ademoiselle

The One Crucial Practice To Thought Leadership Your Organization Can No Longer Ignore

Successful organizations are teeming with talent; those whose perspectives and individualities are the reasons why there were hired in the first place. However, organizations are not devoting enough effort or attention to giving their employees the platform to express their thought leadership to the public and, in turn, the chance to even more positively reflect your business’s brand.

The Follow Through is a crucial piece to sustaining thought leadership in your organization. Allowing and encouraging your talented staff to reflect on their opinions or discuss recent experiences (at conferences, in boardrooms, at the water cooler) that have happened to them in business increases your platform of expertise. Not to mention highlighting the brilliant minds themselves and their introspection on news and trends.

Did you send Alice to a summit on technology and innovation? Habit-forming follow through behaviours such as producing an article or video blog post-experience are important to foster in your employees whose experiences yield thought provoking responses. And you’ll have proprietary useful content to share with your stakeholders.

Follow through by setting up a 360 degree practice that allows your talented staff to create their own retrospective pieces following any type of experience related to your business and sustain a successful thought leadership practice in your organization.

Lifestyle

Updates From the Social Front

It’s the last day of March and we’ve made it through the three worst months of the year, in terms of weather, that is. On the contrary, these past three months (yes, it’s been that long since I’ve written a post, sadly) have been chock full of exciting happenings.

For one, I started a new role and left my life in advertising to bitter-sweet results. I love my new job and the path I’m on, yet it was hard to leave the family I’d been a part of at JWT. C’est la vie!

My sister is planning a big trip to move to London and is leaving in one week, so the past few months have been full of prep, packing, visa applications and dinner discussions about life changes.

I’ve been helping various friends and new acquaintances with their social media and branding, which has me very excited. I’ll definitely keep doing this as a passion project.

So that is it! I will write more now that spring is here and I have settled in to my new role.

Lifestyle

Try This 2-Step Exercise in Discovery

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A few summers ago I travelled with my mom to St. John’s, Newfoundland. It was for the CCAE (the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education) Conference. While I spent many of the days wandering through the charming town and jogging the narrow pathways cutting across the cliff side, my mom attended the sessions and joined me in sampling the finest East Coast breweries in the evenings. A perfect vacay (imo).

On the final day, I was able to join in for the conference’s Keynote session withJessica Holmes, famously known for being a cast member on The Royal Canadian Air Farce on CBC. Not only is Jessica extremely talented and funny, she’s also a gifted speaker and had us all enthralled with her personal tales of success during the time she spoke.

There was one particular exercise she asked us to do that stood out most for me and that I still tell people to try to this day. I want to share it with you.

Start by writing down the names of the three people you care about most.
Next to each of their names, write down the one quality you love most about them.

Once you’ve done that, scroll down.

***

A little further…

***

Ok great… stop.

When the room had completed this task, Jessica began to explain the significance.

“Each of the characteristics that you love most in the people you care about is actually one of your top traits,” she said. She explained that what we love most in others is what we try to apply most in ourselves.

I looked at mine. The three traits that best explained me were: humour, sanity and kindness. Ha! Sanity is what I get from my mom.

Try this exercise. It’s fun and gives you some insight into self-perception – something you may not have gathered from other self-discovery exercises. I still use it to this day when people ask me to describe myself. As hard as it is to talk about what you are best at, this approach always seems to work.

Melanie Reiffenstein is a specialist in brand experience. Follow her on Twitter@MelanieReiff or leave a comment!

Photo: Death to the Stock Photo

Lifestyle

Ademoiselle’s 2014 in Review

I cannot wait to blow this blog out of the water in 2015! Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more to come!

Happy New Year!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,400 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 40 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Beauty, Home, Life, Lifestyle

Why I’m Going Home to Eat Broccoli and Drink Wine

Sounds awesome, right? Sorta.

My fridge contains what I have to look forward to when I get home from work. It also contains what I have to succumb to eating upon return to my apartment. Those two things are wine and broccoli and the events of my lunch hour are the cause of this.

Today, over my lunch hour and in the Zara change room, I realized one thing. I don’t think even Gisèle Bundchen feels like she looks good in the Zara change room. Or in any change room. Honestly, the only retailer who has their act together when it comes to the change room is Victoria’s Secret. And that says it all.

A change room is like a chokey for women. Remember the chokey from the movie Matilda? It’s a closet-sized punishment space with nails and stakes poking outwards in every direction, making it extremely likely for anyone inside to have a full fledged claustro-panic attack. Well, in change rooms, there are mirrors instead of spikes and, instead of the crushing blackness, there are baseball stadium-strength light bulbs illuminating everything. This is the modern female change room, ladies. I don’t know about you but when I’m at home I don’t try something on in my closet and then stand 6 inches from a mirror to determine if it looks good.

As Gretchen Wieners suggests, you don’t buy something without asking your friends if it looks good on you first. So I proceeded to attempt to document about nine outfit changes and send them over whatsapp to my sister in Toronto and good friend in England. This highly choreographed process backfired when no one responded.

Frustrated, illuminated and alone, I decided to buy a few items that, thankfully, Zara allows full refund on if they don’t meet my standards.

And, despite some vigorous healthy habits and gym visits over the past 3 weeks, I still feel like no progress has been made on the ‘132-only’ front. So, tonight, I will go home to my delightful apartment and avoid snacking on useless and temporarily pleasing items and opt instead for a Zara-change-room-friendly dinner. But I won’t forgo the wine. It’s a post-Zara-change-room thing.

Image 1 courtesy of fanpop. Image 2 courtesy of Style and then some.