Posted by Rahna on October 25, 2010 under General | 
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why I recommend it daily.” Zig Ziglar
If you’ve ever heard me talk, you will know that I am a firm believer in the power of continual personal development, gratitude, and networking as key growth engines for growing your business and turbo-charging your career. On November 13th, you can join me for a day of personal development and motivation. Please come as my guest (for free)! You’re Invited to a day of motivation, personal development, random acts of kindness and entrepreneurial opportunity!
When I was growing up, my family used to make fun of me for reading all the time, and once I entered the workforce, I switched to business books. As a matter of fact, I am a bit of a personal development junkie. I read at least two business books per month (this month, I read Stay the Course by Adam Packard, and am currently reading UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging by Scott Stratten).
If you would like to join me, just shoot me an email and we’ll get it all set up. I’d love to have your company and am happy to contribute to the growth and development of those in my world!
Posted by Rahna on October 21, 2010 under Branding, Personal Branding |
I have often said that when you are looking for clues to your true personal brand, you should look at those activities and qualities that you express naturally. Expressing your true personal brand should be as easy as breathing. When a company is looking to discover what is core to its brand, it looks for universal descriptions that everyone agrees on. Those are the underpinnings of a brand, and a good brand manager will build and evolve his/her brand on those foundations when expanding the brand. When you just do something and don’t even think about how or why you do it, you are expressing your core brand, and you will find that, throughout your life, you will find new ways to express that which is at the heart of your brand as well.
Dance is core to Ruth Vesenka Lewis’ personal brand, but her expression of dance is ever-evolving. A life-long dancer, Ruth performed as a professional ballet dancer in the Hartford Ballet, Berkshire Ballet and American Repertory Ballet Company for a career spanning more than 14 years. Currently, she is a choreographer for CONNetic Dance, a professional contemporary dance company, and Ballet Theatre Company. And she is a teacher at Hartford’s Ballet Theatre Academy, Ballet Theatre Company’s school. In recent years, she has choreographed Christina’s World, 1B, Under Blue Cover, Used To Be, and Sisters , and she assists with choreography of the Ballet Theatre Company’s spring production as ballet master.
On November 11th, there will be a showing of a dance Ruth has choreographed, an event that is the direct outcome of Ruth “breathing” (or expressing her core personal brand). I recently had a chance to talk with Ruth about the expression and evolution of her personal brand. I asked her how she expressed herself and how she is actively managing her personal brand in order to turbo-charge her career.
For Ruth, dance is simply a part of her life; she thinks in dance. She is currently working on choreography for a dance called M Theory. It is based on the scientific ”string theory,” which seeks to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity. One particular aspect of the string theory is called “M Theory,” which links many seemingly disparate theories into one. M Theory (the dance) joins different styles of dance (specifically ballet, jazz and modern dance) together into one.
Ruth strives in this dance event to show the highest-quality creative expression with dancers who are capable of working in all three dance disciplines. One of her goals with this piece is to prove to the Connecticut dance community that there is amazing talent locally—not just in New York City. That’s why she is pushing herself with challenging choreography and coaxing excellence from the professional dancers in the performance.
Some corporate skeptics might say, “So, how does this turbo-charge her career?” Those who ask this question are not seeing the bigger picture. By driving this creative project, she strengthens her personal brand, which can have tangible benefits down the road. Among others, some of the tangibles she can immediately see would be:
- More experience in choreography
- Growth from the creative challenge
- Increased skill in working with top talent
- Highest-level exposure within the professional dance community
In addition, she will be able to use the video that is taken November 11th to the dance nationwide to other companies to perform. “I know this is great. I know others will want this.” She has the confidence to move forward with this project and trust that it will yield tangible benefits to her career down the road.
Question: How are you breathing? Do you have the confidence to express your personal brand in your own unique way? You should! How are you just naturally expressing your personal brand, and how can you actively manage your personal brand more clearly, more brightly, more authentically?
By the way: if you’d like to attend the free showing of M Theory ballet performance on November 11 from 12:30-1 pm, the performace is being held at the Ballet Theatre Studios located at 20 Jefferson Avenue in West Hartford.
Posted by Rahna on October 18, 2010 under Branding, Personal Branding |
Want to turbo-charge your career before the holidays?
Are you actively managing your personal brand? Personal branding is such a critical topic—especially during these economic times! Are you worried about losing your job? Are you wondering how you can really make a difference in your office? Are you wishing you could be a leading change agent in your industry, someone everyone is talking about, someone really making breakthroughs in your field? Are you wondering how to make yourself stand out from the competition to your clients? Are you in the process of re-inventing yourself?
Then you need to be strengthening, CLARIFYING your personal brand!
This personal branding program has been designed to take someone systematically through a process for identifying and planning an individual’s personal brand. Anyone can do it, because all the steps have been broken down into manageable discovery modules. It is meant to help you discover your personal brand and map a clear path to evolve your brand to realize your full potential in any economic environment. No matter whether you work as a solo-preneur or in a big corporate environment, strong personal branding can make a huge difference in your career!
This deeply thought-provoking, business-oriented program has been designed to inspire greater personal performance, expand your unique value in the workplace and jumpstart your promotability within any organization.
Over the course of the six week program, you will learn:
- What a Personal Brand is & how it can transform your career
- How to discover your unique Personal Brand
- How to develop an action plan to clarify your Personal Brand to others (Including tips for using tools like Facebook or LinkedIn to enhance your personal brand!)
Is this program right for you?
This program is intended for business professionals who want to supercharge their careers, whether as single business practitioners and service firm professionals, such as consultants, attorneys, and financial advisors, or corporate managers looking to solidify their positions and have a greater impact on their companies and their industries.
If you’ve heard me talk about personal branding and wished that you could dig deeper into the topic and get personal coaching for the development and expression of your personal brand, then this is the course for you!
What the program entails
This six-week tele-seminar series helps you identify and clarify your personal brand through a five-step process:
- Explore: In Week One, we make sure that everyone is clear on what we mean by personal branding and why it is important
- Discover: Week Two focuses on a process of discovery where we learn about who you are right now
- Clarify: By Week Three, you will be eager to define who you want to be, building upon the foundation outlined in the Discovery Phase
- Create: In Weeks Four and Five, we use the goals you outlined in the Clarification Stage to create a plan to communicate your personal brand boldly and effectively
- Evolve: Week Six brings finalization to an action plan for expressing your personal brand now. However, this program also recognizes that no one remains the same. By planning the areas in which you want to grow, you will evolve purposefully, expanding in the ways that you want to grow.
I’m so excited to bring you this course, because I believe that it is critical at this time to help people clarify their brands in order to do the most meaningful work possible and actually thrive in this economy!
Sign up now! The next tele-seminar series starts in the first week of November, so click here to register. We can’t wait to help you!
Posted by Rahna on October 14, 2010 under Uncategorized |
Here’s the press release sent out from Quinnipiac University about a talk I am giving starting at 5 pm on Monday, October 25th. It’s free to the public; I hope you will join me to learn how to turbo-charge your career!
Hamden, Conn. – Oct. 13, 2010 – Rahna Barthelmess, a personal branding expert, will present the lecture “Turbo-Charge Your Career With Strong Personal Branding,” at 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 25, in the Mancheski Executive Seminar Room in the Lender School of Business Center at Quinnipiac University. This event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by Southworth® Paper Company, the leading maker of fine cotton-fiber business and resume papers.
Barthelmess, who has more than 20 years of experience with such brands as LEGO®, Miracle-Gro® and Texaco®, will share proven tips, tricks and tactics for the best ways to get a job, get promoted and maximize career potential.
“I have real world marketing experience to share to inspire, motivate and educate,” Barthelmess said. “Personal branding, both on-line and off, is critical to ensuring career success. My mission is to empower students to maximize their career potential by actively managing their personal brands.”
For more information, call 203-582-3645.
Quinnipiac is a private, coeducational, nonsectarian institution located 90 minutes north of New York City and two hours from Boston. The university enrolls 5,900 full-time undergraduate and more than 2,000 graduate students in 52 undergraduate and more than 20 graduate programs of study in its School of Business, School of Communications, School of Education, School of Health Sciences, School of Law, and College of Arts and Sciences. Quinnipiac ranks among the top 10 universities with master’s programs in the Northern region in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges. The 2009 issue of U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges named Quinnipiac as the top up-and-coming school with master’s programs in the Northern Region. Quinnipiac also is recognized in Princeton Review’s The Best 371 Colleges. For more information, please visit www.quinnipiac.edu. Connect with Quinnipiac on Facebook at www.facebook.com/quinnipiacuniversity and follow Quinnipiac on Twitter @QuinnipiacU.
Posted by Rahna on September 27, 2010 under Branding, Personal Branding, Strategy |
Most entrepreneurs really need to focus on personal branding, as oftentimes, they are their business. I’d like to introduce to you Christine Kalafus, the principal designer and owner of Stitch Design Studio who has learned about branding her business and herself from me (in person and through my newsletters & blogs). I recently asked her about what she had learned and how that knowledge contributed to the success of her business (growing from a home-based business to a commercial location). It is an excellent example of how executing the strategies discussed here can be put into action.
Read this story and you will find that Christine embodies these concepts:
- Be clear about who you are, what you have to offer, and who your target audience is
- Be confident that you have something amazing to contribute
- Be connected to key influencers who can help you and whom you can help
- Be dynamic in ever adding to your brand
Christine paid her way through college as a licensed insurance agent and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Design from the University of New Haven. She was successful in the insurance industry, which made it hard to quit. Sometimes, excellent pay and benefits can cause inertia that can keep us from fully expressing our personal brand. Nine years after college, by then married and the mother of 3, she made the leap to pursue her passion. For three years, she apprenticed and worked for an in-demand seamstress who had agreed to train her.
But she still felt that she had more to offer, so she signed up for a class at the University of Hartford’s Entrepreneurial Center. (That’s where she met me; I have been teaching as adjunct professor for branding and marketing there for several years). “That’s where I learned about focusing on one thing; you can’t be diverse. You have to understand what your specialty is because that is what is going to carry you.”
She started working out of her house, networking with others and doing great work. She was in a new town but word quickly began to spread about her upscale designs and accessible nature. “I remembered our conversations about networking, partnering with people and the importance of prominent placement, and that definitely helped me build my brand. Through my networking efforts, I had the opportunity to design a window treatment for a set of balcony doors in a new space in an upscale, New York-style hair salon that catered to the same type of high-end clientele that I was trying to attract. As an immediate result of that work, I got five new clients who also referred me to others as well. Aligning with the owner of the hair salon was really a big break for me. She turned out to be a key influencer, as hairdressers are like bartenders—they know everyone in town! This woman is a successful business woman who is very well-respected in the community. That really launched me as a newcomer in town.”
When an opportunity came along for a fabulously inexpensive retail space, she had to overcome fears about taking her business to that next level. But she made the space her own, immediately putting fresh flowers out front and making sure her sign was just the way she wanted it to be (being authentic and expressing her brand naturally!). The adjacent storefronts had been vacant, but the power of her brand attracted other businesses to soon fill those spaces as well.
Christine is continually looking for ways to expand her brand and find more ways for people to engage with her. She has recently added event marketing to her brand-building activities. She now offers one-and-a-half hour sewing classes to teach girls the proper techniques for how to sew. She is branching out and trying new ways to build her brand by getting the moms in the door. Christine admitted, “When I first decided to have the classes, I wasn’t sure if it would do anything for my business, but I thought, if I don’t try, I’ll never know.” As it turned out, the mom of one of her first students had just moved to the area and needed her entire house to be redone.
Whether you are in a corporate situation or an entrepreneurial venture, you can leverage the same branding principles Christine exemplifies. Ask yourself, “How can I put these concepts into action in my own business life?” If you’d like, we’d be happy to help you answer that question. If you would like to find out more about Christine Kalafus and her luxurious soft furnishing creations, visit www.StitchDrapery.com or her blog at http://homecouture.wordpress.com
Posted by Rahna on September 23, 2010 under Branding, Consumer Engagement, Media, Personal Branding |
Click to Watch Ad
Sun Life Financial is a fairly unknown insurance company that has been around for 144 years. They have recently launched a campaign to expand their exposure, using humor to try to build relevancy with consumers. There are some very funny ads about “the Sun Life guys,” two company advocates who are traveling the country to try to convince various people to change their names to somehow include “Sun Life.” It’s a really fun campaign that executes on some very strong branding principles: You can check out their ads here.
The campaign is creating relevancy where none existed before. Among other things, the two guys try to convince the Florida tourism board to change its name from the “Sunshine State” to the “Sun Life State” and to convince KC and the Sunshine Band to “KC and the Sun Life Band.”
Humor works well here, because insurance is boring and an unbelievably low-interest category. By aligning themselves with something totally random they are building relevancy with their audience. It doesn’t matter that they are not talking about how stable the company is or how secure their holdings are (although they do manage to weave those solid points in to the commercials in the end). Their strategy is to build awareness, and that’s what this campaign does.
There is also a social media campaign that is closely tied to the commercials which shows more places where the they have tried to convince others to alter their names. They are very consistent in the execution of this campaign, which has video, digital and print that is all reinforcing their primary strategic messages. You can check out the campaign particulars at the Get To Know Sun Life website.
Last week, I conducted a training session for their employees to inspire them to think differently about their personal brands. This is a company that is in the process of strengthening its corporate brand and felt that it is important invest in its people, to help them strengthen their personal brands. There was a wide range of titles, responsibilities and experience levels in the room, but everyone walked away thinking more clearly about how they can express their brands more fully in their jobs.
So in looking at your personal brand, how are you creating brand relevance with your desired audience? Look for ways that may, at face value, be totally random and impossible, but may in fact make strong strategic sense. Build rapport and commonalities to help further a desired relationship with a desired client.
And don’t think for a moment that if you are in a corporate staff position that you do not need to think about this! We all have clients. They may be internal clients, a boss or another department that we serve. Look to build relevancy and points of commonality in order to strethen your brand!
Posted by Rahna on September 21, 2010 under Uncategorized |
Wednesday, October 6th 9 am to 3:30 pm
Share the day with inspiring women, hear professional speakers who provide practical tools you can use, browse our vendors, enjoy a delicious lunch … all this to grow your business and yourself. Give yourself and your business the gift of this incredible event.
Join speakers Pamela Carignan, Kathy McAfee, Rahna Barthelmess and Powerful You! co-founder Sue Urda for a unique day of business, personal and spiritual growth.
You will be transformed by:
- Gaining practical tools to build your business and create momentum;
- Re-igniting your passion and gaining clarity about your purpose;
- Learning to align your actions more closely with your personal values and goals.
I will be presenting a workshop entitled: “Your Signature for Success: 7 Success Principles of Personal Branding”
Read more about the speakers, programs and schedule of events.
The event details:
Powerful You! Women’s Network believes: in the Power of Connections, in the Power of Being Present, in the Power of Relationships, in the Power of Women.
Posted by Rahna on September 10, 2010 under Personal Branding, Social Media, Strategy |
I read a theory about social media strategy today at Diana Huff’s B2B Marcom Writer’s Blog
It’s an excellent post (and subsequent conversation) about how strategy is over-rated when it comes to social media.
Her advice? Don’t try to get super-sophisticated with some complicated social media strategy. She advocates a Nike approach: “Just doit.”
Her argument? We, as marketers (and as human beings), instinctually know what to do when we get in to social situations:
- Be nice to people.
- Answer their questions.
- Respond to what they have to say.
- Post your own take on what is going on around you.
My favorite part of the post is this: “People recognize authenticity and like moths, want to hover near the source.”
I agree that we don’t need to over-think it, but even in her post, whether she knows it or not, she is advocating a strategy: Be authentic.
Bravo, Diana.
Posted by Rahna on August 30, 2010 under General, Media |
If you have ever heard me talk at a speaking event, then you know something about the passion I have for my topic. So this summer I have been working on writing a book, pouring my passion into the pages of the soon-to-be-released personal branding book that has a working title of Turbo-Charge Your Career. I’m so excited to be able to have a new way to share this information with you. Whenever I give a personal branding talk, invariably someone comes up to me at the end and says, “Where’s your book?” And now I can say, “It’s coming!”
I have been working on a draft of all the principles that I talk about, but I want more. I want to know how the information I share has impacted your life. If something that I said influenced your business, your job, or your career, I want to know about it. Please let me know how gaining a greater understanding of your personal brand has helped you, and you could end up in my book!
