Threshold Consulting: It's Your Life, Own It!

Increase Your Karmic Footprint

With the call for a green revolution, it seems more people are paying attention to reducing the size of their carbon footprint in order to create a better environment. While protecting the physical health of our planet is important, it occurs to me that we can make the world a better place by developing our personal brands to expand our karmic footprint in a positive direction.

Many of us recognize that a pay-it-forward approach to life can benefit others and spark a virtuous karmic cycle that brings more happiness. Yet, we can easily forget to do this when immersed in day-to-day pressures at work. While no job is perfect, we can translate our work lives into opportunities to create a better social environment by benefiting others. In fact, focusing on delivering our unique promise of value is what personal branding is all about! So, if you’ve not engaged in the process of uncovering your brand, I strongly recommend it.

Meanwhile, here are three areas where you can begin to make a difference for yourself and for the people around you:

Own your life. When you build your life mainly around the expectations of others, you risk suppressing your unique gifts and may feel frustrated as a result. On the other hand, taking responsibility for your own achievements and happiness, often leads to an engagement with work and life that inspires others even while it satisfies you.

Focus on delivering value through relationships. You may have a wide range of skills, yet you risk commoditization and irrelevance if you become immersed in rote activities that drive little value for your team and your customers. By contrast, taking the time to build productive relationships often produces results that make a significant difference for others.

Build community. While you interact with people at work, it’s all too easy to build walls that separate you from people inside and outside of your company; as a result, you miss opportunities to build relationships with a wide array of people. While meeting new people can be every bit as challenging as dating, the process provides plenty of opportunities to engage in positive exchanges and create mutual benefit as you become part of a broader community.

If there is a theme here, it’s this: being authentically you while finding ways to serve others is the way to expand good karma. Yet, all of this is really a detailed way of expressing a truth Paul McCartney put so eloquently, years ago in The End: “And in the end, the love we take will be equal to the love we make.”

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Your Passport to Success

Perhaps no skill set is more critical to managing your career and your personal brand than networking. It is indeed your passport to success! Yet, in my experience, I’ve noticed that networking is something too many people get wrong: whether it’s by being fearful and getting tripped up when they venture out, or by taking an aggressive approach to promoting themselves and whatever else they’re selling. 

Clearly there is a need to develop the kind of confident diplomatic skills that can help you navigate successfully in business and life. In fact, in a flatter world where coopetition is becoming more of a norm, networking is not just about getting a job. It’s a critical competency that's needed to gain access to people and ideas, and especially to building productive relationships in your company and industry – and beyond.

Certainly networking, like other human relations skills, needs to be practiced and polished in your daily interactions. While there are books that can help you develop skills, I think inspiration and motivation are key – and I’ve recently discovered a terrific source of both: Liz Lynch, Executive Director of the Center for Networking Excellence, and owner of The Stealth Networker Blog. As someone who admits she’s “not a born networker,” she nonetheless grew her consulting firm exclusively through networking, and has gone on to create products aimed at helping people become better networkers.

Still, I think Liz truly sets herself apart as a networking expert with her Passport to Networking video series. Liz has combined her love of travel with her passion for building mutually beneficial relationships to create and deliver short videotaped networking tips from her travel destinations – starting with her series launch at Park City, Utah to her most recent episodes in China. What makes her videos powerful is her ability to tell a compelling story that weaves information relevant to the location with an insightful and useful networking tip. For example, at the Great Wall of China, she advises that we avoid building our own walls that keep people out of our networks.

You can find Liz’s videos on YouTube. Let her be your travel guide on the road to success!

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Own Your Life

June 2008 Newsletter

Dear Subscribers,

Welcome to the “Happy Summer” edition of Own Your Life!

Well, we’ve just passed the Memorial Day weekend, a time that marks the unofficial start of summer. Traditionally, it’s been the time when I pause for a few minutes and think, “wow, summer’s just around the corner.” Yes, I’m pausing again this year, but my thinking is just a bit more emphatic. It’s this: “OMG, where has all the time gone??!!!”

It really does seem like only yesterday that I was writing my last newsletter and celebrating the New York Giants’ Super Bowl win. It certainly seems as if time has simply zipped by -- and what a great time it’s been!  The past few months have been filled with great work, new opportunities for learning, fun activities, and new networking and friendship connections. As the old saying goes, “time flies when you’re having fun!”

What about you? Do you feel time is flying by? And are you having fun?

I sure hope so! Still, I’ll bet that on some level, you’re ready to greet summer as a slower and more relaxed time. A chance to escape the “usual grind.” Perhaps with more outdoor activities, like going to the beach, having cookouts, taking a vacation, or simply snoozing in a hammock.

Whatever summer may bring your way, it can also be a time of reflection and renewal. It’s a wonderful time to pause and reflect on the quality of your life, and figure out how to enhance it. Since your happiness is in your own hands, it’s important to figure out what you’re doing for yourself, what you do for others – and how that makes you happy. So, a great place to start is by taking stock of how you’re doing on practices that can enhance your happiness. Consider each of the following:

1. Count your blessings. Keep a private journal or communicate with others through visits or correspondence. When people in career transition take time to consider what is good in their lives, they often get an added lift in their efforts to find new work.

2. Practice acts of kindness.  Do something unexpected for someone else -- whether it’s letting someone go ahead of you at a supermarket check out, sending an unexpected card or gift to a friend, or telling a Starbucks barista what a great latte she made. Try it, and you’re likely to end up being rewarded with broad smiles – some that will live forever as treasured memories.

Are You Shamelessly Self Promoting?

There is a lot of buzz about personal branding and its value to your professional and personal life. Overall, I think it’s great, since it raises awareness and encourages people to focus on what makes them unique. It’s clear that people get the importance of branding for success. Yet, it’s also clear, however, that many simply do not totally "get it.” Consider:

• Dan Schwabel, at his  Personal Branding Blog, dispels the myth that personal branding is all about you. He notes that it is a matter of delivering value for others, and underscores this with a great quote from Dan Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: “You’re here to serve, not to self-actualize.” 
• Luke Harvey Palmer, at  The Chief Brand Officer…, discusses integrity as an element of one’s personal brand. He says: “This element of your Personal Brand is influenced by what you say about others, your honesty and sincerity, the other people you associate with, and the things you are willing to do to service a clients needs or support a colleague.”
• Anita Bruzzese, at 45 Things, raises the question: “Does Your Personal Brand Taste Like Burned Toast?” She makes this point: “Your personal brand has got to be palatable. Too much self promotion, too little focus on bringing something valuable to the table, and you could find yourself getting discarded [like burnt toast].”

I’m sure you get the message: In communicating your brand, you do need to say what makes you unique, but you need make sure to consistently, clearly, and constantly communicate the value you deliver in a way that is vibrant and compelling for the people you want to reach.

Cross-poasted at The Personal Branding Blog

So, what are you doing?

I’ve just started using twitter, which bills itself as a “service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”  Not heard of it? Well, according to Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets" …) to the Twitter website, via …cell phone… instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.”

Since signing up, I’ve provided several updates, though nothing profound (after all, you only get 140 characters to work with). On twitter you can “follow” people, organizations, and media outlets. I’ve started following several people, and get to see their updates on my twitter home page. Mostly, I follow people I know, and they follow me. Yet,  I’ve discovered it’s easy to follow people you don’t know – and in some cases, they’ll follow you back!

Why can’t we be friends?

As a career management consultant, I spend a considerable amount of time conducting seminars and coaching people on networking. Among the key points I make are: approach networking as relationship building, establish a rationale for the connection, show genuine interest in the other person, and communicate how you can be relevant and valuable for each other. I also make people aware that these principles become even more powerful when they develop great clarity about their personal brand.

For me, these fundamentals apply not only in building professional relationships but in building relationships in all other parts of one’s life.

So, imagine my reaction when, out of the blue, someone who I don’t know adds me as a Facebook friend and fails to say why. Call it the New Yorker in me, but when someone approaches me out of nowhere, it’s a red flag that says, “walk away.” Yet, on Facebook, I will give a person the benefit of the doubt and look at their profile -- and even google them -- to see what we might have in common and how we might establish a beneficial relationship. When I find little or no information (or information that suggests a hidden agenda), it’s awkward. Okay, this may seem harsh, but the question is: why would I want to open up the details of my personal and professional life to some one I can’t be clear about?

Certainly, there is no shortage of material on Facebook etiquette. Yet, I think it comes down to this: as in life, so on Facebook. By following the rules for successful networking, you make it easier and more attractive to connect.

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Andy Warhol Never Imagined the Internet

Andy Warhol, the iconic American pop artist who came to prominence in the 1960s, is perhaps most associated with his Campbell’s soup can paintings. Well, okay, and maybe for getting shot, his Marilyn Monroe prints,  his association with The Velvet Underground, his avant-garde film making, and his association with a diverse array of people including bohemian street people.  He is also well known for saying, in 1968: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

As prescient as his 15 minutes of fame idea has seemed, over the years, it’s clear that Andy Warhol never imagined the internet. Today, in our flatter, faster, Web 2.0 world, it’s possible to become world famous 24 /7! Fame in this sense, however, is defined by Google results that support you in reaching career, business, or even social success.

Now, several online tools and activities make it relatively easy to show up online. For starters, you can sign up for LinkedIn, or for an account on one of several other social networking sites, where you can set up your profile and begin making network connections online. You can also put up your profile on other sites, including naymz.com, zoominfo.com, ziggs.com, or even qalias.com. You can then step up your activity by writing book reviews at amazon.com or barnesandnobel.com. As well, you could comment on blogs of interest – or even start a blog of your own. These are just a few ways to produce searchable online results.

Of course, the critical question is: What do you want to be famous for?

So, before you start to build your online identity, consider what you want to be known for, the audience you’re trying to reach, the value that you deliver to them, and what sets you apart from your competitors. Your online identity should reflect a personal brand that makes you digitally distinct and supports your goals. If you’re getting started, or if you’re not happy with your current results, you can work with a qualified personal branding and online identity strategist to express your brand and develop a web-based strategy to stake your claim to world-wide fame.

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Help Others Tell Your Brand Story

The April 2008 briefing from Trendwatching is devoted to "Status Stories." According to the report, status stories are distinct from “mass-advertising, mass-branding … [where story telling]… has involved reaching (and impressing) as many consumers as possible.” Rather, the status stories trend represents “[a shift from] brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers.”

Driving this trend is an increasing desire for individuality and uniqueness where consumers no longer “want to be like the Joneses, the Mullers or the Li’s.” In this increasingly niched world, unique products are unlikely to be known to the “masses,” and experiences lack the visible symbols associated with a physical product. As a result, “consumers increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases.”

So, what are the implications for personal branding? Since the value you deliver is not typically a tangible product, your brand is very much about selling the invisible. Since your value is delivered in a relationship with your clients and associates, your standing in your brand community is affected by what people say about you. So, if their stories do not technically result in “status dividends” for themselves, at least they need to faithfully reflect your brand! While you have no direct control over what people say, you can help them tell your story by clearly, consistently, and constantly conveying your brand in all you say and do.

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Beyond the Knee-Jerk Reaction

Yesterday, I caught the tail end of a news report with advice on holding onto your job during a recession. I didn’t get it all, unfortunately, but a couple of points made were: work harder, work longer hours, and negotiate a pay cut so employers will be more inclined to keep you. It occurred to me that this is a knee-jerk reaction that can keep people from looking at the long-term value they deliver. Fortunately, there is good advice on recession-proofing your career; for example, Annie Fisher, in her, March 15, 2008 column, provides eight strategies.

As I see it, however, paying attention only during times of economic downturn, or after a layoff, is short sighted. As well, it often results in a narrow focus on job title as the basis for finding new opportunities. It’s an old habit and an ineffective one – especially as job titles have become increasingly commoditized.  Better to have and communicate a base of value that can sustain your career through economic cycles and through the persistent pressures of our faster and flatter world.

How do you arrive at your base of value? Well, the most effective way is to uncover your personal brand. Knowing the unique value you deliver, as well as the attributes, skills, and strengths that drive that value, is one of the best career management strategies available to you. And there’s no better time to get started than now!

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog

Dark: The New Bright

Today, when I opened my browser, I noticed that Google had gone dark “as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.” In the video at the Earth Hour site, I learned that in 2007, Sydney (where the movement started), achieved a 10.2% energy reduction when 2100 corporations and 2.2 million people turned off their lights for an hour. I also learned that this year, it’s expected that “millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour.” I thought, “What a bright idea!”

Clearly, small actions can lead to HUGE results, and this also applies to small actions you can take to exude your brand and stand out in your career. In fact, one of the best things that you can do to help yourself is to help others. So, it’s good practice to find ways to take your career out of the spotlight and focus on others. How? Well, for example, you could write an unsolicited LinkedIn recommendation, or you could host a three-way meeting to introduce people who could benefit from knowing each other, or you could simply give recognition to the fine work of a Starbuck’s barista.

Whatever bright ideas you put into practice, chances are you’ll make others light up while earning appreciation.  As well, you’ll beam with satisfaction at the Good Karma you generate.

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog