Three Words for 2012 – Update
In his January 1, 2012 post Chris Brogan challenged us to forego the idea of a New Year’s resolution and instead come up with three words that would help us define our goals and experiences for the coming year.
My three words were Present, In-Person and Reclamation. Read the post. What I’ve learned so far: Being Present is mostly hard.
Everything around us is designed to pull us into some alternate reality. TV. Internet. Music. Entertainment. Reading. All designed to transport us – elsewhere. Yet the most powerful thing we can do is to land the brain in the here and now.
Ask yourself: Do I have a roof over my head? Yes. Am I going hungry? No. Most of us are actually okay if we just look at the absolute present. It’s living in the future that scares the #!@#$%^ out of us.
Keeping a gratitude journal also has been helpful. I hadn’t kept one in a while but the leader of my foundations coaching class at MentorCoach recommended it so I decided to give it a try again. This time, however, I am keeping it online on Penzu. I got the pro version ($19/yr.) so I could create multiple journals.
Penzu actually comes pretty close to the paper journaling experience, but enables you to tag entries. Which means you can actually find important seed ideas later. When I think about the six boxes full of journals in the basement and all of the ideas that must be buried within them, I’m tempted to transcribe them. But then that would be the opposite of being present, now wouldn’t it? Hmmm, ok, perhaps not!
Also the opposite of present: Researching my ancestors. About every two years I become obsessed with tracing my lineage via Ancestry.com and other sources. This time around I had an interesting a-ha, however, as a result of a metal box full of old documents borrowed from my dad.
I knew that my grandfather was a miner as was his father and his father’s father, ad infinitum. At first iron miners in France and Belgium, then coal miners in Illinois. But in the box I found 38 receipts, each for a different correspondence class on Mining Engineering. Grandpa “Joe” Bouchez was absolutely determined to break the pattern and he knew education was the only way to do that. After a stint int he Navy, which provided him with additional training, he worked as a field engineer for many years, traveling the world.
“Grampa” also was absolutely insistent that all three of his children — not just my father, but also his two daughters — attend college. My father passed on this expectation to my sister and I, so we both also have our degrees. (Granted, it took me three times as long as it took my sister to get the sheepskin, the important thing is that it was acquired.) Dad saw a degree as insurance that we would always be employable — by someone else. What he didn’t anticipate however was that both daughters would ultimately choose to be self-employed!
To Dad — who worked as an engineer at Ford for nearly four decades — self-employment seems scary and uncertain. For my sister and I, however, it was the most natural and obvious next step to gaining total control over the rhythm and experience of our lives as well as our income potential. So, we’ve essentially taken it to yet another level.
The moral of the story: Sometimes it can be useful to reach back if it ultimately helps you to understand and appreciate how you came to be where you are right now.
The next work was In-Person. I only need one word to describe this one: Fail. With the exception of my 50th b-day party in February (which was a blast) and a drink or two with friends and a couple of business events, I haven’t been out much at all. I have seven months left to rectify this. I didn’t pick these words because they were easy. Hopefully I’ll have more to report on this one by the end of summer.
Last but not least, there is Reclamation. Actually, all my energy is pretty much going into this one right now as it will make the other two (Present and In-Person) a lot easier to keep in line. I’ve finally stopped resisting my true calling, which is to write and teach. I still have content marketing and PR clients whom I love and for whom I do good, but recently I also have been doing a lot of communications coaching. And the people (and me) are just LOVING it.
But I have more to offer than communications coaching. I’ve invested decades into the study of how to be happy. I’ve transmitted a lot of this information to others on an ad hoc basis. I’ve wanted to make what I know more widely available, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. I’ve resisted going the coach route because I was afraid that claiming the “coach” title would actually hurt my professional profile rather than help it. Then I found Mentor Coach.
Mentor Coach is founded on the principals of Positive Psychology. Therefore, the approach and program is theory-based. I have already learned so much, it’s amazing. In terms of the negative perception of the title, it finally occurred to that I can use my skills to help change that, by helping to educate people about what coaching can do for them, what to look for in a coach, and why certification and proper training of coaches is so vital.
So, if you need a communications coach right now, call me. If you’re interested in being one of my student coaching clients, call me to get on the list, as to acquire the hours I need for certification I will be offering my services (for a time) at a reduced rate. Take advantage of it!
Thanks for reading, and I’ll update on this topic again after Labor Day.
P.S. Those of you who also did the three words exercise, how’s it going?
Maintaining An Audience On Content Overload
Lately I’ve been assaulted with email newsletters and auto-responders, bored by 80% percent of the automated pronouncements and retweets (including many I can tell the @Tweeter has not actually read), and left cold by a steady stream of sterile salesy appeals for my attention to attend yet another free web seminar that saturate my Linked In news feed.
Can I get an “Amen?”
Even some of my most favorite writers seem to have become so enslaved by the content monster that they are churning out content that has no soul. Some recast the same basic concepts again and again and again, and worse, some stray out of their area of expertise completely and use their posts as an exercise in “writing to learn.”
As you know, I am a huge champion of writing to learn. But I just want people to call it out as such rather than trying to pass off the thing they learned five minutes ago “on the Internet,” as true expertise.
The mark of true expertise is that it’s fairly narrow and very deep. True experts can talk about their category for days on end, with ease. Think: Fred Wilson (AVC.com). Also David C. Baker (ReCourses). And Heidi Grant Halvorson (author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals).
Lack of true expertise is one big reason it’s so hard for most people to publish consistently. Beneath the shiny surface, there is no there, there. That’s why people are forced to feed to content monster (and their audience) the same meal – week after week after week.
If you’re not a true expert yet, it’s not too late (it’s never too late). Most professional services practitioners naturally gravitate toward a specific area. Figure out what that is and go for it. It’ll probably take you 3-5 years to get to the summit (10,000 total hours). Know that and just do it. That’s the first step.
But that’s only half the equation. The other thing that often is missing is a clear mission.
It takes me five minutes on someone’s website to be able to ascertain whether or not their mission is clear. My observation is that the more corporate speak there is, the foggier the mission. (There usually is one, you just have to dig around for it and bring it to the front. You basically have to put the business on the couch and help it figure out who it really is.)
Caveat: Identifying a mission can be a dangerous business because you may discover you don’t want to publicize your company’s actual mission. For example, if your business is your entire life, your secret mission might be to work for clients only in sectors that interest and amuse you. There are other problems with this mission, but that’s another post.
Or maybe you have no mission except to make money. That’s okay. All business owners share that mission (or they should). Alas, the fact that making money is practically everyone’s mission means it is not a differentiator.
Nor is what you do or how you do what you do. Which means no one cares about your “proprietary process.” What they do care about: Why you do what you do. The why is your true mission. The why is what makes your company different from the 8,000 other people that do what you do, how you do it.
To understand what I mean, watch this 2009 TED talk by Simon Sinek on “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.”
When true expertise and a compelling mission are aligned, your voice –not just in your blog posts, but in new business meetings and at networking events, too – will be very distinct. When you talk, people will listen. The heads will nod. The deals will close. Life will be good.
Are you a true expert? If not, what do you need to get there? Are you clear on your mission? Is it working for you? If not, what needs to change?
If you need help working through these questions, or have other questions about this topic, please contact me. While you’re here, sign up for the CMxPR newsletter. You’ll receive the first issue at the end of May.
How to Write Effectively About Complex Topics
One of the payoffs of mastering a discipline is that you gain command of a new language composed of precise, extensive vocabulary that enables you to understand and transmit new ideas to others at your level of mastery at the speed of light and with pinpoint accuracy.
While those words shorten the time you need to communicate with your peers, when communicating complex ideas to non-experts or experts-in-training, you can’t take any of those shortcuts. And your writing must be as clean as the board of health.
That means no extra words, lots of transitions, and the frequent dropping of anchors back to foundation knowledge. It also means defining — as you go along and in simple terms — every single word you use that is not a part of common language.
If you’ve done your job, the novice who reads the piece should assimilate a good portion of the new information without struggle, because the new information links back to things they already know.
If people choose to read your piece again, it’ll be because they want to commit the information to rote memory or think about it again using a different lens – not because they didn’t understand what they read the first time.
Related posts:
Winning the Content Creation Game in 20 Minutes a Day
