#106 - Identity Capital: How to Use it to influence and Persuade Others to Hire You, with Nikki Sherin

Show Notes

Telling your professional story can be powerful, whether it’s to help you close new customers, or so you can pursue a new career direction or go for a job promotion. But how do you connect the dots of your Identity Capital in such a way that the listener sees you as the ideal candidate or business owner? 

To find out, co-hosts Lori Vajda and Nola Boea talked to former chef Nikki Sherin, who is joining us to share her tips, suggestions and ideas so you can create a compelling Identity Capital story.

Thanks for Listening!

Ready to start your business or grow your personal brand? Schedule a free 20 min. consultation call now. 

If you enjoyed this show, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll never miss an episode. Want to get to know us more? Find out more about us and our services at Sticky Brand Lab

We love hearing from you! Leave or speak your message here

If you haven’t already, please connect with us on Facebook! 

Would you like to be a featured guest or have your question, comment or review mentioned? Ask Muse!

Business success strategies are in the works. Come have a listen!

In This Episode You’ll Learn 

• Whether you’re interviewing, networking, or writing a cover letter, it’s all about crafting a compelling narrative.
• Four tips that will help you tell a good career story, one that gets you noticed (and hired).
• Using storytellig to influence and persuade others can help you with your elevator pitches, networking conversations, résumé, cover letter, interviews, and more.

Key points Lori and Nola are sharing in this episode:
(05:36:68) Four prompts to help you tell a compelling Identity Capital story while also letting you share a bit of your personality. 
(9:43.50) How to find that specific attention-grabbing thing within your identity capital.
(13:26:01) Whether you’ve jumped around in your career, or you have a lot of varied interests, use this method to weave memorable storyline, one that positions you as an authority.
(18:05:14) Once you’ve crafted you Identity Capitol story these are the places and situations you can share it to help you stand out from the crowd?

Resources 
​
You can subscribe to Lori and Nola's show, (we love you and want to make it easy) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

ConvertKit: Our #1 Favorite Email Marketing Platform 
(This is an affiliate link)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nikki: Identity capital. It is currency to you. That is the currency you're using to get where you want to be. And those who have the ability to tell their story will always out win those that just are unable to collect that and articulate it.

[00:00:12] Lori: Maybe you've changed careers or jobs. Perhaps you followed your interests and pursued new paths of knowledge or gained new experiences. All of this and more are part of your career portfolio and the assets you add to your identity capital. But how do you connect the dots in such a way that makes the listener understand, and more importantly, see you as their ideal candidate, coach, speaker, or business? Stay tuned friends, because in this episode we've brought back our identity capital subject matter expert, Nikki Sherin, from episode 95, and this time she's here to help us and you craft and tell your own identity capital stories.

[00:00:57] Announcer: You're listening to the Sticky Brand Lab podcast where time strapped professionals like you, learn how to create a business you love in as little as three hours a week.

[00:01:07] Nola: You've got a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience. But how do you sell that diversified career portfolio? How do you take the experiences you've accumulated and honed over time and reframe them as professional assets? And once you do that, then how do you take those assets and use that currency to figuratively buy the job, career advancement, speaking engagement, or whatever it is that you want to pursue? For those questions and more, we turn to Nikki Sherin, a seasoned event marketer and marketing lead for one of the largest IT events in the world.

[00:01:43] Lori: Nikki wasn't always an event marketer. In fact, prior to starting a career in event management, Nikki worked the line as a chef. Taking everything she learned from her culinary training and experience, she connected the dots of her identity capital and crafted a unique and very memorable story that allowed her not only to open up doors to a new industry, but a new profession as well. Nikki has been a food lover, marketer and events professional for the past decade. She is a wife and mom who believes everyone has a story to tell. Welcome back, Nicki.

[00:02:18] Nikki: Thank you guys. Glad to be back.

[00:02:20] Nola: We're glad to have you back.

[00:02:21] Lori: We are so glad you're here because your episode was one of our most popular episodes.

[00:02:28] Nola: Yep.

[00:02:29] Nikki: That's amazing. I'm so glad to hear that. I hope people got some great takeaways from it.

[00:02:33] Nola: Oh, I'm sure. And they're going to get a lot more. But before we get started on how to craft an identity capital story, we understand you just wrapped up your major event for the year. Tell us, how did it go?

[00:02:47] Nikki: It went great. It was a event for IT practitioners to come and get trained and enabled on our products. They worked for a company called VMware, and this was VMware Explorer. It was actually our first year being named VMware Explorer. We've had many years of our event called VM World, but trying to reach new audiences, trying to expand the reach that we have within our customer base, has led us to rebrand, and it was our first year back in person since 2019. So it was so exciting. It reminded me exactly why I do what I do. To be able to see all your hard work come to fruition in person was so amazing. Over 10,000 people there joining us and the energy and the excitement was just palpable. We felt so proud at the end of that week. And I go into our Europe event, which is slightly smaller, um, out in Barcelona in November. So really excited to do it all over again for our European audience.

[00:03:42] Nola: Oh, that sounds awesome. Well, congratulations.

[00:03:45] Lori: Just as a reminder to our listening audience. I first learned about identity capital while watching you in inbound 2021 session, where your topic was, From Chef to Event Marketer, How Identity Capital Shaped My Approach. And I was blown away by it. And only was I introduced to identity Capital, but you did such an amazing job telling your story of how a previous career had many of the attributes that would apply to the direction and the career change that you wanted to make. So can you help our listeners conceptualize your process for crafting your own story?

[00:04:27] Nikki: Sure. So the Inbound session had come from, was actually an opportunity I had within VMware to present to our CMO senior leadership, and it was through a program that was called up and comers, and it was where you were picked out from the organization to come and present on a project or a program that you had done work on and wanted to kind of show off.

And when I started conceptualizing what I might do, I didn't have a ton of time to figure out what my topic would be, and frankly, I was struggling a little bit because by nature my role encompassed a lot of tasks and it was something that was hard to describe, and it was kind of, I'm a jack of all trades, but master of none. That's kind of how I felt at the end of it.

When I went through, Okay, I can talk about this project or this project, but when I started to really think about what I do in my day-to-day and think of a particular project, it really struck me the parallels between my time in a kitchen to my time working on certain programs. Specific to, I had talked about our email process and how we optimize that. So I was trying to take a fairly boring subject of email optimization because you want to have increased clickthrough rates, you want better open rates, you want better engagement. How do I bring that to life in a way that people are going to see this as something unique and different, while also give a little bit of my personality into this presentation.

Once I started breaking down, and this is what I recommend to people, if they've asked me about like, how would I go about this? You know, I did an exercise, I started to break down my past experience and then asking myself a couple prompts: and in my own experience it was very simple to then apply those metaphors of a kitchen to working on email optimizations. So presentation is key, and ingredients, things like that, just started to naturally flow out as soon as I got on a roll there.

[00:06:13] Nola: So let me just clarify for our listeners. When you say kitchen, you're not talking about the kitchen in your home. You were a professional chef. You're talking about a professionally run restaurant kitchen.

[00:06:24] Nikki: Yes. I was a line cook and a garde-manger for those who maybe are familiar with that position, it's more of a like raw bar, and salad prep, dessert I did, and then some of the line when we would get really busy. But the just complicated nature of what I had to do there, and your brain going in 20 different directions, was so similar to what I was encountering as an event professional.

And then to be able to break down the different elements of my skillset and the foundational skills that I had gained as a chef, and then applying those to something that, like I said, was fairly mundane to talk about, and you're talking to a room full of executives, you want to make this interesting. So I was able to really condense it down, come up with my story that would be from chef to event marketer, to be able to communicate to them in a way that was surprising and different and memorable, and weave the more holistic story about not only the project or program I was working on, but on myself.

And it went over very well. And then that led me to presenting it also at Inbound, because I really wanted to show people that their past experience can help inform what their future is going to look like and what their story can be. Depending on if they, maybe, like you said, want to change careers or might want to take an entrepreneurial approach, you need to understand how to build that. So just working through the basically reflection of your past career and what do you think is memorable? What if people said to you in the past like, Huh, that's interesting. I had come on this where every interview I'd ever done, people looked down my resume and went, culinary school, huh? What was that like? Or garde-manger. What does that mean? I was putting these things in my resume purposefully in order to get attention and get a conversation started with somebody where that was always the first thing somebody asked me in an interview. And then I realized, oh, there's something here. I can potentially build this out and be more prescriptive in what I learned there. And tell a more holistic story because it just was something actually that was brought up by other folks. Even though I had done it because of identity capital, I had the intuition to say, I read this book. I need to go do this. I don't want to waste any time. I want to build some skills. But it was really externally. I'd done it for me, but then when I saw it reflected back from others as something interesting, I wasn't really bringing it up. It was kind of just coming to me that then I was able to start learning how to craft my story in a conversational setting, you know, in interviews and things like that.

[00:08:46] Nola: That's fascinating.

[00:08:47] Lori: You touched on the fact that you put it in your resume and it stood out, whereas, I think most of the time, we try to bury those things that aren't connected to what we're pursuing. And you're saying, by putting it in there, it highlighted me as the interviewee and in a way that was unique. And novel. So it already captured people's attention.

[00:09:11] Nikki: Yeah, Culinary certification is still on my resume today and it's gotten a lot longer since then, but it still stays at the bottom as a little call out that I have, you know, was certified in the Culinary Arts in 2013, and it's just something that I always can at least speak to, but the number one question I get in interviews is, tell me a little bit about that, or why do you think your previous experience helps inform how you would perform in this job? And I'm able to then tell the story and say, Well, I started this, and then I can walk them through. And that's part of that. Just once you find that specific attention-grabbing thing within your identity capital, you then just start to build off of that.

And you still start to be, like I said, I broke down my whole resume essentially after that and said, Okay. What are my soft and hard skills and how do they bucket into each of these things, and where do they overlap and map to each other? Because I wanted to be able to apply that to not only what I was doing right now, but just to tell the broader story in conversations that I was having with other folks about potential opportunities or what my future might look like with like a mentor or something.

[00:10:17] Nola: That's a really fascinating way that you described it, and I think it applies to this next question. For someone who's been in the traditional workforce for many years and they want to reposition their career, say to something entrepreneurial, how can they flesh out those attributes and professional assets of their own history? I mean, what are some specific steps you would suggest to guide the process of identifying those building blocks? And I think you started to describe it as buckets. So you started to go into the steps that you used and could you just paint that picture again and how you could recommend others doing the same thing?

[00:10:54] Nikki: Sure. So I think when it came to looking at overall career and I looked at the things that I liked about what I do in terms of , I think I spoke to this last time, where I'm very deadline driven. I really like, um a very fast paced environment. I like deadlines, I like to do lists, I like seeing and end result. I think that's the probably the biggest parallel that sometimes I see between chef and event marketing is, especially for in-person events, it truly pays off. You see how the sausage is made, so to speak. You see all the ingredients being put together, but then you see this beautiful thing come to life, or you see a beautiful dish come to life, and I'm very motivated by that kind of give and get from my career and what I do in a day-to-day. I drive a lot of value from that.

So I think honestly, breaking down the soft skills, hard skills, and personal meaningful connections, helps you start to see each of those elements overlap. You start to find the connection points, especially when you've been in something for a long time.

It wasn't until I started truly examining just in the context of email marketing, in the context of that, it being like, right. I am a very deadline driven person. I do like a fast-paced environment. I like seeing an end result. I like getting in the weeds on things. I like experimenting. All of those things were jiving in the same way, and, I saw it throughout my entire resume when I started then working back, where I was like, I like these things now. You know? I really like that job for that. Like I seem to be gravitating naturally toward these.

So, I think particularly with entrepreneurs, they generally have an origin story. They have something that describes why they choose the path that they go on. So it's either something deeply personal to them, so it's a personal experience. Or perhaps it was sparked from like professional experience, or It's a combination of both. And the key I think, is to ensure the relevancy and do the examination of the why you're looking to change careers, and then overlay your identity capital on top of that, to build credibility in your story.

So I think that you can have a very personal connection to why you might start a business, but that's just a story. That's just something you could tell maybe a friend or you know, a colleague. But if you are in the context of an entrepreneur, if you're looking for pitches, if you're looking for customers, you need a little credibility. And your credibility is coming from the identity capital that you're getting from more of those hard skills. So you're saying, Not only is this my passion and why I got here, but here's the chops to back it up. This is what I needed to do, or this is my experience, and this is how it informs that. And it's not necessarily hard skills, it's most likely foundational skills that you have picked up throughout your career over time.

[00:13:25] Nola: That's great.

[00:13:26] Lori: You know what's fascinating to me on identity capital is it focuses on the professional, but it also focuses on the personal. So it's the combination of those things that make us who we are. So for someone who's either more like me, jumped around, or has a lot of varied interests, how do they connect that red thread and weave those into a storyline that helps them be perceived more as an authority rather than a jack of all trades? Nothing wrong with the jack of all trade. I consider myself that, but when I'm trying to sell myself, I want to sound more of an authority than somebody who is into a lot of different things.

[00:14:13] Nikki: I struggled with the same thing when I was trying to come up with what my presentation might be on this and how I would speak to people about this. And what I did is I was an ED major when I started in college and I lifted what's called an anticipatory set. So you had to go through this exercise in college where, you had five minutes to basically capture students’ attention. And that's, come in, start with something that is going to be maybe slightly relevant to your lesson plan, but really the point is to just gain attention. So what I did in my presentation is, I asked people to humor me and close their eyes and put themselves into a position they were likely unfamiliar with: a restaurant kitchen. So I basically verbalized to them. And when I did this in person at VMware, I had some sound effects and I had things that were just, close your eyes. Humor me. Pretend you're in a restaurant kitchen and you've got things going on up to your upper left. You've got a sauté pan on your right, you've got a salad getting worked behind you, you've got tickets moving ahead. And just created a very frantic environment for people to understand and get through, like my personal deep connection to it. And once I set the stage for that, where I think this is where people could then pivot to the more credibility side of things, is then I started into the more detailed descriptions of the things that I did, but in the context of this metaphor of being in a restaurant kitchen. So I was still maintaining the overall theme of what I wanted to do in bringing more of myself into it, but did then tie in the actual data and elements of the program management that I was doing and the optimizations that I was doing, just all through the storytelling of being in the kitchen because it tied very well for me.

[00:15:53] Nola: Excellent. How does someone identify those skills or knowledge or experience, good and bad from all areas of their life and apply it to their story so they can pursue a new career or venture? How do they put them together to help them craft their story?

[00:16:13] Nikki: When I was pulling mine together, it definitely was starting with, what are the things that I think make me unique in my career journey? I think everyone has those. Often, I think people maybe discount them. I think we talked about this last time, where you reframe your failures from past career moves as identity capital. You then take an ownership of that to be able to look at it in a new way and have a fresh perspective and say, I failed as a chef. I truly did. I did not enjoy the hours. It was very hard. I was not cut out for that particular lens of culinary work. I now prefer to cook at home. But I was able to take that and for a while I think I did feel a little bit of that. Like, oh, well that was a waste of time, or why did I go and do that? But when I went then into the more traditional workforce, I was very quick on my feet and I was very, I would bootstrap a lot and get stuff done because that's kind of what you have to do in a kitchen and you need to be dealing with a lot of different personalities, front of house, back of house. And I was trying to identify those skills to reframe it as this was a learning experience. These are the things that I took out of it. And really try to isolate those things specifically and then pitch those as skills because it was also very hard to move out of that into a traditional workforce. But I had never done anything like that before, but I just was confident in what I had learned in that time and had the ability to just say, Working in a restaurant kitchen is a very difficult job. Here's why. Here's the things that I learned. Take a chance on me. And I was lucky enough to have a lot of people who saw that and saw my passion behind it, and saw that I had a really positive attitude about it and was able to then move that through to other career moves that then ultimately led me to where I am today.

[00:18:02] Lori: So my question here is, once you're clear on all the things that you've identified or you've shared on your assets, your attributes, your failures, looking at your resume, all those components, how do you tell your story? Where do you tell your story? And when do you tell your story?

[00:18:21] Nikki: I want people to understand that their stories are meaningful. That they can help grow their careers or not just something that you know is for them. It could be something that you can craft, that you can form. If you're in an entrepreneurial aspect, your story is, like I said, it's something that you need to make memorable. If you're pitching to investors, you need to capture customers. You need to capture an audience. If you're even just trying to do that through things like social media. I think there are so many things that people need to have different versions of their story for.

If you're looking from a CPG brand perspective, so many startups, there's stories on the back of their package. I worked for a company where, you know, it was signed Pete. He had his signature on the bag because his story was there that he wanted to create a gluten free chip for people to enjoy. And they come up with this very concise story. And it's not just in a business setting like you want to be a thought leader, I think that was one of my goals with Inbound. It was just a personal goal to be able to share with others my story and what I was able to do in the context of, here's how you can also improve your marketing strategy. But I've hidden it in a little bit of a storytelling aspect.

But I think after that, I got so many messages on LinkedIn from people who came from a similar background and were just never pieced together how foundational that experience was to them, to then make those connections. And it's not until I think somebody just tells you, like if you're telling a story to a friend or a mentor, like, this is kind of my career path. And they pick out that one thing that goes like, No, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. It's that tell me more piece that starts your story and you work it, you revise it, you refine it, and it becomes so ingrained then in you that you can tell it at the drop of a hat.

And I think that's what's so impressive about entrepreneurs that I've heard speak before is they've got a very clear and concise story. They just have rehearsed it over and over again and they've got something that is memorable and relevant and very cohesive and to tell the end-to-end story. Sure, they've edited stuff out because I'm sure people have told them like, Eh, you don't need to share that part. Or you could just skip from here to here.

There's no formula for it. It's just very much breaking things down, figuring out what your unique quality is and what is going to start your story, what's going to be your anticipatory set, what is an experience you might have had that is either something that's very common and heavily shared or super unique because you want to relate to people. You either want to get their attention and capture something in them that's like, Oh, pique their interest, or have something totally relatable that they're going to go, I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been in that position before. And then start weaving that together into, Well, then I went through this part and this is what's carried me through to get me to where I am today. I think it's definitely a process that takes time, and a process that takes a lot of heavy reflection.

[00:21:11] Nola: Sounds like you were saying, Reflect, rehearse, revise, reflect, revise, rehearse, revise, reflect,

[00:21:21] Nikki: refine, refine, refine,

[00:21:23] Nola: refine, refine, refine. Yes.

[00:21:26] Lori: Yeah. And I was going in the same direction that you were, that what I heard is, come at it from a learner's mindset. So that's what makes a learner or a growth mindset, I think, is being willing to fall, fail, and get back up again.

[00:21:42] Nikki: Totally.

[00:21:43] Nola: So, it was Meg Jay's book, The Defining Decade, that introduced this whole concept of identity capital. Are there any other resources you can suggest on this topic?

[00:21:55] Nikki: So it's funny because I've googled this topic extensively over time, especially when I started presenting on it, and there's not much out there outside of the context of identity capital and building it in your twenties. It's less about how to apply your identity capital to telling a story. So this is an interesting thing that I don't think has been talked about much in the industry. But what I do love is I am fascinated by entrepreneurs. And I think that Guy Roz has a podcast called How I Built This. And I love hearing the stories that these impressive people have to tell because he kind of walks through their origin story and the nitty gritty of how they got to where they are today. And my brother-in-law happens to be a serial entrepreneur who was on this show. And just hearing about his experience working in advertising. He's got a lot of history in the auto industry with his family is, uh, was born in Michigan and he was working in advertising and it really built this foundational love of design and approaching things a little differently and a very heavy marketing lens and branding passion that he has. So he finds categories and likes to disrupt those categories. Things like cleaning supplies and gummy vitamins and bandages. And he's brought a really design lens to all of those things, but it comes directly back from his advertising days. That set a really foundational passion in him, that was just bolstering his entrepreneurial spirit. And hearing his story and his co-founder's story just were so fascinating. One was a chemical engineer and then was an entrepreneur.

So they tell these stories that grab you and like, I went from this place in my career that is unique and different and interesting to somebody who may never have had experience with something like that, but then have parlayed that into this impressive portfolio of products, and you wonder when you hear that just on its face, Okay, you went from this to this. It's not that interesting. It's the story you tell, from that point to where you are today, and how concise and clear you can be in that, that really grabs people and makes you want to learn more about them.

So I think it's funny because you say on its face, Okay, I was a chef early in my career and now I'm an event marketer. That's cool and that's interesting. But I can then tell the story about how those skills that I inherited from that experience and from my training days to then what I do today and how connected that truly is, I think it is proof that you do build a foundational passion for something without even knowing it, and then you start to recognize that later. So I think you have the hindsight when you've grown in your career to then look back and say, All right, now I'm in the place where I can tell a really compelling story. I couldn't have told this story in my twenties. It just wasn't possible. So now that I've been in events for 10 years, I can easily look back and do that. I think you do need that wealth of experience and knowledge and confidence in what you do to be able to craft your point A to point B.

[00:24:59] Nola: The power is in the storytelling.

[00:25:01] Lori: It is

[00:25:01] Nikki: Totally, it is.

[00:25:02] Lori: Your storytelling has definitely impacted us, but I'd like to ask this one final question. What is the lasting impact you hope to make in the world?

[00:25:13] Nikki: I think that I really do have a passion for mentoring those who are starting out in their careers. I think it's, Meg Jay's book is the one that I recommend to all new hires that I worked with on my team. I want them to take advantage of opportunities. I want them to be ambitious. I want them to take risks. I think that the next generation of people coming into the event space have so many good, fresh ideas, and I want them to feel like they're in a safe space to share those things. I like to make people feel they're heard and try to lead with empathy for what they're going through, and then also just bring to life what they want to in their careers. I think that that's really hard to do and hard to see, but it's kind of cliche. I was like, Oh God, I'll understand it when I'm older. But it truly, it has been one of those things that I would say if I could do it over again, I would do this and this. And I think motivating people or inspiring people to really reframe what they've done in the past and tell a compelling story is something that I would love to have people take away from whatever way they consume my story, whether it be here or through Inbound, or just by connecting with me. I'm always happy to connect with anyone who's interested in talking more about it.

[00:26:30] Nola: I love that.

[00:26:30] Lori: Yeah. A good mentor is really hard to find, so I'm sure that a lot of our listeners, including myself, are very envious of the role of people who work under you because they get to get that knowledge from you. So absolutely, you are an inspiration and thank you for inspiring us.

[00:26:48] Nikki: Thank you.

[00:26:49] Nola: Yep. Thank you, Nikki, for coming back on this show and sharing tips so that our listening friends can craft their own identity capital story. I'm sure you'll be helping many, many inspiring entrepreneurs. If someone wants to learn more about you or identity capital, where should listeners go and how can they connect with you?

[00:27:08] Nikki: They can find me on LinkedIn. Nicole Sherin, I work at VMware. I'm a senior manager of Global Event Marketing.

[00:27:16] Nola: Excellent. Well, friends, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope it makes all the difference in you getting started on your business so you can create your best and most exciting life. If you found the information shared here today helpful, let us know by posting here where you're listening, or on our Facebook page,

[00:27:32] Lori: Not sure how to turn your idea into a profitable side business? Contact us at stickybrandlab.com/contact. We'd be happy to help you.

[00:27:42] Nola: Be sure to come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday for another informative, inspiring, and motivating episode. And remember, action creates results. So tap into your desire to create a business and brand you love by taking 1% action every day. Small steps, big effects.

[OUT-TAKE]
​
You've got breadth and depth of knowledge and of exp blah. Retake.
[00:28:06] Lori: There you go!