Building Yourself as a Brand

Branding yourself by discovering your strengths, developing on them, managing your weakness and positioning yourself the way you want others to perceive you is important for success in todays business world. I certainly was one of the happier and benefitted participants yesterday in the Personal Branding workshop organized by Ficci Ladies Organization (FLO). We had some exciting speakers from the corporate training field in India that included Mohan Raman, Ganesh Anantharaman, Kesan and Nina John share their views about this topic

I was reminded of Satya Sai's explanation of "You" by Mohan Raman - "The Way you see yourself (Personal), the Actual You (More enlightening and spiritual) and the way others see you (What's required in today's business and social world). Personal branding is the third "You" - our ability to get people to associate our name with something we want to be linked or connected with. Perhaps an image, style, words, profession etc. It was rather interesting to note that in many cases (Celebrity world), people have created their brand unconsciously and used that as a strategy in the latter part of their lives to achieve what they wanted.

Ganesh and Kesan introduced "The temparament instrument" which happens to be the brain child of Professor Pradip Khandwala (IIM - A) and that is a great tool to know about yourself. I realized that I had a greater allery to ambiguity that I thought I had from this highly validated and proven instrument. I have worked on a couple of other instruments in the past and have noticed striking similarities - This means that I have good news and bad news.

Well, the good news is that I have been honest and spontaneous about answering these "Strengths questionnaires" which has made me more "Self Aware" and that certainly is a strength. However the fact that scores havent changed much over the last 6 months also reflects that my plan is not working to its best. Time to make changes to the plans and I am making that NOW! Hey, that is also a sign that I am getting my tolerance levels better (Reducing the allergy to ambiguity factor). HURRAY!!

For those of you who are interested to know your strengths, I recommend you to start with Dr. Martin Seligman's VIA Character Strengths test @ http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

I had some great insights and benefits from this online survery too which ranked 24 of my Character strengths in the order of significance. Dr. Seligman recommends that we pay more attention to the top 5 called "Signature strengths" and find ways to use them more often.

Overall, it doesn't matter what instrument you use but your top priority is to build yourself as a Brand. These surveys, tests and instruments are the first steps to "Know thyself", Once you know what you are - make a plan to use the strengths, manage your weakness and promote the brand "You" to move from the ORDINARY to EXTRA-ORDINARY,

“Delight yourself first to delight people around you. Most importantly make your choice NOW”

Meet me at : www.gettingtodelight.com

What is that?

I got a video forward recently from one of our family friends, Mr. Sriram with the title "What is that?". When I watched it, I could not resist writing back to ask his permission to include the video in my blog. He replied that his friend from Rallis India was the one who had sent it to him and deserved a mention. Since I had problems loading the video file, I decided to check out if youtube had the same video and yes it is one of the most popular ones with over 1,206,340 views and shares a "5" start rating by 3077 people.

Patience seems to be a diminishing quality in most of us as we grow up and become an adult. We want peace and quiet when we return home from work forgetting that we were kids too. We cannot repeat an instruction more than once to a colleague and start complaining. When a new hire wants you to teach him/her the task again, we term them "incompetent" and send them back to the HR department. We have zero tolerance to customers requests and call them "Strange", "Difficult" or "Not possible".

We get restless when we have to wait - for a bus, at the dentist, in the middle of a traffic snarl or even for the rain to stop. Nothing's gonna change by getting upset or emotional.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret - Ambrose Bierce

Here are some things that you can choose to do from now:

• Take it easy, hold your nerves, smile and enjoy the moment wherever you are.
  
• Give your love, respect and attention to the elders at home and the family. They truly deserve it.
• Your customers are the very reason why your company is in business and the fact that you still have your job. Engage with them, build rapport and take efforts to fulfill their requests.
  
• Listen to your colleagues, offer to help them when you see they are busy.
  
• Be Happy and delight someone everyday.

Delight yourself first to delight people around you. Most importantly, make your choice NOW!

Life is like a game of tennis

Sunday last was just amazing as I sat up watching the match between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. Almost every game, the final set in particular - I was either tweeting or chatting with friends on the possibility of a Roddick win. I wasn't totally shocked or surprised about Roger setting a record and winning his 15th Slam - He definitely is a true champion. Whenever we hear the Champions speak after they set records, they all often say that they never started playing the game with that intent. Neither do they sit back and relax after achieving the unprecedented feats. Roger in fact mentioned that he will go on to play the game with passion as he just loves it and if he can win more, its all the better.

I like MacAnderson's blogs, quotes and books. Even though I have not read his book "Charging the Human battery" completely, I thought it will be great to pick up one page of this book and pen it down for you. It talks about "Tennis and Service"

"Serve and Grow rich". Someone once said, "Life is like a game of tennis. The player who serves well seldom loses". Financial wealth is fleeting but what we do for others is lasting.

Serving others makes us feel good about ourselves because in our heart's we know it's the right thing to do. As Martin wright said "Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time". Even the simplest gestures demonstrates this - think about opening the door for someone. They say "thank you" - You say "You are welcome". Your heart smiles because you feel good about yourself. You did the right thing.

Create a Service culture, where your employees focus on serving the customer and serving each other. Good things will happen and you create a company about which everyone who works is proud of. People definitely understand that Customers pay the bills and their salaries. However it is serving each other with a smile in the heart, that makes it a great place to work.

Delight yourself first to delight people around you. Most importantly, make your choice NOW!

Meet me at: www.gettingtodelight.com

Negative thoughts - Worse than Swine Flu

I had a wonderful 2 hour session today with some boys and girls who are aspiring to be flight stewards and air hostesses in the near future. I was speaking about customer service and I wrote the word "Emotion" on the whiteboard, circled it and asked the guys to come up with all emotions they could think of and demonstrate the same with a bit of body language or facial expressions as they mentioned the word.

First word was "Joy", then "Happy" which was followed by "Smile" .There was bit of fun and humor in the class as the kids who were in this brainstorming session attempted to facially express these words. Then someone set the ball rolling for the "CONTRA" words. I heard "Sad" after which I did not have time to turn back even to look who was voicing out the words from the group of students. I realized the mood in the classroom getting a bit more serious and within 60 seconds there were 14 negative emotions fired at me without a pause. (I did not think there were so many negative emotions - it included words like Dull, Collapsed, Shock, Frown and so on).

What amazes me is that the human brain faces a big challenge when it has to open the the positive pages of it's dictionary. It has to first look for the keys, open the book, search for the pages, find the words - My my, that is a humongous task. The brain finds it a lot easier to shift gear the moment it has an opportunity.

When it gets to negative words / thoughts or influences, - beware they can be more contagious than Swine flu. As regards to the disease, everyone realizes that prevention is better and wears a mask. I recommend that you also wear an imaginary helmet to block these negative thoughts as they are silent killers.

Perhaps negative feelings are also like the automatic sensor taps in wash counters of unclean public toilets. Show your hands and the water flows out - dirty water. Withdraw your hands to stop getting more dirty. In other words, pull yourself out when surrounded by the negative - It's the only way out.

If only we could reverse this and make positivity more contagious, we will not only make a difference to our lives but also to the people around us.

Delight yourself first to delight people around you. Most importantly, make your choice NOW!

Meet me at: www.gettingtodelight.com