Quotable Notable: “Magic” Johnson
Brownie Point: Layoff Lemons to Leadership Lemonade
Invigorating Yourself—The Concept, Rationale, and Importance
6.5 Fresh Steps toward Invigorating Yourself
Take Your Pulse: Put your finger on the pulse of your vigor and rev up your ambition
Fresh Technologies: Create an innovation blog
The Doggie Bag: The Invigorating Yourself Takeaways
“I am a businessman. This is what I do each and every day. I love it. I love coming to work. I never have a bad day.”
—EARVIN “MAGIC” JOHNSON
NBA Hall of Famer and successful entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson is a perfect example of how maintaining a high level of vigor can allow you to achieve any aspiration you choose to aim for. Argued by some experts to be the greatest pro basketball player ever, Johnson reinvented the point guard position, was named Most Valuable Player three times, and won five NBA championships during his 14 seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers. After announcing he had contracted HIV in 1991, Johnson refused to slow down. In addition to becoming a national spokesperson for HIV prevention and education, Johnson played on the 1992 gold medal–winning U.S. Olympic basketball team and even made a comeback to play with the Lakers in the 1995–96 season.
Off the court, Johnson became a real estate entrepreneur, specializing in building movie theaters and opening franchise businesses in economically disadvantaged areas that other developers ignored, creating profits as well as improving neighborhoods. And more recently, Johnson became a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Major League Baseball franchise. By staying invigorated and positive even in the face of serious health issues, Johnson has been able to enjoy continuous personal and professional success throughout his adult life.
During many of the downsizings and reorganizations I have survived in my professional career, I always ended up with a promotion or progressive lateral move with increased scope, responsibility, and exposure. I credit this to the valuable and competitive brand that I worked to create and then made efforts to keep fresh, enhance, share, and delivered upon. All this branding work has served me well. Basically, the years of delivering my brand in a way that it could be seen by and experienced by people directly and indirectly has allowed me time and again to take the potentially negative scenario of a corporate reshuffling and obtain positive results.
However, during one of the many downsizings and reorganizations I lived through, I did become a bit nervous. This particular restructuring was said to be one of the largest downsizings in the history of the company. I was most nervous about how my new boss (I will call him Bradley) would represent me in the process of selecting who would be let go and who would remain with the company. Bradley was in his first leadership assignment and was struggling a bit to manage the team. He had only been in his current role and serving as my boss for about three months. He and I hadn’t spent much time together.
Further jangling my nerves were rumors that he wasn’t fond of my approach, based on an initial encounter that we had where I provided some constructive feedback on his leadership style. He asked for my honest opinion and I told him. I learned a critical lesson from this—although people ask for honest feedback, you need to be careful on the delivery and keep it professional!
According to my colleagues, our new boss thought I had been rude to him. A month later, he and I had a conversation to discuss the rumor. I told him I was sorry if I had come across as rude and that I respected him as my boss and the role that he held. He replied, “I think both of us acted unprofessionally and we should just squash this and move on.” We both agreed and walked away. I breathed a little easier but was still far from certain I would still be holding a job after all the layoffs had been announced.
The layoff selection process worked like this:
The process ended after three days. I received a call from my boss and he said, “There are a number of groups in the organization that want you on their team. You need to select from one of the three: Training, Engineering, and Special Projects.”
As I stood holding the receiver in my hand, I was baffled and disappointed. I said, “But I have done so well in my role as a district manager and I would like to continue on in this role, as I have worked so hard at obtaining it.”
Bradley replied, “Well, these are the choices and you need to let me know now. Oh, by the way, if you don’t select one of these roles, you will effectively be tendering your resignation.”
I went numb and silent for about two minutes. Finally, I said, “Well, I will take training.” He called me back at the end of the day and told me that the training role had been filled and that I had to take the engineering role. I said, “Do you know that I don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer?”
Bradley said, “You take the job or leave it.” I immediately said I would take it, but then became so bitter and deflated that I started packing up my laptop and company car keys to turn in to my boss. I was thinking of quitting and feeling distraught.
Shortly after that, my future boss from the engineering team called and congratulated me on my new assignment. Once again, I said, “You know I don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer.”
He said, “Michael, we are not looking for someone who can do the actual building. We are looking for someone with strong leadership skills who can help lead the organization through this massive change. We are looking for someone who can get things done and deliver bottom line results. And from what I know and have heard, you are the best candidate.”
I said OK and thanked him for the call. I now had two months to transition out of my current role. For the first week, I was bitter with myself, bitter with my colleagues, and bitter with my employees. I began to question my self-worth, question why I had worked so hard to get to this point only to have the rug snatched out from under me.
Two months later, I assumed the engineering role and was still resenting the fact that I was forced to take on a role that I had no background in, and I also feared that I had been set up to fail. I expressed this concern to my new boss and he said I should try to make the most out of the situation.
Here’s where I stood: I was remotely located and a thousand miles from my boss. I was told to train with my predecessor (who had been terminated as part of the downsizings); as you can imagine he was not interested in helping me learn the job. After about a month, I decided to pull myself up and do what Michael D. Brown is known for, which is delivering results.
I resolved to prove to myself and the organization that I could be taken out of my comfort zone and still deliver. I reached out to my staff, contractors, and anyone else that I could reach out to for help in learning the new job. About three months later, my boss came out to see me and share praise he had received from the leadership team and our clients about how focused I was and how I was able to solve problems they had been struggling with for years. He said he was giving me high marks in professionalism and customer satisfaction.
This involuntary reassignment was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. My new role had put me on a national stage and given me a level of exposure to the senior leadership team that I couldn’t have planned better. In addition, the sudden unexpected risk of losing my job had stoked a fire in my belly and forced me to invigorate myself so that I could maximize the potential of both my personal brand and the new business opportunities that were now available to me. Within seven months of taking on this new role and delivering a consistently high-level, invigorated performance, I was tapped for another role and four more promotions after that.
Staying invigorated will give you a huge leg up in making the all-important “three-second impression.” In the three seconds it takes you to walk through a door and extend your hand to someone for the first time, that person has already made irreversible judgments about you. You send out hundreds of signals about yourself, and people read those signals and react to them long before you’ve had a chance to say anything of substance. Success in the new millennium comes to people who are versatile and can make positive impressions in any group. To ensure those judgments are favorable, you need self-confidence, a positive attitude, and a neat appearance.
Remember that the greatest temptation to give up, to slack off, and to lose sight of your goals will come just before you are about to succeed. Stay laser-focused on achieving exponential personal and professional success—whether it is for yourself, your career, your organization, or your business. You must have the tenacity and discipline to go the distance and secure your personal and professional success. Fan the flame within and catch on fire!
Invigorating yourself begins with taking an energetic, enthusiastic approach to your career. One of the best ways to display this enthusiasm is to thoroughly immerse yourself in the required professional standards.
After you know the standards inside and out, compare them with your current level of professionalism and identify areas of opportunities for you to strengthen your presentation and areas where you need to quickly acquire the standards. You will have a renewed appreciation for your chosen field of expertise and a competitive edge that will fill you with vigor for success and advancement. Without this first step, any invigoration you achieve will be misapplied and ultimately wasted, as the potential for career-killing inappropriate actions and words will surely trip you up sooner or later.
In addition to allowing you to fully embrace the standards of your chosen field of expertise, staying invigorated will also give you a huge leg up in making the all-important “three-second impression.” As mentioned earlier, in the three seconds it takes you to walk through a door and extend your hand to someone for the first time, that person has already made irreversible judgments about you. You send out hundreds of signals about yourself, and people read those signals and react to them long before you’ve had a chance to say anything of substance. Ask your friends, colleagues, and/or Branding Board of Advisers to close their eyes and open them when you walk into the room and give their first impression of you. Compare this impression with your intended impression and work on closing the gaps.
Remember, success in the new millennium comes to people who are versatile and can make positive impressions on any group. To ensure people’s judgments about you are favorable, have self-confidence, a positive attitude, and a neat appearance. None of these traits is possible without a constant flow of vigor and confidence that exudes from you and is obvious to everyone you come in contact with. So stay invigorated and make those first three seconds meaningful!
“You can’t see the big picture if you are in the frame. Get help from someone who can tell you what you need to hear.”
—MICHAEL D. BROWN
While I would not advise walking up to the next person you see on the street and asking for a three-second first impression review, you can certainly conduct this exercise with someone you meet at a professional or charitable event, or perhaps someone you have never met before who knows one of your friends, relatives, or colleagues. Offer to reciprocate the exercise and give your critique of their three-second impression in order to increase the shared value. Once again, compare this impression with your intended impression and work on closing the gaps.
Ask your friends, colleagues, managers, and/or Branding Board of Advisers to select one of the following four categories to describe your energy level:
A. Energetic and ready to move.
B. Sluggish and unsure.
C. Confident and alert.
D. Unsure.
Get multiple opinions, and try to include different people whose points of view you know rarely coincide. If you receive mostly or all “A” and “C” ratings, your energy level is probably in pretty good shape. If you get any “D” ratings, your energy level may be in good shape, but you need to work on how you convey it to the outside world.
Even one or two “B” ratings indicate a potentially serious problem with your energy level. If you are properly invigorated, nobody should be able to mistake your vigor for sluggishness or lack of surety in yourself. Don’t become disheartened if you do get some “B” ratings; use the situation as an opportunity to go back and repeat the first three steps, paying extra-close attention for clues as to where exactly your energy level is sagging and what you may be able to do to jolt it back to an acceptably high voltage.
Even the strongest, most highly charged battery will start to wear down if it runs at full capacity for long enough. From time to time, your own Fresh PASSION battery may falter a bit. Properly following all the steps in this book is an undertaking that requires enormous amounts of time, energy, and dedication—but the reward is exponential. While many of the brand-building activities I describe are contagious and create their own energy that you can feed off, you will still occasionally find yourself understandably exhausted from the challenge of reaching for your highest personal and professional aspirations.
At these times, you need to give yourself an “emergency booster shot,” which is a non-brand, non-career-related activity you can partake in to step away from the grind and quickly reinvigorate yourself. An emergency booster shot can be a walk in the park, a game of golf, a matinee movie, a dinner with a friend, a concert, or even something more involved such as a well-deserved week’s vacation at the beach (if you can afford it!). Your emergency booster shot can basically be anything that is positive, enjoyable, and allows you to take a short break from your brand without becoming a distraction or obstacle. You will be surprised how much more energetic and excited you are about your brand after spending a little time away from it!
This cheerleader can be a part of your Branding Board or a totally different individual. Most important is that they have walked in your shoes and gotten somewhere during that journey. It is one thing for a friend who may know you quite well personally, but knows nothing about your chosen field of expertise, to tell you that you’re on the right track and have what it takes to succeed. It’s another thing to hear that message from somebody who is intimately familiar with your chosen field of expertise and can give you specific insights about what you’re doing right—and what you could be doing better. Just make sure this person isn’t someone who lacks the ability to motivate a three-year-old even if you paid them!
Invigorating yourself is all about maintaining a high level of energy and professionalism at all times. Sad to say, this will clearly set you apart from the everyday American worker. How do you obtain and then maintain this high energy and enthusiasm? By having fun, of course!
As opposed to Step 5, which involves stepping away from your career to take an emergency booster shot of something fun, Step 6.5 involves having fun in your studies and career-building activities. Obviously, we are talking about fun within rational limits—treat your job as one big party, and you will not go far. But by approaching the professional part of your life with a lighthearted, enthusiastic attitude, you will find it much easier to pour your heart into your goals and aspirations.
The new, invigorated you will spill over into your professional life, personal life, during networking with peers, during job interviews and performance reviews, and any other time you can think of. Keep in mind that misery already has enough company and that companies definitely don’t like misery, so stay invigorated throughout the journey.
How invigorated are you? Is your heart proudly pumping enthusiasm and confidence throughout your body, or is it timidly tapping sluggishness and lack of commitment? Answer the following questions using the scale of one to five hearts and find out if your vigor levels need “topping off.”
6.5 I know how others view me within the first three seconds.
Now that you’ve taken the test, let’s analyze your score:
Invigorating yourself is a constant process. You cannot simply declare yourself invigorated and then check off some little vigor box and be done with it (or you can, but you’ll only be fooling yourself!). Vigor, like any form of energy, needs to be recharged, replenished and renewed. Take a look at the following chart for tips on how to stay invigorated on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.
Keep your vigor flowing by composing a text message that describes how you invigorate yourself to stay fresh and passionate in your approach to building your brand and realizing your aspirations. Writing out a long, protracted text message will sap your vigor and waste energy that could be better spent elsewhere, so make it quick and snappy!
You can create a steady stream of bubbling innovation by creating a blog. Create an innovation blog dedicated to brainstorming new and creative approaches to your schoolwork, extracurricular activities, internships and co-ops, and other career-building activities. In addition to posting your own thoughts, you can invite friends, relatives, colleagues, and network members to participate. Open your blog up to public comment to further expand the depths from which innovation can bubble up!
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6.5 One of the most important aspects of vigor is having fun. Apply a lighthearted attitude to even your most difficult tasks and don’t be afraid to find ways to enjoy what may otherwise be tedious tasks. You can’t take a “party all the time” attitude and sometimes professionalism requires a serious demeanor, but you will find yourself far more invigorated when you’re having fun and interested in what you’re doing than when you’re miserable and bored.