Joe Paterno passed away over the weekend.  You probably know this but he was the football coach at Penn State for the past 46 years.  He has more wins than any other coach in Division I college football.  He was known for running a very clean program with no recruiting violations or scandals.  Besides building a winning football program, Joe did a lot for Penn State, giving millions of dollars to the university to expand the library.

I’m a Penn State alum.  Joe was the head coach when I arrived there in the Fall of 1968.  I was always proud to be a Penn State alum.  I was especially proud of the football program and is reputation for fair play.

That all changed for me last Fall when one of Joe’s longtime assistant coaches was charged with several counts of child sex abuse.  You probably know the story.  In 2002, one of Joe’s assistant coaches, Mike McQueary observed Sandusky, who was retired but still had access to the Penn State football facilities, raping a young boy in a shower.  McQueary told Joe, who reported the incident to the Athletic Director.

Sandusky was never barred from the Penn State training facilities, and it is alleged that he continued to abuse young boys up until his arrest last Fall.  Many people, myself included, feel that Joe Paterno should have done more to follow up on what McQueary told him.  Make no mistake, he did what was required of him by law – he even testified at the Grand Jury investigating the allegations.  But doing what’s legal, isn’t necessarily doing what’s right.

Joe Paterno will forever be regarded as a great football coach, but one who gave tacit approval to child sex abuse.  And that’s the career success point of this post.   Your personal brand and reputation are important.  Guard them with all your might.

Last Friday, I was doing an interview for my membership site with Van Horsley, President of the Colorado operations of a large national bank.  I do these interviews to give my members inside advice on life and career success from successful people.  If you would like to see what the membership site is all about, go to http://www.MyCorporateClimb.com.  In our interview, Van concluded his remarks by saying, “Your integrity is an asset.  And once you spend that asset, it’s gone forever.”

As I listened to the coverage of Joe Paterno’s passing, I was reminded of Van’s remarks on integrity.  Joe Paterno spent his integrity when he didn’t follow up on the allegations about Jerry Sandusky.  By not doing so, and by continuing to let this man have access to the Penn State athletic facilities, Joe lost his integrity – which is too bad, because by all accounts he is a man of high integrity.

But that’s the way it goes.  It takes a long time to build a reputation as a person of integrity.  One foolish move can destroy all that.  All of the coverage on Joe’s passing said he “was a great football coach, BUT…”

Tweet 62 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Your personal brand should be unique to you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well-known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called, There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and I believe integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point.  Cathy, my wife, was a flight attendant for 36 years.  Seniority is a very important thing in the airline industry.  It governs how you bid for trips, positions on the airplane and vacations – almost anything important to a flight attendant’s quality of work life.

Cathy was very active in her union.  And seniority was one of the union’s most sacred principles.  A few years before she retired, Cathy’s airline made a big push into the international market.  International flights were plum assignments; they went to people with high seniority.

However, the airline realized that it would be to their advantage to have some flight attendants who spoke the language of the country to which they were flying on these international flights.  Most flight attendants in her airline spoke English only.  The airline proposed putting two “language speakers” on each international flight.  Many people, including Cathy, were upset with this arrangement as they felt it violated the seniority concept.

Cathy used to fly from the US to London.  One day I said to her, “This whole language speaker issue doesn’t really affect you.  You fly to London; there are no language speakers on those flights.  Why do you care so much?”  She said, “I believe in the concept of seniority.  It doesn’t matter if I’m affected by language speakers.  It’s the principle of the thing.”  That’s consistency – and integrity — in action.

And that brings us back to Joe Paterno.  Here was a man with an incredibly strong personal brand.  He was known for doing the right thing in a business where too many people don’t do the right thing.  Sadly, his legacy is forever tarnished, because of what he didn’t do at a moment of truth.  I’m not writing this post to pass judgment on Joe – enough people have done that already.  I am writing it however, to reinforce my point of building your personal brand on integrity.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is one of the competencies all successful people possess.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.  Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Follow the advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”  As the sad ending to Joe Paterno’s career and life demonstrates, even a momentary lapse in your integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.

That’s the career advice I take from the sad ending of Joe Paterno’s life and career.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site last September.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

Today’s career advice comes from Shakespeare.  In Measure for Measure he says, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.”  I always tell my career success coach clients that fear is a career success killer – you have to look your fears in the eye and do something.

Tweet 45 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Everyone is afraid sometime.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Look your fears in the eye and do something.”

Fear is the enemy of self-confidence.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Procrastination is the manifestation of fear.  When I find myself procrastinating, I stop and ask myself “What are you afraid of here, Bud?”

Usually, the answer is on the 12 most common fears on the list below.  Which of these stop you from moving forward toward your career success?  What are you doing about them?

1. Fear of failure – This type of fear has its roots in the misconception that everything you do has to be 100% successful.
2. Fear of success – This type of fear is based on the idea that success is likely to mean more responsibility and attention, coupled with pressure to continue to perform at a high level.
3. Fear of being judged – This type of fear comes from the need for approval that most people develop in childhood.
4. Fear of emotional pain – This type of fear is rooted in wanting to avoid potential negative consequences of your actions.
5. Fear of embarrassment – This type of fear is a result of empowering others to judge you when you demonstrate that you’re only human by making mistakes and having lapses of judgment.
6. Fear of being abandoned or being alone – This type of fear is related to rejection and low self-esteem.
7. Fear of rejection – This type of fear comes from personalizing what others do and say.
8. Fear of expressing your true feelings – This type of fear holds you back from engaging in open, honest dialogue with the people in your life.
9. Fear of intimacy – This type of fear manifests itself by an unwillingness to let others get too close, lest they discover the “real you.”
10. Fear of the unknown – This type of fear manifests itself as needless worry about all of the bad things that could happen if you decide to make a change in your life.
11. Fear of loss – This type of fear is related to the potential pain associated with no longer having something or someone of emotional significance to you.
12. Fear of death – The ultimate fear of the unknown.  What will happen once our spirits leave our bodies?

By identifying your fear, you are more than half way to conquering it and creating the life and  career success you deserve.  Action is the antidote to fear. In most cases, you’ll choose wisely and your fears won’t be realized.  In the cases when you choose poorly, you’ll find that failure isn’t as catastrophic as you imagined.  Successful people learn from their failures.

By taking action on your fears, you win on both counts.  You win if you make a good decision and things work out.  You even win if you make a bad decision and things go poorly, because you have an opportunity to learn from your decision and the subsequent problems you faced.

As Paul Simon says, “A good day ain’t got no rain.  A bad day’s when I think of things that might have been.”  Don’t let fear rob you of the career success that might have been.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Successful people are self-confident.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  They follow the career advice in Tweet 45 in Success Tweets.  “Everyone is afraid sometime.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Look your fears in the eye and do something.”  Procrastination is the physical manifestation of fear.  When you find yourself procrastinating, figure out what scares you about the situation.  Is it fear of failure?  Is it fear of success? Is it fear of rejection?  Is it fear of being embarrassed?  Is it fear of the unknown?  Once you’ve figured out why you are afraid, do three things: admit your fear to yourself; embrace your fear; take action.  Action is the antidote to fear and an important career success key.

That’s my career advice on fear and career success.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you, and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened my new membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb. You can find out about the membership site and get your free copy of I Want YOU by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.com.

Today’s career advice comes from Shakespeare.  In Measure for Measure he says, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.”  I always tell my career success coach clients that fear is a career success killer – you have to look your fears in the eye and do something.

Tweet 45 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Everyone is afraid sometime.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Look your fears in the eye and do something.”

Fear is the enemy of self-confidence.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Procrastination is the manifestation of fear.  When I find myself procrastinating, I stop and ask myself “What are you afraid of here, Bud?”

Usually, the answer is on the 12 most common fears on the list below.  Which of these stop you from moving forward toward your career success?  What are you doing about them?

1. Fear of failure – This type of fear has its roots in the misconception that everything you do has to be 100% successful.
2. Fear of success – This type of fear is based on the idea that success is likely to mean more responsibility and attention, coupled with pressure to continue to perform at a high level.
3. Fear of being judged – This type of fear comes from the need for approval that most people develop in childhood.
4. Fear of emotional pain – This type of fear is rooted in wanting to avoid potential negative consequences of your actions.
5. Fear of embarrassment – This type of fear is a result of empowering others to judge you when you demonstrate that you’re only human by making mistakes and having lapses of judgment.
6. Fear of being abandoned or being alone – This type of fear is related to rejection and low self-esteem.
7. Fear of rejection – This type of fear comes from personalizing what others do and say.
8. Fear of expressing your true feelings – This type of fear holds you back from engaging in open, honest dialogue with the people in your life.
9. Fear of intimacy – This type of fear manifests itself by an unwillingness to let others get too close, lest they discover the “real you.”
10. Fear of the unknown – This type of fear manifests itself as needless worry about all of the bad things that could happen if you decide to make a change in your life.
11. Fear of loss – This type of fear is related to the potential pain associated with no longer having something or someone of emotional significance to you.
12. Fear of death – The ultimate fear of the unknown.  What will happen once our spirits leave our bodies?

By identifying your fear, you are more than half way to conquering it and creating the life and  career success you deserve.  Action is the antidote to fear. In most cases, you’ll choose wisely and your fears won’t be realized.  In the cases when you choose poorly, you’ll find that failure isn’t as catastrophic as you imagined.  Successful people learn from their failures.

By taking action on your fears, you win on both counts.  You win if you make a good decision and things work out.  You even win if you make a bad decision and things go poorly, because you have an opportunity to learn from your decision and the subsequent problems you faced.

As Paul Simon says, “A good day ain’t got no rain.  A bad day’s when I think of things that might have been.”  Don’t let fear rob you of the career success that might have been.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Successful people are self-confident.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  They follow the career advice in Tweet 45 in Success Tweets.  “Everyone is afraid sometime.  Self-confident people face their fears and act.  Look your fears in the eye and do something.”  Procrastination is the physical manifestation of fear.  When you find yourself procrastinating, figure out what scares you about the situation.  Is it fear of failure?  Is it fear of success? Is it fear of rejection?  Is it fear of being embarrassed?  Is it fear of the unknown?  Once you’ve figured out why you are afraid, do three things: admit your fear to yourself; embrace your fear; take action.  Action is the antidote to fear and an important career success key.

That’s my career advice on fear and career success.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you, and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened my new membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb. You can find out about the membership site and get your free copy of I Want YOU by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.com.

Competence is one of the four common sense coach keys to career success that I discuss in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less.  You can purchase a copy of Success Tweets on Amazon.com or at your local bookstore, or better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com.

If you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you need to develop four basic but important competencies: 1) creating positive personal impact; 2) becoming a consistently high performer; 3) communication skills; and 4) relationship building.

You create positive personal impact in three ways.  1) Developing and nurturing your unique personal brand.  2) Being impeccable in your presentation of self – in person and on line.  3) Knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.

Today’s career advice on personal branding comes from Tweet 62 in Success Tweets…

Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.

There are two common sense steps for developing and nurturing your personal brand.

• Figure out how you want people to think of you.
• Consistently and constantly act in a manner that will lead them to think of you that way.

While your brand should reflect you and your uniqueness, it has to be built on integrity.  According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the times – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point.  Cathy, my wife, was a flight attendant for 36 years.  Seniority is a very important thing in the airline industry.  It governs how you bid for trips, positions on the airplane and vacations – almost anything important to a flight attendant’s quality of work life.

Cathy was very active in her union.  And seniority was one of the union’s most sacred principles.  A few years before she retired, Cathy’s airline made a big push into the international market.  International flights were plum assignments, they went to people with high seniority. 

However, the airline realized that it would be to their advantage to have some flight attendants who spoke the language of the country to which they were flying on these international flights.  Most flight attendants in her airline spoke English only.  The airline proposed putting two “language speakers” on each international flight.  Many people, including Cathy, were upset with this arrangement as they felt it violated the seniority concept.

Cathy used to fly from the US to London.  One day I said to her, “This whole language speaker issue doesn’t really affect you.  You fly to London, there are no language speakers on those flights.  Why do you care so much?”  She said, “I believe in the concept of seniority.  It doesn’t matter if I’m affected by language speakers.  It’s the principal of the thing.”  That’s consistency – and integrity — in action.

On the other hand, there’s Tiger Woods.  Tiger had one of the best personal brands in the world.  He earned close to $100 million in 2009 on it.  He will earn a lot less in 2010.  If you were following the news in late 2009 and early 2010, (how could you miss it) you know that the Tiger brand is in serious jeopardy because of some of his indiscretions which have come to light. 

Sadly for Tiger, his integrity is now in question – and that’s being kind.  His wife has left him, taking the kids.  Several sponsors have dropped him.  And, his golf game is suffering.  I’m not writing this post to pass judgment on Tiger – enough people have done that already.  I am writing it however, to reinforce my point of building your personal brand on integrity.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is one of the competencies all successful people possess.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.  Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Follow the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.  As Tiger Woods’s case demonstrates, a lack of integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.  Now, everyone is looking at Tiger and most people aren’t liking what they’re seeing.  So take a lesson from Tiger – one he’s learning the hard way — build your personal brand on integrity.

That’s my take on the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud