Tempo Toronto » Your Approach

Your personal virtual brand

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:47:39 +0000

What’s in a name?

by Deborah Weinstein

Everything, when it’s your personal brand; and perception is reality in the virtual world.

But branding isn’t something left to corporations and products. We are all brands. Your personal brand reflects who you are and what you do. Your personal brand is reflected in what you say and what you do. This is particularly important in the social media space, where your words, thoughts, musings and frailties are broadcast, saved and indexed by robots. It is therefore important to be proactive about managing your personal brand.

Virtual personality

This brand personality also needs to be strong, authentic and compelling. This is what helps people emerge and differentiate themselves from millions of other voices clamouring to be heard. Your name in the socially-networked universe defines your brand — your essence, what you stand for, your reputation and your three second BLINK, all in 140 characters or less!

Differentiate yourself

So, how do you differentiate and elevate your personal brand, your on-line identity, in a social world teeming with thousands, no millions, of individuals calling out to be heard?

For proof of the bottom-line importance of asserting your personal brand you need look no further than:

A recent poll of 2600 North American Hiring Managers that revealed 45% of those surveyed use social media background checks to vet prospective employees; and
35% of respondents said they’d found something social that caused them NOT to hire the candidate. (continues next page)

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How coaching works

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:31:15 +0000

5 key pointers to successful coaching

You may have been staunchly independent your entire life, never relying on the input of others. Conversely you may have benefited from having a mentor through your professional life. However, sometimes we all need a little help to get us through a sticky point, and that’s where coaching – the art of improving the performance of others – may just be the thing to help you close a gap between the present situation and the desired one.

In a work environment, a coach helps develop employees and executives by mutually assessing performance, discussing the current situation, defining achievable goals, exploring new initiatives and supporting a coachee in a plan of action.

When adapted for use in your personal life, a life coach can open doors to your ability to develop new skills and talents, and enable you to improve your decision-making abilities, or determine how to best handle life challenges.

Tempo Toronto spoke with Carol Sachowski, President of storycoaching inc. in Toronto about the benefits of coaching. She is a specialist in leadership development, executive coaching and organizational effectiveness, and is also a highly effective life coach outside the corporate environment. Her personal coaching practice zeros in on individuals wanting to work on personal and interpersonal matters such as work/life balance, career transitioning, changing belief systems, coping with sudden change, improving communication skills, and living a happier, more fulfilling life.

About business and personal coaching, Carol says that “The beauty of coaching is that the line often blurs between the two as the client unearths issues around integrity, well-being, bottom line results and heightened self awareness. Significant and life altering impacts are far from uncommon, and many clients wonder how they managed for so long without a coaching component to their lives”

Here are Carol’s five things to know about coaching.

1. When you are stuck somewhere, or perhaps have lost belief in yourself, a coach works with you to encourage you to to hear your own voice telling that which you, really, know to be true.

2. While it takes your own work, a coach will work with you to help you identify your own solutions. At the same time she or he will look to you for signs of commitment to yourself. (Otherwise, it’s just a chat.)

3. Your coach is an effective sounding board, with no agenda of their own, and from whom there is no fear of harsh judgment, injury, or your private information and struggles being shared.

4. Your coach partners with you, and walks along the same path until you are ready to say goodbye. During your coaching life together, you can expect to see an improvement in your own confidence, to become more decisive, to achieve clarity of mind and to become calmer. With the clarity comes renewed ability to make sense of what you’re encountering, and to make peace with what you are bumping up against currently.

5. Your coach should have their own personal groundedness, be doing their own inner work too, and have credentials (such as Carol’s International Coaching Federation certified coaching course, and her Graduate Certificate in Executive Coaching).

The frequency and duration of coaching depends, of course, on individual needs. For a specific issue, you may need two or three meetings. For others you may need to meet once or twice a week for a few months. A single session may be helpful – what Carol calls an “amuse bouche” of coaching – to give you a voice of clarity in the moment, before going deeper with more sessions.

Our sample session related to an unusual (for us) inability to make a decision that would affect the development of Tempo Toronto, something we’d been spinning over for a few weeks. Having got comfortable with Carol, she asked those incisive questions: “What is it that you know to be true already?”, “What is the cut off point for you?” and “What happens when you consider some different scenarios.”

Clarity. It was amazing. 24 hours later, decision made. Confidence increased. Calmness prevailed. Everything she told us would come to pass inside our heads, did.

We encourage you to try working with a coach yourself.

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Office Christmas Party etiquette

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:13:23 +0000

You may already know how to conduct yourself at the company Christmas bash. Why not share these seven rules of etiquette with younger colleagues?

Coach your younger colleagues how to conduct themselves at your upcoming seasonal party so that they – and you – have the best time ever, without embarassment. They will thank you and you’ll be able to relax and have a good time yourself.

When you were younger and had less business experience, what should have been an enjoyable evening often turned out to be a nerve-wracking night spent worrying about how not to make a fool out of yourself. By fifty-plus, we have learned our lessons well. Now it’s more likely that you have a group, department or entire company reporting to you, so how about showing some leadership this year? You can mentor the younger ones in your group to have perfect etiquette by sharing these seven rules for success at the company bash.

1. DO attend
If the thought of attending your office Christmas party makes you blurt, “Bah Humbug”, you need to step out of your Scrooge mode. Although you may not want to give up a precious evening socializing with co-workers, you must. Arrive on time, with a smile. A brief two-hour appearance is all you need to make them know you ARE part of the team.

2. DO dress appropriately
Don’t fool yourself. The Christmas office party is more business than party. Management is paying attention, so don’t dress as if you are at a nightclub. Stay clear of too much holiday sparkle; avoid anything slit up to your thigh, too tight fitting, or that reveals an embarrassing amount of cleavage. Instead, go for understated elegance. If you have to ask yourself, “Is this too much?”, it is.

3. DO mingle
Put your shyness aside. Circulate and talk to everyone. Avoid gossiping, telling off colour jokes and never complain. Take advantage of the night and introduce yourself to senior management you normally wouldn’t have access to. Instead of chatting about business, ask them about their hobbies and interests. Keep things light and positive and don’t talk too much about yourself.

4. DO mind your manners
Finger foods abound at the Christmas office party. Be sure to place your nibbly on a napkin first instead of popping it directly from tray to mouth. Avoid wobbly, tricky-to-eat appetizers, and don’t double dip! Also, brush up on your dining etiquette. Nothing undermines your professional image more than holding your knife and fork like a hillbilly.

5. DON’T overindulge
A glass of beer or wine is fine. Two “purple Jesus’” and a “sex on the beach” will cause you to do humiliating things (not to mention leave you looking like Rudolph the Reindeer!) No matter how hard you try to make up for drunken foolishness later on, your bad behavior this will haunt you for years. Set a limit and stick to it. Also, never let yourself be photographed holding a drink in your hand.

6. DON’T flirt
It’s easy to feel all huggy and kissy at this time of year with the liquor flowing and dull corporate types suddenly looking like movie stars. Now is not the time to snuggle up to your colleague and whisper you’ve always had the hots for them. Avoid mistletoe, and remember what seems like a friendly link-up tonight could become a sexual harassment complaint tomorrow.

7. DO thank your host
No matter how you feel the morning after, arrive at work on time with a positive attitude. Write your boss a thank you note for the party telling him or her how much you enjoyed and appreciated it. It’s a simple touch that speaks volumes, and will definitely not go unnoticed.

Deborah Boland

Deborah Boland is a leading Image and Etiquette Consultant who specializes in helping executives, professionals, and entrepreneurs upgrade their image and refine their etiquette skills for greater success. She is the owner of the Image and Etiquette Finishing School in Toronto, which offers 1- and 2-day programs in acquiring Executive Finesse.

For more information and to sign up for Deborah’s monthly newsletter visit www.deborahboland.com

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Stay out of e-mail hell

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:09:58 +0000

Top 10 e-sins, and how to avoid them

The days of thoughtfully crafted notes with a fountain pen on finest vellum are over. Almost all of us use email, and most of us have much to complain about. You can ensure impeccable style in your electronic communications if you follow these pointers.

1. Use a pleasant greeting to start your email, close it off equally pleasantly, and put your name at the end. A short, one sentence email without a salutation or a sign-off appears terse at best, and demanding and rude to the reader.

2. Always have something in the subject field, make it clear and concise, and make it relevant to the current topic. (Using ‘Reply’ without changing the Subject Field for a new topic is viewed as lazy, or may be passed over as an old message.)

3. To ensure your mails are recognized as legitimate and not spam, make sure your mail program shows your proper name in the ‘From’ field. Cutesy names, or your name not properly capitalized – or even worse, all in caps – are all more likely to be filtered into ‘Junk’ or identified as spam.

4. If you’re sending the same email to several people who don’t know one another, it’s far more considerate to use the BCc (blind copy) field. If you put them all in ‘To:’ or “Cc:’, this exposes email addresses to strangers which would be viewed as a breach of privacy.

5. Choose your words carefully to mirror your real intent and meaning, and refrain from using bold text, or much, much worse, using CAPITALS for emphasis. It is frighteningly easy for your tone or meaning to be misunderstood by the reader.

6. Forwarding an email to a group of friends, especially one that you preface with “I don’t usually pass these on, but this one was so funny/interesting/shocking/meaningful” is a horribly irritating and impersonal action. If you really think someone would be interested, then forward it to him or her individually, with a thoughtfully crafted note at the beginning. Chain e-mails, ugh!

7. Our age group prides itself on ability to communications. There is therefore no excuse for lack of spell checking, grammar and proper sentence structure because this reflects a lack of education or concern, and will not please your friends. More importantly, you will want to ensure that your emails can never be misunderstood or ignored. And, you will never, ever, send an email written in anger. If you’re angry, call someone. Or if you’re writing late at night, save and don’t send until you’ve re-read it in the calm of morning light.

8. Check the Junk/Trash folder first to see if any emails from others were filtered there by mistake. You wouldn’t want to accuse others of not responding to a communication when they did so promptly, yet your email program filtered them out.

9. Acknowledge receipt of emails that contain useful information, or have helped you in some way, even if you can’t act on the contents right away. You know you’ve received it, and this is reassurance for the sender, who does not. It’s good etiquette to thank anyone who has helped you by email.

10. Before you send large attachments, first ask the intended recipient if they would be interested in what the attachments contain and when would be the best time to send them. Some files are bigger than the space for which recipients’ mail servers allow, and this can clog up their ability to receive other emails. If you ask first, the other end can keep their inbox clear.

Email is no different. It’s a case of common courtesy, consideration for feelings, with a “please”, “thank you” and “have a great day” thrown in for good measure.

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