Reinventing You. Dorie Clark

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СКАЧАТЬ looking for a new challenge. “I felt like I had given conflict resolution all I had and it was time to explore something else,” she recalls. She mentioned her quest to her friend Don, who floated the idea of a personal focus group. When Don offered to run one for Mary, she immediately agreed.

      He suggested she invite participants “who knew me really well and could speak about me in different phases of my life,” Mary recalls. So she developed a list of ten names: her “dream team” of friends and advisers who would provide honest feedback, ranging from childhood friends to college buddies, and from professional colleagues to siblings.

      Though some might have felt trepidation about inviting colleagues to analyze and evaluate them, Mary didn’t hesitate: “My friends already give me feedback and advice, so even if it isn’t usually this scripted, I already have that kind of relationship with the people I approached. Also, people said that one of my biggest strengths was the ability to listen and give thoughtful feedback, so some may have viewed it as an opportunity to reciprocate and help me out.” All ten agreed to come.

      They sat in her living room, plied with snacks, and began filling out four worksheets Don distributed. The top of the worksheets were labeled:

       Mary’s Greatest Gifts Are . . .

       I Could See Mary . . .

       The World Would Be a Better Place If Mary . . .

       I Will Help Mary by . . .

      For several hours, Don led the conversation, asking participants to share their responses for each question. Mary sat silently, taking it in. “All I could do was listen,” she says. “I was able to ask clarifying questions or ask for more information, but it was in the spirit of taking it in, not responding or critiquing.”

      Mary found the process revelatory. Other people “almost have a bird’s-eye view, and they can see your life in ways you may not be able to, because you’re involved in day-to-day living.” The participants praised her communication and leadership skills, and urged her to think broadly about how to translate them: “They could see me working for a political campaign or writing a children’s book.” (Mary is now a senior program officer at a major foundation.)

      The session focused on strengths, not weaknesses. But Mary nonetheless picked up important clues from the conversation. “There was a sense among people that I was a highly creative person and should be doing more in that space,” she says. “My interpretation of that is that I can be very intellectual, and maybe there should be more of a balance with creativity.”

      Perhaps the most startling insights were about her personal life: “It was the first time somebody said out loud, ‘I want to see you with a child; I think you should explore it.’ Up until that point, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids, but that comment made it more relevant for me, and something I should be thinking about more carefully.”

      After the session, she sat down with her professional coach and developed a six-month and yearlong plan following up on the insights and advice she’d received, from increasing her connections to other consultants to doing more work locally. The focus group, says Mary, “took me to the next level in terms of my professional development. It helped me refocus my consulting practice to include more training and development, which I loved doing and was really good at.” But the most important change was personal. A year and a half later, her daughter was born.

      Your Online Presence

      These days, a major part of your personal brand is online. Sure, your friends and colleagues’ perceptions are based on your day-to-day interactions, but if you have even minor celebrity (you blog for an industry website) or you’re job hunting (and people are doing basic background checks), the broader world is forming its image of you courtesy of Facebook and Google. Your first step? Reviewing—and controlling—your online paper trail, because if you don’t do it first, it may come back to haunt you.

      In fact, the New York Times profiled a company called Social Intelligence, which “scrapes the internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years” and assembles a dossier on the candidate.² It has ferreted out racist remarks, drug references, sexually explicit material, and weapons fetishists. Hopefully that’s not your shtick. But even if you’re not a gunrunner or trolling for OxyContin on Craigslist (like one job candidate Social Intelligence reviewed), you still may not be in the clear.

      Your online presence may be spit-polished, with only your wise quotations in industry journals and incisive blog posts about the future of business. Then again, you may not appear online exactly as you’d like to be perceived. Your plight may be banal—you’re a fanatical runner and the only thing that comes up is your race times. It may be your parents’ fault (if your name is Joe Smith, search engine optimization is a cruel joke). It may be someone else’s fault (one guy I know was plagued first by sharing the same name as a former MTV Asia VJ and later a congressman forced to resign due to a sex scandal).

      But sometimes the picture that emerges is downright frightening, as was the case with a young woman I once met with as a favor to a friend. She was obviously smart, just finishing graduate school at an Ivy League university and looking for a position in marketing. We had a good chat, but at the end of the meeting, she leaned in and lowered her eyes. “There’s something else I should mention,” she said. “I’m not sure if you Googled me before we met, but . . . there are some negative things being said about me online.”

      It turns out she had a deranged ex-boyfriend who was posting defamatory things about her online. Because of her distinctive name, his rants littered any online search—and made her life and job search very difficult (she was pursuing legal action). Of course, the fulminations of a jilted ex shouldn’t be part of your personal brand. But thanks to the internet, even the most private of matters can quickly attach to your public persona.³

      Don’t Stop at Facebook

      Review everything, because companies like Social Intelligence will. They report that less than a third of the content they dredge up comes from major sites like Facebook or Twitter. Instead, they trawl lesser-known spaces, where it may feel “safer” to post—and lead candidates to mistakes. Comments on old blog posts, bulletin boards, Craigslist ads, or old Yahoo! Groups archives are all targets, not to mention photos and videos (which may have been uploaded by friends with poorer judgment than your own).

      In addition to your first pass, you may want to have someone else review the data as well. Everyone knows a picture of you with a bong is probably ill advised. But some people might feel that membership in a “This Is America—I Shouldn’t Have to Press 1 for English” Facebook group is witty, while others could see it as racist. (Yes, that was a real case vetted by Social Intelligence.) Getting another perspective can help you discover blind spots and areas where your idea of “just a joke” could be badly misinterpreted.

      Try This

       Search for yourself not just on Google, but also on other search engines such as Bing and membership sites (that may have various privacy settings) like Facebook.

       Search for your name in quotation marks—as in “Dorie Clark”—so you’ll only find hits with that exact phrase. (Otherwise, you may turn up any document, however long, that happens to have both words in it.) Don’t forget to search for variations of your name, including common misspellings or nicknames.

       Don’t СКАЧАТЬ