⚡ Momentum & Activation: Watching it all come together

December greetings, all! 

There are just 2 newsletters left explaining my proprietary Activation approach. After this, we’ll move on to my secret sauce for hosting intentional, high-impact events for executives.

Today we’re focused on Phase 4 of Activation, which is all about accelerating your momentum and seeing your prior Activation strategies work together like a symphony.🎻

Note: This is not a phase you can just jump into – you truly need to do all the work beforehand (see Phases 1, 2, and 3) to build your momentum first.

Option 1: Community Building 🤝

Networking is how you build connections. Bringing your connections together around a shared purpose is community building.

Leading a community is a surefire way to accelerate your momentum because you provide an immense value to those in your community on a continual basis.

Why?

Because community building goes beyond simply making connections or hosting occasional gatherings (a tactic we explored in Phase 3 with a book recommendation).

The concept is beautifully simple yet incredibly powerful:

If you want to understand exactly how to start a community, start with this post.

Want to see the power of when someone else promotes YOUR community? THIS is what you want — other people becoming raving fans of your community and creating posts that attract new business your way.

While there's much more to explore here, we'll keep it concise.

Remember, if you’re an executive that wants to build a world-class network for yourself or launch a community, we’ll do that for you!

Option 2: A Body of Work ✍️

Another way to accelerate your momentum, is to create a catalyst.

A catalyst that will leapfrog you ahead is having a ‘body of work:’ e.g. a book, proprietary framework, or series of articles or videos to demonstrate expertise and build a public platform. The possibilities are endless.

The reason for its effectiveness is because you can’t bluff your way through this — you need to have real expertise to produce a body of work.

Your expertise will be evaluated by your tangible accomplishments, such as your success in a specific role, history of scaling or exiting a business, leading a collaborative project successfully, making a definitive impact in a particular area, winning an award, being elected to something, etc.

For example, Writing a book is a perfect combination of specialization, dedication, and social proof.

Because not everyone possesses enough expertise to write an entire book, nor can everyone convey their expertise in a way that is legitimately appealing and interesting to others.

The lengthy process of writing and finding a publisher is enough to dissuade most people, and promoting the book after it’s published requires full dedication to your craft, and ability to talk about it publicly, and openness to people poking holes in what you’ve written. In short, you can’t bluff your way through a book or you’ll risk being called out as a charlatan.

For those who achieve publication, writing a book provides credibility by illustrating determination, hard work, and subject-matter expertise.

Option 3: Additional Catalysts 🚀

At 18 years old, celebrity chef Francis Mallmann was helping to open a restaurant when an unexpected event occurred — the head chef left the country indefinitely. The restaurant's financial backer asked Francis if he could step in to open the restaurant. Despite his fears and urge to say he wasn't ready, Francis seized the opportunity. When I had dinner with Chef Francis, he told me with conviction that he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't taken that leap of faith.

I call this catalyst “seizing the opportunity.” 

If you've followed the Activation Approach up until to this phase, you'll have built a vibrant network through intentional relationship building (Phase 3), providing unique value to others (Phase 2), and understanding the lay of the land (Phase 1). This positions you to be in the right place at the right time because you’re engaging with various networks, people know you for something specific, and you’ve provided value to people so they want to reciprocate.

This brings me to another catalyst: placement.

Take Tiffany Dufu, for instance. Now president of the Tory Burch Foundation, Tiffany built a million-dollar public speaking business and has become an advocate for helping others develop their speaking careers.

I saw Tiffany speak a few years before I interviewed her. At the time, she said that 98% of her clients indicated that they wanted to work with her because they had heard her speak at an event, or because someone they knew heard her speak and told them about her.

The Must: Tracking and Showing Success

☝🏽 Here’s what you need to do, regardless of which method you use to accelerate your momentum: track your work and show your success online.

Creating a system to track your work, especially online posts, will save you time and help you create better content in the future. For example, while writing this newsletter, I quickly accessed my database of past LinkedIn posts to find relevant examples.

I've also built a database of keywords from all my past interviews. For each interview, I tag the tools, tactics, and strategies covered. Taking it further, I’ve mapped these keywords to each phase of my Activation Approach. This organization lets me easily find relevant interviews, pulling valuable information from multiple sources.

The takeaway: develop a system to manage your expertise and thought leadership. The method should align with your work, industry, and goals. I created these two databases to preserve the wisdom from my interviews and easily reference my past content.

This leads us to showing success — yes, you should share your work, achievements, and proud moments.

Disclaimer: Even now, I get nervous about this because I never want to appear self-promotional or sales-y. 🫣 That’s why I make sure my content is either interesting, engaging, thought-provoking, inspiring, clever, or funny. Your content must provide real value to your readers. ☝️

For example, when posting about an event, avoid the generic "Yesterday I had the privilege of attending... thanks to the organizers for having me."

Instead, open with an interesting fact, question, or thought-provoking takeaway. This way, even people outside your industry will find value in your post and want to read more.

Here are a few examples of showing success while still providing value:

• A recap of a private, global forum I attended

• Announcing a new video series I published

• A summary of what I said on a panel

• Explaining how I’m closing one professional chapter and moving on to the next

By now it should be clear that you can’t accelerate your momentum too early; you first need to do the work, produce the body of work, continually put yourself out there in new and diverse situations, and then seize opportunities as they come your way.

And of course, make sure you share it with the world in a way that provides them value.

I’ll be back in your inbox in 2 weeks,
Nicole

P.S. Did you love this newsletter? Please forward it to a friend, or have them subscribe here.