Exactly a decade ago, I was sitting in a classroom at the IBM Conference Center in NJ. That's where I went every other weekend to get my MBA from Cornell while I worked full time.
It was during lunch time that a free class was offered. The topic was "How to Develop Your Personal Brand." William Arruda was the instructor. (I suggest you look him up on LinkedIn and connect.)
When he touched on the importance of securing a domain name under your full name, I raised my hand to make a comment,
"That seems too much like shameless self-promotion to me."
Attendees looked at William to see how he would respond, as they were secretly thinking the same thing. In this particular situation, for whatever reason, I decided to be the trigger-happy one to point out the elephant in the room.
William took a pause, looked straight at me & calmly said,
"Ms. Sakai. Get. Over. It."
Everyone laughed. Nervously.
Message received, nonetheless. That weekend, I bought my domain name.
But it wasn't until 5 years later when I finally did something with it. Yes, that's the one you're looking at right now.
"Resistance" is a powerful & distracting behavior both in life & business that we tend to hold onto. Sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconsciously.
What happened was…I was hiding behind the age-old Japanese virtue of "Wise hawks hide their claws."
The saying means to convey the importance of not showing off your craft to create unnecessary commotion which may scare off your prey. Sounds noble. Sounds logical.
But the truth was... I just wasn’t confident enough to push myself out there in that way. So, my brain decided to wrap that up with all sorts of logical reasoning as to why I shouldn’t do it to achieve 2 things: