Is Thinking BIG About Your Business or Career Like Bragging?
It’s common knowledge that many people have issues with boastful people. We have a bias against those who seem “full of themselves” and constantly let everyone know how wonderful they are. If the person happens to be a woman, there is even more of a negative reaction to her lack of humility.
If you follow my work and my blog, you know that I help professional women identify and connect with their value and talent and thereby gain
the confidence to promote themselves. (This isn’t bragging or boasting, by the way, but authentically talking about your accomplishments and value proposition.) There is much evidence that communicating your value helps you to advance your career and get more clients.
If you understand your value proposition, what plan do you have to offer your gifts and talent to the world? I mean, what is your BIG plan for your business or career? Do you dare to go there?
I believe that we think small because we are afraid that if we let others know the dreams we have for ourselves, people will think we are “full of ourselves”. We may get the skeptical looks, the rolling eyes, the “are you kidding me?” look. Who do you think you are that you could achieve that?
Well, guess what? If we think small, we stay small. If we keep our ordinary story, we stay ordinary. (I am borrowing that from Suzanne Evans. I just spent three amazing days at her Be The Change Event where I heard this over and over again.) If we want to be extraordinary, then we need to ditch our ordinary story for a bigger one, and we need to be able to articulate that new big story with the same confidence we do our value proposition.
Everything changes when you understand your value. This includes your story and your plans for your career and business. Don’t be afraid to dream big. Don’t be ashamed to create a new big story that expands the way you offer your unique value to the world. It’s not bragging. It’s simply you acknowledging that you have these gifts. It’s simply you understanding your value and believing that you can achieve great success because of it.
What’s your extraordinary story?
Join me Thursday, April 26th for a FREE teleseminar on The 3 Insider Secrets to Marketing Yourself for Success in Business Today.
Learn everything you need to know to position yourself in business today in 3 simple steps!
Tell a Good Story to Pitch Yourself and Your Business
Everyone loves a good story, but how many of us are good at telling good stories? For the most part, I think we create exciting and stimulating stories about our personal lives. We certainly have a tremendous amount of material to serve as our database. We love to tell stories about our girlfriends, spouses or partners, children, grandchildren, neighbors (good and bad). And we have no problem adding emotional content and passion to our stories.
Stories are a great way to draw others in and influence their behavior, yet many of us hesitate to use the same emotions and passion in our storytelling when pitching ourselves and our businesses. As a result, the stories don’t have the impact that we desire to grab people’s attention and stimulate further conversation.
In a recent article in Fast Company, author Kaihan Krippendorf, talks about a workshop he attended on storytelling where he was told to “use lots of LOTS”.
Our facilitator, Gary Lyons, senior coach at The TAI Group, told us a story and had us dissect what we remembered. Do this, and you will realize your audience is often checked out, comatose, or unable to hear or remember what you are saying. The key to engage them is to use lots of “language of the senses,” or LOTS. When telling a story, share with us what you see, smell, feel, taste, and hear. When you trigger a sense in someone, you bring them into the story with you.
Think about your own story. What type of senses can you bring into your story to engage your audience?
See: How can you open someone’s eyes to “see” your value? What do they experience when they see your product, walk into your store, enter your office? What visual trigger will add to your story?
Smell: Perhaps your product or service can be best described by its scent. How can you add this to your story?
Feel: This is a great one! What does success feel like? How does someone feel when they use your product or service? What is the end result? People love to hear stories where they are transported to a new positive mindset. Take them there with you story. Is there a tactile aspect of your product? Is this something you can talk about?
Taste: “I’m so close to success, I can taste it.” We use the sense of taste figuratively and literally. If your product is edible, describe in great detail what the experience of tasting that product is all about. Yummm.
Hear: Another great sense to include in your story! People are talking about your services. There is a buzz that starts slowly and builds up to a feverish pitch. Colleagues and clients are standing up and cheering for you! YEAH! What do you hear?
Kaihan Krippendorf goes on to say about the workshop,
We close with a “before and after” exercise. One of our members gets up to practice a pitch; he is raising money for an energy tech venture. He starts speaking, but I just can’t follow. When he finishes, I realize I have not heard a word. Gary coaches him–lots of LOTS, story spine, look us in the eye, take us in–and the speaker tries again. Now it is all waterfalls of electricity pouring down the mountain, the opportunity to create something and break through with passion. I heard every word, and so much more.
Improve your ability to tell stories–about the company you are building, the project you are leading, the life you live, and will enroll people more completely and emotionally in your mission.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Holiday Networking: Offer the Gift of Connection
‘Tis the season to be jolly! It’s also the season for socializing. We are invited to many holiday events; some for business and some just to have fun and share some holiday cheer. The point is that we are meeting and greeting more people this time of year than any other. It’s a great networking opportunity.
Often these occasions are not about serious networking yet they do provide us with the chance to meet new people and enter into casual conversations about what we do. It’s the perfect time to network without the pressure to “sell” ourselves.
How do you enter into casual conversations with someone new?
Simply introduce yourself and ask the other person to tell you about them. People love to talk about themselves and this opens up the conversation in a casual way. Listen to what they have to say and learn about their business or position.
Offer the gift of connection.
Here is where the holiday giving spirit comes in. What can you do to help this person? Ask them! There may be opportunities for you to introduce them to other possible clients, partners, or referral sources.
When you are open and giving, it opens the door for others to reciprocate.
Take their business card and write on the back where you met them and who you want to introduce them to and make sure to follow up immediately.
Pay it forward and enjoy all your holiday events! You will be surprised how much you will receive in return.
For more tips on how to network, listen to my GPS Your Career Radio podcast with Diane Darling, President of Effective Networking, Inc.
Ice Cream Melts and Three Other Marketing Tips for Summer
This week’s guest post is by Jamie Eslinger, a friend, colleague and fantastic marketing coach.
Jamie “Sling” Eslinger loves to make consumer brands shine. As the founder of MarketingTiara she also coaches entrepreneurs and marketing mavens to be brilliant.
We all have experience chasing ice cream around the top of the cone before it falls off slowly dripping into a puddle on brand new summer sandals, right? But that’s the fun of it! The point is… you KNOW this because you have EXPERIENCED it first hand, or first lick whatever the case may be.
Let’s pretend you are from a far flung universe and ice cream is new. How you would explain it? Describe it? Package it? Convince others to try it?
Let me just get to my point. You know and experience YOUR OWN product better than anyone. You live it, sleep it, dream it, work it. In many cases, especially for consultants or entrepreneurs, TAG you ARE it.
So here are three tips to make sure your marketing plans don’t melt this summer:
1) Drinking Too Much Cool-Aid
Sometimes marketing people fall so in love with their own ideas, they forget to ask the most important person on the planet (hint: the customer) what they might think about it.
Solution: Reach Out and Touch Someone
Even if you already subscribe to third party consumer research, conduct your own.
You can easily create surveys, do in-store questionnaires or hold focus groups with your best customers. And sometimes it’s even better to talk to your worst customers (the ones who don’t hold back any comments). In the end it doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure you take some advice from the old AT&T ads …reach out and touch someone. Find out why they like your product or why they don’t. It will be insightful for your next product launch and you might be surprised what they say.
2) Analysis Paralysis
If you’ve ever made fifteen spreadsheets to prove what just one will tell you, you know this state of being. Usually it means there are other issues at hand. For most projects you can only measure so much before it’s time to take action. Of course, it’s the measuring that leads to success so use the age old advice of measure twice cut once — not measure two billion.
Solution: Testing Schedules
If your team is stuck in the land of analysis it’s time for a test. Encourage them to take action. One way is to set up a market test. Be sure the market is small enough to be measurable. It is also critical to give the test a start date and end date and know what you want to measure BEFORE the test begins. The classic questions to ask are: will this meet sales goals, profit goals and consumer interest? It is easy to get sidetracked once a test starts so make sure you set success parameters ahead of time. It should be very easy at the end of the test window to know if the test passed and the launch is a go. If not, you go back to the drawing board but now with a lot more information than just a spreadsheet.
3) Social Media Blues
Feeling behind the times with social media? Who doesn’t’?! It changes every day. That’s what makes it fun and so hard to keep up with too. In the old days of advertising a marketer paid for tons of research to prove if a television ad or radio commercial was on brand, or if it was compelling enough to sell before the ad ever saw the light of day. Not so these days.
Solution: Merge It
If you are a little weary of how to add social media to your standard marketing, let me just point out there is a huge international focus group in real time just waiting for you – it’s called facebook, sometimes referred to as twitter and other times it comes in the form of a blog. You can tap into this instant information engine to gain free insight about your products. It can be a barometer of what your current customers actually believe and tip you off to important messages you need to address in your advertising. By merging consumer thoughts collected through social media into your standard marketing mix, you can effectively create traditional media (tv, radio, even internet ads) with social media intelligence.
To see a three month plan of how this works, read this great article by Bill Flitter:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/27277.asp
For a marketing strategy that won’t melt I recommend mixing consumer insight with action (test something, do something, don’t just sit there looking at your computer screen) and tap into your social media friends and followers for some key insights and messages. And to the Dog Days of Summer I say enjoy the ice cream and leave the Cool-Aid behind.
Sign up for MarketingTiara’s Shine On newsletter at: http://conta.cc/signupforshineon
Follow her blog at: www.consultsling.com
Check out Jamie’s marketingtiara retreat in September here: bit.ly/aLzx56
What Do You Do When a Door of Opportunity Opens?
There has been a lot written recently about women’s innate ability to lead. One reason that is consistently mentioned is that women are more risk adverse than men. Many thought leaders believe that because women are more cautious, they make better decisions. I believe there is some validity in this especially if you look at the recent events on Wall Street. It’s only speculation of course, but there is a widely held opinion that if there was more diversity at the leadership and board level, this current economic crisis might have been averted. Who knows?
Can this cautious outlook sometimes work against us? It is possible, in my opinion, to be so cautious that you never move forward in your business or career. Being overly cautious can paralyze you.
Almost every major milestone in my own career has been due to me taking an enormous leap of faith and trying something new; something perhaps I was not totally prepared for but decided to embrace regardless. When a door opened, I ran through it and never worried how I would master what was required to be successful in this new opportunity. I’m not saying that every time I took a risk, it worked out well. There have been times that I have fallen flat on my face. When this happens, it’s important to dust yourself off, gather your wits about you, and start all over again. In other words, never let your failures prevent you from learning a lesson, picking yourself up, and seizing the next opportunity that comes along with the same passion and energy.
What is the essential ingredient we all need to have in order to take a risk? Self confidence! Self confidence fuels your persistence and determination and helps propel you through any open door. In fact, with enough self confidence, you won’t even wait until a door of opportunity opens for you, you’ll go find it!
It’s critical for your success, whether you are an entrepreneur or corporate professional, to periodically connect with your value and talent to establish and grow your foundation of self confidence. This, in my opinion, is the secret to success.
We need to periodically connect with our value and talent because we often take our accomplishments for granted. We lose that connection to what is unique and wonderful about us. Do whatever it takes to honor your accomplishments and ability. One suggestion I make repeatedly is to keep a success journal and record all your accomplishments and review your entries each week, celebrate your achievements, and think about what these successes say about you. This will fuel your self confidence and your ability to take on new opportunities, which, in turn, will lead to career and business success.
Self confidence is the secret of success.
Celebrating My Independence
I’ve had family and friends say to me that I’m independent to a fault. Is there such a thing as being too independent?
I left corporate America six years ago to start my coaching business and I’ve never looked back. Sure, there have been challenges; plenty of challenges. I would be dishonest if I said running my own business is a piece of cake. It’s not. It can be stressful and even scary at times. Why? Because YOU are the business and though you can occasionally take time off (as difficult as that is for me personally), at the end of the day, it’s YOU who makes all the decisions and charts the course for the direction of your business.
In the beginning, I would stress over every decision. It seemed to me at the time that every decision was a monumental one. What should I name my company? What should my website look like and say? What is my niche? I have to say now I make my decisions quickly and they are often based on my intuition. Sometimes I make good decisions; some aren’t so great, but I’ve come to realize that this is all part of the evolutionary process of becoming an entrepreneur. I celebrate the fact that I have the ability to make these decisions and chart my own course; to make some mistakes and hopefully learn from them and move forward. That’s what is means to be independent after all.
That being said, I think it is possible to be independent to a fault as an entrepreneur. You can’t build and run a successful business in a vacuum. It’s important to surround yourself with a network of supporters and mentors that you can tap into for advice.
I read recently that every business owner should have an advisory board for their business; a group of like-minded business people who can act as a sounding board when you need it. This advisory board can be a formal group or an informal relationship with colleagues who have the experience and expertise to help guide you.
Who should be on your advisory board? For my coaching business, I look for advice and support in finance, marketing, technology and design and often use a coach myself to keep me on track and move my business forward.
So, it is Independence Day and I am celebrating my independence! Being an entrepreneur is an amazing experience to me. Because I am following my passion to help other professional women be successful, it never feels like work. I love it and every day is a celebration of my independence. That being said, I think as an entrepreneur, it is possible to be too independent and we need to seek out the advice and expertise of others to help us grow. In the end, this gives us the ability to maintain our independence and flourish.
Happy Independence Day!
Ditch the Pitch: A Presentation for Professional Coaches
Here is my presentation for BusinessforCoaches, a UK organization that supports professional coaches worldwide with professional development activities.
Ditch the Pitch Presentation for Coaches
If You’re Stuck, You’re Going Nowhere
A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Libby Gill on my Head over Heels Radio show about her book, You Unstuck: Mastering the Rules of Risk Taking in Work and Life. Reflecting on that discussion this week, I realized that there are so many ways we get stuck in our personal lives and in our businesses. I guess it’s part of the human condition to get “stuck in our ways”, especially as we get older.
Sometimes we get stuck because we become so comfortable where we are that we are fearful of taking any risks that might bring about change. So we stay in a job that has no potential or a job that we hate because in our minds, the choice is between the job that we have become so accustomed to and the unknown. We are frightened of the change. Needless to say, whatever the reason is that we don’t make a change, it is important to realize the consequences of being “stuck”. After all, being “stuck”, quite simply means going “nowhere”.
As an entrepreneur or small business owner, it is critical to not only be flexible, but willing to take some risks and embrace change. Any company that is fearful of change will eventually miss the boat. We all need to keep the pace of the many changes in the business world today. Think about this; if you did not embrace technology or the internet, where would your business be right now? What about social media?
I often laugh when I think about the phrase “business as usual”. In today’s marketplace, does that have any meaning at all? Changes happen so rapidly and the need to adapt and be flexible so critical, that the way we did business just last week, can be obsolete!
In my own business, I am constantly making changes to my business model and tweaking my approach, yet I still find that I get very comfortable with some aspects of my business. Consequently, it becomes more of a challenge for me to let go of certain business practices as my business gets more sophisticated. It seems that there are so many choices relative to how to move forward that it’s daunting. It’s much easier to procrastinate or vegetate instead. (By the way, when this happens, it is a good time to hire a business coach!)
Take a good look at your own business and evaluate your flexibility and willingness to change. Have you resisted any changes to your business recently? Are the reasons for your resistance valid or are you stuck because of your comfort level and fear of taking any risks?
Remember that being “stuck” means “going nowhere”.
Why Do Car Salesmen Have a Bad Reputation?
Why do car salesmen have a bad reputation? Why do we hate those nagging telephone calls from strangers telling us to buy something? The reason, I believe, is that the sales techniques they use are impersonal and we often feel that something is being forced on us that we do not want or need.
The fact of the matter is that even if we do need the product or service that’s being promoted, we are so turned off by their approach, that we can’t wait to escape from the conversation. We say, “I’m just looking, thank you” and hope to be left alone or we hang up. Quite simply, we don’t like being told what we need and what we should purchase. Most of us like to make our own buying decisions.
With that in mind, it is important for anyone who is promoting their own product or service to be aware of how they themselves feel when they are being sold to. Very often, we are so focused on selling the product or service we provide, that we don’t take the time to tailor our message to the potential buyer. We don’t take the time to ask the right questions to see if, in fact, this person needs what we have to sell. If we use one generic approach for all potential buyers, we will not make the necessary connection with the person to close the sale.
Asking questions is, of course, a great way to ascertain if there is a need for what we are selling. Open ended questions such as, “how?”, “when?”, “where?”, “what?”, “how much?” elicit the information we need. The process of asking questions, listening, and responding, creates the foundation for a relationship and it is the relationship that is critical in the end to closing the sale. When a stranger tries to force us to buy something, we get agitated, defensive, and immediately put up a protective wall.
So maybe you’re not a car salesman. Maybe you’re an entrepreneur who must promote their services in order to grow their business. How does this apply to self-promotion? Do the same sales techniques apply when you are promoting yourself? Absolutely! When you are in a conversation and someone asks you what you do, you are certainly in the position to talk about your business and the benefits and value it provides for your clients. But how do you know if this person is a potential client unless you begin to ask them questions to get to know them better?
Remember how you feel when someone tries to sell to you. How do you feel when someone gives you a generic one-size –fits- all pitch? Ask questions that will help you get to know the person better. Ask questions to determine their need; their pain. Then deliver your own irresistible pitch so that they understand very clearly what you do and the energy and passion you have for your business. It may be that this person is not a potential client, but by establishing a relationship, you are setting the stage for referrals or even a future sale.
Can You Take a Break from Work?
I did something really important last weekend. I took a whole day off! I have been consistently working seven days a week for months without a break and my coach strongly suggested that I try to take one full day off each week. Well, if my coach told me to do this and it was part of my assignment, I could not refuse.
I have to admit I was very anxious about this. If I do indeed take Sunday off, what will my Monday be like? Won’t I be even more stressed than if I worked the whole week?
I had to make a plan. I knew that if I stayed around the house, I would be compelled to look at my computer and blackberry and do some work. I know myself all too well. So I planned a trip with a friend to go to Provincetown for the day. It was a beautiful day and a perfect time for an outing on Cape Cod. We took the ferry from Martha’s Vineyard and drove the length of the Cape, listened to great music, ate a fabulous lunch at an outdoor café, and shared some small talk.
My next challenge was to not discuss business all day. I didn’t do too well in this category, but this “taking a break” thing is a process for me, and at least I was off to a fairly good start. After all, I physically removed myself from my office and work environment. (I do think I might have cheated though when I came home that night and did a little work before heading to bed. Don’t tell my coach!)
Monday morning I felt refreshed and energized and not at all stressed. It was a good experiment for me and a great lesson as well.
Sometimes our drive to be successful drives us to work compulsively. Can you relate to this? Intellectually, I’m sure we all recognize this is not healthy. I know that I certainly do, yet pulling myself away from work once a week to do something entirely different makes me anxious; a clear sign to me that this is unhealthy behavior.
I am mindful that at least once a day I need to leave my desk and my office and do something unrelated to work. I am mindful that once a week I should take twelve hours of respite to renew my energy, spirit and passion for my work. What I have discovered is that when I step away from work my creativity kicks in and I can actually think more clearly.
Case in point, for weeks on end I was trying to think of a new name for my radio show. Women Mean Business is trademarked by NAWBO and though I was unaware of this when the show launched, I did receive notice from them to stop using the name. I loved the name and racked my brain trying to think of something equally sticky and clever. I even ran a contest on LinkedIn to get more ideas. Trying to get a new name was on my mind night and day. Here’s the lesson though. As soon as I let it go and stepped away from the problem, a solution came to me. Miraculously out of the blue, the new name, Head over Heels, popped into my brain. WOW! I could not believe it. This process of “letting go” really worked.
If I can pass along any wisdom about this it is to be mindful yourself of how your drive to be successful can work against you at times if you don’t take a break and let go. Not only is it not healthy, but the consistent compulsive need to work actually stifles your creativity and is counter productive.
This is a process that I’m just beginning myself.
Well, need to get back to work. :>)
-
20 Minutes For $20
20 Minutes of Interviewing Coaching For Only $20...
Present yourself with confidence!
