Competence is one of the four common sense coach keys to career success that I discuss in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less.  You can purchase a copy of Success Tweets on Amazon.com or at your local bookstore, or better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com.

If you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you need to develop four basic but important competencies: 1) creating positive personal impact; 2) becoming a consistently high performer; 3) communication skills; and 4) relationship building.

You create positive personal impact in three ways.  1) Developing and nurturing your unique personal brand.  2) Being impeccable in your presentation of self – in person and on line.  3) Knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.

Today’s career advice on personal branding comes from Tweet 62 in Success Tweets…

Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.

There are two common sense steps for developing and nurturing your personal brand.

• Figure out how you want people to think of you.
• Consistently and constantly act in a manner that will lead them to think of you that way.

While your brand should reflect you and your uniqueness, it has to be built on integrity.  According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the times – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point.  Cathy, my wife, was a flight attendant for 36 years.  Seniority is a very important thing in the airline industry.  It governs how you bid for trips, positions on the airplane and vacations – almost anything important to a flight attendant’s quality of work life.

Cathy was very active in her union.  And seniority was one of the union’s most sacred principles.  A few years before she retired, Cathy’s airline made a big push into the international market.  International flights were plum assignments, they went to people with high seniority. 

However, the airline realized that it would be to their advantage to have some flight attendants who spoke the language of the country to which they were flying on these international flights.  Most flight attendants in her airline spoke English only.  The airline proposed putting two “language speakers” on each international flight.  Many people, including Cathy, were upset with this arrangement as they felt it violated the seniority concept.

Cathy used to fly from the US to London.  One day I said to her, “This whole language speaker issue doesn’t really affect you.  You fly to London, there are no language speakers on those flights.  Why do you care so much?”  She said, “I believe in the concept of seniority.  It doesn’t matter if I’m affected by language speakers.  It’s the principal of the thing.”  That’s consistency – and integrity — in action.

On the other hand, there’s Tiger Woods.  Tiger had one of the best personal brands in the world.  He earned close to $100 million in 2009 on it.  He will earn a lot less in 2010.  If you were following the news in late 2009 and early 2010, (how could you miss it) you know that the Tiger brand is in serious jeopardy because of some of his indiscretions which have come to light. 

Sadly for Tiger, his integrity is now in question – and that’s being kind.  His wife has left him, taking the kids.  Several sponsors have dropped him.  And, his golf game is suffering.  I’m not writing this post to pass judgment on Tiger – enough people have done that already.  I am writing it however, to reinforce my point of building your personal brand on integrity.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is one of the competencies all successful people possess.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.  Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Follow the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.  As Tiger Woods’s case demonstrates, a lack of integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.  Now, everyone is looking at Tiger and most people aren’t liking what they’re seeing.  So take a lesson from Tiger – one he’s learning the hard way — build your personal brand on integrity.

That’s my take on the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud

My latest career success coach book, Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less is now available on Amazon.com and in bookstores.  I am in the process of blogging about each of the tweets in it. You can get a free copy of Success Tweets at www.SuccessTweets.com.  If you like it, I’d appreciate a positive review on Amazon.com.

Today’s career success coach post is on Tweet 39…

While other people and events have an impact on our life, they don’t shape it.  You get to choose how you react to people and events.

As I was getting ready to write this post, an email from my friends at Heart Math popped up in my in box.  It had a quote from Viktor Frankl…

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”

Victor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps in WWII.  He lost his wife, mother and father in those camps.  His experience with the Nazis led him to conclude that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning. 

He chronicled his experiences in the camps and what he learned from them in his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  In 1991, the US Library of Congress designated it as one of the ten most influential books in the United States.  It as sold over 10 million copies and been translated into 24 languages.

One of his famous quotes always brings tears to my eyes…

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Speaking of attitude, the June 2010 issue of SUCCESS Magazine has a great article by John Maxwell called “Attitude Is the Difference Maker.”  If you’re not already a subscirber, I suggest you go to www.success.com and become one.  The career advice in SUCCESS is invaluable.  WhatJohn has to say about attitude is a great example. .. 

“Attitude isn’t everything, but it’s the main difference maker.”

As you can see from the Viktor Frankl quote above, choosing your attitude is choosing your own way.   As a human being, you get to choose how you respond to the people and events in your life.  You can choose to have a positive, optimistic attitude and respond to difficult people and events in a constructive manner.  Or, you can choose to have a negative attitude and respond to difficult people and events in a self destructive manner.  Your attitude is the difference maker between a successful, rewarding life and career and an unsuccessful and unfulfilling life and career.

Take it from a career success coach.  You get to choose how you respond to every person you meet and everything that happens that happens to you.  Your moment of choice comes in between the stimulus and your response.  This can be a small space, but it is a real space that exists.  Your attitude has a big impact on what you choose in these moments of choice.

Writing in SUCCESS, John Maxwell says, “Your attitude makes a difference in how you face challenges.  Successful people don’t have fewer problems than unsuccessful people – they just have a different mindset.”  That bares repeating – “Successful people don’t have fewer problems than unsuccessful people – they just have a different mindset.”

We all have our problems and challenges.  The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is simple.  Successful people choose to respond to problems in a positive manner.  They choose a positive, proactive approach.  They choose to take personal responsibility for themselves, their actions and their life and career success.  They choose to see problems as challenges – and they meet the challenges they encounter. 

Choose is the important word here.  We human beings have free will.  We can choose how we respond to the things that happen to us.  We can choose our attitude.  Successful people choose to respond positively to the negative people and events in their lives.  Successful people choose to have a positive attitude.

The SUCCESS article has a quote from Chuck Swindoll on the “Power of Attitude”…

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.  Attitude, to me, is more important than education, than money, than circumstance, than failures, than successes, then what other people think, say or do.  It is more important that appearance, giftedness or scale.  It will make or break a company, a church, a home.  The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we embrace for that day.  We cannot change the past.  We cannot change the fact that people act in a certain way.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.  I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90 % how I react to it; and so it is with you.  We are in charge of our attitude.”

Or as Viktor Frankl says…

“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Your attitude is the difference maker.  A positive attitude leads to positive results and career success.  A negative attitude leads to negative results.  The good thing is that you can choose your attitude.  Remember the career advice and wisdom in Tweet 39 in Success Tweets.  “While other people and events have an impact on our life, they don’t shape it.  You get to choose how you react to people and events.”  Use the free will that God has given you to create your life and career success.  Choose a positive attitude.  Choose to respond positively to the negative people and events in your life.  Remember what Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor teaches us, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”  Empower yourself to make the right choices, the positive choices, when you encounter negative people and events.

That’s my take on the career advice in Tweet 39 in Success Tweets – and the advice of Viktor Frankl, John Maxwell and Chuck Swindoll.  What’s yours?  Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thank for reading.  I have an attitude of gratitude when it comes to my readers.  I really appreciate you.

Bud