Instigator Blog

If you don’t think personal branding is important, you’re flat out nuts.

Nowadays it’s so much easier to brand yourself online - through blogging, social media, networking - and then leverage that effectively offline as well. Bringing your online branding efforts offline is key; because you can’t live exclusively online. And this is especially true in the job market.

There are plenty of places online to look for jobs, and we know that Gen Y and Gen X do almost all of their job searching online. It makes completely sense. And now we’re seeing tools to help companies and candidates brand themselves more effectively online. But ultimately, hiring people is about one-on-one connections and meeting people face-to-face to see if there’s a fit. The online job market helps bring people together, and it’s getting better at it, but you still need to bring your online brand with you when you meet potential employers for interviews, etc.

Dan Schawbel gets personal branding.

Click to continue →

Who doesn’t enjoy the thought of tossing and turning all night in fits of restlessness brought on by nightmares? Woohoo!

The secret is this: Work right until the moment you go to bed.

It’s really as simple as that. Work, work, and work some more. When you’re exhausted, go straight to bed (don’t pass GO!) and try to sleep. I can guarantee a night filled with nightmares.

Click to continue →

Some days are just downright exhausting. Tough, emotionally draining. We all have days like that. They’re unavoidable. You feel spent, incapable of going on, angry, frustrated. Maybe you feel victimized, maybe you feel disappointed in yourself. Maybe both.

We all have days like that. Bad days. So what do you do?

No one said it would be easy.

When you’re exhausted, at the end, feeling beyond hope…

Click to continue →

How big is your ego? Too big? Too small? Just right?

We’re probably not the best judges of our own ego and whether it’s the right size to be a great leader. After all, our egos would get in the way and skew our judgment. But we certainly should recognize the importance of ego and its role in leadership.

Although ego isn’t a leadership skill it’s certainly one of the most important elements of measuring leadership. As Steven Smith, author of egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability) points out in an interview with Guy Kawasaki:

“There are other important elements on the leadership ‘table,’ but ego has the most weight—in large part because of the affect it has on everything else.”

Click to continue →

Bloggers write a lot. We have to. It’s the nature of the blogging beast. Produce content. Do it. Write, write and write some more.

For all the debate over how often you need to be posting to maintain and grow your audience, the fact remains that many of us write a lot of blog content; perhaps 3 times a week, maybe even daily (and some of us post more than once per day!)

But do we always follow our own advice?

The old adage, “Do as I say, not as I do,” comes to mind, and I suspect it applies to many of us. An idea pops in our head, we write about it stating ideas and truths we believe in (I’m not claiming any of us are lying!) and then we’re off to the next blog post. We have to be: there’s four more to write this week!

That killer post you wrote with the great ideas, practical tips and important lessons learned, receives positive feedback, generates some comments, but ultimately disappears into your archive. There are ways of extending the life of a blog post but typically after a few days or a week, a blog post is gone.

Does the nature of blogging lead us to blog for the sake of blogging?

I’ve written a lot of content. I don’t remember everything I’ve written; every idea and suggestion. Recently, I’ve started asking myself, “What did I say on that topic again?”

I don’t want to speak for the sake of speaking.

Part of what makes blogging interesting is the sudden nature of it - publishing content quickly, connecting with people easily - but it’s also easy to post and post and post and not follow through.

Walk the walk. Don’t just talk the talk.

I’ve started using my own blog as a reminder service, a personal archive of what I should be doing. I know I won’t always follow my own advice (let alone remember it all!) but at least it’s there for me to fall back on. When I’m struggling with leadership questions, I can go back and read 10 Essential Business Leadership Skills. If I’m feeling worn down and need a pick me up, I might read Even Superheroes Have Limitations or 5 Inspirational To-Dos You Can Do Every Day. And it’s not just my own thoughts that I reference. Each post has plenty valuable comments: so my reminder service and resource library expands continuously.

Do you follow your own blogging advice?