11 YOU CAN NEVER BE A PROPHET IN YOUR OWN LAND

If you think that standing up for what you believe in and thinking out loud can have harmful effects on your income, your career, and your life, then you are not thinking for yourself. You are thinking about how other people will perceive your thoughts. You don’t have to be outrageous; you don’t have to be combative; you just have to be focused and fearless.

Someone out there in the world already hates you. You may or may not know each other, but they hate you because of your sex, race, nationality, lack of money, possession of money, because of how you voted, because you didn’t vote, and so on. Is that terrible? Yes, of course. Does it change your day-to-day life? No, because you probably don’t know who they are, or you just flat out avoid them. People hate us for things that are beyond our control. We cannot avoid being hated or prevent bias toward us, but we can avoid being affected by it. We can move past it and do our own thing. Bias is everywhere—even in ourselves—whether or not we are aware of it or acknowledge it.

What do we really have to worry about by being too authentic? People care about how you make them feel and how you might benefit them, far more than they care about what you do. That is not selfishness; it is a human trait. How many times have you been tagged in a group photo online, and when you got the image, the first person you looked at in the photo wasn’t yourself? Probably rarely or never, like most of us. We worry so much about what other people think of us without stopping to consider that they’re usually thinking about themselves.

BREAK THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES OF FAMILIARITY

As you grow your brand, you will start to feel resistance from people you know and love. It is not that they don’t want you to succeed; it is that they don’t want the relationship to change. People dislike change in general, and as you become more recognizable and more of a thought-leader, the people closest to you may fear your development. However, this might only last for a short time before everyone accepts the change.

The people closest to you are too familiar with you to really understand or know how to support you as you grow. This can be stifling to your growth. If you try to see yourself as the people around you do, you won’t know if or when you are capable of something greater. This can be true in a family environment, work environment, relationship, or even a friendship. When you pursue goals beyond what you have historically done, the people closest to you may not see the opportunities or your abilities as clearly as an outsider would. We are all more attractive to people outside of our immediate circle. This is based on the law of familiarity: the longer you are around something, the more you take it for granted.

Having worked with executives and leaders from around the world, I have noticed a few significant differences in perspectives on personal branding:

≫ People who are coming from long-term business partnerships or who work within organizations tend to shy away from the idea of personal branding; they share success with their peers and are overly humble and modest about their achievements.

≫ People who are out of their geographical elements tend to thrive in personal branding; they’re open to change, they’re not limited by their immediate networks, and they don’t face as much discouraging feedback from people they know.

≫ People who have been in long-term careers tend to undervalue their abilities and avoid attention.

RESISTANCE FROM PEOPLE WHO DON’T LOVE YOU

You will be sure to find people who dislike you everywhere you go. As you build your brand and start using your voice more, you will find more people who think they dislike you. Instead of retreating or downplaying your success, you will have to push through the feeling of wanting to succeed in front of your haters. You will have to ignore them or learn to kill them with kindness.

When people say and do negative things to others, I have found that it is usually because of a negative or insecure feeling they have about themselves. But sometimes people just don’t agree with you, and that is okay; they don’t have to. As my grandmother often says, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend ’til death your right to say it.”

If you spend too much time defending yourself from people who disagree with you, then you will lose valuable time needed to achieve your goals. I always like to squash these situations by responding, “I’m sorry you feel that way. I hope you have a nice day.” Or I respond by acknowledging something positive about them from their bio. People can’t stay mad at a stranger who compliments them—at least not for long.

DON’T THINK YOU CAN HANDLE THE PRESSURE OF YOUR HATERS?

I get it. Some people are scared and nervous at the prospect of going against the grain, exposing themselves and their ideas to the world, and risking what could happen if they fail. Anyone who has seen the “Mean Tweets” segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! can understand how it might be difficult for people to build a brand and promote themselves. It can open you up to negative feedback and discrimination.

Though I have received only a small amount of negative commentary and email, it has happened. Once I even had a troll email my job because I had written a story about a D-list celebrity who was trolled online. The trolls turned into crazies, who emailed my employer saying that they had hired a “gadget girl” and suggesting that I should be fired. I wasn’t fired, but I was not allowed to walk to my car alone after work.

NEXT TIME YOU THINK THE CARDS ARE STACKED AGAINST YOU, THINK OF SARAH BREEDLOVE

Sarah Breedlove is considered the first female self-made millionaire. At the time of her death, she was worth $600,000, which would be about $8 million today. Sarah Breedlove was not an ordinary entrepreneur or millionaire by male or female standards. If you have heard of her, you probably know her as Madame C.J. Walker. She was an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, as well as a political and social activist. She is considered the world’s most successful female entrepreneur of her time and one of the most successful African American business owners of all time.

Sarah was born into a family near Delta, Louisiana, on December 23, 1867, the youngest of six children. She was the first person in her family to be born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Her mother died when Sarah was only five, and her father passed away two years later. She was an orphan at the age of seven. At age ten and with no formal education, she moved in with her sister and got a job as a housekeeper. At age fourteen, she married a man named Moses McWilliams, presumably to escape her abusive brother-in-law. Imagine that you have no education, both of your parents are dead, you work as a maid, you are a black woman living in the South in the years after the Emancipation Proclamation, your sister’s husband abuses you, and to escape the abuse you end up married at age fourteen.

In 1885, when Sarah was eighteen, she gave birth to a daughter, Lelia McWilliams. Two years later, her husband, Moses, passed away. Now she was a single mother, who needed to quickly figure out what to do in order to take care of her daughter. So Sarah and Lelia moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to be near Sarah’s three older brothers. There she took a job as a laundress, earning less than a dollar a day.

Sarah’s goals were clear and simple: to make enough money for her daughter to go to school and get a formal education. For fun, Sarah would sing in the church choir and visit her brothers at the barbershop where they worked.

As she aged, Sarah began to experience the hair loss and dandruff common for African American women at that time. This was in part caused by the harsh hair-care products they used, many of which included ingredients such as lye that were found in soaps for washing clothes. Other factors that caused scalp issues and hair loss were a lack of indoor plumbing, infrequent showering, and poor diet. Whatever the reasons, Sarah was experiencing this problem, and she wasn’t happy about it.

She decided to take a job as a commission agent for Annie Turnbo Malone, the owner of an African American hair-care company. Since Sarah had hair and scalp problems of her own, she was very interested in these products. She began to learn about them and then to alter them. Eventually she realized that she had a better formula, and she started to develop her own product line. During this time, Sarah also married and divorced her second husband, John Davis. Sarah knew how to think for herself, both professionally and personally.

In 1905, while still working for Malone, Sarah moved with her daughter to Colorado, where she met Charles Joseph Walker, the man who would become her third husband. After they married in 1906, Sarah took her husband’s last name and started her own company with him. She changed her name to Madam C.J. Walker, to match the goal of the business. The title “Madam” was inspired by successful entrepreneurs and pioneers in the French beauty industry. Madam C. J. Walker began selling her products door-to-door, teaching other black women how to care for the style and health of their hair.

Later that year, Sarah put her daughter in charge of shipping products for the orders that she and her husband took as they traveled through the United States, selling their products door-to-door. The following year, they opened a beauty salon and school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, called Lelia College of Beauty Culture, to train future “beauty culturists.” The couple would eventually open another salon and school in Harlem, New York.

Just four years after launching her door-to-door business, Sarah opened her own manufacturing company in Indianapolis. Between 1911 and 1919, Madam C.J. Walker’s company employed thousands of women to sell her products. The women wore white or black skirts and carried black bags. They went door-to-door to sell not only the product but also the brand message.

All of the women Madam C.J. Walker employed as beauty culturists were taught “the Walker Method,” including how to budget and open their own businesses. In 1917, she created state and local clubs for her sales agents to participate in. She named her association the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C.J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America). The association held events and national gatherings, and gave awards to the saleswomen who sold the most, brought in the most new sales agents, and made the largest donations to their local charities.

Sarah Walker was also a philanthropist and visionary. In 1912, she spoke to the annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.”

At the same conference the following year, Madam C.J. Walker was the keynote speaker. Her philanthropic work was extensive and effective. She donated to the building fund for the Indianapolis Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). She also provided scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute, Indianapolis House, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, among other organizations.

Sarah Breedlove not only worked for the black community, she also worked to create an acceptance of it. She moved to New York City in 1918, where she became the assistant secretary for Negro affairs of the United States Department of War. She went on to become more and more political, giving speeches on political, social, and economic issues at conventions and events sponsored by black institutions.

Sarah Breedlove built an empire, empowered a community, brought positive change, and developed an incredible personal brand in a time when women had few rights and black women had even fewer. To give you an idea of the kind of world she was up against, she never had the right to vote in America despite her influence. Sarah passed away in May 1919, and women were granted the right to vote in June 1919 (ratified August 1920).

So the next time you start to tell yourself that you have it rough or that something is impossible, think of Sarah “Madam C.J. Walker” Breedlove. She stood behind her beliefs, her drive, and her love for community to build something out of nothing. She is a true role model for success and perseverance. She is the kind of person we should honor, and everyone should know her name.