Forget New Year’s Resolutions!

Say what? Why?

Making resolutions at the beginning of a new year is a centuries’ old ritual that creates more disappointment and sense of failure than positive results. The reason is that too often resolutions are simply unrealistic promises about what changes you’d like to see, or feel you should or have to make. As such, they tend to lack the commitment, motivation, and structure that can make them successful.

Yet there are those who do the same thing over and over, get the same crummy results, but still expect to get different results the next time they do it. They need to wake up and smell hard reality. Edison would never have created the light bulb filament if he kept testing candle wicks ad infinitum ad nauseam.

Studies done by Dr. John Norcross at University of Scranton showed that only 50 percent of those who made New Year's resolutions kept them for three months.

Rather than resolutions, the confident self-promoter and others should think realistically about what changes they’d like to make. Change is often difficult to achieve because it involves risk and moving out of your comfort zone. While you may not like where you are, you know what to expect and have adapted to your situation in a fashion.

Change represents the unknown, uncertainty, stress, lots of effort, and some pain. For many “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.” So those New Year's promises end up being wishful thinking with little chance of achieving your desired goal.

Instead of making abstract promises, you need to give yourself a break this year and decide what you really want to do. You need to make it as concrete and specific as possible and express it in behavioral terms. Saying you want to “make a lot of money this year” is an unachievable goal. What’s “a lot”? How do you know when you’ve achieved it?

Instead, you need to go for a specific amount but that amount has to be realistic. If you’re making $35,000 a year, it’s probably not very realistic to say you’re going to make $1 million this year. But you might be able to make $60,000 depending upon your p-l-a-n.

Oops! I said the “p” word. Whatever your goal for this new year is it has to have a plan behind it, directing your action. That plan isn’t just breaking the task down into digestible bits and delineating what steps you need to accomplish it. It is also finding ways to tailor the plan to your personality, values, attitudes, habits, and lifestyle. You want to make it as enjoyable and satisfying as possible so it doesn’t feel like hard, slogging work that you'll want to avoid.

For example, deciding that you want to make your additional $25K through speaking engagements may conflict with your discomfort with flying or the amount of time you need to care for an elderly parent on an ongoing basis. But, then again, if speaking is what you really want to do, you may use this as an opportunity to explore other ways of handling those particular life obstacles to give you more flexibility – like taking speaking engagements only within driving distance or finding other assistance for your parent when you can’t be there.

Once you decide what your concrete, specific, measurable, and achievable goal is, you have to figure out exactly how you’re going to achieve it. To make an additional $25K a confident self-promoter could do teleseminars and sell the transcripts and MP3s. You could coach, consult, or speak. You could create e-books, CDs, or home study courses. You could become an affiliate to programs you like.

Whatever you choose singly or in combination, you want to have a sense that it can make the amount you’re seeking, that you’d enjoy doing it, and that it fits with your schedule and life.

You also should be sure to make a public commitment to follow through with your plan. Sharing with others, and even getting constructive feedback from them on it, helps reinforce your motivation to stick with your plan. When making changes, you will tend to have periods of uncertainty and feeling alone. Having a support network can bolster your resolve, help you reward yourself for your progress, and keep you on track.

Furthermore, it's important that you don’t make your plan a matter of "success" or "failure" - life or death. Making $60K as a goal isn’t etched in stone. You may discover as you achieve each successive step in your plan that $50K is more realistic based upon what you’re doing. Or you may choose to alter the way you make the additional $25K or the time period in which you’re doing it.

Resolutions, promises, and wishful thinking can, potentially, lead to your making plans to achieve a goal, but far too often don’t. If you’re really serious about getting what you want – what you really want, then kiss New Year’s Resolutions good-bye.

Self-Promotion is Not About You!

I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s true. That’s because whether you’re promoting your business, a charitable organization, a political candidate, a cause, or yourself, the promotion is about your target audience.

“Yeah, I know,” you say. “I have the demographics on them: age, income, and residential area – all that physical stuff.” But while demographics are necessary, increasingly they are not sufficient. “But,” you say, “I also have psychographics on them: attitudes, values, lifestyle, opinions, and personality characteristics – all that psychological stuff.” Again, while psychographics is necessary, increasingly it is not sufficient.

As the marketing seas change from emphasis on promoting you and your features, they are shifting to drilling down to understanding where your target audience is emotionally at the moment - what their fears, needs, and desires are. They’re also focusing on what benefits you can provide your audience wherever they are.

How do you do that? Online marketer Alex Mandossian says, “Do an Ask Campaign.” You cannot simply assume you know what your audience wants from their demographics and psychographics alone. If you want to match what you provide with your audience, you have to ask them directly what their most burning question is about your topic (a topic which you already know is of interest to them generally).

This tells you exactly what they want and need. You can then fashion your self-promotion around these questions and your answers to them. In doing this:

You demonstrate your interest in what’s important to them
You begin to further develop a rapport and relationship
You showcase your solutions to their problems
You highlight the benefits only your solutions provide
You are seen as a caring and accessible expert.

What all this boils down to is when you promote yourself, you need to do it in such a way that it is first and foremost about your audience and their immediate problem. Then when you have their attention, you begin to introduce what you can do to solve their problem, detailing your benefits and how they are superior to the competition's.

It is still about you but in a more savvy, relationship-building, and productive way.

Giving = Four-Fold Returns

Holidays and giving are synonymous. But, of course, giving isn’t necessarily only physical gifts. When you as a confident self-promoter also look beyond physical gifts, you can create a state of even greater giving … and receiving.

As you may know, I’m the proud mom of 13 felines. No, I’m not a hoarder but a member of an animal rescue group in Corrales, NM, called C.A.R.M.A. (Companion Animal Rescue and Medical Assistance). I’ve adopted hard-to-place, disabled cats, and sick cats (however, density-wise, 13 is the absolute limit).

Several of the ways I help CARMA, besides Pictures with Santa, the adoption clinics, and an occasional check, include writing timely articles and media releases about them and offering free coaching or free seminars for those who make a minimum contribution to CARMA.

When I do these activities, CARMA gets visibility and increased donations. I, on the other hand, get a feeling of having contributed significantly AND secure visibility for what I do as well as who I am as a charitable person. This is a big win-win!

If I had a business having to do with benefiting animals, it would be an even bigger win for me as a self -promoter. That, however, should not the overriding factor in your giving - promoting efforts. Positive visibility is positive visibility, irrespective of what your business is.

While there are all kinds of ways you can give, it is important for you to match what you’re giving to you so that people can make the association. That is not to say that you’re creating a slick commercial for yourself making it all about you. Besides being tacky, that takes away from the focus of your charitable effort and erases the impression of your doing this for charitable reasons.

You can subtly make yourself known via a relevant author bio with an article, mention of what services you're exchanging for donations in the press release, or letting people know you’re offering a complimentary helpful report on something associated with the charity and with you. With a little brainstorming you can create lots of possibilities.

Holidays (any holidays!) can be a particularly effective, indirect exposure of who you are and what you promote. They add another positive identification aspect to the rapport and relationship you’re creating with your audience. And ... you're sharing and helping those in need.

Cite It Correctly Or Don't Cite It At All!

As I've mentioned, stories, analogies, metaphors, examples, and quotations are very useful in helping your listener become interested and involved in what you are saying. However, when you choose that special something to make your point or give it weight, be sure you are stating it correctly and attributing authorship correctly.

I subscribe to a few informative marketing e-zines and hard copy newsletters which I scan for updates, new information, tips, strategies, and tactics. When I see something (large or small) that isn't quite accurate, it jumps out at me and stops me cold, totally disrupting my train of thought.

One guru, for example, said he was playing around with the concept of "feast" as a marketing metaphor. Great concept! But then he mentioned turn-of-the-century actress Lillian Russell and "her famous quote": Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.

"What?!" I thought. "That's not right. Lillian Russell didn't say that." Then a spent the next few precious minutes recalling who said what under what circumstances, totally detached from his newsletter and marketing advice.

The fact is that the line "Life is a banquet ..." is not a quotation from a person. It's a line from the book "Auntie Mame" (by Patrick Dennis, aka Edward Everett Tanner) which shows up in the film "Auntie Mame" and then in the musical "Mame." Furthermore, Lillian Russell didn't say the line (this was way after her time). Rosalind Russell did in the film.

I've seen this (and other things) misattributed or misstated before. This suggests to me that those individuals didn't check it for accuracy before using it. After all, if another guru used it, it must be okay. As I have learned the hard way, unless you know it is correct, you should always go to a highly respected reference (or the original source) whenever possible to check.

Mistakes are perpetuated and become gospel simply by people just repeating them. And, as we all know, the Net is rife with incorrect information and opinion masquerading as fact.

You may be saying, "Big deal! It's just a crummy line in a book or play." What makes it a big deal for the confident self-promoter is that even the smallest factual errors can, at the very least, distract your reader or listener ... or, at the most, create dissonance and irritate them, sending them to search their mental files, or elsewhere, for the correct information, letting your message drift away.

Afterward, they may wonder how careful you are. Their minds may dance around the idea that if one obvious (to them) mistake occurs, perhaps there are others. At which point they may focus on whether other mistakes are made or they may tune you out altogether. In either case, they may block out the rest of what you're saying. A seemingly simple error and - suddenly - you've lost them!

You never want to give your audience the opportunity to become disengaged from your message. Your objective is to have them see you as very credible - someone they can believe in and trust. They don't expect you to be perfect but they do expect you to be correct in what you tell them as you engage them in your area of expertise.

Just Ask Ollie: Ya Gotta Tell A Story

When you're trying to get your message across, you can provide information. You can explain things. You can make suggestions. These are necessary but they also need support. Nothing quite grabs people's attention, engages and involves them, creates understanding, and bolsters identification like stories or anecdotes.

Let me give you a personal example. People who have self-presentation anxiety or marketing reluctance often feel they are the only ones who suffer from fear of being negatively evaluated, found wanting, and rejected by those with whom they interact. Furthermore, they're convinced there's no hope of recovery. As a result, I share with them how I responded before I recovered:

The jarring, jangling, heart-pumping sound of the office phone ringing filled me with dread, nearly making my hair stand on end. Every nerve ending was firing as I wrung my sweating hands. The malevolent instrument was demanding that I pick it up, but I just couldn't. I didn't know what was awaiting me on the other end of the line.

But after a moment of frozen panic, I'd check the caller ID. If I knew the person and why they were likely calling, I could prepare myself at least a little. But when it read "Out of Area" or "Unavailable," a heavy weight dropped into my legs and my mouth became parched. It was indecision time: To answer or not to answer.

Answering without knowing who was calling left me certain I'd babble, humiliate myself, and look totally incompetent. But if I let it go to the answering machine, I'd have to call back ... which was worse. And ... heaven help me if I got their answering machine! Suddenly I'd have 30 seconds to as quickly as possible say all the "right" things in the right order. I'd rather have eaten worms. Fortunately, I found a way to avoid that delicacy.

Ollie North talked about numbers of things wherein he painted a picture. He spoke about Abu Nidal and a specific brutal killing. He talked about wanting to go mano y mano with this terrorist. He talked about why he accepted a security fence to protect his family after receiving death threats. In every instance he reached his listeners where they live. He strongly put a face on the facts that his listeners could see in their minds.

Stories or anecdotes you relate don't have to be brilliant or witty. But they do have to resonate with your audience. They have to leave them with the vivid picture and accompanying emotion you desire ... a portrait you want them to remember, think about, and continue to ruminate upon.

Promoting Yourself Doesn't Mean Becoming an Ollie North Clone

Somehow mentioning self-promotion techniques and Ollie North in the same breath makes some people uncomfortable. So let's do little comparison:

Think about Ollie North at Iran-Contra Hearings:

1. How would you describe the image he projected?
2. What adjectives would you use to describe him as he presented himself?
3. What was his message?
4. What image did he project?

Now think about yourself in promoting your business:

1. How would you describe the image you project?
2. What adjectives would you use to describe yourself as you present yourself?
3. What is your message?
4. What image do you project?

No matter who you are and what your goal is, you have to project your image in a way that resonates with your audience and gets your message across. The objective is to create visibility and credibility because they are the linch pins of achieving success in your business.

Specifically, visibility is not only being seen but also being seen as synonymous with your message. This means that you have to believe in your message and that it is important for others to believe too. Your credibility is your expertise, legitimacy, and professionalism in what you do in your work and how you promote yourself.

Part of your legitimacy is what you say and how you say it. It is fashioned by your personality and values. You're not creating a character out of whole cloth - or being an actor - who is spouting things in which you do not believe. Seeing you as being honest and truthful about what you say makes you worthy of your audience's belief and trust.

Your image determines how your audience views you, values you, is attracted to you, identifies with you, trusts you, and wants to interact with you. Your image defines how you want your audience to think about you and your message and then respond to you and it.

Remember: Your image grabs your audience's attention. It creates expectations and sets the tone for potential interaction. Your image is what gets your foot in the door so you can present your message to your audience and persuade them of its benefit to them.

To work on your visibilty and credibility you need to examine your image and message and ask:

1. What image do you want to project?
2. What image are you currently projecting?
3. How is your audience perceiving you?
4. How are they responding to that perception?
5. What is your message?
6. What do you want your audience to know?
7. How do you want them to respond to that information?
8. What is your goal in concrete, specific behavioral terms?
9. Are you getting your message across as efficiently, effectively, and economically as possible?
10. Are you achieving your goal?

Creating visibility and credibility for yourself is not a once-in-awhile proposition - at least, not if you want to get your message out and achieve your goal. Doing this requires continuous effort, looking for more effective ways to hit your audience up-close and personal.

That is not to say that all audiences are alike - they're not. As a result, you have to recognize that each audience may require a slightly different approach to your image and message. This may sound slick, but it isn't. It is simply acknowledging that each group may be different, knowing what they want, and demonstrating to them ways you personally and honestly can understand them and identify with them so you're speaking their language.

This is precisely what Ollie North did. He knew his audience. He communicated with them in a way that would show he was one of them. He appealed to their values, expectations, and interests. He let them identify with him as "underdog" and fight along with him to overcome perceived "injustice."

Self-Promotion Purpose - Alberto Gonzales & Ollie North

Being a “confident self-promoter” isn’t just feeling confident promoting yourself. It’s also being confident that you understand your customer/client better than they understand themselves.

That is, you know them so well you can predict with a high degree of certainty what they want and how best to give it to them. You have confidence in your knowledge and it is the core of all you do in your promotion. The person who knows them best is the person who can ethically massage them to get their belief, trust, and business.

However, not all “confident self-promotion” is alike … or even acceptable. Being a “confident self-promoter” isn’t necessarily the same as being one with an honest and ethical purpose. One has only to look at Alberto Gonzales in 2007 or Ollie North during the Iran-Contra Congressional Hearings in 1987 to see where the difference lies.

Both Gonzales and North were confident and promoted themselves well toward their respective goals – goals benefiting themselves, not their audience. But of the two it was Oliver North who created a theatrically spectacular self-promotion campaign that provides us with a useful model. Let’s take at look at what he did and the results he got.

It was July 7, 1987, when then-Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver L. North stood in front of a packed Senate hearing room, before him two tiers of 26 elected officials, sitting behind stacks of three-ring binders of documents and testimony. Before and below that investigatory panel sat this lone, decorated military figure, the object of every gaze and the subject of every question.

This was the aloof, enigmatic National Security Council Aide who had stonewalled the Iran-Contra Congressional Hearing for seven months by refusing to testify, give depositions, or cooperate in any way about lying, selling guns, and illegally shredding documents. He had been tagged a “dangerous loose cannon.” As a result, his public favorability rating was barely 6 percent!

However, North was an experienced and effective fundraiser for the Republican National Committee. He was well-known for his powers of persuasion. He used his speaking and promotion skills to create the image that would best get his message across.

First he used his physical appearance to set the tone. He was clad in a perfectly-fitted Marine dress uniform, resplendent with six rows of ribbons and one row of medals. (not his normal business suit). His military attire shouted “this is someone who served his country and did so proudly – think God, Country, family, loyalty, and sacrifice.”

He used nonverbal behavior to look forthright and honest – a poster boy for apple pie, motherhood, and the flag. He made himself the “scapegoat,” underdog, and victim at the hearings, taking the blame for everything. With his jaw firmly set, he extended lower lip and furrowed brow, looking like a feisty David before the Goliath-like committee.

He used folksy words, such as, “golly, gee,” “neat idea, “I pray to God,” and let his voice crack like Jimmy Stewart’s when he was angry. He never did anything to break his focus with specific senators or the mood he was creating. Everything was expressed in throat-catching appeals to patriotism, sentiment, nobility, and justice.

He used illustrations, from a blowup of a newspaper article on Abu Nidal, whose group brutally murdered an 11-year-old girl, to stories, analogies, characterizations, speeches, and props to underscore every point he made. It was a masterpiece of choreography.

But the most spectacular aspect of North’s testimony was his control. He controlled his image – from macho and gung-ho to contrite then humble, boyish, and homespun. He controlled what he said, how he said it, and his emotions for maximum impact. He controlled his audience’s understanding of the intent of his message and their response to it.

His real audience was not the Senate Committee. It was the 55 million television viewers nationwide. He tailored the form and content of his presentation to the medium and his knowledge of his audience. He played to the intimate, emotional intensity of television to grab and hold them, leaving them to hang on his every word.

How effective was "confident self-promoter" Oliver North in creating the visibility and credibility he wanted? Only one day after his testimony, his public favorability rating shot from barely 6 percent to 43 percent!

Furthermore, 60 percent of polled TV viewers now expressed sympathy for him, 67 percent believed him a” true patriot,” and 84 percent thought him “truthful.” Posters, buttons, T-shirts, and billboards sprang up, proclaiming, “Real Americans Love Ollie” and “Ollie North for President.”

Using brilliant “confident self-promotion techniques,” Oliver North literally overnight transformed his public image from that of “lying, swaggering, messianic crook” to that of “selfless, flag-wrapped Guardian of the Western Hemisphere.” This he parlayed into becoming the darling of the lecture circuit, at $25K per gig, and a nationally syndicated talk show host with a popular Internet site.

No matter how you felt about Ollie North, he was a past-master of “confident self-promotion.” But don’t let his dishonest use of these strategies cause you to reject their honest use. The strategies themselves are legitimate, professional, and highly effective.

Everything depends upon your purpose in using them. When it’s honest, ethical, and geared toward benefiting your audience, you can use them to create the image you want and to get your audience to know, like, and trust you. When they feel that rapport, they'll do business with you. All of which further increases your confident self-promotion.

Gonzales Named “Lawyer of the Year”? Bad PR!

It has been said that publicity, any publicity, is good. However, it seems unlikely that this applies to publicity for lawyers.

Lawyers have long suffered from a negative public image. A Harris Poll conducted in August of 2006 found that only 26% of those surveyed found lawyers “trustworthy.” In two ongoing national surveys I’m conducting (one for lawyers and one for the public) on the factors contributing to this problem, lawyers and the public alike state that lawyers are seen as arrogant, deceptive, deceitful, and lying.

For the American Bar Association Journal to award former-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the title of “Lawyer of the Year” only further reinforces the negative public perception of lawyers.

While Edward A. Adams, editor and publisher of the magazine, says they gave the award to lawyers who “made the most news,” “who are noteworthy,” most people will likely nod to themselves and mutter, “Yeah, that figures!”

After all, one usually expects that honors like “Lawyer of the Year” would go to those who have demonstrated the highest principles of law or made the greatest contribution to upholding justice. That turns out to be a big chuckle in this case!

One is certainly hard pressed to think of Gonzales in those terms. He resigned amid investigations of his breaking the law and lying to Congress about such things as possible politically-motivated firings of nine U.S. attorneys and illegally tampering with a witness in ongoing Congressional and Justice Department inquiries

Even though publisher Adams says that the persons picked “do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the ABA,” ‑ and some 40,000 lawyers in the U.S., one has to wonder if their awards’ committee’s social awareness and marketing savvy were out-to-lunch when they appeared to positively sanction the tainted Gonzales and his questionable official actions.

I have to ask Adams and his committee: Don't you care about the impression you've created of the ABA and lawyers alike? If I were a lawyer trying to create positive visibility and credibility with my public, I would be more than a little displeased with the Gonzales award: I'd be embarrassed!

FLASH! It now appears that swift and rampant outrage from those most affected by this bad publicity has caused the editor of the ABA Journal to take action. Because of the so-called "confusion" of the original award title, "Lawyer of the Year" is being changed to "Newsmaker of the Year."

That reminds me of what the Pennsylvania Dutch used to say: "Too soon old and too late smart."

Lawyers who’d like to participate in my Factors Contributing to Negative Public Image of Lawyers Survey can do so at: http://www.confidentselfpromotion.com/lawyer-survey.htm

Non-lawyers can participate at: http://www.speakwithoutfearnow.com/public-lawyer-survey.htm

I have a gift for your participation in these short, anonymous surveys.