... how do one identify one's personal brand?

Okay.

All right, this is another big mistake people make is they don't get nearly concrete enough about what they want people to know about them or remember about them.

And if you don't tell the organization, the organization will figure it out and give you some label.

It may not be what you want.

So we wanna look at the aspects of you that you know to be true and the aspects that other people see about you, and we wanna get a list of somewhere between three and six attributes that we would say are true of you.

Now, unlike a consumer brand, this is not an aspiration, this is a reality.

So how can one turn career setbacks into opportunities to grow?

But then on the other side, when someone is ambitious and what they see as recognition or progression, how do we change that narrative so that by making a sideways move and moving into an area where you're stronger, that becomes something positive?

Right.

I am not advocating that everybody try to be at the top of the ladder or at the top of the tree.

There's not enough space for everybody at the top of the tree and it's not what everybody wants or what they're well suited to.

And I also believe you want to play to your strengths, of course, but you're always trying to broaden your capabilities just a little bit.

I'm not trying to take the things that I'm not great at and turn them into my biggest strengths.

But I got to be aware that I have to bring everything up a level constantly, like just keep accelerating that.

But I never was aware of this when I again, when I worked in corporate and I think we have this tendency to blame circumstances or to blame the leadership or you know i know you address in the book some of the situations and one of them that resonated for me was being passed over for promotion um but we tend to look outside of ourselves rather than looking internally that's something i really appreciated about the book as well to understand the narrative that we've given ourselves but then to also find a way to articulate how how we're actually coming across and and with the knowledge that if we're not influencing that in some way then you can believe that they're saying whatever about us and we don't actually know and i think so many people are afraid to ask for feedback about how they're coming across because they're afraid of receiving something they perceive as negative right

As you were talking, I was like, "Okay, I see."

Yeah.

We control by putting boundary conditions on our team, by saying, "You can't go outside these bounds, this budget, this timeframe, this, you know, approval.

Um, these kind of things have to come back to me before you take another step." We control by knowing what the milestones are, and checking in at those milestones and saying, "Well, what's the progress? You know, where do you need my help? What are you doing?" And we control by, we steer, in effect, by asking really good questions that get people to think for themselves.

So it's a shift in how we control.

Uh, I think a lot of people do command not because they like to dictate.

They do command because they think they're instructing, and it's the least effective way to instruct known to man, 'cause nobody remembers it.

Mm-hmm.