You know the pattern. December 31st arrives. You make resolutions. Maybe a vision board. You're motivated for two weeks. By February, you're back to reacting instead of leading. Wondering where the year went. Feeling stuck in the same patterns. What if you treated...
You know the saying. “Actions speak louder than words.” This is true in all areas of life… including the impacts on our personal brand. Because our brand is all about the perceptions others have of us. This is why a Forbes article caught my attention. It was titled...
We’ve covered personal brand colors and overall brand identity, now it’s time to address our voice. To help us keep our communications consistent, we need to articulate how we write and speak. Since we have had a speaking and writing style all our lives, we don’t want...
Yesterday we covered how to select your personal brand colors. Today, we are going to expand on that with an overall visual identity. Just like a consumer brand, a personal brand has a visual identity. The colors we use. Fonts we select. Images we use. Presentations...
One of the most straightforward ways to highlight a personal brand is through color. Beginning to associate our posts and work online with a color others start to recognize. Over time, color will integrate with fonts, imagery, formats, and content. All these elements...
I wish I could get the message across to people who are busy and employed. Take the time to build your brand. The job market is unstable. Top performers are getting layoff notices. Executives. Entry level. Long tenure. Short...
We’ve all taken time to figure someone out. How they prefer to work. What motivates them. What shuts them down. And we’ve all had moments where we wished people just came with instructions. Turns out, they can. A Personal User Manual is a simple, one-page guide to...
For some of us, just the title of this post will have us running. The last thing we want is photos of ourselves. Yet we need good, professional photos. Headshots for LinkedIn, a bio, or the internal org charts. Images taken when you are speaking, working, and going...
The path to taking control of our career and life begins with a strong foundation. One element that creates the foundation is clarity on our values. In Gartner’s HR Leaders Monthly: April 2024, there was a case study that highlighted a process MACU uses to help...
Our personal brand is complex. Each year of our career, layers are added. We build new skills. Expand our connections. Shape our reputation. When we decide we want to intentionally focus on our brand, we often struggle. Where do we start? What do we do? The...
When we decide it’s time to work on our personal brand, I’m often asked, “Where do I start?” As with most things, there is no one-size-fits-all response. We are all at different phases of our journey and we have different goals. However, there is a framework we can...
What if you could only communicate 3 things about yourself in an interview? No stories. No STAR format. Three things without explanation. What three benefits would you indicate you provide? How would you be selected over all the other candidates in the room? I believe...
Believe it or not, most of us have a marketing stack these days. This is the set of tech tools we use to communicate. As an individual or as a business, we all have them. A simple individual stack might look like Microsoft, Google, and Instagram. Companies can have...
What we wear can sometimes be a controversial topic. We say that what’s inside matters more than what we wear. Which is 100% true. Some consider clothes to be frivolous. Others feel they are an integral part of their identity. The clothes we choose send messages. A...
Our personal brand is all about perceptions. What people say and think about us when we aren’t in the room. Everything we do impacts those perceptions. And, for most people, those actions aren’t intentional. They aren’t processing the image they portray. Inside they...
Several months ago, I came across a resource that I believe should be foundational to personal career management. It’s a company called Career Fingerprint. You can use their site to capture your skills and accomplishments on a regular basis. Keep resumes organized....
The more people I coach, the more I hear a theme. We can see strengths and opportunities in others. We struggle with ourselves. We are too close to the situation. Too in our head…literally! We know too much. We lack objectivity. I get frustrated at how easily I can...
A foundation of our personal brand is our unique difference. We spend years working on our strengths, professional history, and goals. The more we work the clearer our unique difference becomes. Yet, we need to ensure others see that difference. Understand why they...
Previously, I wrote a post called “Hire Me If”. The goal was to get us to think about why people should hire us. This could be for a project or a new role. What makes our approach different from all the other people who share our title. I’ve been thinking about how to...
How to Create a Career Taxonomy That Works for Everything Organizing your career accomplishments, skills, and experiences can be a game-changer. It’s like building a personalized library for your professional life. Crafting a resume, updating LinkedIn, preparing for...
We’ve all been told we need an elevator pitch. A confident answer to the question, “So, what do you do?” Most advice turns this into a mini resume. But a personal elevator pitch isn’t about impressing someone. It’s about helping someone understand who you are, how you...