Editor’s Note: This metaphor of standing in line was very helpful to me. I hope it makes you think about what you have to offer.
Five Smart Ways to Leverage Your Brilliance for Faster Success
by Sheri McConnell
Yes, You Are Brilliant Right Now
Just in case a little voice in your head said, “Oh, I don’t have brilliance to leverage…” I want to laser focus right in where you are at for a moment and show you how you are brilliant and your life is full of possibilities right now.
So picture yourself in a long line. Yes, there are many people in front of you who know more than you do, their brilliance is shining and you are inspired. And you feel like, “Who am I to leverage what I know?”
What you don’t realize is that there is a long line of people behind you… and they see your “Smart Glow” and they are waiting for you just to turn around and start teaching them, inspiring them, and sharing your brilliance in a way that only you can. They need you to lead them or they won’t be able to live their purpose and go out into the world and create positive change.
So you have a few choices, you can turn around and start to shine or you can step out of line for a month, a year, or a lifetime and be a disservice to yourself and others. You have the brilliance to leverage, but you absolutely must decide if you will step up and step in to your purpose and share your brilliance.
Now, that you have embraced your brilliance, let’s talk about the best ways to leverage it to reach the most people.
These smart methods below are powerful because they are scalable. They cost you the same amount of time to do them for 50 people or 500,000 people. And they have an extremely long shelf life, especially when they are interwoven with the Internet. How you get the tools in front of 500,000 people eventually is what we teach here at the Institute in our many programs.
One-Articles
The Internet is driven by words. Nothing is more powerful today than words. Really. Your ability to teach through writing or to have someone listen to you talk and create articles for you is very powerful. Articles can be written once and then used in multiple ways as soon as you create them. You can run it in your newsletter, post it on your blog, post it at ezinearticles.com, reslant it for a future book, link to it on your blog from the social networks, incorporate parts of it into a signature talk when you speak, and so much more. From one single article, you can change the world if you understand how to leverage it over and over again so that your brilliance can shine where ever people are standing in line.
Two-Books
One of my absolute favorite ways to leverage brilliance in business is by packaging information (essentially many articles) into book form. Physical books and digital books are highly respected tools in our society and their shelf life lasts for decades. You do the work once and leverage it for years and years. Books are such a part of our culture that people carry them with them where ever they go in physical form of a book or in their digital book readers. And books are one of the best tools I know of to leverage PR opportunities, speaking opportunities, and money making lead opportunities.
Three-Videos
Nothing is more scalable and easy to produce than a video. With so many low cost flip video cameras available that you just plug and upload, you absolutely have no excuse not to shine in front of the camera and share your brilliance in either short or long videos. People love to learn and be entertained with video as well as share it with others. And remember, you create it once and it can educate 50 people or 500,000 people.
Four-CDs/DVDs
Never miss the opportunity to package your brilliance in the physical form also. Remember, if you are teaching once, it can live on forever off the Internet too by creating CDs and DVDs from teleseminars or from videos. These physical tools are passed around and easy to listen to away from the computer. I do think as more and more people become savvy with all the digital devices, CDs and DVDs will become obsolete in probably the next five years… but for now, there are a lot of people still sharing their brilliance in a big way with these simple leverage tools. For instance, here at the Smart Women’s Institute of Entrepreneurial learning, 1/3 of our revenues are based on information products alone.
Five-Memberships
Lastly, one of my favorite ways to leverage is by building a community in an industry and then leading it. This method is a business model, not a tool. It is extremely powerful when you understand how to do it. Creating a package of scalable products and services that you create once and sell over and over again is just simply smart and one of the many highly leverageable ways to use this model. And memberships also create equity for the company as you sell them. Check out more details on sharing your brilliance as a leader with this model at http://www.smartwomeninstitute.com/workshop
Sheri McConnell is the CEO of the Smart Women’s Institute of Entrepreneurial Learning (formerly the National Assn of Women Writers-2001). You can visit Sheri, access her free article archive, and grab lots of free stuff at http://www.smartwomeninstitute.com. Sheri lives in San Antonio, Texas with her husband, their four children, a weenie dog, and three hermit crabs.
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