Archive | 5:22 am

What do you want to be known for? What do you want to achieve?

3 Jun

I’m a voracious reader. I love to read, and I have very eclectic interests when it comes to reading material. While on vacation last week, I read a novel by Anne Lamott, a memoir by Kathryn Borel, essays by Terry Tempest Williams, two issues of Sunset, and all the local newspapers I could put my hands on. I brought along poetry by Sharon Doubiago and a marketing book too.

Growing up, I was known as a reader, the best reader in school, in fact. By reading, I developed an extensive vocabulary. I was exposed to lots of words and ways to work with them. When I read a well crafted sentence, I still want to know how the writer made me hear the music in the words, I want to figure out why the writer used punctuation the way he or she did. This curiosity led me to analyze writing and style, so that I could apply what I learned to my own writing and to help others with theirs.

What spurred this reverie about what I was known for? A blog post I read in Harvard Business Review about leadership style. The article asks us to answer these two questions:

  1. What do you want to be known for?
  2. What results do you want to achieve in the next 12 months?

Then the article says to plug your answers into the following statement:

I want to be known for ______ so that I can deliver ______.

I’m still working on my answer to this but my working response, my draft if you will, is:

I want to be known for creative intuition so that I can deliver perceptive coaching that gets the writer his or her desired results.

The article on how to define your leadership brand continues with more depth here. I’ll go back and reread the article and reflect on this working statement in order to revise it further. I may even post a text box so that I’ll see the statement often and let my mind chew on it like a bone and find the marrow of what it is that I want to be known for and what results I want.

How would you define your brand of leadership? How would you fill in the blanks? Perhaps this is a writing project we might want to work on together.