In preparation for renewal of a career-related certification, I came across a book on personal branding that offered a good lesson about "transactions." On page 90 of Be Your Own Brand, the authors David McNally and Karl D. Speak, write about Len Berry's three-part equation that can help measure the way people interact with your personal brand and that in every transaction, participants have three different perspectives from which to judge what is happening:
1. expectations
2. experiences
3. observations
For several days, I had been thinking about this notion of expectations, experiences, and observations and I thought it made a lot of sense. Fast forward to last week when I visited a highly regarded professional...an "expert" in his industry. As he was telling me this thing and that thing, I observed that he had a very large hole in his black sock. (You know how people will sometimes let the back of their shoe dangle a bit from their foot?...yup, that's when I noticed. (#3 Observations).
For whatever reason, after I observed the hole in the expert's sock, I momentarily stopped listening to him, simply because my observation had distracted me. And I was surprised. Surprised that a person with his level of expertise would have any part of a holey (is that a word?) sock. If he has a hole in his sock, might then there be "holes" in what he's saying? While my "observation" may be a lame (or even ridiculous) example of Dr. Berry's teaching, I really like his three-part equation...something to keep in mind as you market, promote and sell your own personal brand.
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