True You

5 Reasons You Can’t Afford NOT to Develop Yourself

Posted on by Kate Dixon

Focusing on your development and learning can feel selfish. It takes time, and often, it takes money. Developing yourself brings so many benefits – to yourself, to your company, and to others – that you really can’t afford NOT to.

5 reasons why you can’t afford NOT to invest in your development! #training #learning Click To Tweet

Development isn’t limited to formal classroom training. Practicing a new skill on the job or learning from a colleague or mentor can be every bit as important, and less expensive, too. That said, seminars and workshops can act as catalysts for change. Outside perspectives from instructors and other participants can be exceptionally valuable, and they can give you great ideas for new ways of doing things.

When you’re investing in your development:

  1. You’re promotable
  2. You’re hireable
  3. You’re engaged
  4. You’re confident
  5. You can support others

You’re promotable

Learning new skills and developing the ones you already have can make you more valuable to your employer and prepare you for your next move. When an opportunity becomes available, you’ll be an obvious choice.

You’re hireable

If you’re promotable internally, chances are good that other companies would consider you an attractive candidate, too.

You’re engaged

It’s exciting to learn new things! And having the opportunity to develop your skills and abilities – and even better, to apply them on the job – makes work even more interesting than it usually is. If you’re a leader, don’t forget that Management by Development can be very effective!

You’re confident

Acquiring new skills and knowledge brings confidence and self-assurance, regardless of the subject. It’s not just the so-called “soft skills” training (like communications, or presentation skills, or interpersonal skills) that build confidence. Learning technical or job-specific skills helps you feel more self-assured, too.

You can support others

When you gain new expertise, it’s natural to share it with others. Through mentoring or sharing your newly gained knowledge, your learning can have a ripple effect for your team.

Always strive for a balance between development and contribution in your job. As you start a new role, you’re developing a lot, and contributing relatively little. There’s natural pressure to start balancing the scales by contributing as quickly as possible.

After you’ve been in the same role for a while, though, you may be contributing a lot, but developing little or not at all. Organizations may be okay with this imbalance, but you should never be – it doesn’t serve you (or them) in the long run.

What was your favorite development experience? Tell us about it below!

 

5 Essential Elements Your Personal Brand Needs

Posted on by Kate Dixon

What do you stand for? What are you great at? What is your reputation? How do you want to be known? Combine the answers to these 4 elements, and that’s your Personal Brand. So, what’s the 5th element? Authenticity. Your Personal Brand is the best version of you, but it must be authentically you.

Create your Personal Brand by combining your Principles, Superpowers, reputation, and how you want to be known. But above all, be authentic. #personalbrand Click To Tweet

What do you stand for?

Your brand starts with your Principles — what you stand for. Things like Connection, Decisiveness, Innovation, and Integrity are all Principles. These core values help make you . . . you! Using your Principles in your brand statement can be powerful; when your Principles align with those of other people or organizations, that harmony can make you more satisfied and fulfilled. (To learn more, check out this blog post.)

What are you great at?

Next comes your Superpowers — what you’re great at. Most people start with Superpowers when they’re creating their Personal Brand, but there’s a reason I put this one second. What you do is important, but by itself, it’s not going to help you to stand out in a crowd (or in a sea of resumes). The real power in your brand is how what you do combines with all of the other elements.

If there’s something you want to be great at, but you aren’t (yet!), be proactive and develop it! There are so many resources – books, videos, training classes – on virtually every topic you can think of. And one of the best ways to make your learning stick is by applying it on the job or by volunteering. That won’t work for everything, of course, but talk with your manager about it, and explore the possibilities!

What is your reputation?

Your reputation is an external view of how your brand comes to life. Think about what your friends, colleagues, and customers say about you. And for purposes of this exercise, you can limit this to people who like and support you. My guess is that you don’t want to base your Personal Brand on stuff people you don’t like say about you!

How do you want to be known?

How you want to be known is what I think of as your internal brand voice. It includes only those things that you want people to notice about you. For instance, if you’re a great wedding planner, but you HATE weddings, don’t include “wedding planner” in your brand! Maybe the 2 things you really love about it are the planning piece and managing all of the vendors. Those things could come into your brand statement pretty easily.

Can you get your Principles, Superpowers, reputation, and how you want to be known into a short (one or two sentences) brand statement? Probably not! But if you have all of these elements in mind as you brainstorm, you’ll be well on your way to the most authentic Personal Brand you’ve ever created!

Share your Personal Brand below!

 

Principled Moments: Memories that Matter

Posted on by Kate Dixon

Think about a time when everything was just awesome. You were happy and fulfilled. Ahh! Those are what I call “Principled Moments,” because if you examine them closely, you’ll likely find that one (or more) of your Principles — what you stand for — was being honored.

Principled Moments can happen at home, at work, when you’re volunteering, when you’re watching your kid play sports. In fact, you can learn more about yourself by thinking about how these moments show up in different facets of your life.

Your Principled Moments can tell you a lot about what matters to you. Click To Tweet

What do Principled Moments look like?

One of my client’s Principled Moment was her wedding.

Another client told me about a Principled Moment watching a kid that he’d mentored getting a tough win in a sporting match.

Someone else’s Principled Moment was crossing the finish line in a half-marathon after months of training and preparation.

Yet another client spoke of a presentation at work they knocked out of the park.

What do your Principled Moments look like…at work, and away from work?

Understanding Your Principled Moments

Picture your Principled Moments like photographs. They’re freeze frames that can help you remember those important times.

For example, my client whose Principled Moment was her wedding talked about honoring her relationship with her husband, her family being gathered in one place, and about how her thoughtful planning resulted in exactly the experience she had hoped to give to the people she loved best. Her principles of Partnership, Family-Orientation, and Service were all honored on her special day.

Think back to your principled moments . . . what was going on for you? Why were these particular moments so special? What principles were you honoring? How do they represent what you stand for?

Using Your Principled Moments

Being aware of what lights you up can help you focus on those things and get more of them. When you compare Principled Moments from different aspects of your life, the common threads can be easier to pick out.

My client whose Principled Moment was watching the sporting match realized that, at work, he really loved seeing people on his team do well in high-stakes situations. He realized that both his work and non-work moments had a common theme: preparing others to take calculated risks to achieve higher performance. His common principles were Education, Risk-Taking, and Achievement.

Compare your Principled Moments to each other. What do they have in common? Is it Family? Or Fairness? Or Fun? Or Functionality? (Or non-F-words?) Are there different things that combine uniquely to make your Principled Moments truly meaningful?

Once you identify the things your moments have in common, you can seek out opportunities to use those principles. Whether it’s at work or away from work, the more you can do in the context of your principles, the more fulfilled you’ll be.

How do your principles show up in your Principled Moments? Write us in the space below!

 

Taming Your Saboteur: Just Say No to the Status Quo

Posted on by Kate Dixon

You know that feeling when you’re about to do something important, and you just can’t make yourself do it? It could be something like quitting your job, or jumping out of an airplane, or getting engaged to be married, or speaking on stage, or learning to swim. You might feel terrified, or nauseated, or unworthy, or some combination of all of those (or something different). That icky feeling is your saboteur.

Your saboteur does NOT want you to take that risk and do the new thing. But you want – and need – to explore new things to grow and develop. Understanding your saboteur is key to moving on and up.

There are three things you should know about your saboteur:

  1. Your saboteur wants to protect you
  2. Your saboteur is using old information
  3. Your saboteur is loudest when you’re closest to your goal
Understanding your saboteur is key to moving on and up. Click To Tweet

Your saboteur wants to protect you

When you try new things, you’re, by definition, taking a risk. Your saboteur wants to save you from physical harm or embarrassment or rejection. Which on one hand is a good thing. You don’t want to recklessly sprint into danger.

On the other hand, this is where calculated risk comes in. You can’t grow without some discomfort, but if you’ve prepared the best you can, and planned for contingencies, you’re as set as you can be. You know in your heart that the reward far outweighs the danger.

Your saboteur is using old information

Your saboteur knows everything that’s ever happened to you. All. The. Horrible. Things. And it’ll bring them out for you to consider when you’re about to make a change.

That time when your second-grade teacher whacked your knuckles with a ruler for bad handwriting? Check. Remember when you tripped on stage when giving a speech in high school? Got it. Oh, and you didn’t get invited to that one girl’s birthday party? Yep, your saboteur can show you that mental video anytime.

The problem is that you’re not the same person you were when those things happened. You’ve grown, learned, and changed. You’ve got more experience under your belt, and you’re more prepared. Just because something didn’t work out in the past doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in the present and future.

When my clients are challenged with this, I have them frame a statement like this: “Until now, I didn’t <do the thing>, but now, I’m a <doer of the thing>.” This helps put the past where it belongs. In the past.

Your saboteur is loudest when you’re closest to your goal

When you’re about to hit “send” on the email or leave the dock on your whitewater rafting trip, those saboteur voices can get loud. Like, really loud. I remember the night before I published my website, I was literally sick with anxiety. Even though I knew what I was experiencing, I couldn’t stop the feeling. I spent an hour researching “entrepreneurs and fear,” and was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one.

Once I hit the “publish” button, I was filled with a sense of relief. And delight, and a feeling of accomplishment. And a little bit of, “why on earth was I so wigged out?”

What’s on the other side of fear and self-sabotage is the experience you want to have or the thing you want done. So it’s worth it to tell your saboteur to go to hell, and get on with it!

How have you tamed your saboteur? Tell us about it below!

 

The Key to Calm: Control Your Stuff and Nothing Else

Posted on by Kate Dixon

Control freaks: let it go! There are 3 main categories of stuff, and only one category you can – and should — do something about:

  1. Universe Stuff
  2. Other People’s Stuff
  3. Your Stuff

Guess which one you get to work on?

Let’s check under the hood.

Life gets easier when you let go of stuff that’s not in your control. Click To Tweet

Universe Stuff

This covers things like time, weather, gravity, and things that are in the past or future. These things are in the control of the divine (or whatever deity or cosmos rings your bell). You cannot control Universe Stuff. It’s simply off the table.

Other People’s Stuff

This is anyone else’s stuff except yours. Stuff like other peoples’ thoughts and opinions, what other people say or do, and how they feel. You can’t control any of that, either.

People ask me, “What about people I manage? Don’t I control what they do?” Guess what? You don’t. You get to control what you ask them to do, what resources you provide, and the supervision that you give. Your team members, on the other hand, control what they actually do.

Same principle applies to kids. You can control their environment, what you give them to wear, and the rules you want them to live by. They control how they react to those inputs. Ask any parent of a toddler. Or a teenager.

Your Stuff

Something you finally get to control! Hurray!

You are responsible for controlling what you say, do, think, and feel. How you show up in the world. Not what other people think, do, feel, or say about how you’re showing up, though (that’s their stuff).

Your stuff also includes how you react to the Universe Stuff and Other People’s Stuff. Other People’s Stuff may convince you to moderate yourself (like being quiet in a library, or paying for your groceries before you leave the store), but it’s still on you to do it. How you deal with a rainy day or react to time passing is all yours to control, too.

You might want to impact or influence how others view you in a business meeting. Ultimately, how they view you is their stuff, but there’s plenty of Your Stuff that’s part of the business meeting. You can control how much you prepare, what you wear, your attitude, your tone of voice, and how you show up. Once you put it out there, what people do with those inputs is out of your control.

On the flip side, you control how you react to Other People’s Stuff. If someone is a bully, do you fold, or stick your tongue out, or report them, or punch them, or ignore it? It’s certainly not your fault that they’re a bully. But what you do with that input is Your Stuff. If you’re not sure which way to go, think about how each choice would serve you.

You can’t control the weather (Universe Stuff), but you can control how you deal with it. If you’re planning an outdoor event, you can research what the weather forecast is, and have contingency plans for the unexpected. Those are definitely within your control, even though the rain, or lack thereof, isn’t.

What about stuff like mental illness or other disease? They generally fall into the category of Universe Stuff – you can’t control if you get them or have them, but you can control, at least to some extent, what you do to respond to them.

Wow. This is big. When you stop trying to control things you shouldn’t and focus on the things you should, life gets easier.

What’s easier for you when you focus on Your Stuff? Write in below to let us know!