The greatest casualty of upheavals and uncertainty is dreams. Even though our dreams are one of the most powerful things we possess, one of the strongest assets we have, they are also delicate.
Every time our worlds are shaken, our dreams are affected. We tend to bench them and start operating in the survival mode, thinking that the dreams are auxiliary and lofty, and yet those dreams could mean heaven and earth in our very lives.
Listen to this.
Success in anything is a result of concentration. Failure at anything comes about because of broken focus.
In building a successful personal brand, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to have a broken focus. They start something and immediately change to something else totally different from what they were passionate about a few months back.
That kind of outlook will not help with building a successful personal brand. Listen to this.
Momentum is a friend. A friend to everyone. Whether nature of humans. It brings in great rewards. Someone said that one ten units of effort will give you one unit of results.
However, due to momentum, one unit of effort will start giving you ten units of results. This is also true with personal branding.
Therefore, one big mistake that people make with their personal brand is inconsistency. Listen to this and find out why.
Nokia has been used as an example all over the place about the importance of moving with change and swimming with the currents.
The truth is that we also can be exposed to the same danger that Nokia had and totally miss the opportunity that is available to us through changes that are happening.
As such, our personal brand has to stay current and has to be flexible and responsive to the trends. Listen to this.
You have probably heard the phrase, "all hat and no cattle"...it is a devastating phrase if it is applied to personal branding. In fact, for the most part, that phrase applies to personal branding.
Of the mistakes that people make about their brands, one of the greatest of them all is what Jesus referred to as "whitewashed tombs". Having a semblance of finesse at the outside, but rotting on the inside.
You and I need to be on the lookout that we do not have this kind of lousy brand in our lives. Listen to this.
We can make many mistakes in life and get away with it. One of the things that we should not make a mistake about is our personal brand.
Why? Because chances are that you and I might not necessarily get away with it. Perhaps the greatest thing about a brand is how well it has been crafted and built.
When the audience perceives that no cost has been spared in building a brand, they get to respect it and they want to identify themselves with it. The same applies to a personal brand.
Listen to this.
As a personal brand becomes increasingly important in our day and age, one of the greatest mistakes we can make with it is to lack clarity.
A personal brand has to be on the cutting edge of value addition and productivity and that cannot happen for as long as we are not clear at least in the eyes of our audiences.
Listen to this.
Knowledge applied is power. Clarity of just about anything is important if we are to be on the cutting edge of anything. That is why personal branding is important in personal development.
There are very many mistakes that are made with personal branding. What we need to realize is that we all have brands. We all are brands, whether we are individuals or organizations.
Therefore, the very first mistake that a lousy personal brand makes is not to know that they are a brand. Listen to this.
The world today has seen changes. Long gone are the days where people, individuals actually, mattered less. The world today provides opportunities for individuals to be relevant.
I believe that more and more people will be engaged in life to the degree that they have a personal brand. It is no longer about academic papers for they form just but a fraction of a personal brand.
It is therefore important for us to start learning how to build a personal brand. These episodes will start teaching us how that is done. Stay tuned.
There is nothing that catalyzes growth and development like when you go head to head with someone that is much, much, much more experienced than you are.
You see, if you keep playing a solo game, doing your own thing in obscurity, you will always be doing what you know and what you think is enough. Consequently, you can never reach your potential.
However, when you expose yourself, especially when you expose yourself to an industry titan, there are very many benefits that will accrue from that exposure. You will only stand to gain.
Here is a summary of the six ways that you will gain when you pit yourself against a great.
Exposure is a great thing. It introduces you to many advantages. One cannot get exposed unless they intentionally decide to pit themselves against the industry greats.
Soon enough, you will learn that there is a need for professionalism. You will see the importance of honing your craft so that it can be an internationally recognized entity.
If you do not pit yourself against the very best in your industry, you remain local and unexposed, and that is your undoing. In turn the titans and professionals in your field cannot associate themselves with you.
Listen to this.
When you are doing your own craft in obscurity, there is no knowing what you are doing right or what you are doing wrong. There is no knowing if that if the best that you can ever do
However, when you start doing it as you gauge yourself against other movers and shakers in your niche and industry, you start to realize that there is so much to learn from them.
In essence, they form a benchmark against which you can compare your works on an occasional basis, and thus you get to improve and become a better sharper, and more productive person. Listen to this.
A rubber band is an interesting tool. Perhaps in all its usefulness, no one ever used it when it was not stretched. The same thing happens with our potential in life.
It is possible to have potential unutilized for long periods of time. Until a catalyst in the way of going against a titan in your niche or at least gauging yourself against them that you are now stretched to the core.
This is important for growth and development that it would never have happened if you did not pit yourself against the greatest in your niche. Listen to this.
We grow in different ways. Perhaps one of the greatest catalysts of our own growth is the realization that we are not as good as we thought we were.
This only comes about when we go against the greatest and the best of the best in our industry. We realize that our efforts in our own growth are not good enough.
All of a sudden we learn to arm ourselves with new motivation, urgency, focus, and determination. As we do this, we automatically engage a new and higher gear of growth in life. Listen to this.
We can be doing our own thing in obscurity and actually see some great progress. We can improve when we race against ourselves and push ourselves beyond our own limits.
However, there is totally different feedback that comes to us when we pit ourselves against a giant or a titan in our industry. All of a sudden we realize how far we need to go. We realize what we are missing.
Someone said that feedback is the breakfast of champions. Let us see just how this works out as a catalyst for our growth.
One of our greatest psychological needs in life is growth. It is a permanent thing when we are young. We grow even when we do not want to, at least physically and mentally.
It gets to a time where growth is no longer automatic, but intentional. And at times we find ourselves pushing ourselves in our own way in order that we can grow one aspect of our lives or another.
Whereas that is beautiful, there is one major critical and crucial catalyst that is missing. We need to have that added to our personal growth endeavors. Listen to this.
The world has changed. It will keep changing. Gone are the days where major brands will encamp at universities waiting for qualified people to employ.
Today, they are in droves, as common as table salt. You will be engaged in life today to the degree that you have a personal brand. Academic certificates alone will no longer work, they will no longer cut it.
That is why we need to learn how to craft a personal brand. In this bonus episode, let's see how important a personal brand is, and how we can create one.
The constant thing about life is change. That means that our contexts are always going to be subjective. What needs to stand like a rock is our content.
In matters of fashion, someone said, swim with the currents, but in matters of principle, stand like a rock. What can we do when our contexts are subject to change each waking day?
Listen to this.
There is lots of power in taking care of the physical body. Think about it. Is it possible to do anything here on earth apart from the physical body?
Now that we are all home, or at least, most of us are...what is it that we can do so that we can continue being productive? You guessed it.
We need to intentionally take care of our physical body because there is a lot of benefit to that. Listen to this to learn how important it is, and what three activities we can do each week.
It's a paradox we are living in. Man is primarily supposed to be productive. For that reason, we are here on earth. The bad thing is that we have always thought that productivity is something we do under someone's leadership so we can be paid.
Nothing can be further from the truth. And now that we are experiencing lockdowns and closures of businesses, like never before we are being introduced to the importance of self-leadership.
It is the highest form of leadership there is, and thank goodness, it is the one thing that is going to help us tremendously as we navigate through the Corona Virus Pandemic.
Listen to this.
When all is said and done, a human being finds fulfillment from his work. This work can either be paid for or otherwise, but for as long as a human is productive, fulfillment comes.
So what happens when one is jobless and one is sent home due to the Corona Virus pandemic that is forcing lockdowns around the world? We have to remain productive.
The question is how do we do that? And the answer is that we need to install personal weekly agendas. So what exactly are we going to put in those weekly agendas? That is what we answer in this series that culminates with this episode.
Listen to this.
Let's face it: there is no way that we can become productive during a lockdown if we do not have a weekly agenda, or an agenda of sorts for that matter.
There has to be some level of intentionality in what we are going to do, whether we will be paid or not. The underlying thing is our productivity. We must remain productive.
One might ask: What in the world will I put in my weekly agenda? Consider what's the most important thing to you. Consider what matters to you the most.
What are the non-negotiable activities that you must do each day to crop up what matters the most to you? That's what you put in your weekly agenda. Listen to this.
The human being was created to be productive. Our greatest need, all things being kept constant is productivity. I think one of the misconceptions that we deal with daily is that we have to be paid to be productive, or that after being productive, we must be paid.
Well, what if we are jobless or what if there are lockdowns and curfews? Does that mean we put our products on the back burner and start being waiters? We wait until things change so we can go back and be productive? Nope.
Luckily, there are several things that we can do to keep our productivity going. One of them is working on our own projects, our own ideas, even if we will not get paid from them. Listen to this.
In moments of crisis, when our world has been interrupted, one of the most affected things is our productivity. We've always thought that to be productive, we have to go somewhere and log in, work and then get paid.
But now that we are facing lockdowns and curfews, what do we do in order to continue being productive. It is a fact that if we do not keep our personal productivity going, we can get depressed, for we are creatures who are identified and fulfilled through productivity.
One of the things we can do is to leverage our personal development through this season.
During the lockdown, we have to remain productive. I shudder to think of the people who have nothing to do as they wait for the lockdowns around the world to end.
This is probably the same thing that you will go through when you retire if you are a public servant. The point of existence is not to be employed but to be productive. That means that we can be productive at all times, not just at work.
When we are crafting our agenda for productivity for the week, there are some things that are important so that we not only remain productive but we also are fulfilled and effective.
One of the things that we have to work around during the lockdown is our own character, our attitude and ultimately, our brand. How do we want people to perceive us? Such a thing does not come arbitrarily, it has to be intentionally worked on.
Listen to this.
Having an agenda for your productivity is essential especially when you are working at home or have no job to work on. You will be shocked that you can have a loaded agenda if you were up to it.
Having a productivity agenda is not necessarily for the sake of churning out activities. When you are crafting your agenda for productivity, there are certain important pillars that we need to use so that at the end of the day, your productivity is effective and fulfilling.
That is why one has to organize their agenda around what really matters to them and what really matters to life. Listen to this.
The entire world is on virtual lockdown. Airports have their activities grounded into a terrible lull. The world as we knew it is not the same anymore, neither does it promise to go back to "normal".
What we need to answer is what can be done in order to stay productive especially at the individual level. There is one silver bullet that I have taught jobless people to use that I think comes to relevance at this point in time.
This simply is self-leadership. Self-leadership doesn't look at what you are going to get at the end of the month, week, day or project. It looks at what you can do to contribute and to expend your personal potential. Listen to this.
The most important thing when going through a slump or when you are broke is your mental state. It goes a long way in cementing the actions that you will take as well as creating a psyche with which you will operate.
When you are broke, it is not just the physical absence of cash that will bother you. Something much more powerful and negative is happening in your mental state that directly affects your psyche.
It is good to make sure that you keep that mental state healthy and the psyche unperturbed in terms of knowing that your self-esteem and self-worth and self-concept are not negatively affected. How? Listen to this.
When you are broke, there is a greater propensity to think that you are useless, worthless and that the situation will stay for a great foreseeable future.
It robs you of your essence, your motivation and even inspiration to do anything. You start looking to be helped because you wrongly think that you cannot help.
If the situation pervades, what suffers the most is your mental state, something that is the most lethal weapon you need at such an hour. How do we overcome this moment? Listen to this.
When we suffer a slump of some nature, the lie is that anything and everything we do must result in a direct respite. That is not necessarily the case, especially when facing a financially broke moment.
One might be under the illusion that they cannot do anything because whatever action they take does not immediately or imminently solve the problem, so they wrongly refrain from acting.
This refrain does the exact opposite of offering a respite. It cements it, at least mentally, sending signals of failure and despondency, painting a picture of permanence when it is only an illusion. How do we overcome it? Listen.
How do you deal with a personal slump? How do you deal with a moment of broke-ness? You are feeling like you are useless and cannot contribute.
That feeling can weigh you down so much so that you do not want to leave the house, neither do you want to do anything constructive. How do you handle that situation?
I think one of the things that we were created to do as humans is to be solutions, providing help to this world one way or another. Therefore, I do suggest that when we are broke, we can still find a way to give and in so doing, we shall gain immensely. Listen to this.
