Critical Skill 2: Mental Flexibility Test

April 3, 2006 by Liz

For those of you who like to test your mental flexibiity, or for those of you who want a little more practice. Here’s a test that’s been around for a while you might try for yourself. Think of the test as a personal challenge. It’s not a test of intelligence or creativity. You might find that the answers you don’t get right away will come to you over the course of the next few days when you least expect them to. To access the test and give it a try click the screen shot below.

A score of more than 16 is supposed to be genius, but if you go for days you should be able to get them all. Personally I think there’s a genius in all of us. . . . No one has described what a genius is yet.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Brand YOU–2 Keys to Leadership

April 3, 2006 by Liz

Keeping It Going

Now that you’ve got the basics of your brand YOU in place, you might start a log. Keep track of ideas that work for you and things that you want to work on. You might keep notes on feedback you get that applies to your brand strategy–statements folks make about you, such as “Gee, you’re always so good at getting things done.” Keeping track of such things is important because other folks really decide what your brand is. You only decide what you want it to be.

The first notes in your journal might include notes on leadership such as this.

2 Keys to Leadership

Leadership is an essential part of any personal brand. A living leadership brand has two vital keys–humanity and communication.

You show humanity when you accept your own mistakes and the mistakes others make. There is leadership in that big word forgiveness that too many would be leaders often miss. How nice it is to work for, and with, someone who not only forgives others, but forgives himself or herself as well. Leaders who never err, make everyone nervous, so don’t try to be perfect. That only makes others think they have to be perfect too.

Part of being human is talking to other humans. Communicate. The free flow of information is critical in any leadership role. Communication not only lets people know what is going on, it lets them know that you care about them. Share your thoughts with discretion, grace, and humility. They will return the favor by sharing their thoughts with you.

An Ongoing Task

Building a brand and keeping it going is an ongoing, organic, living, breathing task–just as being you is. Check in on your brand every day or so to see how it’s going. Check your desk to make sure that it still looks like your big idea, too. Each time you reach a benchmark–a great sale, a promotion, a new client–check in on your brand and decide whether it needs a new coat of paint.

Your personal brand is an investment in you and your future. You’re a leader now. Let’s work together to keep your brand a perfect example of the unique valuable you.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Critical Skill 2: Mental Flexibility

April 3, 2006 by Liz

Mental Habits

Just this morning, a friend shot me an email. It asked whether I had time to write up a quick press release. I replied that I probably could and asked the three questions I do to size the time it will take to get the job done.

What is it for?
When do you need it?
Do you have a model for what you want?

I got a response from my friend that was an apology. Apparently my last question reminded him of the press release he had from last year for the same event. He could just brush that off, rewrite it, and use it again.

His habit was to start from scratch on everything. My questions had pushed his thinking.

Flexing Your Thoughts

When I look over the original article for this series, The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future, I keep coming back to the idea that mental flexibility might be the one skill that has the most initial impact. This is the crowd pleaser–the hero. Mental flexiblity unbends the bent, unties the knot, and unsticks the stuck. People notice that kind of thing right away.

If you can do that and they cannot, they think you’re really something.

Like it’s name implies, mental flexibility is a matter of being in shape. Flexing your mental abilities isn’t that different than flexing your muscles. Warm up and try them out one at a time. Know your limits and know your goal is to broaden your scope. These are some ways to stretch your mind, to make your thinking more flexible.

1. Listen to people that you disagree with. Take in their arguments and follow their logic. Try it on for size. Work to see things entirely from their point of view.

2. Look in opposing arguments for the places where you are in agreement. No two arguments are totally opposite. Find the core of the matter where the arguments are the same.

3. Try to put two opposing ideas into one picture and make them work together. This works more often than you might think it would. Get to the core of each argument, keep each primary goal in tact, and then look for a way to make a new whole.

4. Stay in the 30,000 foot view. Don’t get caught in sematics or in details. Words aren’t your friend when you’re looking for flexibility. Words tie things down in a precise detailed fashion. Words can also confuse rather than add clarity–for example, your shade of blue might be more green than mine. If you use many words for the same thing . . . So the blue, azure, sapphire, teal, sky-colored logo would sit here . . ., then you can keep the thinking big picture and flexible.

5. Give weird ideas their voice. Runners push past the wall. So do flexible thinkers. Let other folks have a chance to share their kookie plans. Try them out. You might decide that you like one a lot.

6. Make a new habit of questioning yourself. Why am I doing this? Is there another approach? Is this my own thinking or a habit I’m used to? Does this situation call for action at all? The hardest part is remembering to question yourself. Doing it is actually fun. Once you get in the habit, you’ll not only gain flexibility. Your productivity will also go up.

7. Evaluate every argument. Don’t take anything on face value. People pass opinion as fact frequently, in the media and in person. Many folks just accept such information and repeat it as true–as if they are still in school. Flexible thinkers do not. When someone quotes statistics to you, be prepared to say, “You’re making that up.”

8. Use your entire brain, not just the logical left. Test things out with your perception and your intuition, as well. Don’t leave any information source on the table. Use everyone else’s brains too. Stretching your flexibility means stretching in every direction. There’s a world of new information waiting to be put together.

9. Find the humor and laugh some. There is something funny about almost everything, if you open yourself up to it. Give yourself room to laugh, and you might find other ideas come easier too.

10. Rewrite reality and have a few fantasies. Take that habit of Stephen Covey’s “Change your Paradigm” totally outside of the box. Don’t just make a slightly newer reality–blow your ideas out of the water. Imagine the problem as a dating situation, how would you deal with it then? Suppose it were happening on an alien world . . . and your kids were in charge?

Push your thinking in every direction you can. It doesn’t hurt, and the investment pays off in your ability to think in places where other folks can’t.

Every Company Needs You

Think of your mind as a room filled with drawers and doors, each of which leads to piles and stacks of information that you can access and use. Mental flexibility solves problems when other folks can’t because it allows you to open those drawers and doors to find answers to questions. Most folks don’t have any practice at doing that.

That’s why flexible thinkers get noticed so quickly. They give answers that aren’t the usual ones, and the answers they give are answers that work.

Imagine the impact on your personal brand when folks start seeing you as someone who always asks the right question, gets to the core of things, and fits ideas together. In other words, you have added flexible thinking as a big idea to your personal brand, a core competency of your skill set. It’s one more way to bring the uniquely Brand YOU to the business table.

Flexible thinking is a skill every company needs desperately. Companies can’t problem solve, innovate, or grow organically without it. Why not be the one who shows them does it for them?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Special thanks to: Mental Flexibility for motivating me when I was tired.

New Flat Screen–I Can See the Words!!!

April 2, 2006 by Liz

Should I Have Let the MSM Provide Tools?

I guess when you’re going blind, you don’t really notice, especially when dyslexia runs in the family. Still it was getting hard to miss the fact that I was correcting mistakes over and over. Then my editor–yes, I have an editor–was finding even more. I had started to think of my writing as chili–better on the second day.

Cash flow can be a bit of a problem, especially when a most deserving son is wowwing them at an expensive school called Georgetown. Laptop blogging was my only answer–that and squinting–until I knew I was doing harm to myself and to my brand. Credibility means a lot to this writer. How could I promote my blog, my business, and my brand, when I preach one thing and deliver another?

All of you have been most gracious and forgiving of the repeated repeated repeated and ~~mispelled~~ misspelled words that have been the bane of my writing–your reading–existence. Alas, I was looking like what Tom Glocer and Trevor Butterworth would call a “citizen journalist.” Ew. I lacked the tools for these over-used eyes to see the words. Perhaps I should have spoken to Tom and Trevor about their suggestion that the mainstream media provide tools and editors? Hmmmm. No.

New Computer, New Flat Screen

Instead, waited and waited until this past week when–my tax return check arrived and THEN within what was a matter of minutes a new desktop with a wonderful flatscreen display arrived in my office. And . . .

My God! I Can Actually See the Words!!!

My thoughts on why this took so long

Only my family comes before my readers.
This new computer was an investment in my brand.
I put my brand at risk by not doing it sooner.
This is a textbook example of managing to make a decline happen.

Don’t be me. Spend the penny and save your brand. Not the other way around.

I finally followed my own branding advice. At last, I have fixed the problem. In my opinion, far later than I should have. As my friend, Nancy, often reminds me, “Liz, sometimes you’re so fast, and sometimes you are sooooo slooooow.”

My apologies to everyone who has read through the errors and skipped the multiple corrected posts in their feeds. Hopefully, this new purchase make my visual weakness a little closer to irrelevant. You should also know that transitioning computers is incredibly easier and way less painful than it was a mere six months ago.

BIG CHESHIRE CAT GRIN!!!

I’m thinking of taking a typing class next. Do you think that might be a good idea?

Smiles,
ME “Liz” Strauss

Your Resume-The Brand YOU Brochure

March 27, 2006 by Liz

Forget the Rules

The rules are for everyone. Personal brand is about showing you are the only one.Somewhere along the line, you probably learned rules about writing resumes. What I’m about to tell you is going to break them. I like breaking rules, especially when that works in our favor. I don’t usually do it when it doesn’t.

You don’t need a resume anyway. You need something that works like one, but is more than that.

Get Rid of the List

It’s easy to think of a resume as a list – three suits, two blue, one gray, of what you’ve done and to write it off as a painful requirement of job acquisition. That’s a major missed opportunity. With a few tweaks, your resume can be a dynamic tool in your personal branding strategy.

Throw away the list as concept.

Think about Brand YOU and promotional tools.

You’re making a personal branding brochure. Just let other people think it’s a resume. They’ve been confused before.

A Personal Branding Brochure

Imagine that you’re a product — a Ferrari. Your resume is your specification sheet. Add some marketing copy, and you’re well on your way to a promotional brochure for that Ferrari. On my own resume I include the usual career experience with the chronological job history, but that is page 2.

On page 1, I include branding information built around my branding big idea – that I am a leader and a strategist with a proven track record and competencies in several key areas of publishing. I want the person reading my resume to read this first, to know what I can do before where I did it. The former is more important than the latter. As you read through, you might notice how I took the opportunity to further my brand identity by targeting first statement under each core competency.

Turn a resume into a personal branding brochure.

Use It as a Promotional Tool

Change the way you look at your resume, and you soon find a world of uses for it. Use it as you do your business card. Just this week I sent mine to a business friend with a note saying, “Let me know if my voice might help you in the meetings with the publishers you told me about.” Design it into your blog’s About Page to let your readers know more about you, your brand, and your business.

I use my “branding brochure” a lot when I’m networking.

It’s one more way to let people know you’re not just another suit. You’re uniquely valuable.
Without you, the world would be missing something–the one and only Brand YOU.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

BusinessWeekOnline Agrees

March 24, 2006 by Liz

I just got this in my BusinessWeekonline email.

It seems that Carmine Gallo, corporate presentation coach agrees. Click the screenshot to reach his presentation tips.

Thank you, Carmine. The facts are the facts. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss