Вера СТАРУХИНА.
By putting personality into your business you’re giving prospects something to connect to. That connection is more important than credentials or experience. Once people feel connected to you, it’s hard to break that unless you totally screw up.
Another benefit is that people remember personality more than they remember content. I attended a 3 day seminar once that probably featured 30 or so speakers. All of them delivered great content. But I remember 2 of them. It should be of no surprise to you that those 2 really put their personality into their presentations and a year later I’m still thinking of them and doing business with them.
The biggest advantage you have in business is YOU. So find elements of your personality to put out there for people to connect to.
Every prospect will connect to a different part of your personality. Those who have been following me for a while know how I feel about my mother-in-law. (I think she’s awesome…said in my best sarcastic voice) People now send me their horror stories of their mother-in-law. It’s simple, but it gives us something in common. It’s something they can relate to.
Now people are looking out for what my mother-in-law will do next. And while they’re looking, they are paying attention. That attention isn’t easy to come by these days which makes the importance of putting your personality out there extremely important.
Personality makes you stand out, and makes you human. Your competition can copy your product, copy your price, and copy your website. But they can’t copy you. That’s why it’s so critical to put your personality into your marketing and your business.
Dean Hunt says....
John makes a great point when he says that competitors cannot copy your personality… that is an advantage that we all can, and should be tapping into.
I once had a young entrepreneur tell me that my blog atDeanHunt.com (shameless plug) was worthless because it was tied to my personal brand… my reply was that I wouldn’t sell it for all the money in the world, because it was my personal brand.
I think some people are still struggling to get that our personal brands (which are an extension of our personalities) are the only thing (other than death and taxes) that will be around forever.
Businesses come and go, big brands come and go, even some billion dollar brands have been known to vanish in a short space of time… but when you attach a business to a person, that is something that can never be taken away.
A common mistake that John and I have seen with clients in the past is trying to copy other experts… for example, I have actually heard of a guy who took up surfing because “it worked for Frank Kern, so why not?!?”.
If you try and be someone else, the best you can hope for is to be a second-rate version of them … so as cheesy as it sounds, be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
And finally, a quick way to inject personality into your business, and I know John is an expert at this, is to be more open… I have seen John on numerous occasions talk about his mother in law in trainings, calls, interviews etc… and both John and I regularly talk about our love of the White Stripes and Oasis… don’t be afraid of opening up and sharing with your audience…
It might sound trivial, but here is an example that may surprise you:
I was recently speaking at a seminar, and a guy came up to me afterwards and told me he bought my product solely because I mentioned I used to be a golfer, and he likes golf.
It wasn’t my huge charisma, amazing product, or chiseled good looks that made him buy (haha), it was the fact that he could relate to, what in hindsight, was an irrelevant aspect of my past.
So remember, people buy people. … which reminds me of a trip I took to Amsterdam once (just joking)
Dean
PS: We would love to hear your thoughts, opinions and stories on personality in business… leave a comment below.
PPS: Checkout more from John Morgan here: Surefire Branding
The Journey from Childhood to Adulthood:
By Bill Plotkin
The Importance and Limitations of Rites of Passage
Contemporary, Western society fails us during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Too many people reach their physical prime without ever attaining psychological maturity. Put plainly, in today’s world, growing up is hard to do.
One part of the problem, well documented and analyzed by now, is the loss of meaningful rites of passage at times such as puberty or high school graduation. But this neglect is not at all the biggest barrier to personal development.
A rite of passage, after all — even the most effective and brilliantly designed ceremony — rarely causes a shift from one distinct stage of life to the next. Much more often rites of passage only confirm or celebrate a life transition that has already (although recently) been achieved by the individual, accomplished through years of steady developmental progress.
What happens between life passages is considerably more important to the process of maturation than are the passages themselves (and their associated rites). The primary work of maturing takes place gradually every day as we apply ourselves to the developmental tasks of our current life stage. Children and adolescents need help with these tasks — help from mature adults. And that’s precisely where we are failing our youth.
In order to overcome our society’s impediments to maturation, we must first abandon the idea that the transition from childhood to adulthood takes place in one fell swoop. Between these two life stages lies the challenging adventure of adolescence. And although most all thirteen-year-olds have already turned the corner into adolescence, there’s no guarantee that a teenager will ever mature further, no matter how long he or she might live. The majority of Americans, for example, never do.
Getting older by itself does not cause us to mature psychologically. Adolescence is not at all confined to our teen years. And adulthood cannot be meaningfully defined as what happens in our twenties or when we fulfill certain responsibilities, such as holding down a job, financial independence, or raising a family. Rather, an adult is someone who understands why he is here on Earth, why he was born, and is offering his unique contribution to the more-than-human world.
Although it’s rare for Americans to reach true adulthood in their teen years, or even twenties, it’s entirely possible to do so in midlife.
A greatly complicating factor in the journey from childhood to adulthood is that there are two quite distinct stages of adolescence and a major life passage between them. The journey begins with the passage of puberty, continues through the years of early adolescence (which I call the stage of the Thespian at the Oasis), then transits through the passage I name Confirmation and into the very different stage of late adolescence (the Wanderer in the Cocoon). And finally, after several years of individuation in the Cocoon stage, we arrive at the passage of Soul Initiation, the commencement of early adulthood (the Soul Apprentice at the Wellspring).
What we call “growing up” is nothing like a single or sudden transition. Rather, it encompasses four separate life stages (starting with late childhood) and not just one major life passage, nor even two, but three. Given the complexity and temporal span of this sequence — and the lack of present-day understanding of it — it’s no wonder so many contemporary people never reach true adulthood.
In my new book, Nature and the Human Soul, I introduce a nature-based and soul-centered model of human development, portraying in detail the qualities of each of the eight healthy stages through which I believe we are designed to progress as humans. Here I want to focus on just two of these life stages — those of adolescence — and briefly describe only one dimension of each of these stages, namely the developmental task.
In the first half of adolescence, the task is to fashion a personality — a way of belonging to the human community — one that is both authentic and socially acceptable. This is much easier said than done, especially in our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, materialistic societies. But this accomplishment lays the foundation for all later maturation. Becoming authentic means to know who you really are — to know where you stand, what you value, what you desire, what you tolerate and what you don’t — and to be able and willing to act accordingly, most of the time, despite the social risks. Under the best circumstances, this takes several years to accomplish. In the contemporary world, many never succeed. But what makes early adolescence even more challenging is the second half of the task in this stage, namely, attaining social acceptability. To be a healthy adolescent, you need to belong to a real community. So the way in which you express your authenticity means everything. You must learn how to be true to yourself in a way that at least some of your peers embrace.
If and when you achieve a personality that is authentic enough and acceptable enough, then the enigma we call by such names as life, the world, spirit, or soul shifts your center of gravity from peer group to the mysteries of nature and psyche. This shift marks the passage I call Confirmation. A rite of passage at this time publicly confirms the fact that you’ve succeeded at fashioning a social presence that works well enough. It ushers you into late adolescence (the Cocoon), which is the stage when you begin to ask the big, existential and spiritual questions of life: Who am I beneath my social persona? What is life about, beyond learning a skill, getting a job, establishing a primary relationship, or raising a family? What unique, mystical gift do I bring to the more-than-human community? What, for me, is the difference between sex and romance, between survival and living, between a social network and true community, between school and real learning, between a job and soulwork?
After many years of living these questions, after many expeditions of wandering through the terrible and majestic mysteries of nature and psyche, you, at long last, receive a glimpse or overhear a whisper of the greater, truer story of your individual life or of “the truth at the center of the image you were born with,” as poet David Whyte says. In many traditional cultures and spiritual paths, such a glimpse is called a vision, a soul calling, or the intuition of destiny. Then, if and when you make the unequivocal commitment to embody that vision in your world for the benefit of all beings, then and only then do you traverse through the passage of Soul Initiation (with or without a rite) and into true adulthood (the Wellspring).
As much as anything, the world today needs mature mentors and initiators to support young people to grow into visionary artisans of cultural change, the new leaders who will guide humanity through the transformation that the greater Earth community wholly depends upon. Mentoring our youth to succeed at the developmental tasks of the two stages of adolescence is considerably more important than providing them with rites of passage that confirm their success.
But there’s no reason not to offer them both!
The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known asMexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it's at risk of extinction.
There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.
"They don't have a lot in common," says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says, can be "a little prickly" and Velazquez, who is "more stoic," rarely likes to leave his home.
The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. "When I was a boy everybody spoke it," Segovia told the Guardian by phone. "It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me."
Segovia, who denied any active animosity with Velazquez, retained the habit of speaking Ayapaneco by conversing with his brother until he died about a decade ago. Segovia still uses it with his son and wife who understand him, but cannot produce more than a few words themselves. Velazquez reputedly does not regularly talk to anybody in his native tongue anymore.
Suslak says Ayapaneco has always been a "linguistic island" surrounded by much stronger indigenous languages.
Its demise was sealed by the advent of education in Spanish in the mid 20th century, which for several decades included the explicit prohibition on indigenous children speaking anything else. Urbanisation and migration from the 1970s then ensured the break-up of the core group of speakers concentrated in the village. "It's a sad story," says Suslak, "but you have to be really impressed by how long it has hung around."
There are 68 different indigenous languages in Mexico, further subdivided into 364 variations. A handful of other Mexican indigenous languages are also in danger of extinction, though Ayapaneco is the most extreme case.
The name Ayapaneco is an imposition by outsiders, and Segovia and Velazquez call their language Nuumte Oote, which means the True Voice. They speak different versions of this truth and tend to disagree over details, which doesn't help their relationship. The dictionary, which is due out later this year, will contain both versions.
The National Indigenous Language Institute is also planning a last attempt to get classes going in which the last two surviving speakers can pass their knowledge on to other locals. Previous efforts have failed to take hold due to lack of funding and limited enthusiasm.
"I bought pencils and notebooks myself," Segovia complains. "The classes would start off full and then the pupils would stop coming."
Suslak says the language is particularly rich in what he calls sound symbolic expressions that often take their inspiration from nature, such as kolo-golo-nay, translated as "to gobble like a turkey".
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