Being Bold is the Pathway to Success in the 2nd Half of Life

Being Bold is the Pathway to Success

Are you being bold in making changes in the 2nd half of life?

The inspiration for this post came from the numerous comments I have been receiving from one of last month’s podcast. People have been telling me how inspired they were by episode #72 of the Repurpose Your Career Podcast titled Rebranding Yourself with Alexander Buschek [Podcast]. If you listen to this episode you will have heard Alexander Buschek say the following:

“You need a lot of discipline to change your life. People ask me these days, ‘How did you do that?’ When I tell them the steps I took, they say, ‘Well, yeah… no .. this is something that I couldn’t do.'”

What Alexander did was be bold and he took action. Another way of saying it was he took a risk and worked his tail off to make a change.

Being Bold is not as Risky as You Think

When you want to make a change or a pivot, it is not going to be easy. It does take hard work. However, if you are willing to put the effort in a methodical, planned fashion you will come out on the other end as a better person. It will feel very risky but playing it safe is very risky these days.

Alexander worked hard at establishing himself as a thought leader in an area that he had no direct work experience (Digital Transformation for Small and Medium Business). He was also reticent about standing out.

I cannot tell you how many times I told Alexander to “Be bold. You know your stuff!”

How could I tell? Well, go look at his website, DigitalTransformationBlog.com. Watch his videos. My favorite is Alexander Buschek on 3D Printing and Generative Design.

He did all of the videos using the equipment he had or could purchase for a few Euros.

Remember, Alexander did this by studying up on the subject but had no practical work experience. He did this through hard work, then he was bold and put himself out there. It felt very risky to him at the time.

Being Bold on LinkedIn

Whenever you are making a change and you are in a safe well-established career, I hear over and over again, “I do not want my boss or company to know I’m going to make a change.”

This is when you start making subtle but bold changes to your LinkedIn profile.

Change your header image that matches where you want to go. One of my favorites is this one.

We were doing LinkedIn profile reviews in the Career Pivot Community last week and the question came up about how much personality should be put into the profile. My response was:

As long as it relates to your professional career and where you want to go, be yourself.

The woman who asked was pivoting out an I.T. role that she had been in for over 25 years to being a technology-based creative. She wanted to create artwork using a 3D printer and shoot 3D videos.

Slowly add material to your profile that shows the world that you know your stuff. You could create:

Videos and post them on YouTube
Whitepapers
Blog
Website

Be bold and quit worrying about what others will think. Most of that worrying is because you are suffering from MSU (Make Stuff Up) Disorder. The reality is you do not know what people will think until are bold and try something new.

Being Bold Can Bring Criticism

I know, I know, you do not want to put yourself out there. If you write blog posts, whitepapers, or create videos you open yourself up to criticism.

When I published my LinkedIn Publisher post 5 Things on Your Resume That Make You Sound Too Old, it went viral. Almost 600,000 views and 2,800+ comments. A lot of those comments were negative.

Some people wrote negative comments to the following:

I am going to go out a limb and declare that putting two spaces after a period is obsolete. It is how most of us were taught to type on a typewriter. Therefore, most of us who do this (I have taught myself to stop putting two spaces after a period and it was hard) are over 50 years of age.

Over the years, I have heard that this has been used as a method of screening out older candidates.

This one piece of the post caused it to go viral. Why because the statement I was making was bold and more importantly correct. I was saying something that others did not want to say.

I attended a conference the week this post went viral. I had more people come up to me and tell me that they could not be bold like I was. They could not handle the criticism.