Grow Through A Branding Process: Decode Your Value to Reveal Your True Potential
Wendy Glavin, Founder & CEO, Wendy Glavin Agency
Throughout 2020, we’ve faced hardships, challenges, uncertainty and learned to “pivot,” focus on “the new normal,” and the “next normal”; terms to make sense of what’s happening in our lives. But, thinking about the what if’s can lead us to contemplate worst-case scenarios, most of which are outside our control.
There are a lot of helpful articles about what we can do to minimize stress like exercising, taking a break from the news and social media, focusing on our health and diet, communicating regularly with colleagues and friends, pursuing hobbies and more.
While activities like these may help you cope, they don’t necessarily address the deeper problem – the need to look within ourselves. When you carve out all the experiences you’ve had in your life, you’re able to look at yourself through a broader lens. The process, I created with my team is called, Decode Your Value.
You may have heard me discussing it in a video or during a live event. Or, if you’ve followed my articles on the subject, you’re learned the importance of looking back to identify your core values, merging your professional and personal personas to seize opportunities, instead of waiting for external events to change.
While recognizing your hard and soft skills is one way to categorize your strengths and weaknesses, Life skills consist of what you’ve learned throughout your life which when you know what they are, you can incorporate them into your brand and your communication.
Recently, I began thinking about how I could illustrate the Decode Your Value method. This sparked a memory for me of hiking in a forest long ago with my family and getting lost. Everywhere we looked was the same; tall trees, colored leaves, fallen branches and rocks. We panicked and didn’t know how to find our way out of the woods.
Perhaps, this is how you feel because of or in spite of the pandemic. To help you make sense of the concept, here’s an illustration of my Life Skills tree below. The trunk represents my core values, the greenery are my notable life experiences and the branches represent how the categories connect:
Here’s a Life Skills tree PDF that you can download and complete. If you need help, please reach out with your questions, ideas or comments. Like a patchwork quilt, create your own life tree and spread the word. Hopefully in 2021, we’ll have a digital forest.
As we’re nearing the end of 2020, I’ll leave you with one of my most favorite life quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“For what it’s worth, it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing.
We can make the best or worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
About the Author:
Wendy Glavin is Founder and CEO of Wendy Glavin, a NYC full-service agency. Wendy is a 30-year veteran of corporate, agency, consulting and small business ownership. She specializes in B2B2C marketing communications, executive writing, PR and social media advisory. Her website is:
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