Heeding My Own Advice

I fell victim to a common mistake, and it took me two years to notice. I was so busy helping other people that I forgot to heed my own advice.

I have spent the past two years recommending strategic, integrated communications – best practises to spread a unified message across multiple available platforms. As an illustration, I recommend that if you publish a newsletter, you should break the individual articles apart and repurpose them as blog posts. Those blog posts can be automatically fed to Facebook and Twitter accounts (if it’s appropriate for your brand). This can help to drive traffic to your website, and the circle can be completed by allowing easy access to your social media sites by providing quick links on your website.

I missed this last part.

The simple act of inserting clickable social media icons on my own website has eluded me until this week. The new-and-improved Sociable Communications website now includes direct links to the social media accounts I have been populating for years. This not only offers more communications functionality, but I think it looks better too. I consciously went for a minimalist design on my site, but the added splash of colour works for me.

It’s a common mistake to overlook the simple things in life and in business, even if they are elements that you recommend to others each day. Still, it’s a reminder that we all need to spend a bit of time and attention re-examining our own daily approach to the way we present ourselves and our business. You can always find a way to improve things and evolve your processes for the better.

I always liked a quote from The Shawshank Redemption:  “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” My interpretation of the line is that it’s always in your best interest to seek self-improvement and growth. The challenge is that with a bit of ambition, you are often looking for the forest and the trees, forgetting to prune the bushes at your feet. It’s sometimes hard to see what’s right in front of you. We all need to stop and look down, even when we are running ahead.

Volunteer Commitments are Professional Commitments

A well-rounded professional career can benefit greatly from the experience, connections and mutual value that volunteer commitments can provide. However, your primary focus should be on providing value to your chosen community: you provide no value whatsoever in your volunteer role unless you are fully engaged and fully committed.

This applies to any committees you may choose to join, and it particularly applies to Board positions. For all intents and purposes, Board roles (including voluntary Board positions) mean that you and your Board colleagues oversee other people’s careers, expectations, goals and lives. As such, you are honour-bound to step up and do your absolute best. The root of any Board position is that it should never be “about you”.


If the commitment feels like a duty rather than a privilege, then please do your final duty and source an engaged individual who can fill your chair – and then get out of the way.

So many people join Boards for the wrong reasons: they are fulfilling employer expectations, or worse, they are padding their resume. If you are one of these people, do us all a favour and quit your position RIGHT NOW. You may not respect the magnitude of your Board position, but the staff of your organization certainly do, and you owe it to them (to say nothing of all other stakeholders in your organization) to give your volunteer role everything that you can give.


If you can’t, then please get out of the way of everyone else’s progress.

Your Work vs. the Reasons Why You Work

It can be a strange thing for a business owner or manager to present themselves on behalf of their company - where should the lines between a professional profile and a personal profile be drawn? It comes down to the level of comfort you have with "being your brand". If you own a store on Main Street, then you probably should "be your brand" - your friends will also be your customers (or should be), and your customers should become your friends. In person-to-person transactions, the best way to build repeat business is to build "sociability" into each professional transaction.

However, if you are selling "professional services", then you may not want personal details associated with your work life. Do you really want to know about your Doctor's weekend habits? Do you want your clients to know about yours? It's a tough call.

I personally couldn't care less what people know about me, but I still try to keep some distance between my personal and professional lives. At the end of the day, my clients are extremely important to me, and I count many as great friends, but other things are equally (or more) important than business stuff, and I choose to try to keep things partitioned - if only to remind myself when it is time to stop working. That's a big one - and it is a tough line to draw in the sand.

I spend a lot of my time talking with people about strategy, but it is important to have a life-strategy too - and that strategy should start with knowing where to draw the line between work and the reasons why you work.