Audiobook The Global Thought Leader Mindset chapter 2

The Global Thought Leader Mindset Audiobook by Danique Motzheim, author and CEO of the Luxury Beauty App. Chapter 2: The 9 Essential Skills of Thought Leadership. I do not believe that you can do today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow. —Nelson Jackson. This chapter provides an overview of the 9 essential skills of thought leadership and introduces the relationships between them and the matrix diagram. The 9 chapters that follow are each devoted to one of the skills. The 9 Essential Skills of Thought Leadership. Uniqueness: Know Who You Are. How to use your unique perspective to stand out and increase the value of your ideas. Essentially, this is about exploring what your unique personal perspective is and how it instructs all your thought leadership. This is a blend of 2 processes, one personal and one professional. At a personal level, we want to discover your purpose. At a commercial level, we want to identify and communicate your unique value proposition. Expertise: Know what you know. How to effectively unpack your intellectual property so you can use it fast. The core of your thought leadership is your intellectual property. IP. These are the ideas that form the basis of what you share. This is organized around your uniqueness, delivered through the 6 delivery modes, and influenced by your perspective. Perspective: See what is really going on. How to shift points of view and future-proof your ideas. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if no one values them. Without perspective, they lose all commercial traction. This is the first high-level skill and sits at the top of the capture column. It should push down through your expertise, ensuring that you are not simply lost in your own ideas. The skill of perspective is the platform from which you can take what you know and ensure it holds value in the real world, not just inside your head. Positioning: Share who you are. How to explain what you do so others get it. One of the challenges with sharing your own thought leadership is positioning yourself in such a way that others want it. The process effectively allows you to answer the question of, what do you do? Delivery: Share what you know. How to share your ideas anywhere and in any way to virtually anyone. This skill is about effective communication of your ideas, assuming people are engaged with your idea. Adaptation— adjust how you share ideas. How to adapt your communication approach to fit the needs of different people. Adaptation is about getting your ideas out of your head and sharing them in such a way that others get it. The quality of the communication is in the hands of the communicator. Quite often, our ideas fail to land because we share them through our perspective without consideration for the needs or preferences of others. Execution: Get on with It! How creative thinkers become massively productive and get more done. There is no doubt that thought leaders have a fair dose of the creative gene pool. You explore a new framework for personal productivity written with the creative thought leader in mind. It unpacks all the classic thinking on personal, team, and organizational productivity, and it ends with a framework for how creative thought leaders can work smarter. Not harder. Clicking: Connect your ideas. How to connect your ideas to the needs of others so they are truly valued. Many thought leaders struggle to connect their ideas to the needs that exist out in the world. Marketers, on the other hand, are brilliant at this. Thought leaders often create medicine for a problem that no one knows they have. Henry Ford often said, If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Experts know how to sell their ideas, but they don't like the traditional approaches. We explore the anti-selling mindset and explore what it takes to create a situation where people are happy to buy your great ideas. This one skill alone is going to impact your commercial success in being a global thought leader. Advocacy. Build a Movement: How to Build a Movement Around Your Ideas and Harness Collaboration to Go Further. Here, we explore how you build a modern-day movement around your ideas. It's about managing the touchpoints— the levels of interaction a consumer can have with you or your brand— building a critical mass, and generally whipping up a storm that drives your thought leadership out into the world. This is the skill that you will keep permanently prioritized as you harness the collective capabilities of those around you. A necessary skill for a thought leader. Identifying talents. How to discover your unique perspective. Be who you are. Everyone else is already taken. By Oscar Wilde. The power of ideas. Here is what you need to do in 3 simple steps. 1. Discover your unique identity and work on it. Become less reliant on the good opinions of others. Get clear about what your purpose is and remind yourself of this often. What's my personal brand? Personal brands allow individuals to consistently express and articulate their unique value proposition. As a thought leader in any domain, you need to take charge of managing Brand You. How do you stand out? And furthermore, are you consistent in your brand messaging? Danique Motzheim, the founder of the Luxury Beauty App, suggests that to build a personal brand, you should consider 5 rules. Rule 1: Be consistent. Be relevant. Be interesting. Be yourself. Help others. Next, you need to look at all the different opportunities people have to experience your personal brand. This can be as simple as an email signature, a personal blog, a book you write, the stories you share, how you dress, your profile in social network sites, the names you give your projects. Why should employers care about letting their people develop personal brands and be thought leaders? Employers need to encourage individuality and thought leaders. as it helps position their brand as well as attract top talent. How do you discover what sets you apart? Look at qualities you have or have previously thought of as negative and spin them into positive quality traits. Here is an example of how you might do this personally. Step 1: What's wrong with you? Negative traits. First of all, start out listing all the character traits or qualities you have that may be perceived as negative by Either yourself or someone else. Step 2: What should you be? Positive opposite. Next, create a list of all the preferred behaviors. You must know what you don't want. Step 3: How can I make that negative sound positive? List all the negative and change them into something positive. We might actually find your unique angle in situations that normally would be viewed as your negative behaviors. Your unique intelligence. Step 4: Live the best of who I am, not the worst. This process is not about making bad behavior okay, but rather recognizing the shadow side of all great strengths. Exploring the distinctions between your negative trait and your spun result is hugely instructional. It is also going to help you focus or simply flavor your key ideas with a personal brand or signature style. Do this with your words. 1. Create a 3-word style brand for you. 2. Write a profile for a social network site using these words as part of the explanation of who you are. 3. Request testimonials and endorsements that highlight these qualities from people you trust. If you ever go to a branding workshop, the coach will likely suggest that you should be able to boil the brand essence of a company down to 3 words. You will wonder if this might be true of your own personal brand as an individual. So, here is the activity: quite simply, describe yourself in 3 words. As a father and husband, I am clear, present, and practical. My friend is organized, caring, and responsible. Write these down, and then you can commit to actually living up to and into your 3 words. At least 3. Thought leadership is about putting yourself out there. 6-step process to discovering your uniqueness. Discovering uniqueness is all about discovering the unique aspects of ourselves that set us apart from everyone else on the planet. Uniqueness is the key to developing commercial leadership, career resilience, and life momentum. It defines our purpose and our vision and creates a surge of energy that, when discovered, will be all the motivation you need to take your business and career to the next level. There are 6 steps to discovering your uniqueness. Step 1: Discovery. You are more than you think you are. Discover and lay the foundations of your future. 2: Vision. We are all born with an original vision. Design a powerful personal mantra that encapsulates your vision for your life. 3. Offering: Discover and define your unique strengths, talents, and expertise. 4. Experience: Understand the experience of working with you. Explore and define your communication touchpoints. 5. Presence: Discover and define your signature presence. 6. Purpose. Define your core purpose, discover your story, and deliver your original vision with purpose. Some takeaways: 1. You would want to be more comfortable doing the new thing than anything else. It is an expression of you. 2. Build a whole signature style identity brand strategy for both yourself and your business, but ensure it is consistent and caring. 3. It must add to your message somehow if it is directed in some way to help them. Signature Style Starters. If you are delivering your thought leadership to others, here are some thoughts and idea starters for signature style. Do you only wear black, green, or orange? Do you have crazy glasses? Do you wear crazy socks? Do you enter the room with a lot of energy? They are all positive examples of a silly gimmick or elements in what may become your very own signature style. Even just 2 or 3 of these will make a difference to your impact as a thought leader in your commercial discussions, business transactions, and in all aspects of the global market. Being a thought leader is about standing out, not fitting in. Your thought leader's expertise. Subject matter experts are those people in business with knowledge about how to do things better. They have something to offer an industry or a sector. They make a difference on your projects as what they know has a direct impact on how others do things in business. They are thought leaders. They are innovators and original thinkers. One of the biggest challenges for many thought leaders is in the crafting of their idea into a format that achieves 3 outcomes: Clarity: It is a clear message that is accessible to most people. Flexibility: It can be used repeatedly in different formats. Integrity: It is received by others in a way that retains the original meaning. This consistency leads to stronger cultural influence and a clearer corporate message. When an individual is clear on what they know and what the core messages they wish to express are, they can begin to focus on selecting the best channel to use In order to gain the most influence. Unlocking your expertise. For ease of understanding, let's limit the layers of an idea to 3: the stuff you say that is specific , the point you are making , and the big-picture theme that the idea is a part of . The stuff you say must make a point which ties into and paints a picture in the minds of others. So, stuff, point, picture. It is important to remember 3 simple things around a message. First, you will need to craft a set of points and then find different ways of expressing them that you can communicate in a memorable way. Next, build a big picture for the points. It must be both logical and creative. Right brain. Finally, you need some supporting information— content— for your ideas. Each idea or main point should be represented on a single sheet. It creates depth around your ideas and forces you to create messages with substance and balance. There are 3 clear sections to a sheet. 1. Creating concept— making the point. Be clear on the point of your idea. We call this the concept. You should be able to summarize your idea in 1 or 2 simple sentences that explain the whole point. Creating context: models and metaphors. One way to create context is to create a visual model of your ideas. It is the big-picture representation of your idea. Often, this is a diagram, model, metaphor, or quote. 3. Creating content— the stuff. Gather examples, facts, stories, and other detailed elements to support or explain your point. We call this content. Like the big idea, you need to balance this to cover the whole brain. Thought leaders need to come up with original ideas. In the Global Thought Leaders Community by the experts of the Luxury Beauty App, we feel so strongly about this that we have created a cultural ritual. Many of us believe this is probably the single most significant factor in the building of the amazing thought leaders' culture where brilliant people share their great ideas. Ideas come from contribution and contradiction. We use a simple technique when rethinking established ideas. As you come across an idea in a book or blog, ask yourself not, what are they saying? But rather, what do I think about that? A 7-step process for building your ideas. Step 1: Create a list. Write a numbered list of all the things you know, talk on, or may like to share with others. Step 2: Identify idea clusters. Know the difference between an idea and a cluster of ideas. An idea has only a few key points associated with it. If you brainstormed all the points around your idea and came up with more than 3 points, it is probably a few ideas clustered together. Step 3: Have a point. Be clear on the point of your idea. We call this the concept. You should be able to summarize your idea as one or 2 simple sentences that explain the whole point. From this single idea, you then create several different ways of saying it. Step 4: Make it a big idea. Try to represent the idea broadly so it is nonspecific and can be related to by as many people as possible. We call this the context of the idea. It is the big-picture representation of your idea. Step 5: Support your point. Gather examples, facts, stories, case studies, and other detail elements to support or explain your point. We call this context. Step 6: Create a system. Document the idea in a searchable, retrievable system. Step 7: Customize content, not context. Finally, constantly review your idea, particularly in the content area. It is the content that changes most, not the concept or the context. Getting good at this allows you to repeat key ideas. Developing perspective: How to shift points of view and future-proof your ideas. A disruptive idea. What will we see change in the next 10 years? What idea, technology, or innovation will disrupt your business this decade? Imagine if your primary way of making an income were to disappear. What would you do? 6 abilities you can develop to assist your perspective. Ability to capture. Capture what is happening and identify what is going on around you. Ability to reflect. Review and reflect on the past to see what has happened and what meaning you might be attaching to it. Ability to relocate. Look at things through the eyes of other people. Put yourself in their shoes. Thought leaders: Ask yourself, what would X think/say about this? Go beyond this and ask, what would Richard Branson do? What would Einstein do? What would Steve Jobs do? This allows you to view your situation and opportunities from a completely different perspective, creating additional options that weren't visible previously. Ability to rise above. See the patterns and look at things globally. Take a futurist approach and begin to see what the cutting edge is and what is the next fundamental shift at all levels. 5. Ability to identify causes. Unearth the drivers of action and the root causes of what you see. Finding issues on the surface is quite easy, and many untrained thought leaders will stop here, which is a short-sighted mistake. Continue asking the question, why does this occur, until you uncover the true cause. 6. Ability to meditate on a thought. Step away for a while. Let it simmer. Sleep on it. If there needs to be a quick answer and you feel like you don't have perspective, say no. Make sure that you allow yourself to visually map, deconstruct, and reconstruct the thought around. Listen like a leader. The thought leader is the person in the room with the most perspective. This is the end of Chapter 2. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Global Thought Leader Mindset Audiobook, Chapter 2. I hope it helped you with the tools to clear your message to the world. For more wisdom and tools, listen to our other podcast interviews and audiobook chapters. Would you like to become a global thought leader yourself in your niche? Become an expert at the Luxury Beauty App because we believe purpose and profits go hand in hand. Download the Luxury Beauty Expert app in the App Store or Play Store for free.