What’s Your Style?

The great gift the internet has given the world is the ability to speak to all those who resonate with our personal style no matter how far away they might be.  This is a great opportunity, but also creates a huge hurdle to overcome.  With all the noise and traffic out there, companies and leaders whose message is not clearly defined and communicated tend to disappear.  You know what I mean.  How many times have you looked at a mission statement and thought yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all that before.

We can spot them in a heartbeat: canned content or words we’ve seen repeated forever, that are the standard set of values and ethics or mission statement content that we’ve seen 100 times, that don’t really mean anything except that somebody is saying what it is that they are pretty sure somebody wants to hear.  We spot them, and we discard them, and we move on to the next thing in a minute.

So what catches our eye? Those companies that are unique and courageous enough to tell the truth about who they are. It’s why restaurants that specialize in being rude to customers become wildly popular, and why customers invest more in an outfit from Nordstrom’s than another vendor, even when the item is the same.

So, what’s your style? Have you really considered your personal mission? Have you looked at your values and identified what really drives you each and every day? It seems that this should be fairly straightforward, but that hasn’t been my experience. There is the top layer that motivates us, the surface things that we’re conscious of every day. Then there are the deep desires that resonate on the personal, human level, and those are sometimes harder to define.

Take the time to really look at your “why”, ask yourself, do the people around you in work and in life understand what really motivates you?  What would it look like if you were able to tell them?  I’ll tell you, when you are able to be clear about your Style, you are able to motivate others to support you in the advancement of your dreams.  Take a risk, live large, let the world know who you are!