A couple weeks ago, I had tea with the CEO of Women Lead Change. Tiffany offered to help me with my speaking, marketing, and my overall message. I was so grateful! I feel like I’m a little lost when it comes to selling myself and getting out there, especially as a speaker. I was ready to soak up all of her knowledge, and I thought some of my questions would have concrete answers. I was looking for the black and white “right” answers.
I was wrong. Thank goodness.
We looked at my LinkedIn profile and website while we talked. She said I was way more than the “writer/speaker” description I gave myself. I hadn’t listed all of my accomplishments. She listed several other descriptors I should consider including. As a CEO, she would be looking for more before hiring me for a conference or other event. I shouldn’t sell myself short, she said.
While we were talking, I thought of writing warrants in the Secret Service. I remembered an instructor at training calling one of the first parts of the warrant the “I Love Me” clause. It’s the section of the warrant where the preparer essentially shows that he/she is trained and qualified to investigate the crime in question. It was the place to brag a little bit about one’s training and experience. Let the judge who’s signing off on this know you know what the heck you’re doing.
My LinkedIn and website weren’t the best “I Love Me” clauses, and I often don’t know what I’m doing (for the record).
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how tentative I am about labeling myself as something I want to be good at because I’m afraid I won’t be able to deliver. I’m hesitant because I think I’m just not good enough or that I’m nobody special and even a little egotistical to think anyone would care what I have to say.
It’s the usual underlying tones of fear of failure and fear of rejection.
I asked Tiffany about what I should wear at speaking gigs and how I should do my makeup and hair. Were there any “rules” or things I should avoid (like maybe cut-off jeans or hats or a certain kind of makeup). That sort of thing. How should I look?
“However you want, ” was her answer.
I control my look. I control my “brand” and how that’s portrayed. There are no rules.
In my head, I thought I should always look professional or at least speak in a business or business casual clothing style. All I really know in the “business” realm is the look of an ill-fitting business suit with a jacket 1-2 sizes too big to account for all the gear around my waist as I worked. Outside of the Secret Service job, I worked in the fitness industry where athletic wear was the norm.
So… what is my look?
What is my brand?
What is my message?
What is my label?
Maybe it was coincidence (or maybe not), but amid all of this social distancing due to COVID-19, I came across the YouTube “church” service for Hillsong Church East Coast. The pastor is Carl Lentz (no known relation). I’ve read Carl’s book Own the Moment, and I liked it. In general, I have had a love/hate relationship with church (not necessarily with faith) for a long time. I am not always a regular attender of church, but I did listen to Lentz’s sermon entitled “That Label Doesn’t Fit Me Anymore”. Let’s just say it was good timing.
I am not one to talk a whole lot of politics and religion. Both topics are annoyingly controversial in today’s world, and I think, like most people, I am not as educated in either topic as I’d like to be. It’s hard to get past political and religious labels and actually learn from “the other side” sometimes.
The sermon was about labels, obviously. Carl Lentz talked about how labels do matter. They can free you or become your prison. They can marginalize you or set you free. They can change things overnight.
But labels can create excuses not to change. Labels can be used as a shield. Gut punch, Carl.
My personally-assigned labels/shields/excuses:
Shy
Awkward
Lost
Broken
All of those labels are convenient excuses NOT to speak out and assume I have nothing to offer because I don’t have it all together.
My book Agent Innocent got a bad review recently. The reviewer said, “… apparently because she’s a woman, we’re supposed to believe that the story of her struggles needs telling.”
First of all, this review is a load of sexist crap written by a man who likes to read military-style memoirs. It really doesn’t matter if he liked or hated my book. But those kinds of comments make it easy to use my personal labels as a shield. People won’t have anything to criticize if I don’t let them see me as the train wreck that I am, I tell myself.
Here are some other nuggets from Carl Lentz’s sermon that I found particularly convicting:
I control the narrative of my life experience. I cannot always control what’s happening in my life or what’s going on around me, but I can control what I call it. How I label my life says a lot about where I’m going.
“Maybe you have been giving up the microphone way too much to a spokesperson that has no right to speak into your life any longer.”
In other words, I have the naming rights to my life. What am I going to do about it?
The sermon also addressed labeling our life’s seasons correctly.
“Sometimes we need to label things as they are going to be, rather than what they are right now.”
COVID-19 has taken away my work for the time being. It’s easy to label this “season” as a low one, a season of depletion, financially and emotionally. But it could also be a season of opportunity and reevaluation due to extra free time. It’s a time to reassess where I’m at and where I need to go. It’s an opportunity to rebuild.
That’s what this season could be, but not what it really feels like right now.
But I have the naming rights, right? It’s a big responsibility that shapes where I’m going. It’s nothing to be taken lightly. Also, my labels don’t have to be permanent either. In fact, they probably need adjusting from time to time.
If I choose to label this current season in life as an opportunity to take a big leap forward, I suppose establishing new labels for myself might take some getting used to, too. Change is uncomfortable, and it’s easy to revert back to the past. At the beginning of 2020, many of us wrote “2019” when we needed to date something. Eventually we got comfortable writing “2020” and embraced the new year.
I’m comfortable labeling myself as a writer because it’s something I enjoy. I’m uncomfortable labeling myself as a “motivational speaker” because that scares me. I think of those old “shy and awkward” labels which were labels I self-assigned but also labels reinforced by others. When I was younger, I was minimized and shamed because of an “innocent” label. In law enforcement, my opinions were often disregarded because I did not have “military,” “law enforcement,” or “experience” within my labels. But like the sermon suggested, I am the spokesperson for my life, and I can’t hand the microphone to anyone else.
Little did I know that the combination of a tea date with an awesome, empowering CEO, old warrant-writing lingo, and a pastor with my last name would be so helpful in this unexpected season of rebuilding/rebranding. Life is funny that way, and I love when these things happen.
I’m still working on the “I Love Me” aspect of my LinkedIn profile and website, and I’m not going to pretend I suddenly figured all of that out by listening to a sermon. I have some labels I still need to remove and others I need to start embracing more. That’s the tough part. Sometimes the new and better labels are scary.
I am not a business suit kind of woman anymore, and I don’t see my “look” or “uniform” being anything like it. If I disregard any perceived rules or norms, my preferred work “uniform” isn’t going to involve a dress or slacks. It’s probably going to be jeans, crazy shoes, chunky jewelry, and, quite possibly, some sort of top knot hairdo. Who knows? Maybe I’ll change that up too. I’ll figure out my look, and I’m definitely going to own it.
Maybe that’s precisely the takeaway I needed from all of this:
Always retain your “naming rights,” choose labels that reflect where you want to go, and then OWN IT! And above all, keep moving forward! None of us have it all together.
Embracing the typos till next Monday-ish,
Mel
P.S. Click to listen to “That Label Doesn’t Fit Me Anymore.” (The sermon starts around the 21:00 mark.)