One way to increase productivity is to simplify decision making. Why is that effective and how can you do it?
Click the player to listen to this episode of The BIGG Success Show. Read the summary below.
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Differentiation is so important in today’s marketing environment. Listen as George & Mary-Lynn help you find your intersection to enhance your brand. Click play to hear The BIGG Success Show Podcast (Duration 7:25)
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Differentiation is necessary in today’s marketing environment, which is why it’s important to find your intersection to enhance your personal and professional brands.
An intersection is simply how your interests and what you do, gives you something that’s unique in the marketplace.
We’ll share our personal intersections, along with the intersection for BIGG Success. We encourage you to share yours too! Leave a comment below or email us.
[Mary-Lynn]
For 25 years, I had a brand: Radio DJ. I’ve worked on the air in Illinois in Lincoln, Bloomington, Peoria, Champaign, and Chicago. So when I first left the only profession I’d known back in 2007, I felt a bit lost. I didn’t know how to explain what I was now, and people still thought I was on the radio! I couldn’t escape my identity.
Then one day, when I was lamenting to George, about not being a broadcaster anymore…and it hit me. I was defining myself too narrowly. I was defining myself as a radio broadcaster. But through our blog, podcast, social media posts, business articles, newsletters and interviews…I was still broadcasting!
Once I broadened my definition, I was able embrace my past profession and see my intersection: radio broadcaster and social media entrepreneur. I have a unique understanding of both traditional media and new media. This enables me to help people learn how to broadcast their message in whatever format makes sense for them – and – broadcasting a good message is essential to having a successful business.
[George]
I don’t ever remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to own a business. In fact, some people introduce me as the man who’s never had a job! I’ve had my own businesses for years.
My intersection, I believe, has become that I have this combination of real-world experience along with actual academic teaching. I’ve done both of them for a long period of time…practicing in the real world while staying in touch with all the academic theories.
What’s fun about that is it helps me understand – with the businesses we work with and our own – how we connect strategy to everything we do. How the money, the marketing, and everything has to flow to maximize your results.
[BIGG Success]
Our company is the intersection of life and entrepreneurship. We say that even if you don’t want to own your own business, you still have to think like an entrepreneur.
In work: between the great recession and global competition, everyone needs to be nimble and ready to shift towards opportunity. Entrepreneurs understand how to deal with uncertainty, so the ability to think like one is an advantage.
In life: To live life on your own terms, you have to know what those terms are, then do whatever it takes to make it happen. There’s sacrifice in any decision. Maybe you don’t take a promotion because you want more time at home. Maybe you do start a business to be able to work from home.
Think about your intersections. Those places where your interests and what you do meet. It’s important because:
It leads to BIGG Success!
We have a BIGG news – our podcast has been named the top Entrepreneur podcast in Illinois! BIGG Success #19 on FeedSpot’s 80 Best Serial Entrepreneur Podcasts and #1 on FeedSpot’s Top 5 Illinois Entrepreneur Podcasts on the web.
Panelists chose us from thousands of podcasts on the web and ranked their top 5 list by relevancy, authority, social media followers & freshness.
Our intersection of entrepreneurship and life resonates with people, and we are so thankful.
Thank YOU for listening and subscribing!
Direct link to The BIGG Success Show audio file | podcast:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00151-051424.mp3
Hear about Santa’s personal branding expert on The BIGG Success podcast. Click PLAY for some fun holiday sounds.
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You may not know it, but Santa keeps a personal branding expert on his staff. The funny thing is we knew about this expert’s colleagues for years before we heard of him.
Bigg Success is life on your own terms. There’s an old negotiating rule:
You get the set the price or the terms, but you don’t get to do both. So if you choose the terms of your life, bigg success will set the price.
We were talking about Picasso recently. We don’t talk about a painting by Picasso; we talk about “a Picasso”. His name is branded with his work. d do it.
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But Picasso paid a price for his bigg success. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years for Picasso to become … Picasso.
He started at the age of seven. His father was an art professor, so he had a mentor from a very early age.
In his adult years, he was so poor, at times, that he burned his own paintings to heat his living space. Now that’s expensive energy!
No matter what obstacles he faced, he kept painting. Painting was his obsession.
He was admitted to a top school of art, but dropped out. Formal education wasn’t his thing. He was determined to live his life on his own terms. In fact, he often argued with his father over his paintings.
He didn’t always listen to his mother either. He said:
"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."
There have been lots of generals over the years. We’re on our 265th Pope. But there’s only ever been, and ever will be, one Picasso.
Picasso had a different dream for himself than his mother had for him. He had a bigger vision. He was unique and he sought to prove it.
What would have happened if Picasso didn’t dream so bigg?
Would he have been a general who doodles? Fortunately, we’ll never know.
But we do know that we would have never known Picasso. The world would have missed out on his great talents.
That’s why it’s so important to define your own terms. There are times when you should listen to others. There are times when you should only listen to that still small voice inside yourself. Distinguishing which one to listen to, and when, is one of the keys to bigg success.
Please share that, if you want, by leaving a comment below, calling us at 877.988.BIGG(2444) or e-mailing us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.
Thanks so much for reading our post today.
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| Would you like more tips and tools to live your life on your own terms? Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly – it’s FREE! |
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Financial advisors tell you to pay yourself first. Please join us next time when we say, “Play yourself first!” Until then, here’s to your bigg success!
Our source for much of the information about Picasso, along with the image we used in today's post was Wikipedia.
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00409-060409.mp3
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We love hearing from people in the Bigg Success community and recently, Rupa, one of our newsletter subscribers, sent us an e-mail with two great questions.
She said that Generation Y wrestles with the blurred lines between their private, public and professional lives. So colleagues in their professional world have access to personal information.
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Which leads to Rupa’s first question is, “How do we uphold our ‘professionalism’ while still enjoying our youth?”
Rupa continues by saying that we’re now a very visible society and are encouraged to share our information online. But she’s not thrilled segmenting who can see what by setting up different privacy settings.
So her second question is, “Should we – as a collective society – consider redefining ‘professionalism’ as we've always known it? Is it outdated?"
In the interest of full disclosure, we should tell you that we know Rupa. She is a very professional young person. That’s why her question carries even more weight with us.
For the sake of simplicity, we'll use Facebook, the most popular social network right now. Generation Y users began using this social media service when it was just a place for Gen Y.
Back in those good old days, your boss wouldn't be on Facebook. Today, he or she may be. Back then, a colleague you met at an event would contact you via email. Today, that colleague may ask to friend you on Facebook.
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I think all active social networkers wrestle with this to some extent. I have a friend who holds a highly visible position in her community. We were talking the other day and she said that she originally got on Facebook to keep track of her kids. Her family joined her. It was mainly a personal space for her. But now she is getting a lot of requests from people she knows in the community and she worries about the same thing. I think you have to find a happy medium when using social media. Make it not too much personal and not too much professional.
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When you create your profile on Facebook, they ask you to fill out all kinds of things. But you don’t have to. For example, I don't include my religious or political beliefs on my profile page. However, I also don’t walk around with those labels stamped on me when I network in person either. That’s something I only share with close friends.
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We think you can do one of two things:
This can be done by creating a "Professional" friend list and applying specific privacy policies to that group. We found a fantastic article that lists some useful privacy settings for Facebook along with instructions on how to configure them.
Privacy settings allow you to present yourself in a youthful way to one set of friends and as a professional to another group. Don’t we do that, at least to some extent, in the real world as well? Imagine all of the people you know in one room together!
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I went too far with my privacy settings. Now, even I can’t see what I’m doing!
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Maintaining privacy settings may be a little bit of a pain but your efforts will give you peace of mind – especially if you are in Gen Y and used Facebook for its original intent but you’re now integrating your professional contacts too.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Acceptable behavior hasn’t changed. People still hold each other to pretty similar standards as before.
What is different, and Rupa said it clearly in her e-mail, is the visibility. In other words, you’re more likely to get caught, we say tongue-in-cheek!
Because of that visibility, you have to be more careful about how you portray yourself online. For instance, let's say you are having a bad day. As a professional, you wouldn’t yell out, “I hate my job,” for everyone in the office to hear.
By the same token, it might be wise not to post that sentiment on your Facebook status, especially if you have co-workers in your network of friends. If you want Facebook to be a place to share the "authentic you", and you friend co-workers and managers, then it’s best to set up some privacy settings!
The bottom line is to remember that you are a brand. Your brand consists of your personal life and your professional life. Social media allows you to share both sides of your life with people in a public arena. You have to control your public brand image.
Thanks so much, Rupa, for your thought-provoking questions and for giving us permission to use them!
What are your thoughts about Rupa’s questions?
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00350-031309.mp3
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