Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

10 Warnings On Personal Branding

warnings on personal branding

Warnings on personal branding? I’m not sure what personal branding is—and definitely didn’t know it was dangerous.

Personal branding, defining and refining the you who you want the world to see, makes a lot of sense even if you don’t perceive yourself to be selling yourself or anything else.

Why? Even if you don’t perceive yourself to be selling yourself … you are. Unless, of course, you are a sociopath or a recluse. Selling yourself is really not a bad thing. Most of us would prefer to be liked rather than not liked; respected rather than disrespected; trusted rather than mistrusted; understood rather than misunderstood; heard rather than ignored.

Those are qualities and dynamics we like to sell. And they don’t sound very dangerous.

Personal branding sounds a lot less conniving when we use old adages to describe it, like put your best foot forward or you only have one chance to make a good first impression or dress for the part. [Read more…]

5 Stages of Grief for Sports Fans

ducks-fans

This can’t be happening.

What do the 5 stages of grief have to do with sports fans you wonder? Just ask the diehard Wrigley Field denizens and they will provide you with enough angst and anecdote to write a Ph.D. dissertation in clinical psychology.

The five stages of grief were introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the book On Death and Dying (Scribner, 1969). She posited that the stages of grief are universal and cross all socio-ethnic-economic classifications.

Now I know that losing a World Cup match is in no way comparable to the loss of death—though after losing to Germany 7-1 in Rio, there are Brazilians that might disagree—but our team, MY team winning or losing is so palpable … so visceral … so emotional … why shouldn’t the 5 stages of grief apply to sports fans?

Anyone that grew up with ABC Wild World of Sports on Saturday afternoons—back in the blurry days of television when the only channels we got were from the three major networks and maybe one or two local stations—knows the truth of Jim McKay’s words, when he intoned the immortal phrase, “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports … the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat … the human drama of athletic competition.” [Read more…]