Growing as you go: My latest workshop and lessons learned

Last week I delivered a Building your Personal Brand workshop in London, the perfect way to close out almost eight years of working for IBM/Kyndryl. It’d been in the works for a while – I first started discussing it with the Future Leaders Diversity and Inclusion team at Kyndryl back in June – and I couldn’t be happier with how it went.

We opened it up to both Future Leaders and Early Professionals, and more experienced profiles within the London hub, and we not only had a full house, it was a fully engaged one. I’d forgotten the rush of conducting workshops in person, after so long online, and the mad-dash of it as well!

The feedback blew me away, and it highlighted something I hadn’t quite realised.

Even though I’ve been working on Personal Branding for almost a decade now, the way I approach it has completely changed. I started out wanting to make it practical and accessible, but I was still pretty mired in the complexity of it and traditional ways of presenting it. I didn’t want to lose nuance, and sometimes lost my audience instead.

During the pandemic I experienced the spark that led to my “aha” moment. I attended a workshop by  Sam Laura Brown, the creator of the coaching programme PGSD (Perfectionists Getting Shit Done), and she promised it’d be different. At that point I was filling the little free time I had with workshops, summits and seminars, always hungry for more knowledge and new perspectives, but I can’t say I was actively doing much with what I was learning. But unlike those sessions, Sam had us do the exercises live on the webinar. She actually set a timer and an objective and left us to it. It’s such a simple thing, but it blew my mind. You can see that in my notes, which are still travelling with me from notebook to notebook.

It bridged the gap between understanding how to do something… and actually doing it.

It was powerful, and simple, and fit perfectly into how I’d built my personal branding from the start. After all, my first draft of the book was a good 70% exercises. It made so much sense.

So for my next workshop, I added an exercise. In my university guest lecture earlier this year, I did three.

Last week I did six. And it worked. You can see it in the feedback. (I also created a bonus section to the workbook with extra exercises, because I don’t know how to do things by halves).

Often the answers to our challenges seem obvious in retrospect. But the only way to get there is to try, and iterate, and see what works and what doesn’t. If I’d waited until I had the perfect workshop to share it with the world, it never would have gotten to be the value-packed, transformative session it is today. My perfectionism tendencies fight back hard on this one, but the only way to improve is with practice; shipping your product, whether you’re fully ready or not.

I’ll keep that lesson in mind as I work on my full Personal Branding course, and as I explore my career moving forwards.

Keep it simple, try things, and iterate. You don’t need to commit to a 180^o change today. But you can try out small experiments (a small project, volunteering, shadowing, an introductory course… the possibilities are endless) and see what sticks. Then you can do more of that until you find your balance. But if you wait until you’re perfectly ready, until you’re done, you’re not likely to get there. Building quietly and perfecting in isolation may not feel like it, but it is very risky; if you are not going in the right direction, you might miss a turn and then the path to get back on track is very, very long. It may just not be visible anymore. You may miss out on opportunities, growth and approaches you’d have picked up otherwise.

Are you holding yourself back somewhere in your life, until you’re ready and perfect? What would happen if you gave yourself permission to try things out instead?

Think about it. Your “aha” moment might be just around the corner.

PS: If you’re curious about the feedback, participants said the workshop was the perfect balance between learning and applying in practice what they’d just seen. That it clearly provided both the “why” and the “how” and married the two. And over 88% of participants indicated they were “very” to “extremely likely” to implement what they’d learned, which makes my heart dance.