Perfect Your Personal Elevator Pitch (Management Tip #18-053017)

A personal thirty-second story is not just for job seekers. Being able to talk about yourself and your unique talents is a useful skill for building relationships and projecting confidence. Here are three tips for perfecting what to say about yourself:

• Focus on the relevant, not the recent. Your most recent job experience shouldn't necessarily be what you talk about first. Think about your audience and lead with your most relevant skills or experience.

• Focus on skills. You don’t have to have a background in marketing to be good at marketing. Talk about your relevant skills and how your experience is applicable to the situation at hand.

• Connect the dots. Your pitch shouldn’t sound like a resume but should tell a cohesive story. Bring together the richness of your experiences and demonstrate how they add up.

Develop a Leadership Brand

A leadership brand tells people what is distinctive about you as a leader and communicates what you have to offer. Summarizing your brand in a statement is a useful and often enlightening task. First, answer two important questions:

• What do I want to be known for?

• What results do I want to achieve in the next twelve months?

Take these two answers and put them into the fol¬lowing statement: I want to be known for so that I can deliver . Once you have your statement, be sure that you are living up to it. Ask others for input on whether you are achieving your goals and whether they see your leadership brand in the same way you do.

How to Craft the Job You Want

Not engaged and motivated by your job? You may have the power to change it. Begin by identifying your motives, strengths, and passions to help you better understand which aspects of your job will keep you engaged and inspire higher performance. Then, create a diagram of your current job, including your job tasks, noting which you do most often. Next, create a diagram of your preferred job, indicating which things you want to do more or less of and which tasks you want to add. This chart can help you articulate what you want to do differently. Be sure to engage your supervisor in this process; assure her that you won’t let your current tasks slide and that any new tasks you propose are central to the company.