Let's Talk About Role Models

If I were to ask you to name your biggest role models in life, could you rattle them right off?  Most people can't.  Most people have never consciously chosen role models, although of course, we all are influenced by others throughout our lives. 

When it comes to living an extraordinary life, role models are a requirement.  They're necessary because odds are, few people in your day-to-day life are inspiring you to greatness.  And even if you do have some powerful women or men you especially look up to and strive to be like, I've found we need lots of role models to embody a variety of different qualities we want to develop in ourselves.

Role models are delicious.  They widen your world from what you personally have experienced, inspire you, motivate you, fill your head with ideas and best of all, their influence is available to you any time at no charge thanks to libraries, bookstores, movies and the Internet.  How do you find them?  It's so easy.  Just look around at people, lives and experiences that speak to you.  As you read books, websites and magazines, notice what jumps out at you and find a way to delve deeper into that in your free time.

Throughout my adult life I've had dozens of role models who embodied qualities I wanted to develop.  My list includes:

• Cary Grant for his enduring friendships, financial frugality and foresightedness
• Audrey Hepburn for her grace and huge heart
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her fierce privacy and immovable personal boundaries
• Princess Diana for her raw humanitarianism
• Marilyn Monroe for her constant striving to perfect her craft
• Cindy Crawford for her entrepreneurialism and willingness to take professional risks
• Hubert Keller for his tireless enthusiasm and incredible work ethic
• Helen Gurley Brown for her generous career teachings to her own and future generations
• Jim Rohn for his humor and unique way of speaking that conveyed important ideas so simply and clearly
• Diana Vreeland for her boldness and elegant eccentricity
• George Balanchine for his extraordinary creativity

This list is just a small sampling of extraordinary lives I've studied in detail.  Each of these people has provided me with valuable instruction in how I want to live my life, even if I have never met them.  As they entered my world and engaged me, I made it a point to read books and articles about them, so I could get a detailed picture of their uniqueness and how they came to develop those special qualities.

Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking their role models have to be perfect.  To me, that's a big error in thinking because, for one thing, no one is perfect.  Secondly, just because someone has messed up in one area of their life doesn't mean they can't inspire and teach incredible things in another part of their life.  I don't require my inspirations to be perfect.  Even their flaws can teach me something important.

Fall In Love With The Process

Sometimes we set ourselves up for failure and don’t even know it.  For example, how many times have you changed your behavior to achieve a certain result like losing 10 pounds, only to backslide once you reached your goal and wind up back where you started?  Many of us seem to swing on a perpetual pendulum because our focus is on a short-term outcome rather than an ongoing change.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately given my new interest in fitness competitions.  In this sport there’s a lot of concentration on upcoming competitions.  There’s kind of this outward pressure that you should always be gearing up for the next one. But once the competition is over you don’t want to end up burnt out, crabby and miserable because you can’t sustain the herculean efforts you put in temporarily.

I’ve come to see it’s better to have a long-term mindset where you purposefully fall in love, not with the end outcome, but with the actual things you need to do on a regular basis.  Fall in love with the process of improving.

In my case this means working out hard, watching my diet and developing my stage presence.  Rather than see these things as nasty chores or sacrifices I must make for a little while, I am now seeing them as exceptional skills that benefit me and that I am lucky to get to do every day.  I’ve given up seeing the end state as the trophy or even fixating on the end state at all. 

This philosophy applies to any goal, for example a person who wants to be a top sales person can decide to fall in love with making lots of exceptional sales calls, getting better at it all the time.  Someone who is seeking a long term love relationship can start to consciously enjoy the activity of dating, becoming a better and better person to date with each outing, all with the knowledge that that special person is coming.

When you develop a passion for the process of improvement you develop positive habits.  Success then becomes a natural byproduct of what you’re doing.  Instead of riding that pendulum of frustration, you hop on a rocket ship of inevitable victory.  Your success becomes a foregone conclusion.

It's Not Me, It's Them

As a professional PR person, I’ve had a chance to dive into social media. Twitter in particular I really like, because it’s fun to challenge yourself to say something pithy in 140 characters or less. The exchange of ideas and information there can be fast and furious as well as laser targeted, which makes the format a useful resource for all sorts of things. There is this one thing I’ve learned from my use of Twitter that I did not expect – to become unattached to what people think of you.

Students of self-improvement may be familiar with the phrase “What others think of me is none of my business.” This is a great philosophy because even if we twist ourselves into pretzels to people-please, we never can truly control how someone might choose to view us. And we burn ourselves out in the process. I believe that focusing on what I am creating and contributing is a healthier and more productive way to live. I have found that it is also important to let go of the need for others to like what I am writing/thinking, or to look for praise or agreement.

Easier said than done though. There’s this annoying ego that jumps in ascribing meaning to what others say and do about us, and sometimes those thoughts can become really destructive, causing great work to be abandoned, like when Stephen King threw his manuscript of Carrie into the trash. (It was rescued by his wife and became his first big success.)

As an early adopter of Twitter, my policy is to follow back everyone who follows me. I know this is not how everyone uses Twitter and I’m not saying it’s the right way. Maybe I am just old fashioned, but I feel like it is only polite to return a courtesy. To keep my Twitter feed from becoming unmanageable, I just use the Lists feature to pull out the updates I want to be sure to read. It’s no big deal really. But as a company, Twitter doesn’t want its follow/follower ratios to get too unbalanced, so if you follow folks back like I do, you kind of have to go in and unfollow them if they unfollow you so that your account can continue to grow naturally.

I use a website called JustUnfollow.com to accomplish this task. It is also very simple. I sign in with my Twitter account on the JustUnfollow website, it pulls up a list of everyone who has recently unfollowed me and I click unfollow by each one. (Twitter no longer allows bulk unfollows so you have to do it individually.) 

Now here’s the unexpected learning I’ve received: I have a lot of followers on Twitter so every week, oodles of people unfollow me. More new people follow me than old ones leave though, so my follower tribe has only ever moved in an upwards direction since I first tweeted back in 2009. And it’s not like the unfollowers are directly tied to what I am sharing either. I can have a day where I get the most retweets and favorites ever and still have plenty of folks say, “No thanks, your stuff is not for me.”

I find it kind of fascinating. It has forced me to adjust my previous belief that if I would just tweet amazing stuff all the time, everyone would always love it. And while it is true that the majority of people do seem to like it, I cannot control those who take offense, choose to weed down the number of people they follow, don’t appreciate my point of view or whatever. My personal Twitter policies have forced me to find a way to become comfortable with processing the steady unfollower stream without it impacting my desire and ability to continue to post what I believe is useful information. In essence, it has thickened my skin.

Thanks to Twitter and my ways of using it, I no longer see rejection as something that must be painful or unpleasant. For a variation on what Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can’t please all of the people all of the time.” That’s life. Accept it and move on. I am not suggesting to ignore all negative feedback or that I am absolute in my beliefs. Challenge and dialogue (brief that it may be) can be important. I am still interested in what others choose to share with me, and I am sure most others are too. But it feels very freeing to recognize that everyone has free will, your stuff is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and that it’s totally okay. I appreciate people taking the time to check out my contributions and I am in agreement with whatever decisions they then make. Perhaps the next time I visit San Francisco, I will stop in the Twitter corporate headquarters to thank them for teaching me this valuable lesson.

7 Secrets For Leaving Better Voicemail Messages

If you’re like most business people, you leave voicemail messages all day long but you’re rarely given much thought to how you’re doing it. Voicemail can be a great way to save time, but it can also create unintended negative results if you’re unaware of a few bad habits. Here are 7 secrets to leaving better voicemail messages.

1. Start with something personal – Telemarketer calls are such a problem these days, people might think you are a spammer if you don’t quickly say your name and why you are calling them. If you don’t know the person well, it’s best to say “Bob, this is Pam Smith, we met at the NAWBO luncheon last Tuesday and you asked me to follow up with you.” Now you can be sure your message will be fully heard.

2. Keep it brief – Everyone is time pressed these days. Voicemail is no place to get into a long story. Just leave the tip of the iceberg and save all the juicy details for when they call you back.

3. Slow down – If you’re at all nervous, there is a natural tendency to rush. It is better to speak slowly and clearly, even if it means you will have to distill your message down to its essence. When you talk too quickly, people often miss what you’re saying.

4. Repeat your callback number – People are often distracted when they’re listening to their voicemail playbacks. Even if you say your number slowly, they may miss some of it. That’s why it’s considerate to repeat it. That way the other person doesn’t have to replay the whole message a second time.

5. If you’re cranky, don’t make phone calls – A person’s energy comes through loud and clear over phone wires, so if you’re having a bad day, focus on other tasks, or watch funny YouTube videos until you shake off your blues.

6. Don’t call and hang up repeatedly – With some phone systems, it creates a voicemail for each call received, even if you don’t speak. If you’re in the habit of calling people repeatedly until they pick up, you may inadvertently create a situation where they have to sit and delete multiple blank messages from you before they can get to their actual voice messages. This does not build goodwill.

7. Script important messages – Certain messages are critical. For these types of messages, it’s a good idea to write down your main points so that you don’t lose your train of thought and ramble. As long as you can sound natural, it’s okay to have some written words to guide you as you leave your message.

5 Google Results You Want

Today every business exists in two worlds simultaneously – the online world and the offline world. Even if a company has done absolutely nothing online, their lack of any presence still says something about them. And odds are, there are people talking about them anyway, they just don’t know it.

There are certain categories of information that you want to come up when people are checking out your business online. After you review this list you might want to do a quick Google search to see how many of these you have covered.

1. Content demonstrating your unique expertise – This is stuff that proves you know what you’re talking about. It could be articles, videos, blogs, webpages, whitepapers, newsletters, tweets, ebooks or any combination thereof. Each of these posts are ways to highlight what is unique and special about your firm, your voice and the specific way you help people. People go online to find out what you’re all about, so make it easy for them. Share that kind of information so they can get to know you.

2. Interviews supporting your thought leadership – This is where the media has asked to interview you about your area of expertise. You could be the featured expert or you could just be quoted as one of many in the resulting coverage. It could be a Q & A with a blogger, or a quick conversation on YouTube. This type of content is very powerful to have online because it demonstrates others are seeking out what you know. It is a great endorsement of your professionalism, so if you have never been interviewed by any media, you might want to set a goal for that to happen this year.

3. Pictures and images – You know how Google has a tab called Images? People can click solely to see visuals of you or your business, so you don’t want those results to come up blank. Be sure your website and online presence includes quality photographs. It could be someone demonstrating something, site pictures or images from an event. These visuals will give a fuller sense of you and your business beyond what words alone can share.

4. Testimonials – As a prospect is scrolling through your search results it would be ideal if they came across other people describing their experiences in working with you. You can have a testimonials page on your website, but don’t stop there. Use the testimonials section of LinkedIn as well, and identify third party websites in your industry where people share this type of information. Facebook and Twitter are also great places to share short endorsements too.

5. Participation in online conversations – As people search online for industry content, it is very helpful for them to come across you offering an expert answer to someone’s question or pointing someone else in the right direction. When these types of pages come up on Google, they demonstrate your expertise but also show your community involvement. You can even initiate a discussion if you prefer.

By proactively ensuring these five types of content appear in any Google search of your company, you position yourself as an expert in the best possible way and greatly enhance the probability of a prospect picking up the phone to contact you directly and do business.

Zombie Marketing

“The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.” – W. Edwards Deming

You might have noticed, zombies have become a popular part of our cultural landscape. The continuing interest in zombie-themed movies, TV shows and even events seems to keep growing with no end in sight. As a marketer, it got me thinking about places where “Walking Dead” might be appropriate for certain marketing tactics.

Telemarketing, junk mail and mailbox-stuffing paper campaigns all meet my definition of what I’ll call “Zombie Marketing.” These tactics are dead but they don’t know it. They may work in terms of enough people seem to respond to make it worth doing, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good strategy for a savvy business interested in building goodwill.

Please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying all phone calls, emails or mail campaigns are bad. Just the ones that are spammy, junky or clearly bogus and a waste of time.

See, as a culture, we are moving away from interruption-based communication. We’re moving toward information on demand. You don’t want a furnace repair company to call you on a random Tuesday when your furnace is working fine. You do want to find a reliable furnace repair company quickly when yours breaks down. That requires a completely different approach to getting the word out.

As a business owner who has had the same phone number for over a decade, you can imagine how many zombie marketing lists I am on. Each week I receive phone calls from solicitors saying they are “Checking on the copier,” when I don’t have a copier. Or they want to give me special offers on my phone account, when I have no such account with their company. When I inform them of this, they hang up and dial the next number on their list.

Zombies only think about their own immediate needs. They have zero empathy for anyone else. They’re mindless. They add little of value and their numbers can quickly get out of hand. Kind of like all the junk email in your spam folder, or the print solicitations that you dump in the recycling bin each day.

When considering marketing techniques, don’t be part of the undead horde. Ask yourself, “Does this tactic interrupt people? Does it annoy them? Have I bothered to figure out if this person is even a prospect for what I offer? Am I just putting this out in mass quantities hoping anything will stick?” It is far better to focus on providing quality information of value and making that available in as many forms as possible to those who seek it. One day the zombie techniques will truly die out. Until then, stick to tactics for the living.

How to Grow Your Social Authority

Social authority isn’t given, it’s earned. To develop social authority you basically need to do two things: 1. cultivate a following or network and 2. consistently add value. That’s it. Sometimes people make it a lot more complicated than it really is.

I believe every brand has information that is of value to the marketplace, and today there are more affordable avenues than ever before to showcase and share that knowledge. To begin, simply decide which social media platform is the best fit for you (hint – it is probably where you clients and customers are spending their time). Next, establish a professional profile and then you’ll be ready to start connecting to others and sharing what you know and learn.

I recommend sharing in ways that go beyond just words – use pictures, charts, graphics and videos as well because so many of us are visual and appreciate seeing as well as reading. Also, look for role models online to help guide you. It’s easy to do a search of who is the leading force in your industry on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook. Follow or connect with those people to discover what folks are responding to and finding helpful.

As you progress, you’ll more fully find your unique voice and you may be surprised at some of the far flung connections you make. You’ll also want to set some clear and specific goals for your online efforts early on. Knowing where you want to go will help keep you on track and will make it easier for you to decide if the time you’re spending online is providing a measurable return on investment. If you’re not prepared to form authentic, sincere relationships, social media is no place for you.

Ultimately, social media is a lot like networking – it involves developing relationships rather than selling. It is important to come from a place of contribution. Recognized and lauded social authorities share a focus on helping others succeed and reach their goals, so it’s best to keep in mind how your expertise can save others time, money or effort in developing your content. Les Brown said, “Help others achieve their dreams and you will achieve yours.” Keep an eye out for useful tips, showcase up and coming tools, help others make sense of new trends and provide feedback and input. Most of all, stick with it! When people realize you are steadily delivering great information your social stock will soar and you will become an important social authority.