Today is my birthday, yay!  Normally I get depressed around this time of year because daylight is getting shorter and sailing days are over.  I guess Mother Nature has decided to give me a break this year with wonderful weather today and even many days lately.  And my daughters have given me the gift of saying how they love the fall, which has given me a brand new perspective. And so today I am up early before the sun and the family, and I am taking the day off!  I will enjoy today’s nice weather, celebrate my good health with some exercise and pampering, and do some necessary personal work.  The personal work is preparing myself for the upcoming merger at work, and the transition that will take place in my career.  As I lay awake before dawn, the title of this blog was running through my head:  Promoting the Brand of You.

I have some friends and colleagues that do what I think as a great job of promoting themselves and their brands.  They have well done LinkedIn pages, You Tube pages, Twitter handles, Facebook pages, and more I am sure.  I have been planning to update my CV/resume and my LinkedIn as those are the primary sources of personal promotion.  I think LinkedIn is the number one way, as it is a living document and everyone searches on that.  It really is the new business address book, and I have little need to keep a personal address book updated with friends and colleagues job changes – I just need to keep their LinkedIn contact.  I was sitting the train recently next a guy who was reading a popular book about making the best LinkedIn page.  Upon his recommendation, I bought the book and will use it today to help me update my LknkedIn page.

One thing that I am doing this time (this time of switching jobs) is turning the job search on its ear.  After ten years at my current job, there have been many things that I have enjoyed, both in job title, specific projects, in the way I like to work, and in what I most enjoy.  If you think of a typical resume, there are sections for work experience, education, professional merits and affiliations and personal interests.  And the typical job search is looking at the available jobs that are advertised and trying to fit into one or more of them.  I remember advice to adjust your resume to specifically relate to the jobs you want.  I would rather look at it this way: take what I like doing, what I have enjoyed, and where I have excelled, and go find the need for me in those roles somewhere.  Life is short, eat dessert first!  In this case do what you love, and in doing so work will not feel like work, and life will be more fun.

So with that focus in mind, I will tailor my personal communication and promote my brand with the things that I like most, and what I would most like to do.  My favorite projects have been where I was given the goal, assembled a great team, and without a lot of direction was asked to go get it done.  Whether it was building new video platforms and user experiences for hotel customers, designing and building the best cable show (convention) experience for our company and the rest of the industry, or designing and setting up the best support programs for customers, technicians, customer service reps and consumer electronic companies, the common threads were leadership and accountability, design of the entirety, workings with internal and external groups, managing the costs and working on a deadline, and most of all owning it.  The spirit of running a small business within a large business has been very entrepreneurial, and I loved it!

To be continued….  The family is making me waffles for my birthday.  Gotta go!