by Caroline Leach | Feb 26, 2020 | Careers, Change, Social Media
You have career dreams. Every day you work hard to make them come true. Yet maybe you’re not where you want to be yet. Maybe you feel stuck where you are. Perhaps you’re not enjoying the journey.
So what’s getting in your way? Where are you getting stuck ? How is that preventing you from making the impact you want?
The surface answer may be the outcome of relentlessly comparing ourselves to others. In everyone’s carefully curated social media feeds, we often forget we’re comparing our real lives, full of messiness and challenge, to everyone else’s near-perfect highlights reel. No wonder we can feel we fall short.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that achieving a big dream takes time. Dreams don’t happen overnight or in a month or even a year, as many success stories on social media would have you believe.
Everyone has a dream
A wonderful antidote is the opening words from Barbra Streisand and Jamie Foxx’s version of the song Climb Ev’ry Mountain. Thanks to Leslie Lupinsky, I discovered this inspirational song. Leslie along with Jeff Jacobson led of one of my life-changing coaching courses at the Co-Active Training Institute.
The song begins with dialogue:
Everyone has a dream, don’t you think?
Yes, but the question is how do you make it happen?
Well, first of all, if you can imagine it, then you can achieve it
But it might take a lot of time, and it might take a lot of hard work …
It’s the hard work part that so often gets glossed over. If it doesn’t appear that others have had to work hard for their success, we can start to wonder what’s wrong with us. What is making our path so difficult? Why is it taking so long to achieve our career dreams? How can there be so much rejection along the way?
Finding inspiration in others
Here’s where the long and winding paths of others inspire me.
One is Marie Forleo. She wanted to coach people and help them discover, as the title of her book says, that Everything is Figureoutable. It took her seven years (!) for her coaching business to become sustainable. In between she worked a variety of jobs as she relentlessly pursued her dream. Oprah now calls her “a thought leader of the next generation.”
Another is Susan Cain. She wrote a bestselling book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Based on that, she gave a top 25 TED talk on the power of introverts. How long did it take her to write her book that sparked a “quiet revolution”? Seven years!
Above all, they both persisted through many twists and turns in pursuit of their deeply held dreams. A long-held dream was to make other people’s lives better as a result. There are lessons for us in their stories.
As a result, here’s what I take away from their examples, my corporate years as a communications and marketing leader, and my entrepreneur experience (so far!).
Kick fear to the curb
First of all, why do we have fear in our lives? It protects us from extreme risks that could ultimately derail us. Fear comes to us through our inner critic. It’s the voice that whispers in our ears. You’re not good enough. You don’t have what it takes. You can never do it. If we listen long enough, we begin to believe it. Fear becomes a dream killer. What to think and do instead? Thank our fear for alerting us to dangers, take mitigating actions, and set fear aside.
Be a victor, not a victim
Also, when we believe the rantings of our inner critic, we can view life in victim mode. We start to believe we’re not active agents in our own lives. A negative running commentary can set in. I can’t do that. It will be a waste of my time to even try. The deck is stacked against me. A victim mentality can lead to paralysis, and and endless feeling of being stuck. What to think and do instead? Recall times you took control and overcome challenges. You’re a victor, so remind yourself you can do it again.
Take relentless action
Finally, thinking ourselves out of problems doesn’t work. We have to take action. Sometimes a challenge can feel so daunting that it’s hard to know where to start. Begin with the simplest step. Maybe it’s creating your career dream in the first place, in beautiful detail. Perhaps it’s having a development conversation with your supervisor, to start creating a path toward the future you envision and the contribution you want to make. Or it could be taking better care of yourself mentally, physically and spiritually so you have more energy and enthusiasm to pursue your dreams.
What does this all mean?
With all of this action, what are the implications for you how show up on social media? As a start, you can consider sharing your struggles as well as your successes. How are you overcoming obstacles? What are you doing to handle rejection? How are you persevering toward your dream?
Since the beginning of this year I’ve had plenty of personal experience with rejection. Two articles I wrote were rejected for publication by HBR.org, the online part of Harvard Business Review. People who indicated interest in working with me stopped responding to messages. Some of my speaking proposals resulted in rejections. And there’s more, but I won’t bore you.
All that said, there were also successes and new doors that opened. Consequently, those are the ones I choose to focus on.They are the ones I rejoice in and celebrate.
Above all, the rock-solid belief in our own ability and our own agency is what keeps us going. Ultimately it’s what makes the day-to-day journey so much fun. And that’s what life is all about.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 8, 2020 | Careers, Social Media
The “rules” of social media are clear-cut and straightforward, right?
There are rules for the time of day you should post, the frequency of your posts, and the formula for your content.
All you have to do is follow these rules, and you’ll win on social media, right?
Um, no.
Following the rules might make you boring, turn off people in your network, and even slow down your career progress.
Instead, look at what everyone else is doing, and do something different. Do something that is true to you. Share content that only you could create.
For example, how many LinkedIn posts did you see that simply said “Happy New Year,” along with an image?
Did that add anything to your professional life? Tell you anything new? Help you be better in your work?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, then don’t feel compelled to post content. Just don’t.
Better to skip sharing anything than to post something that doesn’t educate or entertain your network.
That’s why I didn’t share any new year’s day messages. There wasn’t anything new or different I felt I could add to the conversation.
But I didn’t stay away from social media entirely. To the contrary. It was the ideal time to engage with others. It was a perfect moment to comment on or share their content, spark a conversation, and strengthen our relationship.
So for those times when you don’t feel you have anything informative, interesting, or entertaining to share, ramp up the time you spend engaging with others’ content.
Beyond that, how can you make your content more interesting?
Create your own data
I keep a number of Excel spreadsheets to track everything from the performance of my social media minute videos to the messages I send to people on my email list. I’ve tracked data from experiments on what happens from posting daily on LinkedIn. I’ve conducted my own research on how people use social media to boost their careers.
In each of these cases, I have something completely unique to share with my network. And they’re topics that can help others with their social media presence. Not surprisingly, writing about what my own data tells me has led to some of my higher performing LinkedIn articles. These are the ones with the most engagement as measured by the quality and quantity of the comments.
What data could you track that would help you in your own work, as well as help your network?
Look at the world in new ways
Conventional wisdom gets turned on its head every second with how fast the world is changing. As the new year approached, my social media feeds were filling up with posts about how to slay the work world right out of the gate. It felt like everyone was queuing up for a big race that began bright and early on the first Monday of the new year. Who could get going faster and go longer and better than anyone else?
And I realized that’s a fool’s errand. All that will do is exhaust me and everyone around me. What might work better instead? Well, I planned a winter break in late December that was both relaxing and productive. There was special time with family and friends, and there was time to reflect on and plan my business for the coming year. The first weekend of the year, I started working on key projects.
The first Monday back, I chose a contrarian activity. I went to a relaxing spot about five minutes from my house. I enjoyed a great latte and some quiet, contemplative time to “officially” start my work year (that’s the picture above and on Instagram). It felt calm and peaceful and totally different from what everyone else might have been doing.
When everyone is zigging, how could you zag?
Be real and be vulnerable
The blog posts and LinkedIn articles that got the most engagement tended to be those where I shared my struggles. Being Active on Social Media When Your Life Explodes was my most viewed article in 2019. Why? Probably because I shared my challenges in getting my first book published. Sure, I had goals, plans, and self-imposed deadlines. But what do you do when life intervenes? Based on the comments people shared, that realness resonated.
Launching a business, as I’ve done over the last year, is exhilarating and terrifying, all at the same time. Sometimes on social media we can get so focused on sharing the high points that we neglect to talk about what it really takes. What happens behind the scenes. How much grunt work is truly involved.
In the coming year, I’ll share more of that. So I can paint a balanced picture of this entrepreneurial life. The highs. The lows. The progress. The setbacks. Because I’ve learned that realness is what we all crave. And that’s contrary to the images of perfection we’ve been conditioned to share on social media.
The best example is when I sent personalized LinkedIn invitations to a few hundred people at a leadership conference I attended. It took several hours over a period of a few days to send all the invites. Why did I do this? I wanted to grow my connections and relationships with people who have common interests.
One person looked at my profile and invited me to lunch. When we met, she invited me to speak at an association where she was the board president. Several months later, I spoke about how to boost your career and organization through social media. My talk generated a large volume of social media content.
Someone across the country saw the content. As a result, he invited me to do a paid speaking engagement at his organization. He also purchased a few hundred copies of my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media.
Both speaking engagements were highly enjoyable events, where I met fascinating people that I keep in touch with to this day.
More than a year went by between the leadership conference and the second speaking engagement. And it was such a thrill the way it played out. It’s important for me to share the story behind the story. There was a lot of work involved. It wasn’t clear where it would lead. Yet it illustrates that doing the work and trying to be helpful to others can lead to exciting outcomes.
How do you share the real deal on social media?
by Caroline Leach | Dec 18, 2019 | Careers, Social Media
To boost your career through social media in 2020, what social media trends are important for professionals? What can you apply from digital marketing to your work life? And what will most easily fit in your busy schedule?
There are three social media trends for professionals worth considering. How did they rise to the top?
As a start, sifting through dozens of social media trend reports over the last few weeks yielded significant data and insights.
Next, reflecting on the experiences my clients, my colleagues, and I have had on social media gave new perspectives on what’s changing.
Lastly, learning from the weekly industry news sharing in the class on social media I taught this fall rounded out the trends.
Here they are …
Private groups are the new black
More and more, social media is migrating away from public feeds into private groups with a curated group of members who have common interests. People are looking for more authentic and more meaningful interactions on social media.
Part of it may be a desire to skip the often negative parts of social media, in our polarized times in the world. Another big part is the role of Facebook, which has declared, “the future is private” in its strategy to integrate Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
For professionals, the biggest implication is the value of groups on LinkedIn. You can foster stronger relationships in groups related to your professional interests, among people with common interests. You can learn from each other and share relevant information. You can become better known among people who are the most meaningful for your career.
Joining LinkedIn private groups — meaning those that are unlisted — requires that you be invited by the group administrator. By connecting with new people frequently and sharing valuable content with your network, you may find yourself invited to join private groups.
In addition, joining groups, whether listed or unlisted, enables you to expand your LinkedIn network, which in turn makes it easier for people to find you.
You can even start your own group, if you want to create your own curated community of people who can support and learn from each other. And you can join up to 100 groups. Find new ones by using the LinkedIn search bar.
Video eats the web
The rise of video isn’t the newest trend, but it’s certainly accelerating. Cisco predicts that 81% of world’s internet traffic will be video by 2021. As someone who loves the written word, I find this a bit challenging. But it’s hard to deny the data on video traffic and engagement.
This year I experimented with social media minute videos on LinkedIn. The purpose? To share tips from my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media: A Short Guide to Boosting Your Career.
While my LinkedIn articles this year got views of up to 500+, my videos often performed up to five times better. The top performing video attracted more than 2,500 views. Of course, there’s a bigger commitment to reading an article or blog post than watching a one-minute video with captions.
There’s also a much bigger investment of time in writing an article than recording a video. So consider how you could incorporate more video into your professional updates in the coming year. Because the majority of people scroll through their social media feeds without sound, captions are a must. If you’re looking for an easy captioning option, check out Rev.com.
Instagram is your contacts list
Instagram for work, really? Bear with me for a moment. A strong presence on LinkedIn is a professional must. It seemed for a while that Twitter was the secondary place for professionals to share their ideas. However, with the tremendous growth in Instagram (1 billion+ monthly actives and counting), I believe it’s now the next-best place to share about your career, your colleagues and your company.
Instagram is also an easy way to connect with someone you just met in a professional setting. All you do is follow each other Instagram, and voila, you’re connected with a single tap. In fact, Taylor Lorenz of The Atlantic explores How Instagram Replaced the Contacts List.
If you will be hiring talent in the coming year among millennials or Gen Z, being on Instagram is a must. Potential job candidates will want to know what you’re like as a leader and decide whether they’d like to work with you. With unemployment still at historic lows, a vibrant Instagram feed of engaging content can help you attract great people.
And don’t forget about Instagram stories. With 500 million+ daily actives with stories, this is where much of the daily action can be found. Stories give you an opportunity to take a bit lighter and more playful approach to the workplace. You can save the ones you like to your highlights, and let others disappear after the designated 24 hours.
What if your Instagram is currently more focused on your personal life? If you don’t want to mix the professional and personal, you could consider making your account private for your friends and family. You can then open a second account that’s public and focused on your professional life.
What About TikTok?
TikTok is enjoying cool-kid status, for sure. TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company. It reportedly has 800 million monthly active users worldwide, and it’s growing like wildfire.
How should you think about Tik Tok from a professional perspective? Because it’s so new, yet growing by leaps and bounds, it’s something to keep an eye on. Be sure to learn about it. Check out how people and brands are using it, and how that usage evolves. But you don’t need to add it to your professional arsenal just yet.
Just One Thing
If you do just one thing on social media in 2020, make it a commitment to sharing high-quality content with your network. What have you learned that could help others? What have you discovered that could inspire people in their work lives? What are you most excited about in your work life?
Share that.
What is the one thing you will do on social media in the coming year?
by Caroline Leach | Nov 26, 2019 | Careers, Leadership, Learning, Social Media
The end of the year can bring a lot of “shoulds” into our professional and personal lives.
We should do whatever it takes to hit those fourth-quarter operating goals. We should get every last item on our endless lists completed. We should count our abundant blessings on Thanksgiving and on every day of the year. We should enjoy the many holiday celebrations with our colleagues, friends and family.
Except, what if you’re not feeling it?
What if you’re not enjoying — or at least making it through, with a smile on your face — everything on your calendar? What if you feel overwhelmed? What if you feel tired, or lonely, or longing for some quiet time where you can just be? What if you feel angry, or afraid, or just plain sad about something (or many somethings)?
For my Thanksgiving week blog post, I was eager to share something inspiring and uplifting. A few drafts are still languishing in my files, unfinished. They felt forced. Inauthentic. And unlikely to inspire anyone.
So I eased up on my self-imposed deadline. I let myself play around with ideas. I let my mind simply be for a while.
And it came to me while I was driving today.
What do you do when you’re not feeling it?
At lunch with a group of people I met recently, one person said with a sigh that she just wasn’t feeling it that day.
Support immediately came from the people around the table, in the form of questions. “What are you experiencing?” one person asked. “What seems to be the trouble?” another asked. “What do you want?” yet another asked.
Bit by bit, the story flowed. Speaking it aloud began to neutralize its grip. The space opened up to just be with it.
You may find yourself in spots where you’re not feeling it. Yet you may not feel it’s acceptable to share those feelings with others. You may not even to acknowledge them to yourself. If you’re in a leadership role, you may feel pressure to maintain a positive demeanor, even if you feel miserable inside.
Being positive and uplifting others has been my north star as a leader. Emotions are contagious. It’s important for leaders to bring a realistic optimism, a can-do mindset, and an energetic environment to a team. That’s how I believe people do great work, enjoy the experience, and fulfill their deepest longings for purpose and meaning in their lives.
Yet, the leader has to feel it too. Authenticity has an important place in the mix. That can mean many things. It could be a willingness to experience discomfort and be okay with it. It might be a curiosity about what’s causing it. Or it could be reflecting on what’s important.
These are just a few things I learned from two intense November weekends with the Co-Active Training Institute. The co-active model focuses on “being in action … together.” With this series of coaching courses, I’m adding a fresh foundation to my business and leadership coaching business.
In addition to (hopefully) making me a more effective coach, there are some welcome side effects. It’s brought new perspectives to my social media consulting, my community involvement, and my family.
It also helped me identify three important questions for when you’re not feeling it.
What are you experiencing?
What’s happening with you right now? What else is going on? This is about creating space to simply be with the experience and acknowledge its presence in your life.
What’s important to you?
Not feeling it is an opportunity to step back and reflect on what’s important to you. What do you want? If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?
What do you want to be doing instead?
Maybe there’s a hunger in your soul to be doing something completely different. Perhaps you miss doing something you enjoyed earlier in your life, or there’s something new you want to try. What are they?
The same goes for your social media
Much of my writing focuses on how to build your career through social media. One of my first consulting clients said how excited he was to be getting consulting and coaching all in one from me. Consulting was expressly part of our work, but coaching was not explicitly in the mix. That experience was one of several catalysts for becoming a coach in an “official” sense. Thank you, and you know who you are. 😉
The co-active coaching model also helped me tap into some new wisdom about social media. If you’re not feeling it about a specific event or a certain post, don’t feel obligated to share it. It’s ideal to help your network by sharing the best of your perspective and expertise on social media. If that means skipping a post or not sticking to a schedule because they don’t feel right, that’s fine.
It’s okay — and even desirable — to post selectively, take a break for a while, or set aside a posting schedule. Yes, consistency is important on social media. And so is the quality of your content and the way you feel about sharing it. Like most things in life, it’s a balance.
And more importantly, what do you do when you’re not feeling it?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 30, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
It’s almost the end of the year. Do you want an easy way to gather your accomplishments for a year-end performance review?
You may be preparing for a performance discussion with your manager in the corporate world. Or maybe you run your own company and want to identify how you did this year.
In either scenario, reflecting on this year’s highlights helps you clearly see what you did well and where you can improve. It’s an opportunity to pause and celebrate the accomplishments of you and year team. It’s a chance to elevate what’s working well and make changes to what’s not working well.
But in the rush of meeting year-end goals, how can you simplify the process?
Try looking to your social media feeds. If you’ve been sharing consistently what you, your team, and your company have been doing, you have a ready-made record. (Of course, this presumes you follow your organization’s social media policy and haven’t shared any confidential, private, or sensitive information.)
A former colleague (and now an author!), Angelica Kelly, has a year-end ritual that relies on LinkedIn. “At the end of every year, I take stock of the personal and professional. I consider what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve,” Kelly says.
“After this reflection process, I use LinkedIn like a notepad and do an annual update,” she says. “Everything professionally relevant goes into my LinkedIn profile. This includes accomplishments, interests, volunteering, and big projects that highlight transferable skills and new knowledge I’ve gained.”
In addition to Angelica’s approach, if you posted content to LinkedIn or other social networks throughout the year, you can scroll through your posts to identify the highlights. You can capture instances where you and your team:
- Launched a successful new product
- Completed an important project
- Won an award for your accomplishments
- Spoke at a company or industry event
- Attended a conference and applied new knowledge
- Championed company news as a brand ambassador
After that, here are a few things to consider …
1. Link your achievements to the goals you set at the beginning of the year, as well as your bigger department and company goals. Does your social media content show how you made a difference for your company? Did you contribute to some of your company’s key goals and share about those (to the extent you could) on social media?
2. Quantify how others responded to your accomplishments. See what data you can cite from your social media posts. Did your content reach a large number of people? Generate multiple comments and a dialogue on an important work topic? Get shared in a way that helped build your organization’s reputation as an industry leader or a great place to work? Use numbers to quantify the impact of your social sharing.
3. Identify where you got feedback. Perhaps some of your posts served as mini feedback moments on some of your work. Did people make suggestions for improvements that you ended up using? Did people ask for more information so they could apply your learning to their own work? Social media can serve as an online focus group. See if that was the case for you this year.
As you reflect on this year, it’s also a great time to lay the foundation for the coming year. Are there new and different ways you could share successes and learnings on social media? Would you use social media activity to seek feedback and help solve problems? How could you hit what I call the social media trifecta — sharing equally about you, your team, and your organization?
With the year — and the decade! — coming to a close, I hope you reflect on and celebrate the accomplishments you and your team achieved this year. And if you have rituals you use to make the most of your performance review preparation, please share!
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