Blog list ...

Today, there is a lot of emphasis on personal networking and developing the right relationships. Rightly so, as this is all part of developing your own personal brand. In this blog I thought it may be worth considering some personal brand development tactics, designed to manage the way others see you in the workplace.

Our challenge in the work place is that we not only want a reputation of being approachable, we want to be known as someone who can get things done. This way we appeal to colleagues and managers alike, and enhance our career prospects. Traditionally you probably know people that are good at one or the other of these. They are either really cool and supportive to work with, or voraciously pushing for work to be completed, often alienating others. But there is middle ground where you can develop the Brand You as a ‘collaborative achiever’. Someone who makes sure things get done, through others.

  ‘The only limit to your impact is your imagination and your commitment.' 

Tony Robbins

It is pretty simple to understand, but challenging to apply: to maximise your personal impact, you need to devise ways to maximise your stage presence.

In the business world, of course we do not think about 'stage presence' very much. There is too much to be getting on with, meetings, presentations, projects, client visits, reports, work winning, staff management, budgeting, the list is endless. Why on earth should we think in terms of the actor's world of stage presence?

 I hope we are now all thinking of holidays?

Xmas is done, we are all back in the flow, so to keep the motivation going as we get used to being back in the workplace, many of us start to plan where we are going to go for our vacations. Advertisers know this evidently, and our TV screens are flooded with alluring locations.

And do you know, I haven't met one person who travels abroad without insurance? Mark Twain once said: “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”  It seems that we think that way most of the time, except for holidays, when we ensure we are insured up to the eyeballs.

  ‘If you want to stand out from the crowd, give people a reason not to forget you.' 

Richard Branson

 As a nation we are striving.  Striving for our dream lifestyle? Striving for our dream job? Striving for a healthy and wealthy retirement at 50 or 60 or a house by the sea?

Today, we want it all. We want to be happy in our work, we want to feel we are contributing to the world. We want to be able to travel, have time to spend with our children and the ‘me’ time we keep promising ourselves.  We want a great work/life balance. But with living costs increasing we also want to be successful in our careers in order to fund it all. Whatever our motivation, the reality is that the competition we are faced with in the professional world today is steep. With more people progressing to higher education, more people obtaining University degrees, we are having to compete with a lot of ambitious fish.