Career

A Case for Linking Online Presence to Your Success

Posted on by Zinga H

For anyone asking Purposely Chosen Women is underway and going well! At the last session, we discussed our personal brand and how it to our goal keeps us focused, while it attracts the people who are meant to support us in our lives. Going through this session really impacted my own insight on how branding performs as a tool for our own personal success. First, a quick definition of branding to keep us on the same page.

Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from that of your competitors. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be. – Entrepreneur.com Small Business Encyclopedia 

I say you branding is what your circle thinks of you even when you’re not around.

The highly subjective amorphous blob that is your brand could easily spin out of control if you are not true to your core. Your core purpose that is, the one acts as a gravity pulling all the pieces and people you need to establish your destined imprint on the world. The practice of personal branding acts during your movement towards success.

What we are really here to talk about though is online branding. Your online brand can be a highly controlled and targeted simulacrum of your real-life brand. With some focus and effort, you can start building your promise all line for your ideal community to see. This allows you to gain leadership and trust online, which are key components of success.

How it Helps

It helps create internal awareness

When we reflect on our online brand and actively establish it, we concern ourselves with questions about who we are and how our thoughts are portrayed. We center our internal beings on our internal voice of purpose, which allows us to connect to our inner self on a regular basis.

Cultivates external awareness

If you never communicate, people will never you. While there are many forms of communication, online  branding allows us to create our own personal archive of our communications. Whether it is writing a blog or showing a video of our perfect piece of grilled zucchini, the internet affords audio, video, and written formats for communication. Find the ways that you are most happy with and stick to it!

Builds our expertise while gaining

Online branding is not only who you currently are, but also who you are becoming. This means your moving to a future state that may not exist. Will fill this path to the future with experience, learning, trials, errors, success. What we learn and the fruits of our labor are the pieces we share with the world. By building our brand we strengthen our capacity to know all about our core purpose. From building a business to baking cinnamon rolls, we can become an expert on the things people know makes us special.  More importantly, people can trust to expect that we know something about our  special something.

dream motivational quotes zinga

Where to Start

Start with the online brand presence audit. Answer some of the following questions below and consider how you can begin to build your foundation or improve upon your already built foundation.

  1. What’s my one-sentence message to the world?
  2. How often can I consistently communicate this message?
  3. Where and how do I want to communicate this message online?
  4. What’s my style?
  5. What impression do I make on others? (Ask 3 or more people)

How to Grow

When you are armed with this information, think about and create some goals for your online presence growth.

Stick to a select amount of online platforms, such as WordPress, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Then follow these tips.

  • Never stop listening – As you grow, your circle will too. Listen to them for constructive input, new trends to try, or even for inspiration.
  • Stay consistent – Your brand is dynamic and growing, so it requires a certain amount of consistent activity to keep a pace of growth. Find a way to consistently build and do consistently.
  • Change accordingly – Review your brand for areas to change and improve. Whether it’s from some input of information or your frequency of presence. Change when it fits your core purpose.

How can I be consistent and change at the same time Zinga???

Well, that’s just the balance of life. As long as the change is a part of your core purpose and aligns to your true values, you will be staying consistent.

What am I missing? Certainly , there are a TON of tools, platforms, and mediums to grow your online brand. Get started today, and you can msg me for my personal online brand audit checklist.

Until next week.

 

audit your success journey

Audit Your Success Path with these 5 Questions

Posted on by Zinga H

 

audit your success journey

Your success is the purpose of this blog.

Those who have been on their own success path for a while know there is a point where stopping to review, assess, and align is key to re-clearing the path that leads to  your final vision.

How do you know when it is time to audit your success path?

While sometimes there may be huge red flags, like falling into deep addiction or burning out on a project you really cared about, most of the time there will only be subtle clues like debilitating procrastination, overbooking yourself with priorities, and a feeling overall stress.

Whatever the signals will be for you, the outcome will be clear you are not moving forward in ways that matter.

While there are many audits we can perform, financial, social media, productivity, etc. the one for our personal success will only take connecting with our inner selves and openly reflecting and receiving on the answers we bring out. These five questions will help you dissect what points in your success path could use some focus and where you are doing well already.

1. What are my current priorities?

2. How do they align with my larger purpose?

3. What ways am I dividing my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do that support my larger purpose?

4. How consistent am I towards working on my success?

5. What is draining my energy and how  would I rather invest this energy?

While audits can be a deep exploration of your current status, you can use these questions as a way to begin to unfold what might be holding you back, which in turn gives you a place to find solutions. It is absolutely imperative that you listen to your honest answer, whatever it may be. I’m not reading your answers and no one else is, so there’s no need to be polished/pretty/etc. If you do want to discuss your answers  know I’m always here 🙂

 

Comment or Contact Me Anytime.

Career Champs with Alicia Robinson, Founder and Executive Director of Limitless Ambition

Posted on by Zinga H

Bootstrapping a non-profit is no light affair.

alicia robinson limitless ambition kent ohio zinga hart

I remember the night like it was yesterday. Frustrated with being severely limited at my job, I needed a way to vent my  insatiable need to create solutions to complex problems, and I found myself meeting with the coolest professional woman in the coolest building on campus at what was formerly known as the Blackstone Launchpad.

It was a semi-transparent glass box, smack dab in the middle of the student center, and having encountered her before, I curiously wondered how we could connect. When we met, she gave me the invitation to an All the CEO Ladies networking meeting later that week. It was after work so I went. It was there that the true connection was made.

It was there that the true connection was made.

We all had to pitch as a part of the membership. I came up with an idea to develop a social app that categorized and simplified who will be on the current political ballot. Everyone cheered, it was and still is a pretty crucial invention that we can’t quite get popularized.

Then it was her turn, Alicia Robinson. She sat and cheered everyone through their ideas and made friends pretty instantly. Like a cool older sister that you wonder where they get their je ne sais quoi.  We all heard her stitch together her vision of a future where women accept our pain because it pushes toward a life of purpose and passion. Where we network together to build youth girls to dream, believe, and achieve without limits. An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.

An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.

Her ideas of the future were so grand and so big, it  almost felt like one’s first visit to the late FAO Schwartz. She had the determination in her voice that made everyone feel like all the pitches we gave would pan out perfectly, just because we said it. We wanted her to succeed because we felt our own limitless ambition fueling us there in each others presence. A room full of young, emerging women hoping to craft a better future with our best ideas.

women leadership free lessons a woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman

Start-Up Leadership Lessons

By this point, I had experience with growing and refining strategies for non-profits so I agreed to join the group and help create a strategic plan, while doing some marketing.  that is where I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas. This is when I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas than the well-established organizations I was used to before starting college. Becuase it was a start-up, I was voted into the position of president, a role I was surprised to be offered. Yet, my initiative and understanding of the mission along with my comfort with strategic management fit for a startup. I agreed to take the position for three years, we the stipulation that we would spend time finding a president of a much higher-profile by the end of my term.

Alicia and I were still in school at the time, we both also worked full-time had tight millennial budgets, an untapped network, and  starter experience to boot. Our passion wouldn’t let that stop us, and, thankfully, Blackstone Launchpad, now KSU Launchnet provided an excellent source of wisdom, connections, and support along the way. We had late nights,  early emails, weekly and twice-weekly meetings; we devoted any minute of our free time, effort, and attention into making sure Limitless Ambition, Inc did everything as thoroughly as possible, to show we could match the pace of our peers. What we learned was that we had something that worked and that we had to keep serving those around us because they found value every time.

When life called she answered cultivated visions

Our Start Up Nonprofit Grows Up

It is no easy journey and we still have a long road to walk. There were small successes, frustrating failures, arguments, and awkward moments of facing our truths, so we could improve and move on. Yet, all along the way, we knew the moments were moments of empowerment, which was exactly the point. Thus, we kept moving forward, ego bruises and all. Now, we are preparing to host our next summer program and we have grown our team from around 5 to over 20 in three years time. Our organization has had a reach of over 600 people face to face and we have a locally-targeted social media reach of 4000+, all while working our passions part time.

As our team grew our hectic schedules quelled, and now we face new leadership lessons beyond the ones of our early start-up days. How do we ensure our mission is reflected in every aspect of our work? How can we provide community transparency that builds trust amongst those we serve and support? How can we be better leaders, still?

This may be my last year serving as the president of Limitless Ambition, so I hope to leave my lessons here for those who will carry the torch forward. Take a moment below to watch me interview Alicia in my special podcast segment below.

one more move sustain small business success

Sustaining Success for Your Self

Posted on by Zinga H

Howdy! It’s another Monday and this post here is for you!

You know who you are, you are the person striving to realize your vision of success. Yet, success means much more than money to most of us. It is a reality that money is an effective measuring stick of our ability to fulfill goals, it can often be wholly inaccurate when it comes to fulfilling our core desires. You may find fulfillment in your families, friends, plentiful passions, and, most importantly, all of the above. For us, success can be applied to many areas to growth in our lives.

So many goals to be complete — followed by the insistent reminder of the fleeting nature of time. So we make deposit after deposit of our time, money, and energy into our areas of growth.  Then, because we’re human, we take on an ambitious goal. The one that may disrupt our lives immensely and take a risk to build a larger vision of a day-to-day future beyond our current day-to-day grind.

How do we possibly fit it into our current lives? How do we possibly stay motivated to fit it in with our full-time jobs, families, and a host of other responsibilities? There are only so many hours in a day, and your life was full before you set about realizing your dreams of success.

There are a few scenarios we face during a substantive success journey.

  • You are used to managing complex change and fit this new personal risk into your schedule with ease.
  • Your are overall comfortable with managing complex change but find you overlooked areas beyond your limits, and thus are facing a slower growth than you first imagined.
  • You are not comfortable with managing complex change at all, in fact, thinking about it causes a shiver of anxiety. Typically you only think to take the risk and hardly move beyond this comfort zone.

Either of these scenarios can still result in your finding the personal success on the risk you know you must take. While the effort to get from discomfort to ease will vary there are some key points along the way.

Key Point #1 You are the core, captain, engine, leader, etc. etc. 

Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy sums up the important role that the Self plays in our ability to succeed. Self-efficacy is essentially our own belief in our own abilities. Much like the story of the elephants who grow up with heavy chains around the ankles. They believe this is the most movement they can achieve when they are on and thus by the time they reach adulthood they can be controlled with nothing more than a rope. Their self-efficacy in their ability to break the chains reaches a low-point and thus they lose a deep connection to the inherent power that lies within them.-source

On a positive end, I recently encountered a touching Facebook post about the story of Edison, who learned from his mother that he was dismissed from school because he was gifted beyond all the other classmates, and then, when his mother passed, years later he later found the note that showed the teacher thought Edison was too dumb for any formal teaching. The lesson distilled is his mother’s beliefs, built his beliefs about his own genius, so, he fully tapped into as much of his potential as possible.

What’s the takeaway?

Your foundation of success comes from believing you can achieve whatever you set out to do. 

Easy to spell out sure, but in action, this key point takes continuous practice. There are many conflicting images, thoughts, and experiences that will run contrary to our beliefs at times. They will attempt to break our beliefs, but the remedy is to find points of faith, whether it’s self-faith, faith in a higher power, or faith in whatever, practice touching base with the future you know will exist.

There are many conflicting images, thoughts, and experiences that will run contrary to our beliefs at times. They will attempt to break our beliefs, but the remedy is to find points of faith, whether it’s self-faith, faith in a higher power, or faith in whatever, practice touching base with the future you know will exist.

Key Point #2 Sustained success comes from systems 

Whether you like it our not, systems achieve a lot for us as humans. Within our body alone we can count over 5 key systems that keep us going, then there’s the road system, the water system, the school system, etc. etc. Organizing actions and activities around shared functions and themes can give us something very, very valuable. That value is and consistency. We can be deeply grateful that a red stoplight means cars will stop or knowing all the words on a spelling test means you will pass the spelling test. Excellent systems function so well we only notice them when they stop function. Consider your computer, millions of calculations are being made and networks are connected for your pleasurable use. Yet, our level of content with the computer working can often be vastly outweighed by our level of frustration should it suddenly stop, even if the computer spent years serving your needs dutifully!

The point is when systems work, we can achieve a lot more, and when systems break down we can face anything from the minute to disastrous frustrations. The takeaway is to pay special care to the how of things: how you do things, how you want to do things, and how you will do things can be key performance indicators on your personal path to success.

Final Key Point: Shift Your Solution Mindset 

You may jump at this one, but trust, I am not saying shift your solution mindset to the opposite non-solution mindset. What we are getting at here is the idea that the solutions you create to solve your current problems may not be the solutions that will help with future undertakings. In fact, the solutions you will need on your success journey may be wildly different than what you are used to doing. For instance, if you are trying to start a small business on the weekends, but are finding there is simply not enough time to do it yourself. How can you possibly do it yourself in between all the commitments? As you ask these questions for your subconscious to solve you may switch to your default solution of doing even more on your own, and staying up waking hours or missing lunches.

solve problems find success zinga hart quote from einstein - we can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them

Ask yourself, what are other solutions beyond the one I am already thinking?  Our small business owner may question other ways of securing time like: outsourcing easy tasks, scaling back on commitments, or honestly finding current time sinks in their schedule. Even if the alternative solutions you create seem impossible at the moment, finding alternatives will open you up to new possibilities for yourself.

Overview:

  1. You can achieve your success- Find ways to remind and affirm this belief.
  2. A system will allow you to sustain success long-term
  3. Systems that aren’t currently serving you may need vastly different solutions. Draw outside of your normal solution lines.

Well that’s all for this post. Let me know if agree or disagree. You could always message me on Facebook.

clarity on social media marketing for small business shows a clear windshield with a dream catcher

Clarity is Imperative For Sustained Success

Posted on by Zinga H

 

The Law of Entropy. My chemistry professor used to joke entropy was to blame for his messy office.

It’s bound to happen, our persistently organized systems will break down…

Despite our best efforts to build better and better systems, there will always be room for improvement because our systems will eventually encounter a chip, glitch, or setback.

This universal pattern explains why as we try harder and harder sometimes it feels like we find more moments of failure, more than when we didn’t even try at all.  Perhaps we can even give it the term the law of effort: mo’ money, mo ’problems in a sense. It’s why we entrepreneurs are always reminding each to keep hustling and to take one more risk.

You may consider to yourself: what does it take to make sure as we attain new heights of success on our journey? How can we ever continue when we feel the blows of betrayals, letdowns, and disappointments?

One key practice is making sure we are crystal clear about what moves us forward and why we choose to move forward.

It is imperative we keep crystal clear about what moves us forward and why we choose to move forward. @ZingaHart 

Stepping back to unfog our vision’s lens every once in awhile is as relieving as cleaning your car’s windshield. The tension of life’s muck provides a subtle added negative stressor from the strain of trying to see as far ahead as we know we can. So we take a moment to wipe it away, and then we see what we know we have the potential to see. A brighter vision of the road ahead of us.

How do you wipe the subtle stressors that slowly attach to your success goals over time? Do you meditate? Journal? Or perhaps simply unplug? Comment below or share with me on social media somewhere 🙂 

For me, my current long-term project is developing workshops to help small business owners gain social media clarity. Writing this for me takes a lot of concentration and energy, and having a clear strategy helps take the stress of thinking away. When I don’t feel like I know what to do next, I know to defer to my past notes for inspiration, and motivation. No matter what, if you are fighting through a mental fog at any point on your success path: slow down, reflect, and clarify. The next step will open up when your insight can relax on your vision again.

If you are building a social media strategy as a part of your success plan, you should sign up for the 10-day social media clarity challenge.

Go from chaos to clear in just 15 minutes a day – delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up here for free or sign up below. This is nothing fancy, just simple action emails to keep you moving forward. Do this for your personal brand or your business. Challenge starts May 1st. 

Starting an International Food Business With Founder & CEO of Micah Specialty Foods [Video]

Posted on by Zinga H

Being an entrepreneur can be exciting for people who are comfortable risks. Starting Career Champs has been a major learning curve, but it is inspiring hearing from other entrepreneurs building their visions into realities. Nana and Natasha, are the respectively the founder and CEO team that runs Micah Specialty Foods

Nana and Natasha, are the respectively the founder and CEO team that runs Micah Specialty Foods. Their signature dish the Supreme Sauce has been appetizing pallets across Northeast Ohio with its international Ghanian flare.

Hear all about how they take risks in their business, work together across international lines, and use their past experiences to get their business right.

Thanks for viewing! If you are interested in being on career champs, email me at zingahart@gmail.com

 

Braisha Owens Stylist, Career Champ, and Motivator

Finding Your Brand Style, Networking, and More with BOStyle.me

Posted on by Zinga H

I’m starting, Career Champs, a new Youtube segment. Once a month (for now), where we meet with people who are forging their own career paths by owning their own brand, business, product or service. One of the aspects attached to Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill is that he surveyed 100 men to help formulate his insights.  While his advice has been a useful starting point for discussing the nature of success, continuing the process of surveying a diverse pool will help everyone refine the own success.

 

In this episode, we meet with Braisha Owens, personal stylist and owner of BOStyle.me, she works as a stylist for individuals, professional shoots, and retail. Her recent risk in going out own her own and building her name in a new city, reaches all of us who yearn, to build outside of their hometown.

Braisha Owens Stylist, Career Champ, and Motivator

Find Braisha’s portfolio of work on bostyle.me

What risks have you taken in your career for a better future?


I had a blast interviewing Braisha! Her motivating energy will leave you uplifted. Career Champs premiers the last Friday of every month. Stay tuned to meet co-owners of Micha Specialty Foods! 

 

Share feedback on the new segment!

Keep Your Brand On-Point this year NYC

4 Smart Steps to Keep Your Brand On-Point this Year

Posted on by Zinga H

If you are up to date on the latest trends in growing your reach online, whether it is for yourself, business, or passion then you know cultivating your leadership brand means creating content for the web. Content is valuable, purposeful, creations (whether an article, video, comic, podcast, etc.) that attract a particular audience and ultimately drives them to take action.

Yes, all those infographics, quote pics, even random Twitter rants you post are tied to the web of your brand. In a sense, this becomes the pre-impression before the first impression someone might get from meeting you more personally. In a sense it also forms an idea of who you are and a baseline for the value you bring to the table that people can start to believe. 

self authorship zinga hart - Quote is Our Self Image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become

Can you visualize your self-image clearly?

While your integrity is usually tested in real life, your reputation is partially set on the foundation of what you post online. While you don’t have to be a prolific author to write your story, you do need to respect how critical it is to maintain your authenticity, while growing your personal or business brand. Self-authorship is a theory attributed to Baxter Magolda, and is defined as “the internal capacity to define one’s own beliefs” as she wrote in Three Elements of Self-Authorship. This self-definition is at the foundation of developing your personal brand over the course of your success journey. Owning your beliefs takes time because you need to sort out the wealth of information you have absorbed and learned over a lifetime and distill it into your core sense of being. While, not quick task, with simple steps you can begin to dig in deeper, find your internal sage and use that to project and share your brilliant brand with the world in a way everyone can agree upon.

Here are four simple steps to author your self-definition so you can grow and polish it over time.

  1. Journal on what you think you have to do in order to fulfill your dream life: What are the essential things you need to live. Be specific: “Using the bathroom, eat, sleep” are some basics to include, but keep adding until you’ve exhausted your ideas, “own a business, have a family” could all be a part of this list.
  2. Walk away from the list for a day or so and then return. Look over the list and question how this master to-do list aligns to your values, your mission, and your vision. If it doesn’t click, make a note of how the “have to” came into your life. For instance, if you wrote, “own 20-bedroom mansion like Oprah” but your vision is to travel for the rest of your life, then consider Oprah’s role in influencing your personal beliefs.
  3. This working list is for you to return to and to refine over time. Choose the strongest beliefs of the work you have to do to live a full life. Notice what comes up over and over, notice what you are most proud of as you go about your days. Reduce your have to four or five sentences to keep your essentials close.
  4. Own it. Write it out, make it your screensaver, or create a ringtone. Figure out a way to keep your essential commands to yourself a constant in your life.

There are easy steps on the road to self-authorship Of course, there are many more steps on this journey, from vlogging to therapy, but what matters most is getting started. Thanks for walking with me!

 

For more here’s a Youtube video on the four phases of self-authorship

Want a partner to help you hone in on your self-definition?

Set up a free phone chat with me here!

Simple Moves for Personal Brand Consistency

Posted on by Zinga H

Who’s focusing on their personal brand this year?

I definitely am!

Hanging out with women’s empowerment groups, a new network of fabulous friends and potential partnerships, as well as facing anything that feels like fear head on and with gusto!  The energy of my personal brand building focus contagious and like I discussed at my recent workshop, From Passion to Process, where your passion is your energy! It is a colorful word for describing the feeling that arises when we are doing something delightfully desirable.

passion is energy feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you oprah

 

One part of facing my fears was doing starting my YouTube channel! Cheers to all the vloggers out there, creating video content is an intensive activity!  Although, I create content and help small businesses’ build their brand strategy, putting myself right in the center of of building my personal brand still comes with an edge of awkwardness. Yet, I know confidence comes with time, and I look forward to learning and growing by following this new avenue in my life.

How are you growing your personal goals?

If building your brand means incorporating a new strategy, tactic, or method, how do you ensure that you stay authentic to your core values and vision, while treading across new lines?

Tying your vision to your brand means taking control and ownership of every bit of it. From your colors to your fonts, from your values to your guarantee, you need to ensure that you consistently apply your brand across your communication channels, so that you are easily recognized and familiar to your ideal audience.


So what are the major components of your brand that you need to think about? This awesome slide show by  Jarkko Sjöman covers some basic features of a personal brand with the sage advice of Will Ferrell. 

 

Below are some free or low cost moves you can take to improve and align your personal brand today!

Google Yourself (Or Your Business) 

I just did it! Wow, one year ago it my LinkedIn popped up and that’s about it. Now my content, websites, and many other streams of how I want to represent myself on the web comes to the top of the list. How is your Search Engine presence?  Is Google linking you to the content that you are most passionate about? If you are not showing up in the ranks you may want to consider if it’s time to focus on your online brand. Offline method: Do a personal SWOT analysis. 

Update your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to have a voice in the professional sphere of our economy. Since I enjoy working with small businesses, start-up entrepreneurs, and non-profit directors, I make it my mission to meet, connect, and learn with the best that LinkedIn can offer. Updating your LinkedIn profile to include your personal vision or mission statement and the specific values you bring to employers, gives your general audience an anchor to who you are.

Create a piece of content (write a blog post, share a video, make a flyer for you local bulletin board) 

Notice I didn’t say start a blog. You no longer have to have a blog to post articles. LinkedIn Pulse is a great platform for sharing content articles, while aligning to your personal and professional brand at the same time. Is this advice to not start a blog, far from it, but if you are not ready to dig into building your own blog yet then a small step forward would be to post there. That goes for other content as well, find ways to collaborate if running the entire content marketing enterprise is too much to manage right now. You should always strive towards having your own platform for hosting and controlling your content, but not having one is no excuse for not participating.

These small steps are only a beginning! If you checked out the SlideShare above you will see your business card, resume, website, and everything you create or is associated with you is a part of your personal brand. Checking on your brand’s bits and pieces means spending time combing through who you are and how you come across to your audience. Building your brand is about ensuring you are authentically projecting your core value, purpose, and passion with the world, which is no small feat!  Keep striving because your end vision is definitely worth it.