BIOGRAPHIES: A Message to Speakers, Authors, and Business Owners on Shameless Self Promotion

“Boxing was the only career where I wouldn’t have to start out at the bottom.

I had a good resume.”  – Sugar Ray Leonard

Seems that I spend much of my career-business coaching hours on sales and marketing, bios and curriculum vitae. And it seems that almost every client I have ever worked with says the exact same thing, over and over again: “I’m good at promoting and bragging about others, just not about myself. It feels impossible… What do I say?!” Of course, this lack of skill (at least in our own minds) to express all our qualities, quirks, and qualifications in black and white terrifies most of us. Even for really arrogant and cocky people. My theory is simple: when we write it down and format it in an official way (Bio, Resume, CV, marketing materials, website content, etc), it all becomes glaringly real. We look at these documents, read over every word, and ask ourselves: Did I (or my company) really do all that… and is this really me (my company)?

Here is someone who answers: Yes, you did… and yes, it is.

Hiring Managers and Decision-Makers know that self promotion comes with a twist – they look for information between the lines, possible embellishments, and any trace of in-authenticity. If they are good, they will know if what they are reading is real or not, exaggerated to the slippery slope of falsehood or embellished in that “normal” kind of Bio/Resume/CV way. The key is making sure that what you have included, you can deliver. If you can do that, then shamelessly promote yourself to your heart’s content.

A simple example: I once had a client who was genuinely brilliant, and had begun to engage in public speaking for local professional organizations. Most of his gigs were pro bono, but the exposure and experience gained was worth the generous contribution of his time. He was also a pretty solid speaker, and was often asked to return. I heard this story, took notes, and created a position for him called Public Speaker and Meeting Presenter. I noted where he had spoken to date, and a little information about his topic focus. I also added this info to his bio. Well, when he saw this, two things happened: first he felt proud and deeply inspired, and then immediately after this feeling, he felt deeply uncomfortable. “Can I say that?” he asked. “Can you speak and present publicly and are you any good at it?” I returned. Without a hesitation, he said “Yes.”  He wasn’t lying to me or to himself – he is a solid speaker and presenter, and in that moment, he knew it down to his gut. Voila… an excellent example of how shameless self promotion can work. He got over it, and we added it to his CV and bio.

One more thing to consider: do not lie. Do not falsify information or embellish to the point of nonrecognition. This is not only unethical and creates bad career karma, it is illegal and might burn bridges for you. Ok, you have been warned. Good career coaches have a talent for understanding this fine line, this gray area of documentation. However, we also adhere to a code of integrity that prevents us from stepping over a certain professional line. Just saying…

Here are three points to consider and two examples of Bios I have done recently. One is for a client who has been getting more public speaking engagements for his work with leadership and working in global IT environments (name/details are changed to protect client’s privacy), and the other one is mine. I change it every so often to update the content and relevance, but the nuts and bolts of writing a good one is there. Before you get down to writing, first consider these points:

• PERSONALITY: yes we want to know all about your Harvard PhD’s and all those awesome clients you have worked with, but where is your character and personality? Beware of dry language and lists. Some lists are unavoidable, so pepper in some creative images. Use a thesaurus and take advantage of the 500K words in our rich English language.

• ONE MINUTE COMMERCIAL: this is similar to your one minute commercial in that you might want to include a few key pieces of information – name, location, durations, title/position/job, industries or environments, qualifications/education (if applicable), clients or company names, and results. You can add testimonials to this as well, but I place mine on the last page of my CV after references. A good bio is like an expanded one minute commercial.

• RELEVANT and UPDATED: I recommend keeping this updated because, as the saying goes… you never know. It is also a good idea to have a few versions, depending on the “slant” you need. Most careers are pretty complex in my experience, so make sure you keep the data relevant and updated to fit all the different things you do. I have focused on HR, leadership and operations for the past decade, and have a slightly different bio for each of these arenas. I also have two different CV styles, by the way, to match either conservative or more casual work environments.

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BIO EXAMPLE ONE:

PROFESSIONAL BIO – John Smith

John Smith is a 22-year professional of the IT, Systems Analysis, Business Analysis, Customer and Vendor Liaison, Strategic Planning, and Project Management arenas. His career began as a Technical Writer and grew into IT Consulting, Quality Assurance, Team Leadership, and Personnel Development, which has culminated into successfully managing numerous projects in various roles including Senior Program Manager. His expertise has been developed mainly in corporate environments at global firms including Lockheed Martin, DTE Energy, and Ford Motor Company.

John has a solid reputation for his exceptional leadership skills, and his natural talent for effectively navigating through complex projects, plans, and people. His ability to bring diverse teams together into a focused forward momentum is what makes him unique. As a dedicated leader and manager in IT, Program and Project Management, he  has created measurable results and proven success by analyzing business requirements, relying on his extensive technical knowledge, and designing and implementing creative and strategic solutions that improve productivity, communication, information flow, customer satisfaction, and employee performance. Working on budgets up to $5M, he is also known for bringing in projects on target and under budget.

Currently, John is a Senior Program Manager in the Global IT Application Division at Ford Motor Company. He has a BS in Information Technology from the University of Michigan, and is an MBA Candidate in Management from Walsh College. In addition, he regularly engages in professional development education, and has participated in countless seminars and workshops in the areas of Leadership, Project Management, Six Sigma Lean Manufacturing, and IT Applications. He is an active member of the Michigan Council of Technology Professionals as a Mentor in their Mentoring Program and a regular Public Speaker and Meeting Presenter at various foundations and professional organizations including Young Leadership Council, Professional Leaders and Entrepreneurs, and the Project Management Institute. For more information, please visit…

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BIO EXAMPLE TWO:

BIO – Michele Wilke

With 25+ years in the professional coaching and training industry, Michele Wilke brings an extensive background to HR, team building, operations, international business, systems development / documentation, and leadership. She began her career on the West Coast getting trained in coaching and studying applied behavioral psychology at the Kairos Foundation in San Jose, California. The core of this in-depth, often challenging training remains in her work today. Michele also comes from a long line of business owners, and grew up working in her family’s printing and advertising business. There, she began to develop and collect valuable hands-on, soft and hard skill business tools.

In 1988, she relocated to Kyoto, Japan and spent eight years working as an adjunct professor in the Japanese university system focusing on HR and communication courses, and also as a cross-cultural management trainer and coach at a variety of companies including IBM Japan, Mitsubishi, and Omron. Opportunity brought her to Regensburg, Germany for almost nine years, into the heart of BMW, Siemens, Bavarian engineering, and the German autobahn. There she trained and coached executives, business owners, and culturally varied teams in the areas of HR restructuring, team building, diversity and cross-cultural communication, leadership, operations, and strategic planning. Once again, she taught as an adjunct professor specializing in international HR, international management, international marketing, east-west studies, personality profiling and cross-cultural training.

Michele returned to the US in 2004, and has continued to coach and train around the country in various industries including manufacturing, financial services, culinary-hospitality, and health care. Corporate clients include Google, Live Nation, Home Depot, Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management, and AxleTech International – A General Dynamics Company, as well as small to medium sized businesses, sole-proprietors, and municipalities.

Finally, she regularly educates and inspires groups with her insightful public speaking engagements and workshops. Topics include: Team Building, Recruiting, Communication, Leadership, Conflict Solutions, Global Business Alignment, Project Management, and Change Management. She offers high-performance and high-accountability tools and solutions that support clients, participants, teams and companies to go from good… to achieving the extraordinary. Michele Wilke has the tenacity of an Olympic athlete and the patience of a saint. For more information, please visit: www.velocitycoachingservices.com.    

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There are a thousand ways to do this.

First step is to dive in and start promoting your talents or services.

Get to work writing (on your own if you can write – or get professional help).

Shamelessly, of course.

The Four R’s of Relationships: Respect, Resilience, Responsibility & Rewards

“Lust is easy. Love is hard. Like is most important.”  – Carl Reiner

Truth is, many of us still don’t know a whole lot about relationships and how to have good ones. Not deeply and sustainably, anyway. The divorce rate has risen again, cheating is a reality show, and (almost) anything goes. We have lost our boundaries somehow, and the war between the sexes (which NOBODY won) rages on, as Venus and Mars continue to live in different universes. Love is still a popular subject with artists, actors, writers, and musicians, thank goodness, and yet love does seem to be an elusive concept for many. Myself included.

So why do I feel competent enough to share a few bits of wisdom about relationships? Because I have had many failures, some successes, and although my heart has been broken down into a heap of tar and despair, I have hope. My friends tell me that it is perhaps improbable  that I will find that special someone, but it is possible. Ahhh… words of encouragement from the peanut gallery. Actually, I have indeed helped many people with their relationships.

Right now I am working with a client’s career direction and internal roadblocks… and VOILA! We uncovered some unresolved relationship issues. Not the loud kind that give you a two by four upside the head – no, the kind that is more insipid, and sneaks up on the best of us. Even when I do business coaching, relationships are going to come into the sessions. They just do. And so, I have learned a lot about relationships in order to be better prepared for clients… and to be ready when I meet him, hopefully before I become food for worms. If Barbra Streisand can find love after 50, there is hope indeed.

I once read an article that talked about genuine love being the most difficult state of mind-heart-body-soul to achieve. Amen. My hope is that these Four R’s of Relationships will add a little more wisdom and possibility to help get us back on track when we are off, to fight fair when we want to hit below the belt, and to not give up. If I had known how horrifying divorce was going to feel, and could see the scars that it was going to create before I got married, I would not have said I do when I did. I would have waited until I understood these Four R’s more deeply.

Today, I sense that I get it, and am only recently capable of experiencing the kind of love that M Scott Peck writes about in The Road Less Traveled: Love is honoring, respecting, encouraging, and allowing the personal, mental, and spiritual growth of the other. How true. Read on, enjoy the ride of your relationships, and have fun with the questions at the end. Do them with your partner, your best friend, or your sister. They will certainly offer some solid ground for you both!

• RESPECT: Respect includes the relativity of other people’s perceptions. First we must ABSOLUTELY spend the time to define our terms and explain ourselves in plain language, with examples of how it looks like for us, what we MEAN by respect. Since only about 20% of what is said was correctly understood, defining our words is an excellent place to start – unless of course we want to continue making inaccurate assumptions.

• RESILIENCE: New studies show that people are more resilient than they think. One key to not giving up is to start each day at “zero”, a clean slate (this is also a “re-framing” tool used by successful entrepreneurs and fearless leaders, by the way). I once saw a bumper sticker that read: How can I miss you if you never go away?! Resilience sometimes looks like separate holidays, time to unplug, and howling at the moon. It might mean telling your partner, best friend, brother or even a very close colleague what you really think (and feel) about something they did that hurt you. And if you choose this road less traveled, be concise. Say it in two sentences, say it with your heart, and leave your wounded ego at the door.

• RESPONSIBILITY: Maturity, composure, and creating one’s reality are the signs of taking responsibility. The key to conflict solutions is to FIRST take personal responsibility for everything we did and said, AND didn’t do and didn’t say. We need to stop pointing the finger in the other direction. If our partners are the cause of our misery, then why are we still around? Because we know (deep inside our minds) that we are creating our reality, and that nobody “makes” us feel anything. They might try very hard to push our triggers, but we are fully responsible for our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions. Period.

• REWARDS: The Buddhists understand that life is filled with suffering. Us Westerners still struggle with this concept, as we tend to believe there is a perfect life with perfect stuff, and of course with a perfect relationship. Instead, we can appreciate life’s simple moments, the little stuff, the daily rewards that make it all worth our immense efforts. Traditions seem to work (although I must admit I dislike Valentine’s Day, whether I am in a relationship or not). And small gestures like saying a warm “thank you” when you partner does the dishes can make someone’s entire day. Gratitude is at the core of rewards. Think about it.

15 Questions Towards Creating Happier and Healthier Relationships

1. What does respect look like for you in your personal relationships?
2. How long does it take you to let something go (all the way down)?
3. When and how often do you cut others slack? Do you cut yourself slack?
4. What does “fair play” and “fighting fair” look like for you?
5. Do you think it is unhealthy or healthy to fight at all?
6. Why do you think some people lock horns more often than others?
7. What are your “non-negotiables”, and are they really deal breakers?
8. Do the people in your life know what your non-negotiables are?
9. How far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go regarding being honest about your own emotional triggers and baggage?
10. What have you specifically created to uplift… and to harm your relationships?
11. Are you willing to get counseling (or any kind of expert support)? Or not?
12. What does honesty and honest communication look like for you?
13. When was the last time you showed authentic gratitude towards the special people in your life?
14. What can you do everyday, to express your gratitude to those you care about?
15. What can you do today to create something differently, and what would that look like?

For more info: www.VeloCityCoachingServices.com

This content was presented along with Barb Wilson of Wilson Development Experts, an affiliate of VeloCity. We came up with the four R’s, and then we each gave our own version of what that means, and how to apply this knowledge. For info on Ms Wilson, go to the VeloCity website, and then click on the About Us page.

IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS: Awareness of Personality Types Can Save Your Sanity

“Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.” – Carl Jung

Of course, there are days when I’d like to be blissfully unaware, moving about the world in a superficial daze. But actually, if I had been Neo in the Matrix, I would have taken the pill to wake up in the real world, too. Paying attention to personality types can make the difference between having a conflict with someone or not, or taking something personally or not.

Like wine, this knowledge is the “great equalizer”. When we can embrace ALL of us, the positive AND the negative of ALL characteristics, then we can get ourselves out of the boxes that we have been creating for our narrow lives. And more important, we can relate to others with more grace and understanding. Pretty cool stuff considering how easy it is to learn about the basics of personality analysis.

When learning about any personality model, is it vitally important to remember that the classification of personality types only shows ideas about reality, not about reality itself. If these ideas fit for you, you can use them to have more power and choice in your expression of being authentically who you are. If they don’t fit for now, say pass and move on.

It’s all about paying attention and choice. We can choose which Personality Characteristics we wish to wake up… and which ones we should probably send off on a holiday for a while, to regain some balance. There are several useful Personality Models to learn from, and the Enneagram is one that is easy to recognize. It is considered the oldest model around, originating in the Sufi Indian community. Learning this tool can be used for expanding one’s self-expression, leading teams more effectively, handling conflict and “difficult” people with more fairness and composure, and helping us realize that we are all so alike.

Helen Palmer, one of the leading experts on the Enneagram, has written about these nine types in a way that allows people to immediately APPLY this knowledge, personally and professionally. Her book and website are at the Resources page at the VeloCity website (link on the right margin). The following information has been adapted from her work. Enjoy!

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ONE: The Perfectionist
Negative aspects: critical of self and others, convinced there is one correct way, feels ethically superior, has fear of making mistakes, uses should and must a lot.

Positive aspects: aware, moral mentors, keeps control in times of crisis, good organizers.

TWO: The Giver
Negative aspects: demands affection and approval, seeks to be loved by neglecting their own needs and always being available to others, manipulative, shows different sides of personality to meet other people’s expectations, seductive.

Positive aspects: genuinely caring, supportive, loving, and kind.

THREE: The Performer

Negative aspects: seeks to be loved for achievement, competitive, obsessed with image as a winner, focused on status and status symbols, and confuses real self with job identity.

Positive aspects: effective leaders, good at marketing and promoting, captains of winning teams.

FOUR: The Tragic Romantic

Negative aspects: attracted to the unavailable and impossible, not living in the present moment, sad, overly-sensitive, focused on their loneliness, absence of someone or something and loss.

Positive aspects: creative lifestyles, artistic, ability to help others when they are down, committed to beauty and the passions of life.

FIVE: The Observer

Negative aspects: keeps emotional distance from others, too private and doesn’t get involved in life or relationships, doing without is a defense against involvement and possible failure, feels drained by other people’s needs.

Positive aspects: can be objective decision makers, intellectual, dedicated monks or spiritual leaders.

SIX: The Devil’s Advocate

Negative aspects: fearful, too concerned with obligations, procrastinates, not a risk taker for fear of attack or judgment from others, identifies with the under dog causes and teams, against authority and people in authority positions.

Positive aspects: loyal to a cause, politically active (especially left), great team players, and loyal friends… are people you can call at 4am, no matter what.

SEVEN: The Epicurean

Negative aspects: childish, superficial, has difficulty with commitment, wants to stay emotionally high, starts things but doesn’t finish them.

Positive aspects: adventurous, loves life, generally happy, stimulating to be around, humorous.

EIGHT: The Boss

Negative aspects: overly-protective, loves a fight, has to be in control, expresses anger easily, excessive way of life (too much, too late at night, too loud), only respects people who will stand up and defend themselves, cannot show vulnerability and weakness.

Positive aspects: can be excellent leaders, are powerful supporters of others, good at making decisions, doesn’t give up, tenacious.

NINE: The Mediator

Negative aspects: sees too many points of view, neglects personal goals and replaces them with unimportant activities, tendency towards drugs, TV, alcohol and over-eating, spaces out and not sure if they want to be in a situation or not, wishy-washy, anger comes out in indirect ways.

Positive aspects: agreeable, excellent peacemakers, counselors and negotiators, are successful when on track and focused, strong intuition.

Ask yourself the following:

• What are your tendencies, negative and positive – at work, at home?

• What kind of affect do you think these tendencies have on your environment – negatively and positively?

• What can you do today to apply this knowledge so that your communication and connections to people improve?

FOOD for THOUGHT: Fifteen Fast Facts for Communication and Behavior

A pessimist is someone who complains about the noise

… when opportunity knocks. – Michael Levine

Here are fifteen fast facts… which are useful when learning how to communicate more effectively. Although they may seem obvious, they are important to always keep in mind, especially during times of stress, conflict or change. This list was created from various sociological studies and books as well as from personal and professional observations over the past 20+ years.

What a difficult balancing act… we engage in, when subjective and objective reality live at odds with each other… and we stay stuck in “reality-is-how-I-do-things-around-here” mode. This list, if assimilated into our brain and composted so that we could be a more savvy communicator, as a result might create more flexibility and awareness regarding our overall behavior patterns. Food for Thought…

1. Only about 15% to 20% of what was said, was actually understood.
2. Assumptions are approximately 70% incorrect.
3. Men and women tend to communicate differently: men are more linear, logical and result oriented, while women are more circular, intuitive and process oriented.
4. People tend to remember much more negative information than positive information, no matter the actual ratio offered.
5. People tend to remember the last piece of information given, then they will remember the first and almost never more than 2 pieces of information in total – also, they will most likely remember information which was applied to real life.
6. North American language patterns and syntax tend to give negative information sandwiched between two pieces of positive information.
7. People who ask intelligent questions are considered to be intelligent.
8. People who do not usually ask questions are considered to be ignorant, arrogant, fearful or lazy.
9. Small talk has one primary purpose, no matter what the topic is: to begin and continue to build a relationship with someone, personally or professionally.
10. North American workers tend to prefer a more direct yet respectful honesty to an indirect approach, even if the information given is rather negative.
11. Intuition plays more of a key role in decision-making than most executives and leaders are willing to admit – one’s gut reaction, even after long consideration, usually wins.
12. Lack of awareness is the number one cause of interpersonal conflict. Number two is lack of information or lack of information flow. False interpretations and assumptions are number three.
13. Most employees, even leaders, consider themselves to be “team players”. This is not usually the case – being a good team player usually needs to be learned, applied, developed and then perfected.
14. A comfort zone is an addiction – changing this is like giving up the daily behavior or mind-set “fix”.
15. Communication and behavior cannot be separated… we are like open books.

It is most astonishing that in spite of all this, we humans still seem to be able to get our points across and connect to another person’s wavelength.

Incredible… gives me hope somehow.

For more information, please visit: www.VeloCityCoachingServices.com