Consider This …

This picture represents our economy. Notice that there are a few bigger rocks, many smaller.  Big rocks are lifted up higher by smaller ones sometimes.  All rocks are bathed indiscriminately by the water; some rocks get more sun than others.   All are shifted by larger forces; some glide with the flow and others resist it, bumping along uncomfortably.  Notice that absolutely every rock has its own unique character.  No two rocks are exactly alike.  They fit together randomly, with each wave challenging their position.  They seem unperturbed by the water or one another:  they seem to be absorbed in worship of the sky.

The idea of business branding is pervasive these days, perhaps mostly because of the blanketing of society by a few big corporate names.  The worldwide familiarity of Coke and McDonald’s have become our standards of business success.  Of course, duplicating the renown of these giants is not easy; and most corporations will admit that they work very hard on establishing consistency of character throughout their organization.

What does this mean for the individual?  Your employer requests conformity to the corporate character, and that’s fine if your personal goals are indeed aligned with those of those boss.  But given the stresses of life in a capitalist system, and the fact that you work because you need to pull your own weight economically, it’s very often the case that as a worker, you do not necessarily share your employer’s ambitions.  You have an entirely separate set of dreams; your personal brand has much more to do with raising your children or playing golf or Friday night salsa or whatever else feeds your soul if not your pocketbook.

The big time capitalist emphasis on branding could eventually turn around to bite the moguls in the eye.  Because if corporate branding is so important, and if the personal branding of leaders is even more important, then the lowly workers as well begin to see that by developing strength of character and reputation similar to that of their bosses, they can fulfill their highest dreams.  And if everyone is intent on establishing such personal power, corporate structures which depend on obedience will crumble.

Despite the risk of initiating such a mega-change, every individual in the free world has the resources to build personal branding; and every worker would do well to learn as much as possible about his/her natural gifts and how to express them usefully.  Every individual can benefit from the self-knowledge and compassionate thought that is required in order to project a recognizable brand. 

We’re so far down the dusty industrialist road that many workers are far removed from their core individual natures, and have no idea how to research and express an authentic personal brand.  Which is great for the bosses, but truly not supportable as we progress deeper into the century.  The challenges of our global society cannot be dealt with by automatons.

If you’re a worker, one of those heroic millions in service to a corporate brand, please keep checking this blog, and let’s together explore the riches we were born with and the ways we can grow them creatively.

Back when I used to teach acting, I would advise my students never to think about developing a ‘personal style’ as an artist, because style surfaces of its own accord as you continue to practice.  As much as we are all individuals, each with our share of inborn gifts, we can’t help but manifest native styling in all aspects of our lives.  As we progress, we may become more aware of the details of our own personal style, and at that point take steps to modify it according to the dictates of superego. 

This collection of salient characteristics, this automatic communication of personality, might be called our personal brand.  Everybody has one.  Being familiar and comfortable with your brand can help a great deal in locating the work and living situations that will be nurturing for you.

As introspection is a little-admired quality in America, a huge portion of our workforce has never turned their attention to their personal branding.  For most of us, attention is focused on the brands of others, while we remain witless consumers.  For decades, I ignored my personal brand while working for ‘the man,’ or the organization or business, which bore all the responsibility for branding.  I even subliminally assumed my personal brand was defined by the business.

While young, you may not wish to make any self-definitions; brands are developed with maturity, it’s true.  Still, even a small amount of focus on the image you project to others can go a long way towards avoiding situations where you don’t fit, and attracting those situations that nurture your growth.

Having been one, my undying loyalty is much more for the workers of America than for the bosses. The incredible act of heroism involved in simply arising each morning to go and fulfill the wishes of another cannot be denied.  The dreadful lack of decent leadership in business makes this courage even more astounding.  Tomorrow, I’ll look at ways the worker’s branding interacts with that of the employer.

I’ve been writing the blog daily for almost three months, and have earned a comment here and there, but wow! Yesterday’s post received serious comments from two whole people! Must have touched a nerve. Both commentators objected to the idea of keeping your business branding separate from your personal branding. Of course, my point was about giving your business the credit for branding successes; about institutionalizing your creative practices so that innovation and strong branding become company culture, not just your personal modus operandi. But my commentators’ concern points to a potential misunderstanding of the argument. Your business brand will have no strength unless your personal brand is even stronger than that of your enterprise. That is, your personal branding comes first, and it must be powerful before you are capable of endowing your work with similar impactful character.

“Innovation, as I’ve said before, is an inside job. It begins with the individual. Organizations don’t innovate. People do. And if people are ruled by past experiences, old assumptions, and limiting concepts of what’s possible, nothing much will ever change.” So stated Mitch Ditkoff of Idea Champions in the Heart of Innovation blog recently.

So yes, personal branding is of foundational importance. Personally, your character must be at least as well developed as that of your business; you should define and cultivate your creative and compassionate potential at all times. Your spirit will pervade in all aspects of the endeavor, and you can’t escape its influence.

I woke this morning thinking of the worker. I write so much here about the business owner, but what about the worker? There are many times more workers than owners. What relation does their personal branding have to the business’ success and longevity? How can the worker employ creative practices to boost personal branding and happiness?

Perhaps we are moving towards an economy in which every individual is in business for him/herself. I’ll look at this concept over the next few posts.

James Chartrand of Copyblogger fame wrote at the end of last week about the risk of personal branding becoming a prison from which the business owner is helpless to escape.  He advises branding your business, but keeping that separate from personal reputation.  Thusly, he states, “You create options for yourself, not obligations.”

He makes an excellent point, that pertains to business of any size.  By crediting the business, rather than a person, with the character of your brand, you are ensuring its longevity beyond your personal involvement. 

This is particularly important when it comes to using creativity in your business.  The application of creative principles should be institutionalized and not dependent on the spirit of an individual.  If you intend to use creative problem solving and orient towards innovation, carefully build these from the ground up with your company, ensuring that every participant is in the loop.  When breakthroughs occur, the company - not you - receives the credit.

What about the solopreneur?   The solopreneur by definition does not seek for the business to survive past the owner’s personal involvement.  With the solopreneur, we must take an entirely different perspective:  that of life and work being one and the same.  Such a business person ‘makes a living’ by ‘having a life’.  That’s rather enviable, isn’t it?  Personal branding for such an individual equals business branding.

For the vast majority, business reputation is most beneficial if kept separate from personal reputation.  I suspect, however, as our economy morphs, many more of us will define our work in the sense of solopreneurship, not expecting eternal life for our enterprises and therefore freely associating our personal values with that of the work we do.

This door represents the specificity of one business.  Note that there are doors everywhere, and they tend generally not to compete with one another.  But the opening of one often leads to the opening of another.  And note the tremendous personality one door can have.  Note how much one glance at it can tell you.  Note not only the visual experience, but the emotional one.  You get a feeling from this door, as well as factual info. 

There are millions of doors, but none exactly like this one.  This one services a few people, and they are grateful.  It does its job, it prospers. 

Can your business be so specifically and personally described?  Is it known and loved the way this door seems to be?  Does it have a well cultivated, useful, proud personality that is not afraid or suspicious regarding other businesses, but serves its own purposes faithfully?

There’s an old fashioned notion still strongly prevalent in small business circles, one that works against success in today’s economy. But people cling to it like a right and priviledge of which they’re proud. And the issue relates directly to all my previous blather about specificity.

Newly established as a small business, and needing to make my presence and services known, I joined a couple business networking/referral groups. It’s been useful and fun so far, and I’m happy to contribute. But there’s a dyed-in-the-wool rule these networking groups abide by that deeply turns me off: no two businesses of the same type can be members simultaneously. So the group has one realtor, for example, and all others in town are barred. The thinking is that in referring business to one another, there will be no conflicts.

It used to be that one realtor in town could cover the needs, and if another set up practice, that meant dividing the spoils. But any aware person nowadays knows no one organization can answer the needs of our mushrooming population. There is plenty of room for the energies and innovations of all of us, and the more we open up channels of communications, the better off we all are.

A small business distinguishes itself through specificity. An individual business becomes successful through careful identification and cultivation of individual strengths, always unique, always useful in some way, to some people. Realtor A is not inherently better than Realtor B. If they have both precisely identified and defined the specifics of their services, they’ll each find more-than-sufficient markets. And in the meantime, they can help one another to self-define, if only they’ll open up communications!

I would love it if other virtual assistants were in my networking groups. I prefer to see other people in my field as friends, not competitors. In a global economy, competition retards growth, while cooperation makes clear the specific offerings of each.

So far, however, I see no cracks in their armor, and raising this issue with the groups to which I belong is not likely to happen anytime soon. The pride and paranoia are impenetrable! But I’ll chip away behind the scenes, perhaps, because change is inevitable eventually.

David Armano at Logic + Emotion had this to say about specificity a week ago:
“We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro interaction which makes a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious. The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand or service. Little things. Feelings. They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize.”

There’s an assessment of being that the Easterners deliver to us: we are at every moment either accepting or rejecting. With absolutely everything we encounter, our first reaction (which is most often subliminal) is attraction or aversion. Our attitude about the ‘other’ is unfailingly conditioned by this emotional, and essentially paranoid response.

Check out this premise as the hours unwind today; or even just over the next few moments. Look around as you sit at the monitor right now, and notice your immediate responses to objects nearby. I love the coffee cup; I’m afraid of the to-do list; I’m attracted to the letter from my father; I’m skeptical about the hi-tech, oddly-shaped felt tip pen; I adore the big pile of painting supplies; I become slightly ill when viewing the floor’s clear need for a vacuum.

Why do we muddy our progress and perceptions with these persistent automatic judgements? The coffee cup and the to-do list have equal rights to existence and to my attention. Do I not make things more complicated than necessary by coating them with my emotions?

The answer is, of course, yes and no. In our quantum universe, we know our responses create our reality. We are born responders, and will always emotionally judge our experiences. But getting a handle on this, and realizing clearly that this is the nature of your humanity, will help to liberate from any shackles emotions create.

So while our creativity is anchored in the specific, it remains relatively useless until you manage to see past your native prejudices.

While you hear the occasional tale of a bright young graduate (or drop-out, as the case may be) striking it rich with a clever idea, for the most part entrepreneurs base their business on skill of some kind. It could be anything from skill in customer service, to skill as vice president, to skill in creating and dissolving entrepreneurships by the dozen. Generally speaking, going into business for yourself means offering a skill of some kind.

Problem is, it takes time to develop marketable skill; often a great deal of time. For this reason, it may be well into your adult life before business ownership becomes feasible.

Another factor that’s crucial to business success and that requires significant maturity to acquire is doing what you really want to do in life.

That may sound inane, but ask most any young person (say, under age 35) what they really want and you’re likely to get mumbled, confused answers. Ask yourself right now: what is my deepest, truest want at this moment? what do I most profoundly want in my life and my future?

Young people rightfully don’t dwell much on these questions, unless they pertain simply to a Friday night’s entertainment, or perhaps where they should attend college, or which company offers the best working environment.

It is more towards the middle years that you start questioning whether you even want entertainment on a Friday night; or you suddenly thirst for new knowledge in a way you never dreamed of while you were in school. Or the awareness slowly creeps in that it’s time to become all of yourself, to use all your skills, to serve your highest wants and offer the fullest expression of your gifts – in other words, you finally realize it’s time to get started in your own business.

Indeed, it’s not easy to know what you truly want. We both want and don’t want so many things: e.g., temptations of all kinds, disciplines, new technologies, taxes, all that stuff. The old immediate gratification so often grabs the stage from our ultimate wants. Only such folk as Zen monks and the Dalai Lama can say they act according to their deepest wants exclusively. Nonetheless the rest of us do our best to follow their example, whatever our creed.

All the above is meant to introduce another essential creativity practice (of course!), which I call urging. This comes from theater improvisation exercises. In that arena, half of a group sits as an audience, while the other half goes onstage – a specifically marked out area of the floor. Those onstage are asked to urge, to do whatever they are moved to do. There are no other instructions.

This is difficult for many, requiring some getting used to, yet it brings continuous revelation even to the seasoned practitioner. Later on, perhaps I’ll discuss this exercise in detail. For now, look at possibilities for urging in your life. Or it may be more relevant to suggest, look for the times when you naturally respond according to your urges rather than according to reason. When you think about these times, what do you learn about yourself? Do you know what you want?

A hefty serving of business wisdom was offered up in a telecast I heard last week, featuring the founder of Starbucks (Howard Behar), the founder of StartUpNation , and the author of a new book about business success. One of the many salient points made: as established by Peter Drucker many years ago, the results-oriented activities of any business are its marketing and its innovation (while all other activities are mere costs), and naming something in itself is an innovation. Their example was the labeling of Starbuck’s drink as short, tall, and grande; a naming that became an important innovation that helped to establish their incredibly powerful brand.

Having the motivation and courage to start up your own business is admirable in itself, but many folks stall when it comes to naming their endeavor. As I chat with other virtual assistants, it’s clear that this is often a real stumbling block.

“A thing’s name is its numen,” said Northrop Frye eons ago. I memorized the statement at the time, for its pithy truth. Definition of numen: divine power or spirit; a deity, esp. one presiding locally or believed to inhabit a particular object. Deciding upon your business name is deciding upon its spirit. In one sense, it’s a terrifying choice to make; but on the other hand, if you’re really into and ready for the experience, probably the spirit communicates itself to you voluntarily, and your business name appears effortlessly.

As an example: it’s not my business name, but my business website has the domain name, asthemoonclimbs. Unwilling to duke it out for the perfect keywords pertaining to virtual assistance, at the time I simply went with the spirit that presented itself. Excited to be concentrating on my ancient skill of writing, and thinking about all the tragically terrible writing out there, especially on the internet, and thinking about how the Zen archer moves beyond the use of bow and arrow, and - I must add - having maniacally high expectations for my own productivity, I was struck by the domain name out of the blue, and didn’t fight it for an instant. If a person says their name is Fred, you have to call them that whether they look like a Fred or not.

To satisfy the curious, the phrase ‘asthemoonclimbs’ comes from a poem by Archibald MacLeish:
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem should not mean, but be.