Windy City

Windy City

January 31, 2016 Uncategorized 0

Though, honestly, I’d argue that Chicago, when I went there last week, wasn’t so much windy as wonderful. (Ugh, the teenager in my brain just rolled her eyes at that one. She’s thinking, “Oh. My. Gawd, why are you so old?!”) Being a native New Yorker, my immediate impression of Chicago was, how lovely to be in a city where adults, routinely, use their indoor voices. Don’t even get me started on what it’s like when humans make eye contact, without acting as if you’re some kind of needy serial killer. Or, the young people who, after my workshop, approached me to shake hands and tell me how useful the workshop was.

(Dear God, even I think that I sound like John McCain’s memaw right about now. Once upon a time, you know, I used to be a lot of laughs. Before I started this goddamn wonderful coaching business, I use to be a lot of fun, dammit.)

Anyhoo, I was in town, briefly, at the behest of the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago, to teach those good people that contrary to popular belief, LinkedIn can actually be highly useful for achieving one’s goals, and to give them hands-on training on how, exactly, they could do just that. Did it go well? Well, considering that, by the end of the presentation, I had a room full of attorneys passionately engaged, asking questions, and telling me how “motivated” they were to fix their LinkedIn profiles…hmm, you tell me.

Now, let’s say you, Dear Reader, are at home, or the nail salon, reading this, thinking, “Jesus H. Christmas, Carlota, stop masturbating your damn ego, and give me a hint as to how I can fix my LinkedIn profile already, before I murder you and make a Netflix series of the crime!” A good place to start is to identify, on a piece of paper–get it down in black and white–why exactly you are on LinkedIn. “Because um everyone else is,” isn’t good enough, sorry. What are your goals for your career? Alternatively, what would you like to change in your career?

To use LinkedIn successfully, you need to play an active role in realizing your ambitions, and thus you need to know what you’re looking for, in order to find it. You can tell me, for example, that you’d like to be hired by a better law firm, but unless you’re willing to take the time to identify the types of firms you’re interested in, and what, from those firms’ POV, you specifically bring to the table, and how you’re going to demonstrate that, then LinkedIn is fairly useless. Giving you the platform to demonstrate your talents is what makes LinkedIn worth your rime. So when people are passive on LinkedIn, when they simply visit it once a year or so, when people simply race to make empty connections, there’s no real point to being on the site.

At the very least, identify your top specific goals for 2016: what are you looking for? Then, take a step back and read through your profile. Is there any overt relationship between your goals and the story your LinkedIn profile is telling? Let’s face it, if you yourself can’t see the connection, why would you expect a stranger could? (They can’t.)

This is probably a good time to email me at carlotazee@gmail.com, or leave me a note in the comments and let’s see how we can make your profile a good thing, instead of a liability.

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