What do you no longer teach?

This was the subject line of an email I received recently that really resonated:

Usually we’re answering questions about what we know.

What do you teach?
What are you good at?
What’s your expertise?
What do you want to be known for?

But this was different.

What did you once believe was important enough to teach that you don’t teach anymore?

And why?

For years, one of the things I taught was personal branding.

It made sense.

I was working primarily with actors and other creative professionals. And when you’re an actor, how people perceive you matters. You can be enormously talented, but if you don’t understand what you’re communicating when you walk into a room, you’re missing a pretty important piece of the equation.

So we talked about branding concepts.

Positioning.

How other people see you.

How to communicate what makes you different.

And I still share the tools I taught back then.

I just don’t think of it as branding or “sell” personal branding anymore.

Because the more I heard people refer to themselves as a brand, I realized I wasn’t actually that interested in helping people construct a “brand”.

I was interested in helping them uncover their true identity.

There’s a difference.

I’ve seen a lot of personal branding become about presentation.

Find your niche.

Create your message.

Choose your three words.

Position yourself so the right people see you the right way.

And some of that is useful.

But it can also become another performance.

Another version of trying to figure out who everyone else wants us to be.

And, as someone writing a book called The Price of Pleasing, you can probably guess how I feel about that.

What I’ve become much more interested in is integration.

Who are you when you’re not trying quite so hard to manage how you’re perceived?

What do you already know?

What experiences have shaped you?

What happens when the person you’re presenting to the world and the person you actually are start becoming the same person?

I saw this with actors years ago.

As people became more confident and more accepting of themselves, something interesting happened.

Their work changed.

They started auditioning for different roles.

Bigger roles.

More interesting roles.

And eventually, they started booking them.

Yes, their careers were changing.

But the career change was often downstream from something else:

They had changed.

That’s increasingly how I think about the work I do now.

And strangely enough, I’ve been experiencing some of this myself lately.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks looking backward.

Old workshops.

Old writing.

Old frameworks.

My 90 Conversations in 90 Days experiment.

Things I built years ago that I’d almost forgotten about.

And I’m asking:

What still belongs?

What have I outgrown?

And what did I create years ago that might actually be more useful now than it was then?

Because evolution doesn’t require burning everything down and starting again.

Sometimes the next thing is already hiding inside the last thing.

You just have to look at it through the eyes of the person you’ve become.

So I’ll pass the question along to you:

What do you no longer believe, teach, practice or do that you once thought was important?

And maybe the more interesting question:

What have you learned since then that changed your mind?

You might discover you’ve outgrown something.

Or you might discover that something you thought you’d left behind still belongs.

Just in a different form.

That’s evolution of your identity in a nutshell.

Until next time,