
- You know the difference in mainstream news and social news.
- You know where to find tech advice, marketing advice, sales advice, what matters to you advice.
- You know what a wiki is, what a Flickr is, what a twitter is.
You know lots, and have helped others around you understand even more.
Who are you teaching? Where are you laying down your knowledge?
Creatives and Your Secret Mission
For every day we don’t unlock our own value, we remain plugged into our other identity. I twittered this sentiment, but I believe it applies to a lot of YOU. You have ideas and thoughts and realizations that rise above what you’re called upon to accomplish in a given day.
You can choose a few paths: one is to just do what you’re given to do, go home, and wonder why life hasn’t dropped off a big fat bag of cash and destiny on your door. Another is to fight the system at every turn and rail against everyone that they don’t “get it” and that you’re smarter than all them, no matter how it all looks right now.
Or, you can work on your secret mission. Realize that you’re different. Cloak some of that during your “day job” hours by doing more than what’s necessary without drawing much attention to the fact that you’re doing it. If your workplace is ripe for change from within, be that agent quietly. If not, then work on what you will do outside of what you’re paid to do to build on that secret mission.
The point is, there’s what you take to be reality. There’s what you MAKE to be reality. The more you work on B, even if it’s your secret mission, the more you can grow your abilities, find ways to satisfy what you know is true, and move into bigger things.
Or you can bitch about how they don’t get it.
Recommended reading to prove you’re not crazy:
The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, duluoz cats
