Human Development: Personal Brand

This is episode 3 of our Human Development series. At Method, we want to help our people grow in their craft and serve our clients as best as possible. In this episode we discuss Personal Brand and why this subject has become so important in business and professional development.

This episode will feature Dr. John Tuders, Method's Executive Director of Business and Human Development, and Dr Alex Jacobs. Alex brings almost a decade of experience in leadership development and coaching. 

For some, the idea of a personal brand sounds like it belongs strictly in the world of social media, but it’s bigger than that. Our personal brand helps guide us in how we work and it allows others to know what to expect when working with us. This can’t be created without first examining ourselves and giving an honest assessment of where we are and where we want to grow. In other words the process of creating a personal brand requires us to know thy self.

Transcript

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You are listening to Inside Method, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a global consultancy. This is episode three of our Human Development series, and if you haven't had a chance to go back and listen to our episodes on filter quality and relational intelligence, I would highly recommend that you do that. A method you see, we want to help our people grow in their craft and serve our clients as best as possible. This series focuses on a variety of subjects that we believe help us do exactly that. In this episode, we discuss personal brand and why this subject has become so important in business and professional development. Hi, I'm Josh Lucas and aside from myself and Dr. John Tutors, our executive director of Business and Human Development here at Method. You're also going to hear from Dr. Alex Jacobs. Alex brings almost a decade of experience in leadership development and coaching. And for some, the idea of a personal brand sounds like it belongs strictly in the world of social media. But it's bigger than that. Our personal brand helps to guide us in how we work. It allows others to know what to expect when they work with us. This can't be created without first examining ourselves and giving an honest assessment of where we are and where we want to grow. In other words, the process of creating a personal brand requires us to know thyself. are you interested? I hope so. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode, so I won't hold us back any longer. Let's jump in and learn about personal brand. Yeah, absolutely. Josh, John, Thank you guys for having me. This is such a treat to be here. I know that God and I have talked about this a lot actually over the last few months, and I feel very honored to be able to be in your space and be talking to you guys about this. And, yeah, you know, John and I, our really it's a our relationship was born out of the pandemic, one for modern times. But I, I know that we have had our own, I think, intimate conversations around what it takes to build a personal brand or what it actually kind of means to build a personal brand, I should say. So I run through myself a little bit and then I can just sort of spew out my completely uneducated thoughts and we can go from there. Yeah, I've been doing this is the stuff that I think really matters to me. You know, I've, I've, I've, I served as a brand strategist. I was in the design world for a long time. I was in academia before that. I've also run magazines and been in the journalism world. And right now I'm I'm a consultant in the tech space, but I do a I focus on a lot of the culture work, where we work a lot with a lot of the senior leaders that we're working with and these questions of personal brand or how to build yourself, especially in or in or in an organization, especially in kind of the modern organization where so much of what we do is remote, virtual mediated comes up quite a lot, you know, and these are these are demands that a lot of organizations are making now on people, right? For better or for worse, I think we're all told that our career is ours to make and ours to own. It's up to us to sell ourselves internally. You know, many organizations look for and aspire to have a kind of entrepreneurial mindset in the talent that they bring in and especially the leaders that they hire, which I think are really wonderful things. But it also is a totally different kind of skill set to have and and one that a lot of people aren't necessarily trained in. So I'll talk a little bit about how I conceive of personal branding. Okay. Let's talk about a brand. So my definition of a brand is pretty simple. You know, I actually think the I think the best way to define a brand is that old adage, I don't I don't know who this comes from, but what do they say? A brand is what someone says about you behind your back, right? Yeah. It's not what you say about yourself. It's what others say about you. Yeah, exactly. Which is to say a brand is your reputation. And not just your reputation. A brand is is kind of your essential reputation that that which exceeds you. That's that which is kind of outside of your control. It is. It is how you're perceived and rightfully, rightfully or wrongfully, it's how you're perceived. Right? When you're thinking about like branding a product or branding an organization. You know, I think the things that make up a good brand are a lot of the same kinds of foundations that make up a good personal brand. And for me, it kind of comes down to sort of fourth four things for a brand, and we'll talk about that, what that means for personal brand. Like I think a good brand knows and names its audience, right? Kind of understands who it's for and is directed towards that. Good brands usually offer transformation, not just satisfaction. So the ability to take someone from one place to another turn, someone from one thing to another, an arc, right? A story that someone can be a part of, a narrative. The third thing is, I think good brands and this is a thing we're going to come back to communicate authentically, right? You know, I actually I'm I'm glad you brought that up. And I think that's a that's a great place to even start, right? Like, I think what you're clawing out is the fact that consumers, clients, customers are much savvier and better informed and well-educated than I think a lot of people perceive them to be. There's a lot of cynicism, of course, in marketing and advertising around target audiences and, you know, market segments and the reduction of people to a bunch of numbers that can be manipulated. But I think the carryover to that towards personal brand is a lot of it is the same way. You know, back when I was an educator, I don't know, probably the best piece of advice I ever received was when you think about walking into a classroom and, you know, approaching a group of very smart, precocious undergrads, the one mistake, the really fatal mistake you can make is not being yourself. Yeah, you have to be yourself because they will see through you immediately, regardless of, you know, how perfect the facade is that you bring in. And I think in a workplace it is completely the same way. Kind of get I you know, and we've all seen that, right? We've seen we've seen leaders who think that they need to aspire to be the hardass or the disciplinarian when it's not in their nature or vice versa. We've seen leaders who are really, you know, can be insecure or neurotic and try to play themselves off as the cool, laid back California surfer dude. And it just never works. Everyone sees completely thriller. The last one is very simple. Thanks for keeping me on track. Last one is very simple. It's a good brand that makes and keeps its promises. so it's the it's the question of knowing your audience, speaking authentically or the other. To know your audience, speaking authentically, offering transformation, and then and then keeping your promises. So when you think about, like, what that means in a personal brand space, a lot of those things are the same thing. So what I would say is in terms of a good brand, knowing and naming its audience for a personal brand, when we're thinking about what translating those skills, it's really, I think, just about knowing and naming yourself, right? This goes back to this question of like really kind of understanding who you are, what are your your abilities as opposed to your skills that are your kind of natural orientations. You know, all of the things that make you the core kernel of self as opposed to just employee number 7609 And then I think that the that the the question transformation I think good personal brands have some kind of transformative vision. You know, we're not expecting anybody to be a guru and sit down and transform everyone around them. But I think people that have strong personal brands at least are able to offer a sense of a kind of future oriented sense of the kind of impact that they will have on the people around them. And then I think the last thing is, is is again, it just has to do with authenticity, right? Communicate good personal brands, communicate authentically and with a sense of purpose. And then, yeah, keeping your promises. I mean, first and foremost, we talked about reputation. It's if if you want people to trust you and believe in you, yeah, you have to step up and deliver. I mean, this is going to sound the irony is that for everything we've said, many people's minds might, I think, erroneously assume that we are pointing to the realm of kind of personal politics and turning yourself into a kind of candidate or a brand to be sold. Really, what I'm talking about is the action is the opposite is the complete opposite of that. Right. In in trying to figure out who you are authentically and how that is communicated. Unlike a politician, you know, there is no brand without authenticity. There is no authenticity without vulnerability. Vulnerability is the is the way in, which is why a lot of people struggle with this, because a lot of people are vulnerable. Being vulnerable is not a comfortable position to be in for a lot of people. No, it's not. And it's not a thing that is often asked of us in terms of how we project ourselves in a talent market, how we project ourselves in a market of ideas or a leadership market, all of the many different arenas that we're asked to compete in, in our professional lives. You know, vulnerability is often seen as a, a a liability. It's a weakness. Yeah, a weakness. But I've often thought that showing up with all of your wounds is actually the best and easiest way to do it. And I'll tell you why. Number one, it is who you are, right? Think about how much energy it takes to, you know, build the suit of armor just to pick it off. You know, the other thing that that does is when you show up with your own vulnerability, you can elicited from others. Right. And you can build real relationships with people. You're like, hey, this is me. I don't know anything about this thing. I'm I'm an idiot. Please tell me right. And I think that at base, showing up with vulnerability, to think about who you are authentically actually takes a ton of guts and everyone understands that and recognizes it. So while a lot of people think that they can project courage or, you know, excellence or whatever through or through whatever machinations, whatever artifice they produce that curry, you know, everyone can everyone can sense the courage it takes to show up and just be like, yeah, this is me. There is a domino effect and you know, I think when we when we think about the people who we work with or people with whom we've had strong work, relationships, mentors and colleagues, people who we would say have like good personal brands, or at least ones that we feel confident that we can define a lot of that, a lot of the through line of between all of that is being able to have a confident sense that you can you are seeing through to the actual person underneath door when they get in their car and drive home. You run into them getting coffee on the weekend, you're going to be running into the same job, right? Or you're going to be running into the same. Josh And you know that we have we have professional habits we have to wear, you know, for poor courtesy. And but the point being, you know, we're not supposed to be these Willy Wonka's Willy Wonka is, you know, walking around with our circus outfits on, going home to an empty halfwit world. And I think that to go on to the question you asked John about, okay, Right. We understand that authenticity is important. We get that being vulnerable is important. Maybe we're ready to start, but how do we actually get there? What does that actually mean? What are the steps? I think there are a few ways to do it. And I can walk through some of the different kinds of exercises that I've done with people. None of these are prescriptive and they can all very easily be replaced with other different kinds of exercises to get there. What is matters is the goal. Really. The first things I'll start to do with people are not about putting a logo down or writing a tagline. The first thing we do is stuff that I think would be legible to anybody in terms of just regular, good old personal development, right? So while usually sometimes what I'll talk with people will go through some psychometric evaluations, you know, people do their Myers-Briggs or look at their Holland Codes or Enneagram, and we're going through the Enneagram right now with the Dragon. So yeah, and it's and I'm sure you guys have thoughts about this too. All of the psychometric tools are useful, just like when you're at the county fair and you go to the fortune teller. Right? What's useful about it isn't that it is like some reductive article of truth. What's useful is that it gives you a place to react. You know, the fortune teller tells you, Oh, I can see that you have big things in your future. And you're like, You have no idea what you're talking about. And that might be the same when you do one of these psychometric. And that is good, you know, that's a good thing to register. I have one that I do with people, which I just call dichotomies similar. You know, it's just a dichotomy of different, different values, right? Different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that people can have to interpret the world. And I ask people to put themselves where they are on that scale. So, for instance, you know, on one side might be the promise of the future, and on the other side is the influence of the past. And the question is how do you orient naturally, not how? What do you aspire to? Not in your job, What is required of you to think about, Right, You know, out of work on your own? Are you more thinking about, you know, what the future holds, the promise of technology or progress? Are you more thinking about when you look at an article in the news or you're talking to somebody about an issue that's happening, Are you more thinking about the influence of the past in the way that what happened in the past is kind of set up to what you're dealing with now? Some people might find themselves right in the middle. Some people might feel very strongly about one side or the other, and we have a whole list of those. And you go through those. You know, I think some of the other ones are like reality and mythology. That's a that's a fun one. Yeah. And this is just an example. Right? But the point the point of this this exercise, the psychometric exercise, is another thing I'll just have people do is just to free, right? So I'll ask people to sit down and what I call it, an attribute map. It's really just a writing exercise. You tell people, you know, how do you orient naturally, think about all the things that you enjoy doing in your life. And then and then what I want you to do is, you know, write down the actual tasks and then begin to build concepts from that. So someone might write down like, you know, go do yard sales, you know, treasure hunting. They might write down, you know, getting lost, you know, watching a lot of random YouTube videos they might write down, you know, I don't know, doing research on different products or something like that, really mundane things. So you'd probably be embarrassed to tell anybody in your job that you do. The point of that is that you begin to kind of build a pattern out of that and say, Well, actually when I think about it, the the core motivators I have when I'm getting lost on YouTube or treasure hunting has to do with like, you know, curiosity, right? Because I'm really naturally curious person and I like learning things. Or maybe it has to do with this an element of, of research, right? Maybe this is all part of a kind of research oriented self that I have. You know, I like the idea of amassing knowledge. I like the idea of dipping into different domains and pulling out useful information. And then what you have is, is a conceptual book. When I think about how I am naturally I feel more comfortable in maybe more research oriented capacities or more collaborative oriented capacities or more creative oriented capacities, so on and so forth. And when you have that language in place, you can begin to think about, you know, exactly sort of who you are on a on an everyday basis. Yeah. And Alex, I remember doing that exercise a little while back and kind of going through those pieces and I started realizing I'm a builder, right? I'm not an operator, right. That was one of the distinctions. I you know, I like putting teams together. I like new organizational designs. I like a challenge of a new product or environment that I can start from scratch. I love gray. I love ambiguity, right? I like coloring it, right? I'm not an operator. You know, I started realizing that though I had roles that were operational roles, and I realized, yeah, I did good at them, but it wasn't like jumping up in the morning on Monday. MM No, but I jumped up in the morning on Monday when I was building something or starting something. And so it was that kind of exercise that really started again. Like, what is my personal brand? And really once I started realizing that when people say, you know, what do you like doing? And it's always one of those, you know, who are you in the camp? I'm a builder. Yeah, you can plop me into places and build and I'm okay with Gray. Like those things started coming out of that. So I don't know if that's an exercise that others would do. I think the great No, I think that's I think that's well put. And and that kind of defines it. And that's basically the same answer I was thinking about, though, from a from a different vantage point. You know, I would say let's take a step back, write a all of these things we're talking about in terms of your natural orientation. But these are not skills. These aren't even necessarily behaviors. Right. We're not talking about things that you've learned. We're not talking about the different competencies you might bring in to the workplace, you know, based on the job. And we're not even necessarily talking about, you know, how well it's not really evaluative about how well you how well you are at being curious or so on and so forth. It's more about defining the things that come really naturally to you. Gotcha. And I think that people struggle when they feel like they need to construct or build a brand based on how or what they think to be a desirable persona in it. Yeah, again, this a kind of professional marketplace. And the point is that I just think that that way always leads to ruin because like we said at the top, everyone will always see through it. So what's more important is actually just figuring out like who who is, who is the person of Josh, for instance. And I think like in any professional context, be it a new job or a new project or a new client, the question is always what happens when we put Josh in this new role? How does Josh show up right now? That's great call. Yeah, but to begin to answer that question, we need to know what a Josh is first. Yeah, okay. I credit Jon for this, for this little tidbit of perfect clarity. Right? There is a difference between a purpose and a mission or a purpose statement and a mission statement, Right? I think, as Jon put it to me, this was, I don't know, sometime a couple of years ago. There are many missions. The mission can change on a daily basis. We can have 15 or 20 different missions based on, you know, the requirements of our job and the vision of our company. Purpose is different. And really, when you think about purpose, there should be only, you know, one or a handful of purposes that don't change are ever present. And as John just said, are completely, completely and only contingent on yourself and not on the whims or decisions of other people. So what does that mean? What do we mean when we say purpose versus mission? So let's say you sit down, you think about how you orient naturally. You know, you look through, go through whatever different kinds of assessments you want. I encourage you to talk to friends as well and get a sense of how they see you that can, I think, be really valuable if you have strong friendships and they'll, you know, they'll they'll tell you to your face, as any good friend would do. You sit through those things and then you say, okay, this is who I am. I know that the way I orient is that I am. I like to lead. I'm really interested in teamwork and building effective teams and being a collaborator. I know that the way that I orient is that winning is really important to me. I really like success and achievement and victory, and that's not a bad thing. That's just who I am. Those are things that are really naturally motivating. You said, Okay, so those are different attributes that define who I am, but from a question of purpose, what we're going to do is take those attributes. We're going to turn them into values, right? We're going to turn them into social or moral goods. So if you say take something like, you know, leadership and you say, what is the social or the moral good that underpins leadership, Right? What are when you think about good leaders or good leadership, what is the value that is the the benefit underneath that? And you'd say, well, maybe for maybe for leadership, the value is has to do with courage or it has to do with having a vision. Or maybe the value has to do with, you know, being generous and supportive, right? There can be a whole bunch of them. You'd sit and you'd kind of you'd write those out, right? So you're taking an attribute and you're pulling out what the moral good would be out of that. Everyone has a different set of moral imperatives. You know, I may be trained in philosophy. We won't have to go there. But the point being, you're pulling out the things that you understand to be beneficial and then you're saying, okay, well, if I was to construct a professional purpose around these values, what would that look like? One of the ways that I do this, one of the exercises I do to help sort of crystallize this is this little thing that we call the I call it the C Blago O or the C XO, And it's very it's a little Mad Libs thing. It's very simple. You're just basically asking somebody if you were a C-suite officer in your company, in your organization, but instead of being in charge of a, you know, whatever a business tactic or a business division, you were in charge a lot of value in the company. What would that be? Would you be the chief courage officer? Would you be the Chief Resilience officer? Would you be the chief optimism officer? Would you be the Chief Transparency Officer? So on and so forth. Right. You know, all cheesy, but the point is it begins to connect how your natural orientation can be beneficial and purposeful to the people around you and to the organizations that you're you're within, right? Yeah, I love it. You know, I think another way to put that and I'll say this in the UNB version or the B version, I should say, is it's it's like, you know, like what? What do you give a funk about? You know, just like, like what do you give a funk about, Like at work? Like, are you there are many things that we care about. And I think I think the potential pitfall and I've seen this with people when working through this is there are a whole bunch of values that we all support and believe to be imperatives, right? So it's not a question of, oh, if I call myself the chief collaboration officer, does this mean that I don't care about empathy or I don't care about intelligence or I don't care about resilience, or you know, whatever the other things are, It's not a zero sum game and it's not, you know, mutually exclusive. So the point being, let's put a list together. You can put a whole bunch together and just say to yourself, what is the thing that I feel like I am uniquely suited to be the steward of the custodian, the protector, as in in my professional world, right? There might be a bunch of people who are really good at helping to maintain quality right in in your work. But you might feel like there aren't a lot of people who are very good at asking the right questions and unpacking assumptions. So maybe you really want to be thinking a lot about bias and maybe that is your goal to be the chief unbiased officer. And when you are in meetings, when you are kicking off projects, you're working with clients, you're really thinking to yourself, what are the biases that we're hearing in here? And in my role? What can I do to raise my hand and make sure that we are asking questions about these things or at least noting them? Same goes for things like quality or vision. Like, you know, if I'm if it's my job to have the if I'm thinking I'm deputizing myself to have the 50,000 foot vision when I'm going into this meeting, I just want to make sure that we all have a sense of what that vision is upfront. We can all wear these different hats and we all often have to. So again, this is not a zero sum thing. This is more about a sense of commitment of like, what's the thing that I'm going to be oriented to on a daily basis that not only is the thing that is important, but again is a thing that feels like it's a natural outcropping of who I am. It's like naturally tied into who I am. I'm not I'm not showing up and trying to figure, yeah, no, I agree with you. Josh I think that, you know, I understand that at many companies, you know, smaller matrixed organizations, larger ones too, you know, we're often asked to wear a lot of hats and to take on more and more responsibilities as part of our professional growth. And those are going to be important things. And useful things, of course, especially in a sense of service. But it can also we can become deluded in the deluded, diluted in the process in terms of adulterated. We don't you know, we're we're spread thin. We can't really show up as our full selves in different functions and meetings because we're just, you know, so overburdened with different responsibilities and being able to take a step back and say, well, what like, you know, what exactly am I trying to do here? You know, what is the goal? You know, obviously, sure, we want to impress people and. We want to, you know, get a raise or a promotion. And those are fine things to do. But if that is the only purpose of all the things you're doing, I'm going to tell you you're just going to drive yourself and say, Oh, yeah, yeah, because you control my case is because it's because not only is it out of your control, you're you will you will probably end up miserable too, because you're just going to feel like doing all this stuff. I don't want to be doing it. I don't know why I'm doing it. It's, you know, you're just going to feel out of a just a bare sense of obligation. Yeah, I would say I would add to that that, you know, I do some consulting for for h.r. And when we think about workforce strategy and talent acquisition, i think there needs to be a sea change that's happening. And i think that if if if you're paying attention to what this conversation has been about, which is the importance of uncovering and building a self around an authentic best version of who anyone is or any employee is, it requires somebody in a in a talent acquisition space and leaders in general to think to think well beyond the resumes of the candidates that are coming in or the new hires that are coming in. You know, people are not that are not reducible to whatever smattering of experiences they may or may not have. They're also not reducible to the skills they have. You know, how often is it that the mandate comes out that we need to replace Jaffe And we need someone who's got, you know, proficiency in R in Python, period, as opposed to saying you know, we need a good person who is going to be as curious and thoughtful as Jeff was, or we need somebody whose personality and natural orientation is going to fit in and hopefully complement some of the other skill sets that we have here. So to do that, we need to think less about some of these educational background and you know how they show up on paper. And we need to think more about who this actual person is and whether or not they're the right fit for us and we're the right fit for them as a company. You know, you bring talent in. And I know that there are a lot of people in the older generation a lot of senior leaders now who have grown frustrated with the increased rate of turnover you're seeing in the talent market. You know, people are not holding jobs as long. They're moving around more choices. And there I think, you know, I think there are real natural reasons for that. One is there are more choices, too. People feel more empowered to make changes. Three, it's might not be a bad thing. Why? People are looking for a good match, but they're looking for a good match fit between who they are and the company that they work at. And there are lots of great companies and lots of great people and it just doesn't really work out. The roles don't work out. People don't feel like they have the support. People don't feel like whatever natural skills they bring or natural abilities they bring are being leveraged in the way that they want. They have different visions for themselves in terms of their growth in the company. So it means that companies have to do a lot better job thinking about the whole person in front of them and putting together a growth and development plan from the beginning that can point towards a direction of increased impact within the company, not just, well, you know, this is what this is what our career ladder looks like. This is what the promotion cycle looks like. It has to be like, Oh, okay, I see Josh comes in and Josh is a super creative guy and we need to think about obviously how he's delivering to clients, but what are ways that we can tap into his creativity in a meaningful way that can give him a sense of not just purpose but also ownership over this in the company? Yeah, and I think that that is what a lot of the good companies are thinking about right now. Very well said. I think I completely agree. You know, I think leaders understand that a little bit. I think I think many leaders now get the fact that they need to they need to step up. They're they're much more than managers. They have to not just provide a strategic and attractive vision, but they also have have a real sense of who the people are underneath them. You know, like a good manager in a football pitch, you know, a good manager in a in a baseball dugout. You want to think about, you know, who you want to put in different situations that matches up well. But to do that, you know, also really to your point, John, you really need to help the people underneath you better define who they are. Right. And it's not how we did with the mandate being like, all right, my Friday, everyone has to give me their perfect right, right. This kind of work happens in again like intimate one on one interactions, ones that can produce vulnerability, ones that can help people help reports and team members begin to piece together thinking about who they're and what their natural orientation is, and thinking about what what the real attributes are. And that takes patience. And it also takes the it takes the courage to hear things that you might not expect right. You know, I think one of the thoughts I was having around where we were talking about with that conversation, thinking about being assertive servant leader, and how as a leader, your job is to kind of understand your people first. Okay. This goes back to what you were talking about and beginning with the call, John, about your your comfort with greatness and ambiguity. You know, I think just to speak globally, right, projects and initiatives are growing much more complex. There are a lot more dependencies and intricacies to a lot of the things that we're doing, a lot more different kinds of skill sets that need to be integrated, right? We're not just making nails at a factory anymore. So because of that, I think that there are a lot of people who have a lot of leaders who have the natural inclination to really want to have a vise grip on process and logistics and have things as formalized as they can. And that is works well when you're making nails at the factory, but it doesn't necessarily work well when you know you have a really difficult project that has spun on a dime because the there's a war in the Ukraine or because there's some external factor that's changed it. So the point being. Right, yeah, what you don't what you want to have is not necessary. You don't need to have the strongest processes or the strongest formulations, but you need to have or the strongest teams. And you also have to have an appetite for a little bit of an handsomeness. You know, you have to have an appetite to watch the team turn or watch this new project come out. And maybe things are a little bit messy in the front and that's okay. You know, messy is fine so long as you are confident that your team is working hard to resolve the problem and that they have a dynamic in place that you're confident that they're going to get to a solution? Yeah, you know, I think the thing to follow up with that and you're absolutely right, John, and I want I want the listeners to understand that this is not a proclamation in defense of stagnation. Right. Right. I know, John. And I you know, we we had a session recently where we were we were going through that Marshall Goldsmith book. And, you know, one of the things he makes very clear is the the poison of making excuses for yourself and not allowing yourself to grow, because you're just saying, well, this is who I am, and I couldn't possibly change and it's not my job to change other people again. So to relate what we've been saying, when you think about a personal brand, when you think about who a John is in a situation who had Josh as a new task comes up, you're put into a new position, you're asked to step up and take greater responsibilities or you're asked to, you know, handle the thing that you haven't done before. The question isn't, you know, Josh couldn't possibly do this. The question is, okay, you know, like Kim did a great job doing this. Kim did it this way. How is Josh going to step up and do it in his way? Right. If the goal is to if the goal is to, you know, produce an X or to build some kind of relationship, Josh has doesn't have to do it the way that Kim did. That's right. You're right. Josh should just do it the way that Josh does it. You know, the goal of getting to the same place. Exactly. No, no, no. Absolutely the case. It's not about, you know, what I can and can't do. It's more about what is what's the hypothesis that I have and what's the experiment that we're going to be drawing around? That's right. So I haven't done this before, which means that this is an experiment. We don't exactly know what the results are going to be. It doesn't mean that I can't do it or I shouldn't do it. By no means it means let's let's go. Let's have a hypothesis around how I'm going to show up and let's see what happens right now. And having a kind of having a natural curiosity around your own growth in that way. Right. I think the second thing to add to around this question of personal branding and purpose is like, no one is static. People change, right? People change over their careers. People change as they learn new things about themselves. People change as things happen to you in and out of the workplace. And that's okay, too. Those are good things to register. Also, you know, there are many people I've seen. This can often be a death sentence. You know, you if you choose a career aspiration should when you're you're 18 and your hippocampus isn't fully formed and then you feel so beholden to that, right? You're b at the sunk cost fallacy or sense of embarrassment or really a sense of fear of changing your mind. And and you're completely tied to this thing that really isn't you or is you anymore. And you can't just say to yourself, listen, you know, maybe that's just not who I am, right? Maybe my I really wanted to be a lawyer and I just am not into conflict. That's, you know, even though I thought I was, I'm just not That's just not me. Yeah. What you said really reminds me. There's. I think there's an important nuance to add to conversations around growth. Right? We we like to talk about growth. Professional growth growing is great. And I think the assumption made is that growing means is an add. It is additive process. you know, you you add more here, you add more, they're growing is not an additive process. Growing is a process of clarification. Right. Of clear of clarification to to a to a more evolved form. So sometimes sometimes growth means like you learn something and you're like, oh, no, actually this isn't me, this isn't the thing I want to be doing. This isn't the thing I need to be taking on for myself. I need to be doing this other thing, going in this other direction. So just for people to remember that when we're thinking about growth, we're thinking about kind of who we are as a person in defining ourselves. It's not about it's not this kind of, you know, late capitalist metric of adding productivity and right. And adding human capital. As much as it is just a process of clarification and finding, you know, there's this William Stafford poem that I really love called a ritual to read to each other. I think about this moment because it has there's a stands at the end, which is what it's for. It's important for awake people to be awake or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. And then like the the signals we give. Yes. No. Or maybe I should be clear, the darkness around us deep at the point being, you know, the way people should be awake. If you are awake, if you aren't, open your eyes, you know, think about where you are in the course of your career in life. You know, take full stock and and honest stock of who you are, who you want to be, how you can show up as the best version of yourself. And I just encourage people on a daily or weekly, monthly basis when you're in your career, to just be reminding yourself like, what is the through line? You know, it's very easy for us to get so bogged down in the urgent things and not the important things. Yeah, and I think that's the benefit of having these kinds of conversations to pull people out of that and, you know, get them to shore and say, you know, do you remember what the line is that you drew that make sense? Do you want to draw a new line? Do you see the direction you're going in Thank you for listening to my my pantomime and watching my soft shoe. It was a real pleasure. Thank you both for having me. And, you know, I look forward to having some future conversations with both. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. I hope you were able to pull some helpful content from that conversation. And remember that this is episode three. So if you missed the first two episodes on Filter quality and Relational Intelligence, I would highly recommend that you go back and listen. I think you'll find those very useful. Also, next episode is going to be taking a break from the Human Development series for for a bit, and we're going to be actually focused on health care and the role that A.I. is starting to play and could potentially continue to play as we move forward. And you're going to hear from Scott Pope, Andy Bosom and Gareth Jones, some of our very smart method teammates who are who have been focused on this topic for for quite a while. So I think you're really going to enjoy that subject. Now, in the meantime, don't forget to check us out on social and drop in on any of our monthly tech talks. We would love to see you there as always. Until next time. Don't forget to stay nerdy. May be than.