Your Strategy Is Uniquely Yours Alone
I spend most of my days thinking about, reading about, writing about and talking about strategy for individuals, small businesses, and huge corporate brands. When you look closely at what I do, it will soon become apparent that like snowflakes that every strategy is uniquely different and in that way they’re all the same.
True strategy draws from who you are, where you’ve been, what you know, what you’ve experienced, and decisions you’ve made. So even though an individual, a small business, and a huge corporation might all have the same vision, mission, and goals. The opportunities that come to them are as different as who they are and what they know.
A solid brand is like your character. Build on who you are, not on a strategic plan.
It’s a serious risk to invent a brand that isn’t you or the values that your business is built upon. What happens when you do is that the brand becomes a bad facsimile of what you really are. And sooner or later the true you leaks out in some way — you don’t live up to what you invented.
You can’t write my blog post. You can’t give my talk. You can try to copy me, but you’ll always be a copy.
The value in what you do you is your own version of the way you do things.
I can’t be Copyblogger Chris Brogan, Oprah, or even my own mother, but I’m one heck of a Liz Strauss.
The closer we get to understanding who we are and what we value, the more people trust us to show up in ways that we say. They see, feel, and respect that we are living what we’re saying and they know they can trust that. It resonates with others when we ARE who we ARE, not just how we act.
And within us, our businesses and our corporation, the integrity and confidence of know who we are offer rich context that telegraphs itself to anyone who hears any one of us talk or anyone talk about us..
Don’t reinvent yourself. Don’t re-engineer new ways of reaching out.
Reconnect to your values and be what the best version of you is about.
That’s how you’ll attract the people who share those value with you.
It’s the YOU in what you do that makes the brand, the business, and the team work the way it does. No one can compete with that. People can join in, adding to the story and enhancing the mission.
The you in what you do is the ultimate barrier to entry. It attracts opportunity, but defies replication.
Read that sentence again. Information, products and services are all over the world and all over the Internet, but there’s only one YOU. No one can do, see, think or add the difference you make in exactly the same way you do. Anything that isn’t you … isn’t your brand – it’s discounting your true value and values.
That unique YOU is the part that people love, protect, stay loyal to, and bring their friends to experience.
You are the value. You are the difference.
Have you figured out what’s the YOU in what you do?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
