Creating a positive brand is one thing, living the brand is quite another matter. It’s not about the logo, it’s about the benefits. People buy our brand because of the benefits they receive from what our brand has to offer.

If you work for someone else, the brand you represent is directly related to the caliber of work you do and the kind of relationships you forge. Remember, your brand is the identity you’ve established within the organization you work for. Your brand represents what sets you apart in the workplace. It’s what makes you different from everyone else.

Here are four ways to promote your brand in the workplace:

1. Be a great teammate.

You don’t work in a vacuum and you don’t live in a cocoon. You’re interacting with people every day. You and your brand are being judged by the contributions you’re making to the projects you work on and the people you work with. Being a solid contributor to the team is one of the surest ways to create a strong brand in the workplace.

2. Establish yourself as an expert

Just knowing how to do your job isn’t enough. In order to add remarkable, measurable and distinctive value to your organization – and to the people you work with – you need to become an expert at what you do. An expert knows his or her job from the inside out, becoming the “go to” person for direction and advice.

3. Become a visionary

In order to build a remarkable brand, you’ll need to see beyond the present. People will be looking to you to know what’s coming up on the horizon. You don’t have the luxury of living in the present – which is quite all right – because the present doesn’t last very long. Strong brands stay strong because they’re future focused, always looking for a new and better way.

4. Focus on results

It’s not what you say you’ll do that will establish your credibility as a valuable brand. It’s what you actually produce that will determine your value in the workplace. Pragmatic results are what count. Your value to the organization and to the team will be measured by the results you produce – not by the promises you make.

See why I said it’s easier to play the blame game than to take responsibility for results? Be a great teammate, establish yourself as an expert, be a visionary and focus on results. If you do those four things, your brand will be as strong as any in the marketplace. And so will your value.

We live in an interesting time. Remember when the prognosticators in the 1980s were all predicting a paperless existence by the end of the 20th century? They were saying, because of the advancements in technology, specifically personal computing, we’d soon live in a paperless world and only work 32 hours a week. How’s that working out for you?

No, I’m afraid in spite of all the technical advancements, we’re not enjoying a world without paper nor a much shorter workweek. The mistake the crystal ballers made was overlooking the human element. While our Macs and PCs can do magical things, they don’t do a very good job of dealing with our personal or professional priorities. Unfortunately, that’s our job.

We’re the ones who have to decide what will move us in the direction we want to go. We have to choose life’s real priorities. Based on the plans we made for making 2012 better than 2011, we have to make sure our daily priorities align with our annual aspirations.

The key is to be very clear on what we want 2012 to look like. I recommend writing, yes, I said “writing,” a S.M.A.R.T. vision statement for 2012 – a statement that’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound. Without this kind of specificity, your vision is nothing more than a wish or a dream. And without specificity, your vision for a better life has no power.

With a clear and compelling vision for what you want to accomplish, you’re able to prioritize what your month, week and day will look like. If your vision includes making more money in the year ahead, you’ll need to specify exactly how much you want to make. From there the math becomes pretty simple – divide the annual number by 12 to get the monthly nut you’ll have to hit. Better yet, divide that number by 52 to get a weekly figure you’ll need to earn. Simple, right?

But herein lies the rub. It’s not the math that’s difficult. It’s the “daily discipline” that causes all the problems. It’s deciding what three or four things you’ll have to do each day to achieve a desired outcome. Whether you want a fatter pocketbook or a slimmer waistline, it’s all about making specific daily tasks or activities a priority. It’s about contacting a certain number of customers or prospects, or it’s about choosing to eat really good food – instead of feel-good food. It’s all about committing to priorities.

When everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority. Being successful at anything means having a clear target to shoot for, then making sure your daily actions move you in the direction you want to go. Remember, successful people and people who don’t succeed at much of anything have one thing in common; they both hate doing the same things. But the successful folks do them anyway.

Successful living is for the most part about doing things we don’t necessarily like to do – but doing them anyway.

 Looking for a good New Year’s Resolution? Here you go – stop believing everything you see and hear in the media and stop paying attention to the naysayers. Here’s why – the two things you can absolutely control are your thinking and your behavior. Let’s face it, whatever happens with the leadership in North Korea, or the turmoil in the Middle East, is out of your control. You can’t change a thing that’s going on in either of those countries.

 Here’s your formula for success in the year ahead: E+R=O

 Event + Response = Outcome. This formula is based on the fact that the outcome of any event is not predicated on the event itself – but rather on our response to the event. And I’m not just talking about what’s happening in other parts of the world. I’m talking about what’s happening in your world.

 Years ago, I taught time management for a company here in Phoenix. One of the principles we espoused was that time management was really event management – and everything is an event. Getting up in the morning is an event. Interacting with our family and friends, driving to work, shopping at the local grocery, are all events.

 The outcome of each of those events will be determined by your response to the event as much as the event itself. Wake up on the wrong side of the bed today? Your response will set the tone for your entire day. Does getting the kids ready for school in the morning feel like you’re herding cats? Someone cut you off in traffic on your way to work? Does the person in front of you in the “15 items or less line” have a basket full of groceries? These are all events in which you have the ability to control the outcome.

 Making 2012 a success will in large measure be the result of how you respond to the curve balls life throws at you. Solomon said: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” We all face similar challenges every single day. The issue isn’t will we face these challenges but rather how we’ll choose to respond to them.

 We have absolute control of two things: how we think, and how we respond as a result of how we think. Start the year off making the resolution to control your thinking and your behavior in each event you face – and in doing so remember – EVERYTHING IS AN EVENT.

Each of the answers to the questions below will require action on your part. It would be a big mistake to leave this as just a plan. After you answer these questions, list a “first action step” beside the answer to get you moving to make something happen.

Success comes from doing, not from dreaming. We’re the only species on the planet that has the ability to design the future we want to have. Take advantage!

Here are some questions you can use to plan for a successful 2012. I wish you the very best year ever!

What successes are you looking for next year?

How can you make better decisions in 2012?

What do you need to learn or relearn in 2012?

Which piece of unfinished business needs your attention in the year

ahead?

What project needs to be completed in 2012?

What risk(s) do you need to take in 2012?

What surprise would you like to experience next year?

Name three people you want to positively impact in 2012.

What important relationship needs to be improved next year?

What one word best sums up the experience you want to have in 2012?

While we don’t want to linger in the past, it’s always beneficial to learn from it. Every success and every failure teach a lesson. Success is seldom permanent. It’s a moving target that can prove elusive. Failure isn’t fatal – just painful. If we’re smart, we learn from both.

Here are some questions about 2011 you can use to reflect on. Next week, I’ll send you a series of questions you can noodle on as you prepare for the year ahead.

What was your biggest success?

What was the best decision you made?

What was the most important lesson you learned?

What is your biggest piece of unfinished business?

What were you most happy about completing?

What was the biggest risk you took?

What was the biggest surprise?

Who were the three people who had the greatest impact on your life?

What important relationship improved the most?

What one word best sums up and describes the year’s experience?

Next week, we’ll ask and answer some important questions about the year ahead.

The only place to start is where you are right now. Waiting for the right time, more money, the right people, help from a friend or colleague, are all recipes for disaster.

Your success and achievement in 2012 will come from your energy, your efforts and your actions, not from anywhere else. Peter Drucker said: “The only way to get the future you want is to create it.”

In the next few weeks:

1. Desire

Desire is more than wanting or wishing or hoping 2012 will be better than last year was. Desire is that fire in the belly you probably feel right now to do those things you need in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish in the year ahead. Warning! If you don’t fan those flames you’re feeling right now, they will go out.

Action: Write out a clear statement of what you intend to accomplish in 2012 – and share it with a trusted friend or colleague.

2. Personal Initiative

Remember, the cavalry isn’t coming. You’ve heard the saying: “If it’s meant to be, it’s up to me!” Guess what? It’s only up to you! Inertia is the killer of improved performance and real achievement. Why? It’s easier to do nothing. Unless you take the necessary actions to change the way things are now – they’ll stay the way they are now. Become a person of action in 2012.

Action: Make a list of three habits you’ll develop in 2012 that will change the status quo. Remember, most of what you do – you do because of habit.

3. Process

Efficiency expert W. Edwards Deming said: “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” Process is everything when it comes to performance and productivity. Establishing routines is a very effective way to shake off the mundane. Start with a morning and an evening routine. When you wake up, do something productive before you do anything else. In the evening, take a specific action that will prepare you for the next day.

Action: If you don’t have a defined process for improving your performance and productivity – get one. I can help with that – call me or drop me an email.

4. Commitment

Commit to what? Commit to the process you’ve decided to use for changing the status quo. Establishing a morning or evening routine is only half the battle. Committing to live the routine long enough for it to become a habit is the key. Establishing a routine for a day or two won’t get it. Three to four weeks of consistent behavior is what it will take to establish the habit of doing the same (productive) things the same way – every day.

Action: Develop a morning routine, one that will get you off to a productive start every day. Hint: Don’t get up and check email – do something productive first!

5. Accountability

This is the missing ingredient of performance improvement. Make yourself accountable to someone for the actions you’ll take to change the status quo in the year ahead. Chances for success and achievement are dramatically increased when you tell someone else what you’re doing and what you intend to accomplish. You’ll be amazed at how willing a good friend or colleague will be to help you succeed.

Action: Call a trusted friend or colleague. Outline your plans for 2012 and ask him or her to be your accountability partner. Specify a time each week when you’ll get together to update your progress.

Taking control of our workspace and our calendar are two ways to lessen the stress of going to work and facing its challenges. Here are some practical suggestions on how to take back the workday and ramp up our productivity.

Keep Your Work Area Organized – papers scattered or stacked on your desktop create unnecessary stress. It’s difficult to stay focused on a specific task or action when your work area looks like a paper grenade went off. Use a foolproof filing system – more about that in a minute – to keep paperwork off your desktop and in an appropriate file or file drawer.

Bookend Your Day with Routines – It can be difficult to manage time during the course of the workday. There’s just too much going on: meetings, dropins, ringing phones and surprise challenges. There are two times of the day when you have complete control: first thing in the morning and the end of the day. Take advantage. Use the first hour or so of the day to work on important projects or tasks. Use the last hour of the day for review and planning.

Stay Up-to-Date on All Paperwork – I know you’ve heard this before but try and handle items in your in-basket only once. Once you take something out, make a decision on what to do with it. Take immediate action – file it – delegate it – or toss it. By the way, studies show that once you file something – you’ll probably never look at it again.

Leverage the Day by Batching Tasks – By doing similar tasks at a particular time of the day, you’re able to better manage your time and increase your efficiency. Schedule time during the day when you (1) return calls or emails, (2) work on important projects. I know your day is busy but you probably have more control of your calendar than you give yourself credit for. Try to schedule small segments of time (15-20 minutes) when you can work on your priorities. If you don’t control your calendar, someone else will.

Follow Checklists for Important or Repeated Procedures – Follow the lead of airline pilots. Before a commercial aircraft pushes away from the gate, the pilot and copilot go through a checklist to make sure they and the plane are ready to fly, and they do this before every flight. Create a checklist for repeated but important tasks. For instance, how about creating a pre- and post-meeting checklist? What needs to happen before and after a meeting to make it productive?

Create a Foolproof Filing (Retrieval) System – The reason things stack up on your desk or credenza is because you’re afraid if you file it, you won’t be able to find it again. Right? Here’s a system I’ve used for years and highly recommend. File paperwork in one of three ways: (1) by name, (2) by subject, or (3) by company. The beauty of this filing system is that once filed, you have the comfort of knowing it will be found in only one of three places.

Develop a Continuous Improvement Philosophy – Things change. We hear this all the time, but I’m not sure we believe it. Part of the problem is we’re all creatures of habit. Studies show that most of what we do, we do because of habit. We love our little comfort zones, don’t we. We intellectually agree that we have to be ready to change, but being ready to change and changing are often two different things. My recommendation is to develop the philosophy of continuous improvement. Instead of allowing yourself to get too comfortable in managing your day-to-day activities, regularly reflect on how to do them a little better.

Your situation today, whatever it may be, is the result of
choices you’ve made up to this point. The fact is that the choices we make day
after day turn into habits. Studies show that as much as 80 percent of what we
do – every day – is done according to our habits. We do the things we do, and
act the way we act, primarily because of habit. For the most part, our behavior
isn’t predicated on policy or directives, or because of bad parenting or a mean
and ignorant boss. We behave the way we do because of our habits. We make our
choices – then our choices shape our circumstances.

Scary thought, is it not? Every decision we make each day
determines the quality of our life. We choose how much education we need, where
we work, who we marry, whether or not to drink and drive. We choose how much
effort we’ll put into our work each day, who we emulate, how much TV we’ll
watch, and on and on.

Not happy with that little scenario? Then change it. You
have the power to control your destiny – by controlling the choices you make
each day. Here’s the rub: most people make no conscious effort to track the
choices they make throughout the course of the day.

Want to improve the quality of your life starting today?
Then you need to start counting. You need to create a simple system for keeping
track of the things you want to START doing, STOP doing, do MORE of, or LESS
of.

For example, if you want to eat more nutritious foods as a
way to lead a healthier life, you’ll need to start keeping track of what you
eat. Want more money in the bank? Start controlling your expenses and saving
more than you spend. Do you have any idea of how much money you spent
yesterday, and what you spent that money on?

Here’s the problem; you’re just not keeping score. See, no
one intends to be overweight. No one wants to end his or her working life with
no money in the bank. We’re heavier than we want to be and we put no money in a
savings or retirement account because we don’t keep score. We just stumble and
bumble our way through life hoping something good or not too bad will happen to
us. We don’t pay that much attention to the habits we’ve formed that are taking
us down a road we really don’t want to go down.

Jim Rohn said: “Failure is the result of a few errors in judgment,
repeated every day, and success is the result of a few simple disciplines
practiced every day.” Errors in judgment repeated every day lead to a life we
don’t enjoy very much. A few simple disciplines, repeated every day (does the
word “habit” come to mind), build a happy, productive life.

Let me encourage you to start keeping score of those few
things you may be doing unconsciously. What are you eating? How much are you
eating? Keep track of your expenses – daily. For most folks, income isn’t the
problem. Expenses are the problem. Most of us simply spend more than we’re able
to earn. That’s a bad plan. Keep track of anything you want to do – or should
be doing – to improve your quality of life. I zeroed in on weight and money
because both are low-hanging fruit when it comes to quick wins toward a
healthier and more stress-free life.

Create a chart that lists the habits or behaviors you want
to develop. Make it possible to count – each day – what you want to track. How
much, by when, is a simple formula for tracking the behaviors we want to see.
Track those behaviors every day. At the end of the week, total up where you
scored – and where you didn’t. Commit to yourself, and to a trusted friend, to
improve next week what you didn’t do so well this week.

Living a happy, healthy and successful life is easier than
you may think. All you have to do is begin shaping your habits and keeping
score.

 What’s done is done. I can’t change the things that happened this year. But I can learn from them and work hard to make the next year better by applying the lessons learned, good and bad.

 Here a few musings you might find helpful as you prepare for the year ahead.

 1. Life gets better when you get better

 Gilbert Orland said: When an archer misses the mark he looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull’s-eye is never the fault of the target… .” Improving our quality of life always starts with self-improvement.

 2. You can’t unscramble an egg

 A pastor friend of mine used to say: “You can’t unscramble an egg, but you can make a pretty good omelet.” Bad things happen to good people – no one is immune. When things don’t go the way we planned, it’s time to dust ourselves off and try “Plan B.” More on this in a minute.

 3. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.

 I’ve written about this concept before. The primary reason we fail is that we quit too soon. If things don’t work out on the first try, we quit. Bad move. Skills and abilities take time to develop. Keep practicing!

 4. You’re only as free as your options.

 Continually develop new options. Have a “Plan “B.” Few things work out the way we planned. President Eisenhower said: “Plans are meaningless – but planning is essential.” Part of the planning process is coming up with alternative plans. I call them: “What if plans.” What if my chosen course of action doesn’t work? Have a “Plan B.”

 5. You can learn what you need to learn – to achieve what you want to achieve.

 Man was designed to be a learner. Anything anyone else has learned to do – so can you. You can acquire any knowledge or skill you need to rise to the top of your chosen field. Learning something new is more a matter of will and persistence than intelligence. Develop the attitude, “If he or she could accomplish that, so can I.”

6. We set the length of our own tethers.

This is very much in line with Number 5. Henry Ford said: “If you believe you can do a thing or you believe you cannot, in either case, you’re probably right. You now have or can certainly acquire the talents and abilities you need to achieve your goals and dreams. Don’t tether yourself with self-doubt or the fear of attempting a great thing.

Forget what you tried to do but failed. Remember, you can’t unscramble an egg, but you can make a world-class omelet.

 Dave Ramsey, the TV and radio celebrity whose financial strategies are used by millions of people, offers this sage advice: “Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses – the Joneses are broke!”

 If you’re interested in standing out in your organization or industry, here’s my advice: Don’t follow the lead of what everybody else is doing, because chances are – they’re just doing what other coworkers are doing, or just doing enough to get by.

It’s always easy to outperform someone who’s just doing what everybody else is doing. You start the process by simply looking at your job or the services you provide from a different perspective. Here’s how: Focus on doing those things that will contribute to the success of the company you work for. Know what your company’s goals are.

The Center for Advanced Research, the research arm of the Franklin Covey organization, conducted a five-year study on Employee Goal Awareness. The study involved almost 6,800 employees in 530 companies in both the public and private sectors.

The results of the study were shocking, to say the least. I’ll spare you the specific numbers (they’re available online) but suffice to say, the CAR study revealed that, depending on the industry or government sector, somewhere between 43 percent and 74 percent of the employees surveyed couldn’t name a single organizational goal. That’s right; the odds are, somewhere between half and three quarters of employees in most organizations can’t name a single organizational goal. There was absolutely no linkage between what they’re doing and what the company wants to accomplish.

The bottom line of the CAR study was this:

“When large numbers of American workers show up to work each day knowing neither why they are there nor what they are supposed to do all day, it means American business is operating very inefficiently, and that means poor service and lower profits.”

Get your hands on your company’s strategic plan. Study that plan and figure out how to link what you’re doing with what your employer intends to accomplish in the next 12 to 36 months. Let your boss know what you’re doing. Ask for his or her help

See why I say it’s easy to outperform the competition? If half of the people in your organization have no clue what your company’s goals are, or what it intends to achieve in the next year or so – and you do – you can’t help but outperform most of the people in your organization.

If you’re a corporate leader or senior manager, make sure every employee in your organization understands how their respective job is aligned with the strategic plan and corporate initiatives. Make sure the focus of their efforts is on doing those things that contribute to achieving corporate objectives. That simple adjustment will put your company at least 50 percent ahead of your closest competitor.

Following the crowd or trying to keep up with the Joneses doesn’t make a lot of sense, if the crowd doesn’t know where it’s going and the folks with the nicer car and custom home are in debt up to their eyeballs.

The key to outperforming the competition is to actively manage your future. Know specifically what you need to do to help your company succeed and to make the most of present circumstances.