 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tuesday Tea. I am so excited that you can join me for this tea today. For my Canadian friends out there, happy Monday. That's a Tuesday. We're just coming off of a long weekend here in Canada. So that was fun. Feel like every weekend is a long weekend here in Canada. It's not like we can go anywhere, which is fine. I spent the weekend here at home, woke up Saturday morning and joined my bubble friends for a rousing game of pickleball. So it was our second time out, at least Sean and I, my husband and I, it was our second time out playing pickleball with our bubble friends. So it's four couples. And so we had two courts on Saturday morning for two hours. And I don't know if you've tried pickleball or if you're tempted to try pickleball, it's a dangerous sport. My forearms are absolutely killing me. And now I've learned that if my forearms are killing me, it's because I have bad form in the way that I'm holding my paddle. So just when I was thinking I had some progress and I was starting to make some great shots, now I'm learning that I made the shots all wrong and it's back to the drawing board. But anyways, I'm still healing from my Saturday morning pickleball game. And then we had a bubble barbecue with these same couples. Again, socially distanced. This time in our backyard, it's bring your own food, bring your own everything. And we're gonna keep doing that until restrictions allow us to maybe host with some food. But we've been doing that every other weekend. I guess this is our third weekend doing that together. Sunday, Sean and I were in the garden as we are most Sundays now. So I spent some time in the garden. And then yesterday, I actually did do some work because my masterclass is coming up in two weeks as well as my personal branding course is launching in two weeks. So I have a lot to do over the next two weeks. So took some time yesterday to get some work done here in Canada on a holiday Monday. And also went for a walk with Sean and Farrell Sparkley. But a lot of the work I was doing was around today's topic, why I changed my personal brand. Carol, I love it. Yeah, when you hear the word pivot, your brain turns off. So in launching the announcement for today's live, I asked about the word pivot, which has become a bit of a swear word in our industry over the past year. A lot of people are sick of hearing it or else they turn it into a drinking game, which is always fun. They're using all kinds of alternate words, transform or reimagine. And I love those words too. But it all comes down to a lot of us over the past year have had to pivot and make a change in our careers, the way we deliver our services and in our personal brands. And that's definitely been my story over the past year. I actually changed my brand a couple of times. Subtle differences. So probably no one really noticed a big massive shift, but definitely made some subtle changes over the year. But it wasn't really out of necessity. It definitely was something that I was looking to do anyway. And the big shift of 2020 for our industry provided me a little bit of opportunity to actually change my brand and to pursue some of those things that were sitting on the side of my desk. They were still there. They were sitting on the side of my desk, but I couldn't tend to them because I was so busy with the business at hand. I was one of the lucky folks. I had a great business. I had a great business partner really, really enjoy my work working with clients in helping them find hotels and destinations for their program. So site selection for the industry professionals out there. So I've been working site selection for 14 years, but off the corner of my desk, I always had the blog and the video series and things that I would do when I had time, which wasn't a lot, but I made time to do. And over the past six or seven years, I've really, really enjoyed that part of my job. It wasn't something that I had to do, but it's something that I chose to do and I really enjoyed it. One of the reasons I created a personal brand from the beginning was I wanted to try to do sales differently. I wanted to try to attract clients to my product offering, not through cold calls or even really cold emails, but through inbound marketing. And I did a post about inbound marketing, I think it was last week actually, then it went out if you wanna check out that post, but I really felt us as hospitality professionals, inbound marketing has a really great place in hospitality. Cause inbound is about being in service to others and attracting people. And that really is what hospitality is, whether you're a hotel or a destination or a restaurant, you are attracting people into your venue, into your place and then you are serving them when they're in that place. And I really felt my role as a site selection professional, I could do that. I could invite people into business with me and my business partner. I can invite people into community with us just as they are going to be invited into the hotel to host their meeting and conference. But then again, March 2020 rolled around, I think it was March 13th, which is now a date in my calendar that I quote unquote celebrate every year as being the date that changed our industry, changed all of our lives if we're in the hospitality industry. And I changed my brand as a result. The first few weeks and months after March 13th was still full of taking care of the business. Steven and I, as many of you know, decided to dissolve our partnership as we kind of went our separate ways in our new passions. And who knows, there might be a day there where we get back together. Steven is a wonderful business partner and we had really exciting plans for 2021 or for 2020, sorry. But after we processed all the cancellations and really as a partnership, we didn't have much left to work on. I wanted to pursue more on the branding side of things. It's an area that I had been working off the side of my desk for so many years, but loved it so much that now it was time to really get to work and put more investment into it. And so that's what I did, is I started to work on changing my brand and working on this new meta thing around branding because I found passion in it. I haven't lost my passion for site selection, don't get me wrong, when we get started up again, I'm gonna be super excited to serve my clients and to connect with partners again. But I wanted to really explore this personal branding side of my business because I was passionate about it, especially around LinkedIn and many of you know me through LinkedIn. I love building community, contributing to community, seeing other communities through people's brands and especially on LinkedIn, which is the professional brand platform. So that was my passion and I started to work in that. And I started to double down on my LinkedIn efforts. I've created a course around optimizing your LinkedIn profile and really enjoyed that process of building a course. That was what I call a starter course because my passion really was about branding as a whole, personal branding A to Z. LinkedIn was a tiny bit of it, so whether you call it a starter course or maybe a spotlight course, it's only one piece of the branding puzzle. My goal was really to create a larger course for hospitality professionals, well, sorry, back up, a larger course around personal branding. At the time, I thought, this is now we're in August, September. At the time, I thought, oh, this course is gonna be for all sales professionals because the hospitality industry has been hit hard and they're not coming back for a while. So I'll create this personal branding course for all sales professionals. So my brand changed a little bit. I moved from being in the business and events industry to being in the sales profession industry and started to learn more about sales industries in other industries or the sales process in other industries and very quickly realized that that wasn't gonna be my jam. When you are selling in hospitality, whether you're an inbound marketer or not, there's just a family way of doing sales in our industry. That way of selling doesn't exist in all industries and I found a lot of other sales processes did not resonate with the values that I hold true in the sales process. So I actually did a brand pivot again. And again, maybe most people didn't notice it but I went from personal branding for sales professionals back to personal branding in the hospitality industry. Cause again, that's my passion and that's why I wanted to make this shift. And you might be in that place too. And whether it's a passion within the industry or a passion outside the industry, if you have that passion and you have the flexibility and time now to make that switch, it's a great time to look at your brand from soup to nuts and make that switch as well. Now, the other reason I wanted to change my brand and as you know, is our business has changed and the hospitality industry and especially site selection is not coming back for full time for a few years. So that gives me quite a stretch of time to explore other opportunities. And you might find yourself in the same boat whether you're in site selection or you're an independent meeting planner. If your business has changed this is a great time to explore those other things that you've always wanted to try which means you might be looking at a brand change as well. Cause our business certainly has changed and it's given us time to explore some things. The other thing that if this pandemic had hit 40, 50 years ago these opportunities wouldn't be so prevalent or so readily available because of all the resources we now have at hand. And that's the other thing that I love about branding at this time, at this particular time in history is there are so many resources available for us to explore what a personal brand looks like, to explore what our content can look like, explore what our platforms are, the platforms that we're on to amplify our brand but it's a lot of learning. There's a lot of things to learn when you explore creating a personal brand. There's a lot of decisions that you have to make. There are a lot of technology pieces that you have to weave together. You can personal brand through email and email alone but that in and of itself is another tool that you have to learn. So there's a lot to learn when you're making a brand change but there's also a lot to learn if you're serving a new audience. So if you're longing for opportunities to learn something new, serving a new audience or changing up your personal brand is a great way to get a water hose full of information flying right at you. I wanna recognize Cheryl. Cheryl, thank you for your comment. She said, travel agents are the same. My sister's a travel agent, Cheryl. She's a work from home travel agent. My gosh, she worked for so many companies. The company she's working with has just left me but she's out of Medicine Hat, Alberta, working for an American firm. She's luckily kept her job, Cheryl. I'm very, very, very fortunate and lucky. I feel for her, I'm so thankful that she's been able to retain her employment but you're right, a ton of her colleagues were let go during this time and they haven't come back yet. I believe some of her European counterparts have come back but her American counterparts are still slow to come back. So travel agents are the same. I couldn't agree more. Cheryl, and if you have created a pivot or a brand change in your life, I'd love to hear from you whether you wanna drop another comment about that or just send me a DM because I'd love to hear what travel agents are doing or some of the different, oh, Cheryl, oh my gosh, my heart is breaking. Yeah, so I, oh my God, don't make me cry. So I totally get it, Cheryl. And I'm really hopeful that you're looking at different things to keep yourself busy, whether it's just reading books, again, going back to all the things that we can do with our time during this crazy time of pivoting. There's tons of books to read. There's YouTube videos to explore. Podcasts are exploding. So whether you wanna listen to a podcast about business or you wanna listen to a podcast about real life crime stories those things are so popular. There's so much that you can learn now through different mediums and 2020 definitely brought light to that. So Cheryl, I hope you have found a pivot or a brand change that has excited you. The other thing that what a brand change does is it invites different opportunities into your circle. And those opportunities might look like work placements, new clients, right? There's always the hope for new clients. But it could look like other opportunities like maybe being a guest blog writer for a magazine or a periodical. It could be as a guest podcast, a guest and sharing your story on someone's podcast. It could be doing a video series. I did a guest videos actually quite a few over the past year talking about branding, talking about the meetings and events industry. So when you change your brand and you start to serve others in this new brand capacity, you start to invite those other opportunities as well, especially if you're working for a larger organization. They're watching, which is great because they're seeing all the good work that you're doing to remain in service to your clients and customers. And so opportunities internally start to present themselves as well. And I have a couple of students who have done that through their branding careers and through their meetings and events industry careers where they have created brands for themselves. And it's invited these really interesting opportunities internally for them. So that's what a brand can do for you. And Cheryl, I see your question that you need to learn how to market and brand yourself. Cheryl, I have a masterclass coming up in a couple of weeks that talks about the key decisions you need to make in growing or starting your personal brand. You can learn more about that class over at leanncolerwood.com forward slash webinar. Hopefully you can find a time that works for you for you to join us there. So those are the four reasons I feel if you are looking at your personal brand and wondering, okay, is this the time for a refresh to my brand? I would love for you to keep those four kind of questions in mind. Number one, are you passionate about some things outside of your current job responsibilities? Number two, are you longing to learn some new skills and some new traits that you can add to your portfolio? Number three, are you looking for opportunities to create more awareness for yourself and create more awareness for your organization? And of course, number four, the biggest one for the meetings and events industry and the travel industry. If your business has changed, this could be the great lifetime opportunity to relook at your brand, relook at the things that you wanna do as for someone like me, as I wanna end my career. Are there things that you can start to explore now with the time at hand? Those were the reasons that I changed my brand. But I also wanna hear from you if you have gone through a brand change. So whether it's a pivot in a job role, a pivot in the education that you're taking, I have a friend, Heather. I always talk about Heather because she's such an inspiration. She went back to school. I mean, talk about a longing for learning. There's someone who went back to school during this time to hone a skill that she already has a ton of talent in. So, so proud of Heather. And I wish I had her energy. But I'd like for you to share your story. So whether you're here live today or you're watching this on the replay, by the way, quick stat for you. I hear that 80% of people watch the videos, the live videos on LinkedIn, on replay. Isn't that a crazy high stat? So that's pretty high. And I'm hopeful that you're watching on replay or live and that you're able to maybe take a pause and think about your own brand, think if it's time for a change to your own brand and let us know your story. Drop your story in the comments, even things that you maybe want to look forward to doing in 2021. Let us know what you're looking forward to learning, looking forward to being in the months ahead. As I mentioned to Cheryl earlier, I have a masterclass coming up, talking about the five key decisions that you need to make in order to start and grow your personal brand. If you head over to liankholderwood.com, a forward slash webinar, you can learn more about those masterclass times. And hopefully I'll see you there and we can talk about how to get you started on either starting or changing your own personal brand. Thank you so much for joining me for today's Tuesday tea. I hope you brought a tea to enjoy while you were watching this video. I appreciate all of you so very much. And I look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks for watching everyone. Bye for now.