Bestselling author and Hall of Fame speaker Sally Hogshead talks about the value of being a specialist, and how to create your own "anthem".Hear Sally's full interview in Episode 47 of The Action Catalyst.
It's a real aha to see yourself not through the lens of how you see the world, but rather how the world sees you. What we find is people, when they begin to look at themselves through the lens of how the world sees you, they feel self-conscious. They feel awkward or, oh, what if there's going to be something negative?
Or sometimes they feel vain, like, well, why do I want to focus on how people see me? But when you begin to understand how people see you at your best, When you understand why people love you and champion for you and buy from you and hire you and promote you and adore you, then you can focus on that. You can just do more of what you're already doing right and stop focusing on the rest of it.
And it's incredibly freeing to be able to say, look, you don't have to be perfect at everything, but you do have to be extraordinary at something. So instead of trying to be kind of good at a lot of things, be incredibly good and very, very different in one particular area. And this is what we see with high performers in teams. They're specialists.
They have some area that they're specializing in. And so what this book is showing you is that your personality has a natural built in specialty. There's something that you're just naturally primed to do. You're already great at it, but you just may not be. You may not have identified it and you probably don't know how to articulate it to other people.
So if you read the book, the book identifies what you're naturally suited to do. In other words, how does the world see you at your best? How can you do more of that? How can you articulate that in your marketing? And then how do you distill that down to a two or three word phrase that we call your anthem? Your anthem is the tagline for your personality. It's kind of like the Nike's just do it.
It's a phrase that describes who you are at your best. And we've taken about 20,000 people through this process. We've distilled it down to a really, really simple system. It takes about 10 minutes. So here's how this works. There's an adjective and a noun. When you put the adjective together with the noun, you get a descriptor of who you are at your best.
The adjective describes how you're different. The noun describes what you're doing when you're doing what you do best. So for example, I have somebody on my team named Corey. And Corey's archetype is named the detective. She took the same assessment that people will take when they get how the world sees you.
And when you take the assessment, it tells you an archetype that describes how the world sees you at your best. And it starts feeding you the actual words you need to be putting in to anytime you're describing yourself, like a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter bio, a resume, a business card, anytime you need the words to describe yourself. So Corey is really detailed and her archetype is the detective.
So her three adjectives are clear-cut, accurate, and meticulous. In other words, when Corey is set up to perform in a way that's clear-cut, accurate, and meticulous, she has a very high likelihood of winning. She has a great advantage there. But me, I'm not likely to win when the game field is clear-cut, accurate, meticulous. So Corey's anthem is meticulous follow-through.
In other words, the way Corey is most likely to deliver her highest value is through meticulous follow-through. So when you're creating your marketing, when you're introducing yourselves to people, what is it that you need to say that for them is going to see you as being intensely valuable? You can just keep coming back to those words, those words that describe who you are at your best.