Let’s talk about how to make yourself bulletproof when it comes to your career, shall we? It’s actually not a very difficult concept intellectually: influence the way people interpret you, then use those same skills to influence the way people interpret other elements in the environment, repeat. The challenge comes in when you execute this plan, and the challenge will happen on two levels.
(1) as a social creature, human beings tend to want to “play nice,” whereas when you start taking control you’ll discover it isn’t a very “nice” thing to do, and a part of you will have to reconcile the “I’m a nice person doing not-nice things” question in your head.
(2) As an ethical creature, you’ll struggle with a moral dilemma of grabbing control of a situation you’re not really qualified to control.
And I don’t mean “qualified” in a project management sort of way, where you talk about whether you have the technical skills to understand what your team is building. I mean qualified in a human, “my decisions impact what kind of lives the people around me can live” sort of way. In a “my decision today could mean that someone’s child doesn’t go to the college of her choice… am I really qualified to hold this sort of power?” sort of way. Self-determination has a ripple effect on the people around you, which forces you to deal with some real ugly questions on a moral level—and which could bring out some real ugliness in you if you’re not ready. I’ll explain more in a bit. Read on.
Personal Responsibility: The Foundation of Your Success
Staying Power starts with personal responsibility. We have to assume that no one else is going to anoint you Grand Poobah, either because they want the position themselves or they don’t see why you’re the perfect person for the job. So if you want the job, you’ll have to manufacture the opportunity to take it.
You should have a pit in your stomach right now. If you don’t, you’re either too naive or too Narcissistic to be trusted yet with the power you’re striving to hold. If you’re excited by the prospect of making your own success, that’s good. Nothing wrong with that. But you should also be feeling a tinge of loss of innocence: in taking responsibility for yourself, other people will get hurt.
How do I know that?
Because you’re deciding to serve your own needs, and that means other people—whose needs may be more acute, more noble, or more important—will wait. As a result of your decisions, other people—including people you don’t know and will never meet—will be affected, sometimes for the worse. That puts quite a burden on your shoulders. If you don’t see it, like I said, you’re either too naive yet or too Narcissistic. Pause here. Go for a walk—alone—and ask yourself who the hell you think you are that you deserve to have control over any other human being. Come back after you’ve had a Moment of Clarity.
Personal Responsibility must come first. Personal branding comes second. Personal branding is a process, a tool… and it’s one of many you’ll have to master to be successful. Personal Responsibility, however, drives your attitude and your mindset. If you don’t first adopt a perspective of Personal Responsibility, you won’t succeed. You may earn a bunch of money, but you’ll never succeed. No matter how much you earn, a part of you will remain unfulfilled. Your emptiness may not be as epic as Scrooge’s when he self-centeredly ignored Bob Cratchett’s needs, but that’s the concept.
So what is Personal Responsibility? Personal Responsibility is a forward-looking, blame-free, and—this next word is critically important—self-aware perspective on life in which you choose to focus on finding the path to your goals… or making one.
Personal Branding: An Incredibly Powerful Tool
Personal branding is one of the tools you can use to make a path to your goals when there is no readily available existing path. Specifically, it’s a tool to make sure that others perceive you a particular way. It’s a psychological process in which you anticipate how people will filter you and then proactively shift your initial appearance to counteract the impact of those filters you know they’ll be using.
This concept sounds manipulative to some, not so much to others. For just a moment, the question of whether of not this concept is manipulative is worth exploring:
On the one hand, all I’m doing when branding myself is making sure that you interpret my actions according to the intention I’m putting behind them—I’m trying to avoid an argument where I have to defend myself by saying, “But that’s not what I intended!” There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Anyone who has “under-promised and over-delivered” or “managed customer/client expectations” has engaged in this type of branding. So too has the person who has changed clothes before an interview or a night out at the club. “Dressing to impress” is a personal branding statement. It’s not wrong to dress to impress, is it?
On the other hand, the idea of branding is easily abused. For someone good at spin, it’s not very hard to polish a turd and pass it off as something exotic. Literally:
“Oh, this? Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But it has very real value to me. There’s a story behind it. This dried out nasty-patty was the only thing I took home from my humanitarian trip helping the orphans of Zambia. I got mugged on my way out of the city, and these guys took everything I had. Camera, photos… everything. To be cruel, they put this in my pocket. But you know what? It was the greatest thing they could have done. I knew by their desperation that I had made a difference. I carry this little turd ball everywhere—it’s become sort of a talisman. It make me feel like I not only brought good things to that place, but that I carried some of the negativity away. We’ll find out soon enough, I’ve booked another trip for next winter.”
(I just made that up. It’s not bad… and btw, if you’re looking for help articulating your authentic story, email me. You should see what I can do with material that’s true.)
So how do you balance the good and bad elements of personal branding? You don’t—that’s not even the right question. The question is, how do you balance good and bad in your soul, so that when you get to the personal branding question, there’s no moral dilemma about how to use it?
The answer may surprise you on account of its simplicity: you make the decision to take Personal Responsibility for your career. That pit in your stomach doesn’t happen when you start branding yourself, it starts before that, when you decide to take full responsibility for your own success. And if it’s not there, rest assured, your understanding of how to use personal branding—indeed, your understanding of how to use any psychological or interpersonal tool—will be superficial at best.
Controlling the Frame: Even Bigger than Personal Branding
I’m a fan of personal branding, because it gives people an important foothold along the path toward something far bigger and more powerful, namely “controlling the frame.”
“Controlling the frame” is the act of determining, through subtle action, suggestion, and savvy, how others interpret their world. Not just how they see you, but how they view the situation they’re in, their relationships with others, and even their own abilities and their own role in the bigger picture, too.
Controlling the frame is how you take personal responsibility for your own success and build the power-base you need to achieve the goals you have for yourself.
And if you thought personal branding was potentially manipulative, just wait until you see how manipulative controlling the frame can be!
The Moral Imperative
Let’s be clear:
Personal branding is influencing how others interpret you.
Controlling the frame is influencing how they interpret the universe you both share: you, your relationship with them, their relationship with others, the situation you’re in, who’s to blame, the best option for fixing it, who their friends are, how much they should trust their organization… literally, everything.
I explore the concept of controlling the frame in chapter 8 of Super Staying Power, which comes out in November. I’ll see if I can get permission from the publisher to post some of the section on this topic—it’s powerful stuff. (The chapter on controlling the frame is, by itself, worth the entire cover price. If you want to become a leader, this chapter will not disappoint.)
The way in which you control the frame cannot be laid out in a blog post. Few authors since Sun Tzu have been able to capture the concept, except in stories. And the stories in which someone controls the frame tend to make lasting, powerful, uneasy impressions: think The Lord of the Flies, The Count of Monte Cristo, Shogun.
What I can say is that at its core, controlling the frame means anticipating the impact of every word you say and every move you make five or six steps out, and using that information to determine your single next step. It is the ultimate adaptive strategy, where you use whatever exists to simultaneously move forward and hold others in check. Controlling the frame is, in a very real way, psychological warfare, and given the limited language we have to describe it, it is at times unfortunately indistinguishable from manipulation. (Hence the need for the moral imperative.)
And again, let’s be totally, totally clear: if you seek to make yourself bulletproof by controlling the frame, you must operate under a moral imperative to work for the betterment of both yourself and others. To knowingly use psychological tools for personal gain at others expense is Wrong.
It is also why you have a moral obligation to attempt to control the frame, even if you think it is manipulation. See, you and I both know that there are people out there who will try to game the system. We know that; we are disappointed but not surprised when we learn of devious wrong-doing, because we expect some people to engage in such behavior. Well, if you sit back and don’t fight for control of the frame, and you allow someone else—someone too naive, too Narcissistic, or too evil to care about you—to gain the upper hand over you and start dictating your reality, then you’re a schmuck and deserve what you get.
I believe that it is immoral to use frame-controlling tools to subject anyone to psychological slavery… and that includes yourself: it is immoral to allow others to gain an upper hand over you without a fight!
Over the next few months, look for much, much more to come on the idea of “controlling the frame,” including how to leverage what you’ve done in personal branding to go the next level and not only define yourself, but your situation and your relationships, too. Until then, think about what this means, and whether you believe you are ready to start living a life of self-determination. If you are, you are going to need to know more about “controlling the frame.”
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