Hey guys, I am so excited to be coming to you today from one of my favorite places on grounds at the University of Virginia. I think it is one of the coolest spaces. It's called Open Grounds, and it is a collaborative work space that is meant to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, which is so neat. And you can come in here, they have all kinds of cool technology. You can see a little bit behind me, but they have monitors and they have support, and you can come in and have meetings here, and some faculty teach classes here. But it's a really cool space, and so I'm excited that I get to be out of my office and working in here today. Today's lecture, what I want to address is how often you should revisit your three words, your mission statement, and your photo. We talk about the fact that we need to address other things in having to do with our personal brand, and I feel like it's really important to address these things. In my opinion, you need to revisit your three words at least annually. That is really important, just to periodically check in with yourself. We talk about the fact that with your board of directors, if you can meet with them annually, just to keep your goals in mind and if you didn't meet your goals or if something changed and you changed direction. Having that kind of opportunity where you are accountable to other people, is quite helpful because it keeps you on track. When you know that you're gonna be accountable to other people and that you're gonna be having to make this report, you're gonna be thinking, I think, a bit more mindfully about what you're doing and how you're going about it. So, for your three words, I would say at least annually, you want to revisit those. Now, this may not be true for everybody, remember this is not a one size fits all kind of thing. This is suppose to be personal. Personal branding. Personal to you. And, so that may not be true for you. You may pick three keywords and stick with them for the rest of your career, and that may work out great for you. Other people, you may need to change them every six months. It just depends on you, on your work, on where life takes you, because I can tell you personally that you think you're going in one direction and suddenly life has other plans and you're going in a different direction. Now, my three words were honesty, integrity, and creativity, and those are sort of what I think of as being bedrock words. They're not super trendy, and there are things that I'll always have, I hope, and, I think, things that will always be important to me. Honesty, integrity, and creativity. And I know we've talked, if you haven't seen the lecture on how personal should your personal brand be, take a look at that, but this kind of ties into that, because my three words, they're not just for me professionally. They're for me personally, as well, because those are very, very important things to me. I wanna be honest, I wanna have integrity, and I wanna be creative in my personal life, and with my family life, and all those other areas that are non work related. So to me, those are sort of, as I said before, bedrock words that I can see fitting into my life no matter what kind of work I might do. If my job changes, I think those three things will be kind of classic. If this were a style quiz, those would be the classic words as opposed to trendy. But it just depends, and it's gonna depend on the nature of your work. So, those are things to keep in mind. So, annually, every six months, if you feel like you're on the verge of a major change, that's a great time to revisit your three words. Same thing with your mission statement. All of these things that we're doing should be living documents. These are not things that you can do once and forget them. These are things that you should constantly be revisiting and keeping in mind and they should be kinda your load stones. Your guiding star, if you will. And just make sure that they are, continue to be applicable to your work, because if they're not and it's no longer what you want out of your personal brand or your career, then you need to change that. It's that simple. One word about your photo, we've talked about the importance of a really good quality photo. Have you again, this is not how attractive you are, it's another way to further your brand. How you're dressed, if you're dressed kind of casually, that says something about you. Your surroundings say something about you. But, we've talked about all that before. But what I would say about how often you should update your photo is if you experience a major change in your appearance, you should update your photo. Particularly if you're gonna be meeting people whom you don't know and the only way that they know what you look like is a photo of you on the web. So, for instance, if I cut my hair really short and dyed it bright purple or went bright blonde, I would need to update my photo, because the last thing you want to do is show up to a meeting and have them, just, you don't want to start off the meeting with them being thrown off balance because you look completely different from your photo. That is not the way to start off a meeting, because that sort of can make people feel very uncomfortable and they're like, well, if this is different, what else is different. So you always want your photo on the web to mach your current appearance, so just keep that in mind. Me I'll probably never cut my hair cuz I never want to have to have a photo taken ever again, so I think I'm serious about that to. Anyway, please let me know, let everybody else know in the forums, how you feel about this. If you think this is a good schedule and if you've done some of this, how often you feel like updating worked for you? We'd love to hear from you and I hope it was helpful.
