118. Maximizing your Personal Brand: Communicating Who You Are to Help Get What You Want
22:49 Share

hi， mathere， our goal at thinkfasttalksmart is to help you own and develop your communication skills where curious if were hitting the mark web talked about feedback and listening many times on the show and now wed like you to share your thoughts about thinkfasttalksmart wewant to make sure were bringing you the topics and guests that are of interest to you knowingmore about you and the reasons you listen will help us a lot weve created a listenersurvey that would like you to complete will take no more than 5 minuteinit will be very useful the survey can be found at fastersmarderdodio slash feedback， while the survey can be taken anonymously if you do choose to provide your email address， we will enter you into a randomdrawing where three people will win assignedbookeanotherthinkfasttalksmartswag we look forward to hearing your ideas in inputsoon thank you and advance for sharing your feedback and helping us and most importantly thank you for listening again go to fastersmarter dodio slash feedback many of us Carey very specific ideas about certain brands when i say think of a luxury car sportsaparal or a softwinkwhat companies come to mind well think about this what comes to mind when people think about you whats your brand mynames mataborhamsini teachstrategic communication at Stanford graduate school of business welcome to thinkfast talksmart the podcast today im excited to speak with dori clerk Doris a consultant speaker lecture and author among her many booksars standout representing you and her latest the longgame Dorian i recently met and found of commonalities in our approach in our work and dori i am just excited to have you here welcome thank you mad im really glad to be here alright！

are you ready to get started yes！

lets do it id like to start with your perspective on personal brand to begin whatisyourdefinition of personal brand and what you mean when you talk about brand equity？

essentiallyitsasynoninfreerreputation thatsreallyallit is because having a good reputation， generally is a useful thing in business and in life absolutely when you talk about brand equity what is that mean？

i understand the notion of equity。

but what is brandequity just as a corporation might have brand equity i mean ECOCA Cola Trademark is worth millions because everybodynos the red in the little curl， accused you have brand equity in your own life your reputation makes things either， easier or harder for you ifyouare knownas someone whois a great worker and always on time and always wanningtobehelfulindoinghighqualitywork？

everyonegonna want to do business with you and the converses obviously true and so the question around brand equity is what kind of a reputation have you built up and is it what you want and is it helping you in the world？

or not？

and if its not， how do we fix？

it yeah！

id like to dive into that one of our very earlypodcast episodes we had Allison cloger？

whos a colleagofmine who teaches a class on reputation management i found it really fascinating can you walk us through your methodology for defining our personal brands and what best practices do suggest for communicating our brand in the world absolutely mad so when it comes to defining our personal brand and really understanding who we are where we want to go one of the things that Ive discovered is that it can be really challenging for us to do it ourselves this is a place where friends and colleages can be extremely valuable in nearing back to us we have to recognize we know too much about ourselves and so as a result， we know all the things， but we dont understand the relative waitof them and so， if you have a group of trusted people， they can actually mirror back and say oh， but youre actually fantastic at this thing or youre much betterthanotherpeople， addoingxyzyourwow， you really like up when you talk about this thing， but not that thing and that data can be very helpful because its really hard for us to perceive it， so we begin to have that as clues， and we begin to think about where we want to go but once we are developing our vision about what are we want to look like and you can do this through identifying people that you admire in your industry， your field seampieces of what might be possible for you the way to begin to communicate that with other people， theres a few things that you can do i mean one is at a really basic level thinkabout whatyouaretalkingabout something that i often suggest people as adnist opportunity is that literally everytime you see someone that you havent seen for a while they are going to ask you some variation of hey， matt what have you been up to and usually， we do not have a good answer for that we just oh you know same old thing or you know oh gosh i saw this movie last weekend its just nothing creative but if you want to be knownforsomething if you want to be known as a strategic thinker， or if you want to be known as the expert on women and negotiation those are the things you should be telling people you should identify in advance and have a in your back pocket some kind of anecdoed about oh， ive been spending a lot of time researching xyz oh， wow， i just got back from a conferencerwe were talking about a bc those are the thingsthat can become the meet of what other people think of when they think of you because thats what youspending timeconversingabout thats a really easylo hanging for the weallcan prepare fitsvery nicely with my whole approach to these types of spontaneous speaking where you actually can do some preparation in advance so that when these things come upyouready to go？

so you should be thinking about what are the things are important to me？

how can i package up the things that im passionate about and where i want to go next？

i love that advice and i love the methodology the way in which we can really ascertain howpeopleseeus notbyjuslooking internlyyourselsebubyasking others thats a very helpful i know you and i share a passionfor strategic communication im curious to get your thoughts on how we best establish strategies for our careers where we see yourself now and where we see yourselsgoing anyoualsotalk about i know when you talk about strategetalkabout strategicalleverageso im hoping you can add some inside into that as well it does feel intimidating sometimes to people iftheyare on sure where do you get the strategy？

how do you figure out the strategy and i like to actually just kind of boil it down and make it simple my favorite question is will who are you？

jealous of jealousy does not have to be a bad thing jealousy can be a clue it can be oh gosh i really wish i did what he was doing i really wish i had his career and it doesnt mean that you want a stickpins in a vodude hall or you know do something to harm the other person it just means that you are resonating and connecting with somethingthativedoneedidenablesyoutoslikefortheclusionsayoh， well， okay！

if imentiedbythathowdidhegettherewhatcouldi， do theycouldhelpmegettheretoo， ibeginsecreattheoutlineoftheelistpossible strategicplan for you that would be the first part and tearpointnataboutleverageone of the things that i always like to be mindful of is its hardoutthere and so the more we can try to uh kill two words with onestone the better and so when we think about making decisions that serve takeadvantage of leverage theres a lot of ways we can do it but its thinking through are i how can i take the goals that i want to accomplish and findcreateofwaysways to serve tap into opportunities that i have did make it even better or even more accessible i think about in my most recent， bookthe longgame i tell the story of a guineme， Phil van nostringtowasai mean now hesbecome every year more and more successful but he came to New York originally as a kind of young photographer who was looking to make it and one of the things that he did was work i i will say in air quotes for free， which is a thing that on the surface many people would say ah why would you do that thats not good but he wanted to be able to have a cool new yorklifestyle and he realized a lot of the people that he knew or that he could work with these we didnt have a lot of money to pay for fancy photography but they could trade him things and so he ended up doing all this workfor restaurants and so hebe able to eat amazingmealsintakeouthisfriendsallthetime because hegetscript hegettrade from the restaurant and so eaten though it wasnputtingcationis pocket it was a very smart leverageway of helping him lead the lifestyle that he wanted in a kind of cleverway。

i love this advice about how to be strategic and youve actually helped me we just released an episode about fear of missing out foam o i interviewed Patrick Mcginis the the guy who came up with the concept and we were talking about how to manage our future of missing out， but youve just helpgivemec because i suffer from this significantly in my life， you can actually harness that， so your notion of who makes you jealous what makes you jealous you can also look at your fearmissingout and saying what are the things that i missing out on and have that become items in a strategy that you can strive for and then in the second piece i really like to what you said is we need to find those accesspoints in our lives they can give us some of that leverage that might give us access to the learning or the experience or the colleags that we need to execute on that strategy i think thats fantastic thank you for that i love that its not just strategic its also very tactical things you can do that thats very helpful yeah！

thank you， matt and if you dont mind。

im just curious whenyouthinkabout personal branding whatsyoursort of philosophy around at how do you think about it in in your own life for me personal branding is really about how you communicate who you are to the world and when i think about myself and what i try to communicate you know， im fundamentally somebody who is very curious and im very curious about communication so in everything i do i try to learn about communication， but i also try to bring outlearningsanother people and so im constantly asking questions im constantly trying to put myself in situations where i can learn more and help others learn more so tomewhathelpsmeanpersonalbrandisiveaguidingprinciblecuriosity 那 guiding passion about communication and thats what helpsme make the decisionsimakeinmycareer yeah， i love that thats a great response thank you youre an advocate of becoming an expert in whatever， you do in fact you developed an entire methodology and community around this idea why is beingan expert so important and can you share some nuggets from that methodology but how to develop our own expertise？

theres kind of two pieces to are right one is the expert peace whys it important to be an expert well is certainly i want to put a stake in the ground i think many of your listeners would probably agree that we lift a world where theres enough noise， theres enough charl attends that theres something important about having the integrity of legitimate knowledge i think that strivingto be an expert and and be able to to really contribute to others knowledge that is hard one and not just something you picked up through Google is kind of a noblething how do you help other people with deeply held sandfortforinformation that you have worktogether i really just respect that it a fundamental level but the other peace that i think is critical and its a dram that i like to bang is the importance not just to be an expert but a beingiverecognized expert because i feel like for so many people unfortunately， they spent so much time in efforgetting one more certification， one more degree learning all the things but its like the tree falling in the forest if other people dont understand the contribution， you have to make if they dont understand the knowledge that you have to give in the way that you can benefit them another people it doesnt do that much good i mean if niceforyou， it helps maybe the handful of people around you， but i think for a lot of people if theyre embarking on that journey of knowledge， they actually want to make a difference they want to help people at scale， and so you need to be a recognized expert in order to do that so that people will be able to turn to you and say oh well what is he thinkabout that thats the place we want to be so to your point theres threepillars of the recognized expert， methology and we can go into more depth about any of these but briefly its content creation so number one is basically finingways to share your ideas publie so that people know what your ideas are user have your intellectual property out there in the world whetherds books are articles or speeches or what have you number two is your network becauseof all its about how you get new ideas but also， you need an amplification device you could be the greatest expert in the world on communication， but if the other greatest expersing communication， dont know you thats not a good sign thats not a good look so you gotta leave kind of plugdan and the number three is social proof and basically that is how can we make sure that you are easy to recognize by very busy distracted people as an expert id varies from fieldthefield but it could include things like what kind of clients have you workedwith？

what stageshave you spoken on？

who blurbed your book？

what articles what publications have you written for or what magazings are？

newspapers have featured you are quoted you those are the types of things what awards have you want where people say oh gosh？

shemus really be credibleif such and such was willing to feature her or to have her keynote a lot of people who listen to this podcast listentolearn about skills that will help them take them into the next step in their career what advice do you have？

for people who are looking to advancein their career to perhaps expand their perview takeonmoreresponsibilitygetmoreaccess what are the things that you would advise them to do yeah well？

one of the concepsmat that i talk about in the long game that i think is useful here and i has a little bit of a silicon valid callback is the idea of Google twenty percent time was very impactful to me and some of your listers will know in the old in days， Google had a concept that they were advocating call 20 percent time it was originally inspired by 3AM， which had 十十 percent time similar idea， which is that they theoretically encourage their employees to spend up to twenty percent of their time working on discressionary activities things are not part of your data day job responsibilities this is how Gmail was invented， how Google news was invented it obviously yielded some business breakthroughs that were quite meaningful to the company now the caveat here and i think its an important caveat to dive into is that if you ask contemporary employees of Alphabet now oh， hey， do you do percent time veryfew veryfew are going to say yes， estimator i its not perfect estimates， but estimates are that maybe only ten percent of employees actually do this this is not a ubiqudest thing and the reasons pretty clear， which is that people get busy people have things to do theyre so busy with their regular jobs they dont have time to mock around with these unclear merkee it might work it might not work kind of things so we out we understand that right that is the normal human poll that being said youre not gonna get the gmail youre not gonna get the Google news if you dont do that and so what i really want to encourage is the truth is everything in this world has become pretty decentralized right， especially over the past thirty years， whether were talking about tensions， whether were talking about professional development， whatever， it is the responsibility has been shiftedforbetter and forworse on to the individual employee this this is a similar instance right we cant sit back and waitforemployer to tell us what we need to know and then teach it to us we need to be proactive enough that we are setting the agenda that we are coming up with this and so i think that its useful for us as a frame to say well whats my twenty percent time and thats a big chunk of time maybe its your five percent time maybe its your ten percent time but what is the discressionarytime？

might be nightsinweekends lets be honest but what is the discressionary time？

that you are using to keep developing yourself we need to have a answer for that question but its how we keep ourselves both interested and engage but also ahead of the curve and ready for things that we can even predict in a future i really think thats great advice so do i everything youve said is been really helpful and is helpmee personally！

i hope many of our listeners have taken value beforeiandid like to ask you the same three questions i ask everybodythe first， i makeupthats justforyoudoryinantheothertwarevery common are you ready for these questions letsdoitexcellent alright， so my first question is as you look at how your career is unfolding what is your next step？

whats the twenty percent timeyourspendingtimefocusing on well！

i can answer that a couple away is matt one thing that ive been pursuing since two thousand are of been working pretty sigiously for the past seven years on it is learning to write musical theother that is something that i have been working toward i created a goal that over a tenyear period i wanted to write a show that meditsabroadway so were on the path well， see well see how i do its not directly relevant per se to my regular career， but it is something that has been an fantastic learning， opportunity， and has exposed me to a lot of new people， a lot of new ideas and worlds so thats great i will say my more career centered answer is that ive been spending a lot of time really deep diving into email automation， which i think is uh an important concept for the kind of work that i do and i think is useful for lots of people yes！

i can tolyseethe value of email automation i certainly appreciate your myonlike im just fascinated by your whole musicaltheater， but did do perform and do musicaltheater at some point in your life？

no， no， i actually， this is all relatively new i was not okay musical theater kid i grew up in a little town in North Carolina where my school was so small we didneven have a theother paragram so no i had to figure all this out later on well。

thats cool and i i can see how many of your skills that you bring in terms of being very methodical having a strategy in the creativity you bring to the workthatyoudo i can see why it would be attractive let me ask question number two who is a communicator that you admire and why yeah so when it comes to communicators that that are fantastic theres a lot that we can say i will pick a sort of classic one！

which is sparkobama and i love him mostly because he is just so calm hes a calm communicator and as of course you know when talk about everybodyhas theyre kind of styled they lean into interes some people where thats not witheroptimizing for theylooking for something totally different but personally， i think that if you are a worldleader and if you are running a nuclear power that is brushing up against other nuclear powers being calm and findingways to kind of dscalate is a good skill to have certainly a amazing communicator and somebody who many people admire for sure let me ask you the final question what are the first three ingredientsthegointo a successful communication recipe as so we get our milk at our sugar， at our eggs， so as were baking our communication gate， i would say the first three if were plugin it all in i would say that the most important pieces are being clear about who your audience is because if youdoingitrightyourtailoringit to whoyourtalking to its number two asking the question what are they needfrom you？

what is the goal？

so really sort of understanding what is it？

your trying to do and trying to accomplish in that moment and then the thirdpeace would be about so thats thats kind of about them the thirdpeace are saying maybe is about you and theres lots of places you could go but if im just picking three the one， that i would choose is about being able to be in control of your own physiology because how the weer were all up on mirror neurons， and we know thats a thing i think most speakers have intuitively understood that this is true but now we know from researchasliterallytrue your emotions are contagious and if you are the speaker as long， as you are collected， theyre gonna be just fine so， but if you are really nervous youre， gonna make them nervous its gonna create conditions you dont want and so， if we can learn a master our own physiology。

it putthe winded are back and it makes everything easier those three ingredience are critical the notion of really understanding who are speaking to thinking about what do they need for you in this moment and i love this pointof how your demeanor impacts in influences the audiences you speak to so if you can think through how best to convey theemotion you want you can get that reflectedback from your audience and there are things you can do in terms of your confidence in your calmness they can setyouup for success in there certainly things you can do thickaninvite difficulty etc thank you for that endoy thankyou for everything i love your energy your methotical approach the way that you see FINDINGWHEREAREINPROPOSINGHOWWEGETTOWHEREWEWANTTOBETHANKYOUFEARTIMEIWISHYOUCONTINUEDSUCCESSINALOLOFYOUENERSYOURWRITINGTHECOMMUNITYYOUBUILTECETRA thanks for spending time with us thank you so much man， thanksforjoiningus for another episode of thinkfasttalksmarkthepodcast from Stanford graduate school of business this episode was produced by Jenny Luna Ryan campus and me matabrams arm music was provided by Floyd wonder for more information and episodes find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and please make sure to subscribe and follow us on linkedm， hi， mathere quick question for you when was the last time， you took a step back from your daily life and took the time to invest in yourself and your education for a lot of us its been a long while but heres the truth great leaders never stop learning if this sounds like you， i encourage you to explore Stanford executive education programs these programs are Jam packed with insights from Stanford GSB professors and bring together top leaders like you from all around the Globe explore Stanford executive education programs now add grow dot Stanford dot edu slash learn。