UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — While it may not be on stage or for the role of Hamlet, we all audition.
We audition for our dream college and dream job; for our role in relationships and on teams. But what sets life apart from theater is instead of waiting for the curtain call, your future is something you can create.
“Do the job you want — people stay in the audition stage too long,” Regina Lewis said.
Lewis’ audition began as a press assistant carrying top executives’ bags. Today, she has notable executives and business leaders turning to her.
It was through the two simple actions of listening and borrowing — listening to what people were asking her and borrowing best practices from leaders early in her career — that Lewis credits for landing her in her current role as USA Today contributor and media consultant.
On Dec. 1, Lewis traded her traditional television viewers for an audience of Schreyer Honors College Scholars at the Creating Your Future event co-sponsored by Shell and the Schreyer Honors College Student Council.
Her keynote address “Brand YOU — Managing Your Personal Brand in a World Where Everything Communicates” engaged Scholars in a conversation about the importance of establishing and maintaining a personal brand.
“I was extremely impressed with the Creating Your Future event,” said junior Scholar Marissa Works. “It was an enjoyable, cozy evening in the Nittany Lion Inn with great food and a wonderful speaker who encouraged all students to consider key components to surviving and thriving in the working world.”
Drawing off of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, who said, “Your brand is what people say when you’re not in the room,” Lewis currently advises many companies’ high achievers struggling with intangibles and long-time employees who are “being passed in the left lane.”
Lewis, who is the mother of Schreyer Scholar Claire Lewis, hoped she could help bridge that same gap for the honors audience.
“Honors students by definition are high achievers, and high achievers I have found in my work tend to do a lot of the hard stuff right,” she said. “They will work incredibly hard, head down, but sometimes they don’t get some of the intrinsic things right. If they do, what a winning combination, so it was my sincere hope that this would take good to great.”
Branding can be a key differentiator that many professionals tend to overlook; less than 15 percent of people have defined a personal brand, and less than 5 percent consistently live it.
If these numbers weren’t motivation enough, there was one quote that particularly stuck with Works.
“[Lewis] said, ‘This is the easy stuff, guys. You’re already doing the hard stuff,’ referring to keeping up grades, studying hard and building a resume,” Works said. “I love that she said this, because it made me realize that building a personal brand is actually a fun process that just tops off the hard work we have been doing in our time here at Penn State.”
It all starts with asking yourself the baseline question, “What are you best known for?” and then expands to achieving the seven end goals of a successful personal brand that Lewis described. These goals include accepting your brand as leadership responsibility rather than as self-promotion, and finding a signature voice to establish an explanatory narrative that threads through past, present and future career trajectory.
One true test of whether you have achieved your personal brand, said Lewis, is to video yourself and then turn the sound off.
“What would people think of a video of you if the sound was off?” Lewis said.
This test was what earned her a spot on CNN even though she didn’t have a journalism degree. By watching her body language and composure, the public perceived her as a pediatrician or defense attorney — two highly regarded professions.
Lewis advised Scholars to start practicing a short pitch of themselves in the elevator and in the car, and to do their own 360 review to see what people are saying about them when they aren’t in the room.
“It’s hard to see the picture from within the frame, so ask other people,” she said. “High performers tend to be self-critical, so they tend to be pleasantly surprised.”
In a community where grades and tangible successes are taken very seriously, Works thought this was a message well-suited for its audience.
“It was a refreshing reminder that in order to be successful, we must go beyond grades and GPAs, and consider how we are portraying ourselves as professionals down to the smallest of details,” Works said.