Threshold Consulting: It's Your Life, Own It!

Here’s Your Chance to Learn More About Personal Branding – For Free!

It seems lots of people have heard about the importance of personal branding for career and business success. Yet, despite how often the term pops up in print, online, or in conversations, it also seems that some people don’t really get it.

Just this week, Jim, a Candidate at a Career Center where I conduct some workshops and also do some career coaching, told me he went to a personal branding presentation. When I asked how he liked it, he told me the presenter seemed to know his stuff – but about branding a business. Jim told me, that essentially the presenter said you need take branding lessons from great companies and apply them to yourself. Jim then observed that he thinks establishing a personal brand is different. Smart guy. It is different.

So, do you get personal branding?

Need to Motivate Yourself? Choose Self Determination

What motivates you? If you’re like me, and most people, you probably find that some external reward is what it takes to get you fired up to get things done.  Well, at least most of the time. Sometimes it’s avoidance of negative consequences that does the trick. Still, I’ll bet you operate on a bit of intrinsic motivation as well. Well, at least some of the time. 

The reason I bring this up is that I recently read a great article titled “Unleash Your Potential,” in Men’s Health. Essentially, it covered the application of Self Determination Theory (SDT) to the choice of fitness routines, and it referenced the approach of Saint John’s University coach John Gagliardi, “The Winningest Coach in College Football History.”

Essentially, Coach Gagliardi does something counterintuitive in his approach: he avoids drills, laps, and calisthenics, allowing his players to practice for games by simply playing 90 minutes of touch football. As Tom McGrath, author of the article states, Gagliardi “… crated a football program powered not by his own threats or intimidation or screaming, but by the players’ natural passion for football.”

So, what are the elements of intrinsic motivation?

So, what parts of your career can be disaggregated, digitized, and off-shored?

As a career coach, I’ve long been a proponent of helping people determine who they serve and the value they produce in their work. In fact, I think there are several fundamental questions that you need to answer to establish a vision for your career and life. Usually the answers point to more of the right brain activities in your life and work.

If you’re asking and answering useful questions to guide your career, great! Yet, I think that far too many people not only don’t pay attention to their careers but focus on the wrong things when they do.

Having just started reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman, it occurs to me that people will increasingly need to consider a global context when making career decisions. So, in managing your career it is no longer sufficient to think about your technical ability, but to also consider the competencies that separate you from the masses of people who can manage the technical elements of your job – and do so more cost effectively than you.