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Telling the Branded Story

So, I mean just to touch on a couple other pieces of this, there's some interesting research that actually just came out from a friend of mine, a woman named Francesca Gino who like me, her book came out from Harvard Business Review Press, She's a professor at Harvard business School and she talked about about networking and you know, it's interesting because I think that many of her points in networking kind of tie in with personal branding and authenticity and things like that. And what she discovered is that many people who, who engage in, you know what she calls instrumental networking networking with sort of a professional focus. They actually literally feel dirty afterwards. I mean it's it's so it's so acculturated into us that it's like, oh, you know, I'm doing something wrong and you know, we're never we're never gonna be able to do it if we feel that way. I mean you don't like, you're never gonna do something if you feel like you're violating some kind of inherent moral code, ...

right? And so I really want to want to make sure and we're gonna get into this over the next couple of couple of days and even momentarily um that we're not in any way with personal branding, asking you to do something that should make you feel weird or feel bad, what this is about is about number one going into yourself and really looking clearly at who you are and the value you can bring, do you know yourself? And then number two, how do you tell your story, number three, how do you connect that story with other people so that they feel it too. And if they share those values and share those ideas, they say yes, I want to work with you, that seems great. Let's you know, let's do it. That that's what personal branding is, which I consider a really virtuous thing. And so you know, we might think that it's about masks, but it's not, it's about authenticity. And so I was mentioning earlier, my colleague Andy Molinski, this is one of the pieces we did for Harvard business for you, How to adapt to american style, uh self promotion. And so there's a few strategies that we have that I wanted to just talk a little bit about because if you do feel discomfort, you know, whether you do come from a different culture or just a family culture, say that says, you know what, I don't know about this, how do you do it? Probably the most important part, the most important thing is what I call rebranding the act of branding because you know, if it seems sleazy, you're going to feel sleazy, you know? Absolutely. But the key thing here is to really understand that what we're doing when we when we think about personal branding and come up with strategies and whatever it is about advancing a larger mission you're doing it in service of something that really is important to you. If you are a graphic designer, if you are a photographer, if you are a event planner, all of these things are things that you care about, you love, you want to share with the world and so if you know and you can keep it in mind that one of the really necessary steps to do it is to make sure that people know about what you can do and that you can find like minded people that's really powerful. Here's a big one, right? It's really simple about personal branding, it's almost so basic, but this is a place where it's so easy to make a change if you do one change as a result of this today, I say this to you people at home as well alright, one change, one thing you can do to get value out of this here it is, I go to so many cocktail parties, so many networking events and you go up to people and I mean we all know right, what the questions are, oh what do you do, what have you been up to lately? These are literally the questions that everyone asks every time, It's not like it's a surprise and nonetheless you're at these things and people seem absolutely dumbfounded, they have no idea what have you been up to lately and say, oh nothing much what even up to, oh same old, same old, you know, they have these ridiculous answers and so if you want to make one simple change every time you go to an event like that, just have one thing in your head and hopefully the thing that you mentioned to talk about should have a few different criteria, right. One is that hopefully it's interesting enough that it can spark a conversation with the other person so that they would want to say, oh that's cool, tell me more. Or possibly they can relate their own story about it, but number two, if you're able to do this, whatever thing you mentioned could help spread your brand, not in a sort of weird overt way, but just in a way that it's helping to advance the narrative of who you are and the types of things that you do. So if, you know, if Barbara was going to a cocktail party or a networking event and somebody said, so you know what, what are you up to lately? And Barbara could say something like, oh well, you know, I'm really excited because I'm working on this project, I just got a new client and so I'm working on a project where I'm doing X, y, z for them and I'm really pumped and at a very basic level, that's pretty cool because she's sharing something she's genuinely excited about, but it also is implanting the idea in the other person, oh that's the kind of thing that Barbara does, I thought she made crepes. So, wow, okay, cool. And so when they, when they need a graphic designer, it's like, oh I can call you now so we need to have at least some kind of a good answer. What is the thing that you care about and you know want to to really go for in the world and helping over time you find a way to think about it and if you're blocked in certain ways from pursuing it to find another way, because there's so many things that are possible and you just have to peel back the expectations to not be limited by your past, to not be limited by your resume and to say where else can I go? Because you do have more, more skills, more abilities, more, more ways of doing things than you could possibly imagine If people see something, you know that I wrote when I was like years old and they think it's weird or whatever, if they are going to judge me on that rather than on the totality of the work that I've done and the totality of the person that I've become fine, whatever we sometimes the art of having a strong personal brand is being comfortable recognizing that we can't control everything, we can't control everybody's reaction to every single thing we do. We're not, you know, professional image managers, like somebody trying to sculpt the presidential campaign, even I know from experience on a presidential campaign, you can't control every facet, every nuance, every word you have to get comfortable with the fact that some people Yeah, some people are going to read something and they're going to say that's stupid. You know what? Okay, because if you put enough of yourself out there, if you if that's literally the only thing that they see about you, then yeah, maybe there may be a lot of people are going to have that judgment, but if you continue to give, if you continue to put yourself out there in a variety of ways, whether it's sharing things online or being active in your community getting involved in groups, people are going to have so many different exposures to you that one little thing is not going to change how they view you. We need to choose not to be embarrassed and to say I am not going to hold myself back, I'm not going to hide myself out of fear that one thing is going to ruin everything and trip everything up. You gotta, you gotta make the decision and be willing to do it. So I hear sometimes from people about, you know, well you know, isn't this about you know, kind of bakery right? You know, and you know, we're going back, we had that image of the mask, the carefully constructed mask and so just one distinction that I want to draw for you guys is that probably, I'm guessing most of you if you've ever had a job interview, you probably dress up for the job interview, right? This is pretty standard, You don't want to go in and like, you know, your ripped jeans and your sweatshirt, you probably wear like a suit or a skirt or something to look good and most people would not say, oh, that's so fake, you're being inauthentic. And I think similarly, um you know, here's the distinction. So Mark Zuckerberg, right? He he used to get a lot of flak, he's getting a little better now, I think Sheryl Sandberg's, you know, whipping him into shape, but you know, he would do things like go meet with investment bankers in his hoodie and sandals and yes, that was very authentic, Good job. Mark Zuckerberg, you're being yourself. But the problem is that in the context it was a little disrespectful, right? Because the reason you dress up is that you are signaling to people, you know what, I want to be my best self for you. I want to show you the respect of dressing nicely to show you that I take this seriously. And so if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're looking, you know, you're meeting with these investment bankers about some of the most important like billion dollar deals and he's like, you know what, take it or leave it, you can have me and my hood and you're nothing, it shows a kind of disrespect and so with personal branding, I think some, some people if you know, if they're trying to push a rhetorical argument, they say, well, you know, I mean I should, if, if it's about being authentic, shouldn't I just be able to, you know, wear the sweatshirt literally and metaphorically, I mean, you know, so I like to swear a lot, shouldn't I just swear a lot all the time and it's like, no, it's not, that's not quite what we're after here, what we're after is you don't want to be somebody else. You don't want to be like the Frankenstein monster that's totally not like you. But I think that it is legitimate to, to want to be your best self. You know, it's, I think as an aspirational vision is actually okay, the first mission for us is to get comfortable with our own identity. If we're starting a business say, you know, we're venturing into a new area and when we brand ourselves, that can be tough because we have to somehow show people that we're confident. Oh yes, you should hire me. You know? Yes, I can totally photograph your horses and but meanwhile if you've just started, it's like, well, you know, I think I can get a good shot. I don't really know. So it's like this tough moment, how do you, how do you do it? So you hear sometimes the thought, right, this is sort of bromide fake it until you make it and you know, that's pretty good, right? You know, that's, that's okay, fake it till you make it, but some people really get hung up on like the well that's fake and so I think there's a much better formulation that a woman named Amy Cuddy, a Harvard business school professor talked about, she's a famous Ted talk and she uses the formulation, fake it until you become it. And if you just sit with that for a minute, I think that's really kind of powerful because it is about your best self. It's not, oh I want to pretend to be this thing that I'm totally not. It's about how do I get the vision of myself in the future of where I really want to be and then how do I get myself toward that? So that that becomes my reality?