Taking a stand against shallow self-promotion
The world today needs more genuine, credible experts and leaders to stand up, stand out and share their experience, their wisdom, their stories and ideas.
G’day, my name is Trevor Young and this is my newsletter about positioning ourselves to take advantage of the opportunities that come with being an active participant in today’s Reputation Economy. You can subscribe by clicking on this button:
Taking a stand against shallow self-promotion
The writing has been on the wall for ages now, and that is, it’s never been more important to build public recognition for your ideas, your insights, your expertise and body of work.
Put simply, your professional personal brand is everything!
It matters not whether you’re an up-and-coming senior company executive, an entrepreneur, an established business leader, an academic, a professional consultant, or a former corporate high-flyer-turned-CEO-of-a-company-of-one - fact of the matter is, if we don’t control our own destiny, no-one is going to do it for us.
Now, I’m not here to tell you what “controlling your own destiny” looks like - I’ll leave that to Tony Robbins.
But I do care about good people of substance getting the professional recognition they deserve, and all the benefits that come with that.
I care about good people of substance enhancing their reputation, growing their sphere of influence and creating more impact in the marketplace or community in which they operate.
Stories and ideas
Personally, I think the world today needs more genuine, credible experts and leaders to stand up, stand out and share their experience, their wisdom, their stories and ideas.
And by leaders, I mean thought leaders - knowledge leaders - business leaders - education leaders - community leaders. You get the idea.
We live in volatile times. If you’re running your own business, it can be really tough to stand out from all the noise with a differentiated voice.
If you’re leading a large organisation or you’re an academic struggling to gain recognition for your ideas, or you’re transitioning from corporate to doing something you really want to do, like running your own personal enterprise, then having a strong and trusted personal brand is A1 critical.
Shallow self-promotion
Of course, you’ll always have the naysayers, and I totally get it.
The whole notion of ‘personal branding’ unfortunately gets tarred with the brush of platitudes and shallow self-promotion we see all too often on the social web, including LinkedIn.
There is no escape: We are inundated day and night with self-proclaimed ‘gurus’ flooding our social news feeds telling us they’ll make us rich if only we use their ‘proven system’.
They’re easy to spot: They loudly proclaim they are “global authorities” or “world leaders in ...”. Many simply point to flimsy achievements as evidence. I actually saw someone recently describe themselves as an "entrepreneur, disruptor and innovator" - wait ... what!?
It shits me, if I’m to be frank. Because the genuine experts - those credible professionals who have toiled away in the trenches for years but haven’t, for whatever reason, 'put themselves out there', are getting left behind.
Sure, they might get the odd tidbit of coverage or recognition for their work; indeed, the hard toil they’ve put in over the years will see them achieve a decent degree of success. But ultimately, their personal brand does not do justice to the quality of knowledge and achievements they have ratcheted up over the long haul.
I’m hoping that together we all can change that perception.