How to Strategically Win at Everything with Stephen A. Hart

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute here at A&I. We believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Third, check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Stephen, thanks for joining us today.

Kwame, thank you so much for having me, my brother.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. We're glad to have you. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Sure. So I always start conversations off from a place of gratitude for first and foremost, I am husband to Kristen of 12 plus years. We have two crumb snatchers who are now 6 and 10. And beyond that, I am a marketer for the world's largest cybersecurity training institute, a podcaster, which is how I'm familiar with Kwame, been podcasting for the past five years under Trailblazers fm and also brand strategist and creator of Brand Uacademy, an online training program that I've put together to help entrepreneurs, corporate professionals and leaders to build an amazing and dynamic personal brand. Right.

And so that is why we had you on here, Steven, to talk about a personal brand and the importance of building a personal brand. And so I know people might be listening and saying, well, Kwame, why in the world are we talking about personal branding, a negotiation podcast? So why aren't we just talking about negotiation skills at the table? So what is the value of understanding and building a strong personal brand as it relates to negotiation?

Yes. Well, as it relates to anything. We're living in 2021 in a post pandemic world. Everything is going to be digital, right? It already was, but even more so now someone is going to be googling you, whether it's for a new job, whether it's for you're running a business and you're looking for a new client. It could even be someone looking to date you, someone's Googling you, and the results that they find will more or less leave them inclined to do business with you, to hire you, or to date you. And so I think we have to take time to think about or online presence and our personal brand. And our personal brand isn't something that's static. Right. It's a dynamic, iterative process to address different sides of whether we're talking about brand identity and the visual elements of your brand and. Or the things that relate to the messaging and things that influence your credibility and trust both online and offline.

Yeah, man. And you know what's funny is that I've recognized this for myself too, because in addition to the negotiation trainings that we do here at the American Negotiation Institute, I still practice because I want to make sure that my skills stay sharp. You know, I don't want to be that negotiation trainer who's pulling out stories from decades ago. So I've recognized in my negotiations, people do their research and they say, oh, I notice you have the podcast. I notice you have the TED Talk. I did the research on you, and it gives me kind of a leg up because I don't need to prove myself. They don't need to ask, oh, is Kwame legitimate? Does he know what he's talking about? They do the research and they can see that. So that carries a bit of the persuasive burden.

And I was just going to expand on what you're saying. So, as a marketer, we are trained as marketers, that the very first thing that happens with marketing your brand, whether we're talking about a big business or even right now, as you're talking about a personal brand, is awareness. You have to be able to drive attention and awareness. That then leads to interest and engagement, then leads to that quote, unquote, conversion of whether you're landing a job or a client. Again, the very first thing, is that you have to be able to amplify your identity again online through things you've done, such as TedX or. Or some of the other speaking engagements that you have, and making sure that following you getting off of a stage, off of a TED stage or after you've launched your book, that there's somewhere else there. You've now made yourself memorable. But where are you leading people to from that point out? Are you leading them to a website? Are you guiding them to your social platform? Is that going to leave them with a certain Measure of credibility and trust. You, for one, are amazing at creating really valuable content on an ongoing basis in LinkedIn. And so over time, over the last couple years that you've been creating that content, you've been able to develop that credibility and trust, right?

Absolutely. And those two terms, you said it now twice, credibility and trust. And those two things are incredibly powerful during your negotiation. So let's focus now on the various things that people can do to build that credibility and trust with their personal brand.

It always begins, first and foremost with understanding and knowing your why. Right. In terms of building a solid brand foundation, a lot of people immediately hear the word personal brand and the default to the brand identity and the visual. And they're thinking of a logo, they're thinking of the visual elements. That's very important. But before we start defining what the visual elements look like, let me ask the listener or the viewer of this video and this conversation, do you understand what it is that you're doing, what you're offering, why you're offering it? Do you understand who you're serving? Do you have clarity on your audience that you're serving? And those things are critical because it impacts the messaging, it impacts the visual, it impacts everything else that you're going to develop. I always say, from a messaging standpoint especially, I am not going to. I'm not speaking to everyone or I'm going to lose in the messaging, you are speaking to a very specific professional nine times out of 10. But from a personal standpoint, if I'm communicating one message to my mom, to my wife and to my daughter, right. That one message is too broad. But if I'm gearing a particular messaging specifically to my wife, my daughter can't receive that in the same way. Right. So you have to be very clear on who it is you're serving. And talking about persuasion, the more clear you are about who you're speaking to means that you understand not only who they are in terms of the demographic data that I'm speaking to a woman who's in her mid-30s, who has children, who earns X and does X, but I also begin to understand the challenges that this person is facing. The psychographic data, what's keeping them up at night? If I understand that group, if I'm able to then group like challenges and values, and I understand exactly how to frame that messaging, and it's not general. I'm not speaking to everybody with the same message now, I'm able to really capture their attention again, I'm building that awareness initially, but I want to move from awareness to interest, and I want them to be able to engage with me in a way that they won't engage with anyone else. And that's all coming back to personal branding. So the foundation starts with understanding who you're serving, right? For that very reason. Because when you understand who you're serving, then you're able to clarify your message. And I say if you confuse, you lose, right? So you want to make sure you're able to communicate and clarify that message so that you can persuade in that negotiation of whatever it is that you're offering up. And then comes that brand identity piece. Then we start to define how are you going to brand yourself. Are you branding yourself Kwame Christian, or are you branding yourself American Negotiation Institute? Then we start talking about the different online elements of your brand, your domain name, your social handles. We start to look at things like your color palettes, which sounds fluffy, but Kwame has listened to me talk about color a number of times over, and people actually make a subconscious judgment based on color alone. Within the first 90 seconds of seeing your brand, things like color, your fonts, your photography, your graphics, all of these things come into play.

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Yeah. And I tell you, when I remember when I saw you speak and talk about the different colors, I felt like I never knew colors. I didn't realize how much detail, but it mattered. It really matters. And I remember I was talking to lawyers at the Oklahoma State Bar, and I included personal branding in the negotiation training. And I know there were a lot of people that were surprised, but then they started to realize, oh, my gosh, this is really important because, again, your brand will carry a lot of the message. Think about with. With trust. One of the things that is almost magical that you get with trust is the benefit of the doubt, right? So for me, Stephen, I trust you completely. When it comes to branding, if you tell me something that I did not know before and it might be counterintuitive, I'm like, oh, I didn't see that coming. Stephen told me, that's it. Right? That's all I need. And then if somebody else says, oh, did you know this counterintuitive thing? I'm like, no, and I don't believe you. That doesn't sound like legitimate at all. Right. And so I think, again, when you think about the message that you're trying to carry at the table, there's a lot of work that can be done before you even get to the table with establishing your credibility beforehand, you know, and that that online presence is huge.

And as you touch on that, you know, and tying back to the brand elements, the visual elements, when you take the time, and not many people do so, when you take the time to define things like the color palettes, things like your fonts. And why is your fonts important, Kwame? Well, there are certain font styles that communicate fun and happy and others that communicate professional and others that communicate dramatic kind of energy. Right. And we're looking at fonts all day, every day. Whether it's picking up our phone, looking at, you know, a sign on the highway, looking on Netflix, you're looking at different types of fonts, and they're communicating a different message every time. But the combination of fonts, the combination of colors, the combination of all these brand elements are impacting a cohesive footprint. When I land on Kwami, your LinkedIn page, and then I now come back to your webpage, and I see consistency from your LinkedIn to your webpage. And now I happen to show up at 1A Kwami's events, and all of your materials now carry the same elements. It's cohesive, it's consistent, it's professional. Again, it comes back to that piece. Right. You don't come across in a way that leaves me questioning you.

Absolutely. I think a lot of times when people are talking, there's a little voice in the back of our head that just says, prove it, prove it, prove it.

Absolutely.

And then when you're so intentional about your online brand, like, every time you share a piece of content, what you're doing is you're proving it. You're proving it, you're proving it. Hey, do you know your stuff? Yep. I proved it for the last three years by giving you free content in the form of articles, blogs, podcasts, those type of things. And so, again, there's. We can take that same element. And I think a lot of people think to themselves, oh, personal branding or branding in general, this is more of a corporate thing for companies or entrepreneurs. Now let's speak a little bit to the importance of personal branding and how we can actually do it. If you are working for, for a corporation that already has logos and whatnot established for the entity, yeah, this applies.

To the individual just as equally as it does to the corporation. Everything I'm talking about applies to the person. Do you understand your why do you have clear vision on where you're going in and outside of your company? I four or five years ago took the time to sit down and think about where do I want my life to go? What's the purpose that I want my legacy to have served? Right? Where am I trying to go for the two chrome snatchers that I have? Where do I see myself 30 years out from now? I'm from Jamaica. I envision myself in 20 years from now sitting on a beach somewhere in the north coast of Jamaica. When I'm doing so retired and I'm looking back, what would I have wanted to accomplish? When you're answering that question, you may be answering it in relation to the company that you work for presently, but truthfully that question goes much more beyond just your career. And so you need to think of your life in general and really what do you want your brand to represent. And I give thought to that longer term that allows me to reverse engineer. So when I'm thinking out 20, 30 years from now on that beach chair and I say I want to have been a best selling author, I want to have spoken on a TED stage, I want to have accomplished impacting the lives of 10,000 entrepreneurs, well that's great. Those are big picture dreams. But now how do I reverse engineer that to actually bring that to life? When we walk through that exercise of looking at that big picture dream without obstacles, we know take it back to Jim Collins practice of creating our bhags or big hairy audacious goals. And I've practiced doing this for a 10 year BHAG. Somebody who I've been reading quite a bit recently is Cameron Herrel. He's the author of this book called Vivid Visions. And Cameron actually recommends doing this over three years. And so I've been consuming a good bit of that and looking at the hybrid, but it really comes back to the same practice. How vivid, how clear can you paint a picture of your future self that then you want to reverse engineer the process to say, okay, you know what? 3 years out from now, 10 years out from now, 30 years out from now. This is what I hope to achieve. What needs to happen this year, what needs to happen this month, this week, today, in order for me to get out three years from now and see my business, see my career, see myself, see my marriage, my role as father, whatever else, other areas of your life that are important to you, seeing those come to light in the way that you would have envisioned, I think that's where we start. That's where we start, is getting clear on that vision. It informs the mission for your life. From there, you get clear on, well, if these are the things I want to accomplish, who do I want to serve? So I want to personally impact 10,000 heart set entrepreneurs. My work has been focused around really impacting black professionals. I've hosted a podcast featuring black professionals for the last five years. I want to take that one step further now, Kwame, I want to be able to. Not only have you listened to the content of a podcast, I want to be able to help those people consuming the content to know, put that into application and build their brand. Right. And so that's what's fueling me. What's fueling you? The person who's listening right now, the person who's watching right now. What is fueling you? And where are you wanting to take your path, your walk? What, what path do you want to blaze as you look ahead? And how do you reverse engineer what needs to happen in order for you to execute? What are the tasks and goals and steps forward for you? I think from there it's stepping into the things we talked about before, taking the time to begin the process of defining your brand elements. And I say begin because that's an iterative process. How many times have you changed your.

Logo or even the name of the.

Podcast or the name of the podcast? And it will continue to evolve over time. It's not static. And it happens for the biggest brands. Apple's always had the apple. But if we go back and look at a timeline, we've seen modifications to the Apple over time. Starbucks, the same. You'll start with a name and maybe a logo, a symbol for your brand, for your personal brand. And those things are great. You'll start with a website. Maybe it begins as one page, just informing somebody about who you are. You're not a big business. You don't need a big 30 page website. But I encourage you to lock in your domain name for your name, for your first and last name. Why? Because when somebody is googling you, you have Control over your own website. You do not have control over Facebook, over Instagram, over LinkedIn or other hubs that you find online. It's important that you have a presence in each of those locations. But your online home, your online headquarters should be your own website. And from there, you're driving traffic out to the different places. So if you're a courier, professional or a corporate leader and you're listening to this, you have control to dictate what's told about you on your own website. You're in control of your own brand, of the brand called you. And so you can house a portfolio there. You can showcase the things that you've accomplished, the media that you've, you know, and your accolades on your website. And as time goes on, you can begin to create content like we're doing right now in Zoom. Everyone is on Zoom, right? Over the last year, you've gotten really comfortable, right, with being able to be that talking head to talk on video. So too many people are like, oh, I'm afraid of video. We've been doing it for a year now. There's no one that's not cool with doing video. And so you could do video and showcase some of the things that you're strong at, some of the things that make you unique. And again, work on the messaging, clarifying your message. So whoever that customer is, whether it's the employer, whether it is an institution or a partnership or a client, whoever that customer is, you have to clarify the message so that customer is going to listen. You know, I can't stress home enough. If you confuse, you lose, right? So you take care of the vision, the visual elements, what we call our brand identity, we take care of our brand messaging. And then you have those in place. It's easy for you to build a different digital footprint, channels, right? Your, your LinkedIn, your Facebook, your Twitter, you know, your website, all those things now have a cohesive feel from the visual as well as the messaging. Your bio, you can write a bio in your messaging, right? That is short, long, no matter what, where you're placing it, it's consistent, the message is consistent, the domain and handles are consistent. And these things, people will never say, oh, you have a really polished site. They'll be like, kwame, things really look tight, bruh. You know, right? Am I lying? People are gonna be like, kwame, your stuff is tight. And what it's signaling is. And you've really taken the time to polish your footprint and you stand out from the crowd.

Absolutely. This is great. And for the listeners out there who are either entrepreneurs or people who are in their careers and they say, okay, well I realize that I have not been doing a good job of building my personal brand. Is there some kind of academy out there that could possibly help them build the brand called you?

Funny you should ask. So about two and a half years ago, I actually created a self paced course on a brand called Brand New Academy and we've now migrated to doing a full day boot camp. Our next boot camp is going to be in March of 2021. I don't know the timeline of this, but we're going to do them every other month, just about. And so we have a full day intensive where I am guiding you through the instructional material. But what's more important, I'm walking you through actual real use cases, real life examples of people doing the right things with all these things that we talked about. And on top of it, it's going to have hands on exercises. You're actually going to be doing the work throughout the course of the day. And then following our full day workshop or boot camp, you'll have access to all this material because again, it's going to take you time to work through those different pieces and you're going to iterate over time. But I want to put in the work and put my hands on you and make sure you're getting it done. So if you need to, if you're listening again and you're saying, you know what, I don't think my online presence is where it should be or I haven't even started yet. So whether you're building or you're optimizing your online presence and personal brand, I think Brand New Academy, Personal Branding Bootcamp is a great place to consider starting. You can learn more about that over@stevenahart.com bootcamp and explore our next class offering.

Fantastic. And everybody links in the description of the episode. Stephen, really appreciate it, my friend. Thanks for coming on.

Carmi, thank you so much for having me.

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