Lyn Bird gives a framework for fearless authenticity, which she says is your moonshot. We must dare to lead with authenticity, even when it feels impossible.
Origin Story
The first step in the framework is the anchor point: your origin story. What have you learned about yourself and how do you build that into how you go into the world in business and in personal relationships?
No AI can define your origin story. It’s all about you personally. How you apply that in your relationships and building relationships is really important. Then you need to think about how you can amplify that. When we get down to my personal origin story, one of my earliest memories growing up was building a jigsaw puzzle, which I built with my grandmother, who’s now 104.
This passion for puzzles was always about solving problems. I’ve applied that throughout my whole life and I think it influenced very heavily how I decided what I did in my career, which was going into coding and tech and building big computer technology systems for companies.
The second thing that really defines who I am is Africa. We all underestimate what a huge competitive advantage it is being born here and on this continent, because we question everything. Nothing is the way it seems. Nothing needs to be the way it seems, and you can challenge every kind of thinking that’s out there every single day.
The last thing that really influences me heavily is creativity. I spend my life in coding and in logic and it’s very linear. But I also have a deep passion for contemporary art. All of my art in my house is from Africa because when you look at art, it evokes an emotion.
Relationships
There’s the famous Maya Angelou quote: ‘People will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.’ I embody that in everything that I do going forward. On the topic of feelings, a Coke campaign targeted students going into their freshman year at college who didn’t know each other. These students wanted to make friends. Once you got a coke from a vending machine on campus, you couldn’t actually open the bottle: you had to go to somebody else with a bottle, start a conversation, put them together, and pair the bottles to open them.
That campaign is beautiful in terms of bringing human experience into what it is and what people do. Coke focused on a pain point and helped these young people going into college to start the first conversation. Conversations are really important in building relationships.
A mentor once asked me how I’m doing and I said to him I have the best team I’ve ever had. And he said to me, ‘If that’s the case, then you’ve got the wrong team, because if you like everyone, they’re not challenging you and the way you think. And also remember, you have two ears and one mouth, so please use them proportionately.’
What people say and what they mean are not always the same thing, so you really need to dig deep to think about what is the conversation we are trying to have, and what are people trying to say? You need to increase your listening and observational skills. Through experience, I’ve leant to use my ears and mouth proportionately, and to trust my gut. If you want to build sustaining relationships, doing the right thing is always the best thing to do.
A framework for fearless authenticity:
– Explore: step into the unknown and learn continuously.
– Investigate: listen deeply and ask very bold questions.
– Iterate: create for your audience. Make sure that you know where you’re going and what kind of perspective you want to land in the world.
You can think your way into a new way of acting today. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking. You have to build relationships, and you have to go out there and do it by feeling and not by thinking, because these machines and models think on our behalf much faster than we can. What we’re left with is just the humanity of who we are.
What authentic story will you dare to tell as you progress? The story I told today would not have been the story I would’ve told six months ago. These things are constantly evolving. So in being fearless, you have to continue learning and exploring things.
It’s a continuous exercise. You don’t write a personal brand story and leave it. You visit it every six months and do it over and over again. Authenticity is your moonshot. Your intelligence is no longer really a differentiator, who you are as a human being is your differentiator.
Once we dared to put a man on the moon. What we need to do is dare to be different and dare to ask the questions and continuously evolve. That gives you the rocket power to actually fuel your own moonshot in whatever you do.
Bird was a speaker at the Nedbank IMC. Modern Marketing was a proud media partner.
NEDBANK IMC CONFERENCE
www.imcconference.com
