Have you noticed that it is now common to use the term “personal branding” instead of self-promotion?

Personal branding and self-promotion are, in fact, the same.  I have come to believe that the term self-promotion is so off-putting for women that we will do almost anything to avoid it. Hence, it’s become the” pink elephant” in the room. We know it’s there and yet we don’t want to recognize its presence, hoping that somehow it will disappear. Its very existence is, in fact, threatening, overwhelming, and often scary. We’d rather dance around it rather than deal with it.

So now we call it personal branding and hope that with a new name it will be more acceptable and something that we can embrace instead of the uncomfortable concept of promoting ourselves. But I believe in calling a spade a spade. It’s still all about promoting yourself, and self-promotion remains an important key to your success as a woman in business today.

And the evidence is in. There have been a variety of studies and research that support the need for women to talk about their accomplishments in order to advance their careers, such as the Catalyst 2011 study, The Myth of the Ideal Worker: Does Doing All the Right Things Really Get Women Ahead. Intellectually, we understand the importance of differentiating ourselves and letting others know what we bring to the table. Emotionally, we get hung up in our limiting beliefs about the need to be humble and blend in, our need to be liked, our fear of rejection.

Well, it’s time to “man-up” and dance with the pink elephant. She’s not going away and your continual avoidance of her will only contribute to your lack of career and business success.

How do you dance with the Pink Elephant?

First, you need to change your mind set about promoting yourself. There were probably many things you didn’t want to learn and did anyway, right? Self-promotion is a necessary skill. (I remember how much I hated Algebra, but I realized its importance and learned it.)

Second, take the time to understand your value and what is unique about you. This is so important that I can’t stress it enough. You probably think you know what value you offer your organization, your clients, your community, your family and friends, but I would challenge you and say that unless you’ve taken some time and done some soul searching, you probably don’t know your value.

If you don’t know your value proposition, then promoting yourself will ALWAYS be uncomfortable and difficult. You will feel phony because you haven’t made the necessary connection with your unique value.

As I’ve said before, everything changes when you understand your value. You can then talk about yourself with confidence. You will speak up in meetings, voice your opinion, and take advantage of opportunities to showcase your talent.

Dance with the pink elephant. If you climb on board, you may just end up where you’ve always wanted to go!

Are you being stingy?

…by not letting others know what you have to offer?

…by not speaking up and sharing your opinion or ideas?

Sometimes we are so focused on our “own stuff” and our fears or discomfort talking about ourselves that we forget that what we have to offer helps others. That’s right! Think about it. What you have to offer, whether it’s a product, a service, an innovative idea or new approach to a problem or simply your opinion, helps other people and improves their lives and/or careers in an important way.

Re-framing this as an offer to help is a terrific way for you to move beyond your fear and discomfort and focus on what the other person needs. It gets you beyond the “stinginess” factor.

How would your next job interview go if you used this mindset, understood what you had to offer and focused on how it could help the company?

How would your next networking event go if you used this mindset when meeting new people, finding out what they need and offering your assistance?

How would your next senior management or department meeting go if you used this mindset and offered your ideas and opinion?

For the next few weeks, I am offering you the opportunity to write and tell me specifically ONE way you help your company or clients (what value you offer), and I will feature your “commercial” in a new section of my blog/newsletter.

Please include your name, position, company (company website or personal website) and email so that other women can contact you.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

An amazing shift takes place when you connect with your unique value. It’s an incredible ah-ha moment!

When you truly understand your value, you present yourself with confidence; your body language changes; your communication changes; your relationships change and the way others perceive you changes dramatically.

For years, women have come to me for guidance on how to promote themselves. They struggle with feeling authentic and comfortable talking about their talent and accomplishments even though their resumes and experience tell a story of great success.

Why is this?

Because we struggle to fit in and be like everyone else in order to be liked. Now, as professionals, we are told that we need to differentiate ourselves and it doesn’t feel right. Somewhere along the line we get messages that we should be quiet about our talent. As a consequence, it becomes more difficult to make the connection back to what makes us truly unique.

We lose the vital connection with who we really are and our unique value proposition. We listen to everyone’s advice on who we should be, what we should do and how we should do it. This external focus distracts us from our own inner wisdom and our core essence.

What does it take to find ourselves again?

In her new book, Take the Lead, Betsy Myers says,

Leadership is a function first and foremost of self-knowledge and honest self-reflection.

How many of us take the time to figure this out?

How can we present ourselves to the world or promote ourselves authentically if we don’t do this self-reflection to find our unique value?

Understand that authentic comfortable self-promotion can’t be faked. It comes from a true understanding of who you are and what unique value you bring to the world.

Take the time to discover your value and this will be your foundation for career success and fulfillment.

I am offering you the opportunity to discover and connect with your unique value proposition so that you present yourself to your clients, your prospects, your colleagues, your friends with authenticity.

The GPS Your Career Group Coaching Program is a journey of self-discovery that will dramatically change your business and career by helping  you to position yourself successfully.

This four week course starts February 15^th, 8-9pm Eastern and includes four 60 minute coaching sessions, worksheets and stimulating exercises to help you do the deep dive and de-clutter to re-discover who you really are and what you have to offer your company or your clients.

No more struggles with self-promotion! No more struggles trying to get clients or be noticed at work!

The class is limited to 10 participants, so please register now.

I have a power point slide in many of my keynote presentations that states Confidence = Competence. When this slide appears, it’s always an “ah-hah” moment for many people in the audience. Isn’t it true though? When you present yourself with confidence, people assume you are competent.

Think about your own purchasing decisions. Would you be willing to purchase a product or service from someone who lacks confidence; who stumbles through their sales presentation and seems unprepared and anxious? You would no doubt hesitate unless you felt sorry for them. (Not a good reason to buy, by the way.) You hesitate in this case because you believe that when a person lacks confidence in their presentation, they may lack competence. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to understand this when selling your own products and services.

Now, I’m not saying it’s necessarily true. It’s just our perception. But the perception is important because that is what people base their decisions on.

Maybe you’re not an entrepreneur, but a woman with ambition to get ahead in her organization. You are talented and gifted and produce great results, but when it comes to presenting those results, speaking up in meetings, you fumble and stammer. Do you come across as a potential leader? Probably not!

I’m not a proponent of faking confidence. I’ve read some articles that say “fake it until you make it.” I’m against this tactic because authenticity is so important in our presentation. It is, in fact, this connection with our authentic selves and the value that we offer that is the foundation of the confidence we need in order to present ourselves as competent. This authenticity inspires trust and it’s vital for our success in business.

I do a lot of speaking now about the topic of understanding your value because I believe until we understand and connect with our unique gifts and value proposition, we will continue to lack the confidence to present ourselves as competent.

Do you understand your unique value or the value that your products and services offer?

Starting January 10^th, I am be offering a four week group coaching program that will take you on a journey of self-discovery to understand your value and better position yourself to grow your business or advance your career. This four week program will be done via phone and participants will receive four hours of coaching, valuable worksheets and exercises as well as feedback from a group of like-minded professionals. Each participant will also receive mp3 recordings of every class.

Check out my website, for more information! And be one of 10 lucky women to take this journey. The group will be limited to 10 so please register now.

Women DO ask for promotions and raises but they still lag behind men in compensation and position. The latest Catalyst study, The Myth of the Ideal Worker: Does Doing All the Right Things Really Get Women Ahead?, dispels the myth that women are not proactive in advancing their careers. After following 3,000 high potential MBA graduates, Catalyst found that doing all the “right things” such as being proactive, requesting high profile assignments, and asking for promotions and raises, did not significantly help women advance their careers.

Examining different career strategies, Catalyst found that the common proactive strategies that high-potential women often adopt to advance their careers did not work in their favor. Quite simply, men outpace women in both advancement and compensation. The gender gap in pay and position still exists despite women’s efforts to negotiate for better pay and placement.

Here are some of the key findings:

Women seem to be paid for proven performance—women who changed jobs two or more times post-MBA earned $53,472 less than women who rose through the ranks at their first job.

In contrast, men seem to be paid for potential—men who had moved on from their first post-MBA job earned $13,743 more than those who stayed with their first employer.

Across all career profiles, men were more likely to reach senior executive/CEO positions than women; in the most proactive category, 21% of men advanced to leadership compared with 11% of women.

What I find especially important in the study is Catalyst’s recommendation for career advancement.

The same strategies don’t work equally well for men and women. Women must adopt strategies different from their male colleagues’ to advance their careers. When women were proactive in making their achievements known, they advanced further, increased their compensation growth, and were more satisfied with their careers. They also advanced further when they proactively networked with influential others. (my underline)

So let me ask you, how well do you think you communicate your achievements?

Have you identified your web of influence (your power network) and do you consistently communicate with this network to keep them apprised of your accomplishments?

Learning how to effectively articulate your achievements is not about bragging. It’s about YOU connecting with the VALUE  you bring to your organization. It’s about how your value benefits the organization; how YOU impact the bottom line.

Once you are able to do this well to your internal and external network, people will better understand what you have to offer.  As the Catalyst study suggests, this is paramount to advancing your career in today’s workplace environment.

If you would like improve your ability to do this well, I will be offering a full day workshop, GPS Your Career Day, in Boston in the beginning of December (exact date and location TBD), AND a four week coaching group, GPS Your Career Group, starting in January.

Email me if you would like more information.

A prospective client called me last week about my coaching services. She had read an article of mine about how to prepare for an interview and was seeking help to better position herself for employment. We talked for a couple of minutes and I asked her what she does. It’s a simple question, right? We are asked this question all the time, but when I posed the question to her she could not answer it. There was silence on the other end of the phone.

“See”, she said. “This is my problem.” I can’t talk about myself let alone describe what I do. Turns out she is a financial analyst and had dropped out for 18 months to have a child and seems to have lost her way.

Of course, I hear this from men and women who are employed as well. We all get so tied up in our daily lives and everyday tasks that it is easy to lose touch with who we are and what is special and unique about us. We lose touch with who we are. I mean who we REALLY are.

Why do we lose touch? Well, we get distracted by the clutter in our lives. We are bombarded daily by the media with new promotions, new opportunities, new gadgets and technology, new theories. It’s easy to get distracted from the essence of who we are unless we are willing to take the time for introspection and meditation.

What’s missing is the connection with our core essence. What makes each of us unique?

I do many workshops to help professionals connect with their value and what I have discovered is that many of us are so disconnected that we lose our way. We need a foundation. We need to re-establish this connection with our value and establish a strong belief in ourselves and our capabilities and strengths. I’m not talking about the normal hype or the mundane adjectives we often use to describe ourselves, but the connection with our true authentic selves.

Do yourself a favor and take some time to re-establish this connection. What are your strengths and what do you contribute to your organization, your family, your community? How would others describe you? Dig deep until you truly understand your value, not what you think others expect of you or what you think you should be. If you dig deep enough you will find your core essence.

It is this core essence that provides the foundation for your confidence and well-being. It is this foundation that will free you to talk about yourself in a positive way and promote yourself with conviction.

The news last week featured the results of an interesting research study from University of Ontario’s Ivey School of Business, Cornell University and University of Notre Dame. Basically, the study demonstrated that men who were “highly disagreeable” at work earned 18 per cent more (an average of $9,700 more a year) than men who scored “agreeable”. The headline in the press was that nice guys finish last, but is there more to it than that?

For the purpose of this study, “agreeableness” was defined as people who value relationships, altruism, and the good of the group over their own self-interest. This is typically seen as more feminine behavior, right? Those who were considered “disagreeable” were viewed as self-serving and aggressive.

Charlice Hurst, one of the co-authors says of the study says that we shouldn’t take all this literally, but it is important to note that the ability to stand up for yourself and advocate for your self-interests does get you noticed for promotion.

….. speaking up for yourself more often may make you more highly valued by your employer. It comes down to standing up for your interests and being more assertive in your negotiations based on what you know your value to be rather than making people happy your top priority.

She offers more food for thought. It could be that the high earning men are actually nice guys on a daily basis but are more aggressive and proficient at negotiating for a better salary. Interesting point! We can still be nice (if that comes naturally) and advance our careers by being more assertive when we need to be.

We all know that women who are aggressive and self-serving are already viewed negatively by most organizations. Being nice had less of an effect on women’s compensation with an average of 5 per cent gap in salary. The study concluded that women are already discriminated against in terms of salary and in fact, are expected to be nice, to be nurturing of others, and therefore, are not penalized further for this.

The important lesson for women, I think, is that we can still embrace our innate feminine style. We don’t need to mimic “disagreeable” behavior to get ahead. (This doesn’t really work for men either.) But what we do need to do is learn to speak up for ourselves if we want to advance our career. We can still be an advocate for our team, but we also need to know  when to advocate for ourselves. There is an appropriate time for both, and knowing when to stick up for yourself is vitally important to get noticed and get promoted.

I think parenting is the most difficult role we have as adults. Sure, we might have tough decisions to make about our careers, our relationships, our lifestyle. But nothing compares to the anxiety we have about raising our children.  We want the best for our children. We want our children to be happy and successful and there is no clear road map on how to accomplish this.

I read an interesting article by Lisa Gottlieb in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy. What was of particular interest to me in her article was how we, as parents, try to provide the perfectly happy childhood for our children and actually make it harder for them to grow up. In fact, Gottlieb says that in our efforts to boost our children’s self-esteem, we are actually causing more anxiety and depression and lower self-esteem.

How does this happen? According to the author and her quoted experts, we give our children an inflated view of their specialness. We are constantly telling them how special and talented they are because we live in a culture where everyone wins and gets a trophy. Our goal is to have happy and self-confident children, and yet, we are protecting them from accurate feedback.

I was particularly interested in what the article says about how we affect our children’s self-image because I now coach many adults who want to advance their careers and promote themselves but seem to have lost their connection to their value and talent.

Could it be, in fact, that we were told as children how talented we were when we knew in our gut that this was not always accurate? Could it be that we received constant praise that we felt was not deserved? Perhaps we got the trophy for “Most Improved” soccer player because everyone had to get a trophy.  Maybe at the time we were even a little embarrassed to get the trophy. We knew that we stunk at soccer so what was all the fuss about? In other words, we felt that the praise was unjustified and we didn’t really have the talent at all.

If everything becomes special, than nothing is special in the end.

The author says, “the irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. “

The message here is that what we need to focus on for ourselves (and our children as well) is what truly makes us wonderful and unique. What have been our earned accomplishments (because we all have some!)? If we make false claims, our efforts at promoting ourselves will not be authentic and will backfire. We will lose our belief in ourselves and will, therefore, have difficulty communicating our value to others.

Think hypothetically about receiving a trophy you knew you didn’t deserve and how you would feel. Now shift gears and think about winning a trophy for your earned accomplishments and successes.

Every day every one of us deserves a trophy for something that we actually accomplished.

What was your trophy for today?

I just got back from my Saturday morning yoga class. I look forward to this class all week to help me deal with the stress my body seems to store up all week long. I don’t profess to be a yogi. In fact, my body tends to be tight from years of running and traveling for work. (That’s why I really need this class.) But most of all, I need the lessons from the yoga instructor who tells us every week to leave our egos at the door and go with the flow.

As I was driving home from the class today, I began to think more about how difficult it is to leave our egos out of our daily activities. I was thinking specifically about self-promotion. Is it all ego driven?

My intent is not to get into a heavy philosophical discussion here, but this is intriguing to me. Yes, our ego will push us to be the best we can be; to advance our careers and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. Thinking strategically about our career can in itself be ego-driven I suppose. What I have discovered in my work with female professionals is that when they lack a strong sense of self-esteem, self- promotion is much more challenging.

I decided to find out exactly what the difference is between self-esteem and ego  and found some clarity.

According to this online dictionary, self esteem is ” a balanced and unexaggerated self respect and self love. It combines a healthy regard for the self with a healthy regard for others. Healthy self esteem esteems others as equally as the self. Others are treated and regarded as respectfully as the self.”

“ Ego, on the other hand, always believes in its own self importance above the importance of others. Ego always requires outside approval, validation, and constant attention and gratification. Ego believes in its own superiority above all others. Some versions of ego insist on inferiority as a role. Both inferiority and superiority are lies though, and variations of the same theme — of feeling “less than” others.”

If you agree with these definitions, than self-promotion is not necessarily an ego-driven activity. It truly depends on what motivates your actions. It is possible that the act of promoting yourself can come from a place of healthy self-esteem. In fact, that’s the more desirable approach because when you believe in yourself, you promote yourself with authenticity. It’s this authenticity that will improve your self-promotion efforts. You are more credible when you believe in yourself. Self-confidence comes across to others as competence.

It’s when you are motivated solely through your ego, that self-promotion takes on the qualities that most of us detest. This type of self-promotion comes across as bragging and pushiness.

Lesson: Leave your ego at the door.

Stay connected with your unique qualities and strengths and promote yourself authentically. Don’t try to prove your superiority over others. Staying true to yourself and your talent will get you much more attention in the long run.

Think about it. When do you feel the most stress at work? According to author Tony Schwartz in a recent post on Harvard Business Review, we feel the most stress when our value is threatened.

Across more than 200 studies of the effects of stress, researchers have found that the highest rises in cortisol levels — meaning the most pernicious “fight or flight” response — are prompted by “threats to one’s social acceptance, esteem and status”.

When someone puts us down or criticizes us, we not only get upset and feel under- appreciated, but very often we move into a defensive state of mind.

To feel valued (and valuable) is almost as compelling a need as food. The more our value feels at risk, the more preoccupied we become with defending and restoring it, and the less value we’re capable of creating in the world.

Two things struck me as significant in this statement. First, are we so disconnected to our value that someone elses criticism can throw us off guard and upset us? And as a result of this disconnect, how is it possible that we become so focused on defending our value that we can actually lose our value in the process?

First let me address the disconnection. Our lives are so crazy busy these days, it’s all we can do to keep up with our responsibilities at home and at work. Everyday we are running at full speed and focusing on completing our to-do list. How often do we take the time to identify our strengths and establish a lasting connection to our value? Without a strong connection to our value, we are trying to navigate a boat through strong currents without a rudder.

Tony Schwartz suggests, “Our challenge is always to reconnect to our own core value — even when someone else’s criticism cuts deep. What that requires, first and foremost, is compassion for ourselves.”

I think we need to take this one step further and intentionally make the connection to our core value. Take the time to identify what makes you unique; your strengths. Make a note each day of your accomplishments and successes in a journal and think about what these achievements say about you. This is your value proposition. No one can take this away from you. It is the foundation of how you promote yourself at work. This is your rudder.

With this connection to your value, no one will be able to set you so off course that your only new course is to defend yourself. Stay focused on your value and even if you are temporarily upset when someone puts you down, you will be able to quickly get back on track.