How to Transform Your Career - for Designers and Creative Professionals

Hey, hey. Heat. Hey. Hey. hey, hey. Heat. As a creative entrepreneur, it can feel isolating to go it alone. Imagine being surrounded by other accomplished creative colleagues eager to accelerate the growth of their business and personal brands. I'm Philip Vandusen and I'm launching a membership community called Bonfire for creative pros like you because I believe in the power of building a meaningful network. Bonfire is a hybrid coaching, training, networking, and accountability community. A place for us to share, grow, and ignite our potential together. Need more confidence about your next move? With our fire milestone success map, you'll know what your next step should be and exactly how to get there. You get bi-weekly video sessions, private online community, a deep resource library, and exclusive access to yours truly and other amazing benefits. So, come join Bonfire, a community of like-minded individuals who are as passionate as you. Visit phipandusen. com/bonfire to learn more about the launch. Let's fuel your creative future. Hey everybody, happy Friday. Thanks for joining me here today. It's really great to see you here. Um, I'd love to hear where everybody is from. I have to adjust my volume here a little bit. Let me know where you're from and uh I'm going to be talking a little bit more about Bonfire later today because it really kind of um weaves in with the topic that we're going to be talking about today really well. Um, and so I'd love to know where you're from. the lead engine is from the UK. That's awesome. Um I'd also like to know uh how many years in the industry you've had and if you have been thinking about transforming your career or uh pivoting or transitioning to another sort of role or another category of the industry. Um I'd just love to know kind of where you are with it because that'll give me some information on how to kind of talk about what we're going to talk about today. So, as we're waiting for people to

shuffle in, um, if you haven't connected with me, um, go to phipvanddusen. com/muse and you can sign up for my brand muse newsletter. You'll also be on my email list, so then you can get all of the, uh, um, announcements for my live streams and my videos and my podcasts, etc. I also uh share some thought leadership on our industry as well as resources and tools and introduce you to um uh great uh resources for you and your career. And uh as Corks Peter Lewis so um thankfully put in the chat, if you have a question as I go through the presentation, just type question in all caps so I can see it when I scroll back through uh the comments. So, it makes it easier for me to do that. And then if you are interested in any kind of personalized attention from me, some one-on-one coaching, if you go to philipandusen. comon, you can learn more about my individual coaching or you can stick around and learn more about Bonfire, which is my mastermind community where you can also get um direct coaching and personalized attention from me. All right, you guys. So today we are going to talk about transitioning transforming your career and uh it's a kind of an important topic right now because there's a whole lot of things uh happening in the industry. Um Jorge is from Orlando, Florida. That's great. Jorge, welcome. 18 years in the industry, 3D artist. Cool. You're seeing a lot of changes in your industry. That's for sure. Um, I'd love to hear from anybody else who's in the audience, uh, what part of the industry you're in, kind of how long you've been in that part of the industry, and, uh, if you've been thinking about transforming your career in any way, that'd be really helpful. Um, okay. So, we're going to jump right into it. What do you say? All right, let's do this. I got to move some windows around here, so give me just a second. So today we're going to be talking about transforming your career. And I'm it in terms of kind of a stage-based framework. I'll focus most of my commentary and um and presentation on creative professionals, um design professionals, but this really goes for any kind of soloreneur, entrepreneur, um who's thinking about maybe shifting what they're doing or the focus of what they're doing. And so I wanted to tell you a little bit about my own story because that frames out this topic really well and will show you why I'm so passionate about it. Um I've had over 30 years in the industry. I've spent 20 years in big corporate. I spent uh over five years in global branding agencies. And I've had 10 years running my own branding consultancy and building my own personal brand, my own um content library and a number of courses and communities. And I'll share a little bit more about that in a second. Cha changes. Yes. So I have been through a lot of changes in my career. And I'm just going to outline. I've been through five major pivots in my career. And the first one I did was I was actually trained as a fine artist. I have my masters in painting. I have my MFA. And I actually taught for two or three years. and then found out that career wasn't really going to give me the kind of lifestyle I needed. It was also very difficult to find work, consistent work as a um as a fine art teacher. And so I started in fine art and then I found my way into the fashion industry through t-shirt design. And I worked for a number of different companies eventually ending up as at Old Navy where I built Old Navy's um global uh t-shirt um product business which was an $800 million a year business. was a huge business at the time. And uh then I moved from fashion over to the agency side and I went into uh brand identity, learned brand strategy, CPG, worked with a huge host of Fortune50 big enterprise level clients. And then I pivoted back over to in-house over the client side again. and I took a leadership role, global creative role at um at PepsiCo. And then the little skull and bones shows that I burned out. I burned out big time. And that's what this looked like. Um I was in a big global role. Um I had some family stuff going on and I just hit a wall at about in my early 50s. I hit a wall and I just bailed. I bailed um from that career. I didn't even know if I knew what I wanted to do or if I wanted to keep going in branding and design. I was really kind of lost and very burned out and had to go through a lot of self-reflection. And eventually when I came out the other

side of that, I had gone from in-house big house corporate again and then I moved into a solo career. And what did that look like? I'll get to that in a second. But the point I want to make is sometimes we go through career transformations or pivots by choice and sometimes that they're by circumstance. And I experience both of those. I've been laid off or been the victim of corp uh global financial downturns or corporate restructurings and found myself out of work three times in my career. That was not by my choice and not something that I asked for. But I had to transform myself in order to deal with that. And then there are times when I've done it by choice when I went from the fine art um kind of world and teaching fine art and the time where I kind of burned out and left my last big corporate job. That was a choice even though it was one that was kind of made under um duress. So Jorge says, "I'm in the process of transforming my career to teaching and building tools for digital artists. " That's excellent. this is going to be a great presentation for you. And uh Jim, 25 years in the industry. Cool. Um Pace Studios from Canada. Excellent. Good to have you guys here. Thank you so much for joining us. And so sometimes it's by choice, sometimes it's by circumstance. Sometimes you can go through these. It's a fivestage process of transformation and change that I'm going to talk about today. Sometimes you go through those things in a planful way. Sometimes you can kind of go through it thoughtfully. Other times it's, you know, it's more traumatic and it's kind of forced on you and you have to process through these things and make these transformations and these changes and these pivots in a way that was unexpected, right? And I've done both. But what I'm going to talk about today in these kind of stages of change, this works for either one of those things and they are applicable to both of those scenarios. So, in 2016 when I burned out and left my big last big corporate job, I had a four-page website, black and white website, little portfolio, blog that had nothing on it, a resume page, and this homepage, which was just like a bio page. That was it. That was my entire digital presence. I'd been behind corporate and agency walls working for clients, had [snorts] a lot of experience, huge teams, etc., But I had no visibility or no had built no personal brand. I'm going to adjust my volume here just a little bit more again. Um, and like I said, I had a lot of corporate experience. I've been agency side, client side, built huge teams, etc. Had some recognition, worked with a lot of really giant, awesome clients. Enjoyed it a lot. But I'd never done any content. I'd never spoken on stage. I'd never done a digital conference. I had no podcasts, no videos, no blogs, no nothing out there. I had no visibility to the larger world unless I showed up at a physical um trade show or something like that. And [snorts] when I kind of when I hit that wall, I was my attention was turned, right? I suddenly learned about this world of the consulting economy, solopreneurship, building a personal brand. And I'd kind of had it working for the man to be honest with you. I'd had a very long, very successful career, but I hit a wall, a big wall. And I really had to do things differently. And I realized that I didn't know anything about what I needed to know in order to be independent. And so this was not planful. And it was a huge shock to the system. But my attention and my curiosity and my um my energy was really getting fed by this idea of being a soloreneur. And so I my attention was turning. In 2016, I joined a mastermind group. And this was absolutely pivotal for me in terms of accelerating my growth and learning what I needed to learn to be independent and to grow some career agency and some career longevity insurance for myself and um and upskill what I knew so I could survive as an individual contributor in my own business. And then also in 2016, I launched my newsletter, which has been running now for 10 years. I launched my YouTube channel and I think I'm getting my 10-y year anniversary in June of this year. Um, got my silver play button on the wall over there, which I earned about two and a half, three years in. And by 2017, 80% of my clients from my business, from my for my uh branding and con uh consulting business were

coming directly from YouTube. So that content engine, that inbound marketing engine of long form video on YouTube really performed for me. And it's um it's a medium that really still performs. And so and I'm going to go into that in a live stream a little later in the month. But there actually beginning of next month. Then in 2019, I started a podcast. I started a series of my initial mastermind groups which were 12 weeks long. It was called the guild. I ran four different instances of that. Um, I launched my free Facebook group which I'm now suns seting in the next few weeks actually and I built my brand strategy 101 course which is still available and then in 2013 just a few years ago I launched Bonfire. So that ad at the very beginning that I played I definitely have to update because it says I am launching Bonfire and actually I launched it over two years ago and it's been running successfully since. So Bonfire is a proven entity and you're going to hear from some of the people who've been in Bonfire and had their careers transformed by this experience and my solo career was built on the foundation of being in a mastermind group. And so that's going to feature a little heavily towards the end of the presentation. But so now I have this, you know, I have a successful brand consultancy. I'm doing all this content, my mastermind group, my courses, my newsletter, all this sort of stuff. speaking at digital conferences, being a guest on podcasts, all of this I built as a solo per person. And the beautiful thing about having this kind, you know, co-career agency is that no one can fire me. No financial downturn is going to put me out of a job. No corporate restructuring If I can lose a client, sure, but there's a whole bunch of other clients that want to work with me after that. So there's nothing that can affect my livelihood because I have built professional agency and I want that for you too. And you can have that kind of professional agency and that kind of insulation from the forces that be even if you are continuing to work in a full-time job. you can build that kind of insulation from um you know things happening by circumstance that aren't expected so you don't end up kind of like I did in 2016 with a three-page website and absolutely no idea what to do. I don't want that for you. So let's talk about how to transform your career. This is why career transformations feel really different right now or the idea of transforming your career. We are definitely having a moment. Our industry, the creative industry right now is seriously having a moment. Hi Valerie, welcome from Colorado. Really good to see you here. Thanks for showing. Um and Valerie and I are in a peer mastermind together. and masterminding continues to be an incredible force um in my professional career and I want the same for you. Anyway, we're seriously in a moment right now like there's an tremendous economic insecurity going on, geopolitical level economic insecurity and tumultuous things happening in the global climate and you know what I'm talking about. The creative industry itself is going through huge disruption with um you know in the last five to 10 years the gig economy right the consulting economy the creative um you know content creation engine and industry that's been built up and now AI in the last couple years has just kind of completely blown things up and everyone's head is spinning around AI burnout is rising you know there was this huge rise coming out of COVID and through COVID of remote work and the isolation that remote work the continuation of feeling of isolation and loneliness that's been kind of permeating our industry is just really significant and I see it a lot in the people that I coach and that I work with. A lot of folks are also really just like questioning is AI going to take my job? Right? There's definitely a kind of chicken little sky is falling kind of feeling out there around AI and I totally get it. Um, [snorts] and that's something we're going to talk a little bit about too developing some uh kind of professional agency and career insurance around what AI is doing is in our industry. But here's the thing you have to understand that's why career transformation is really important topic right now for just about everyone to consider. So even the people who were employed in agencies and in-house and corporations and stuff with job jobs, right? They are going to be affected by all of these things and they're a little more

insulated and, you know, head down doing their work. But even folks who have full-time jobs, and you may be one of them on LinkedIn or, you know, on YouTube watching right now, this is the sort of stuff that's really important to have your, you know, kind of spidey sense and your antenna up around. The thing you have to understand is that these sorts of transformations and these sorts of moments in time, these moments that we have in our careers are normal. Career pivots happen all the time. The thing is that they are no longer rare. And a lot of times for creatives anyway, they're no longer linear. Meaning it's not like a career ladder, a straight line. Sometimes there are side jogs and circuitous pathways that happen in our careers. I've had five, right? I just outlined them for you. [gasps] It happens. and being prepared for it and understanding these kind of stages of change that you need to pass through in order to have a transformation that makes sense is [snorts] important. And the thing I want to impress upon you, especially for the folks who've been in the industry a while, and I know there's folks in the chat who have been, is that these late career or mid to late career transformations are different from the ones that were earlier in your career. We are faced with agism. Agism is rife in the creative industry. So, if you're over 40, I hate to tell you, but you got a target on your back, and it's something you really got to start thinking about and paying attention to. I don't mean to be a doomsayer here. [snorts] I just want you to be prepared. And I coach people, and I have, you know, people reaching out to me every day who have been blindsided by agism. There's family responsibilities that we have. There's financial responsibilities, mortgages, rent to pay, people to support, parents to support. So later in your career, these sorts of transformations have a lot more moving parts to them than they did when you were younger. We have financial needs. And so these sorts of transformations, if you're thinking about one or being faced by one by circumstance, they take a little more preparation, a little more thought. And so there's a little bit of a mental reframe that I want you to go through. And that is that, you know, you're not starting over. This is not that. This is not the beginning of your career where you're kind of completely starting fresh. You're not throwing away your experience and in fact your experience is going to inform everything that you do in this transformation. It's an evolution and it's gaining agency over your future. This is the time to build that career longevity insurance policy and I'm going to help you do that or at least think about it today. Now, career transformations follow a predictable series of steps and they're set steps and I'm going to walk you through them today. And if you can recognize where you are in these stages of change, transformation, you can make better decisions around what to do next. Okay? So, that's why I'm walking you through them. So, here are the five stages of change of transformation. There's pre-contemplation, contemplation, number three is preparation, number four is action, and number five is maintenance. And so in my podcast, I'm going to say that again. There's pre-contempl number one pre-contemplation, number two, contemplation, number three is So let's jump right into it. Well actually people move through these very distinct stages of change and no one skips a step. You may not actually start at step number one if you are coming at it from having been this change or transformation or pivot force fo foroisted on you by events. And you also have to remember that it's okay to move backward or to pull back and kind of relook at a previous step at some point. The goal in this whole process is awareness. It's not urgency, it's awareness. So, we're going to go through these five stages in detail. And the first stage, as I said, is pre-contemplation. Pre-contemplation is when you're thinking to yourself, something feels off, but I'm not going to call it a problem yet. And I would venture to say that probably 60% of the people in our industry are feeling this right now. And at this stage, you might be still functioning in your career. employed possibly. You might even

still employed possibly. You might even be still very capable, even possibly advancing in your career right now. But you may have this inkling in the back of your mind. You may be feeling increasingly nervous, restless, or drained, right? Starting to kind of like feel like you don't have that energy that you used to have. Some of the common signals of this are that you've lost your excitement or your creative energy. You may be feeling boxed in by your role or by your title. Maybe you sit hit some sort of promotional ceiling. Maybe there's someone above you who's not going to be moving. Or maybe there's some sort of, you know, ceiling that you don't want to cross, like move from being an individual contributor to going into management, for instance. You may be increasingly irritated by your work or irritated by the fact that it used to feel more manageable and now it may not anymore. You could be telling yourself also, and this is an important one, you could be telling yourself, I should be grateful, right? I should be grateful that I have a job. There's so many people who don't have jobs. And but that's one of those ones that you have to be careful about because it can keep you stuck. And so there's one another thing that some people do is that they stay busy to avoid any kind of reflection. They tr kind of keep the wheels moving and frenetically kind of keep moving so they don't have to sit, think, reflect and kind of take stock of where they really are. So that's one of those signals that happens in that kind of precontemplation phase. And the thing that you have to remember is that discomfort, discomfort or pain kind of shows up before clarity shows up. You don't [snorts] need to have a plan yet. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just have to start noticing patterns. You have to kind of slow down and think, take some stock, and start noticing kind of patterns of behaviors or feelings within yourself. So you can kind of start to kind of precognate the fact that some sort of pivot transition transformation is kind of coming down the pike. There's this great quote that says discomfort is not a weakness. It's the first signal that something wants to change. I put another way is that growth is painful. And if you're going to grow or if you're starting to have a growth spurt, right, you may be feeling some pain. discomfort. It's a signal that you want to pay attention to in yourself. Stage number two is contemplation. You guys tracking with me? Sheila, good to see you from North Carolina. Jorge, awesome. 100%. Um, stage two is contemplation. And this is a stage where you say, "I know something needs to change. " Like, you're starting to realize that this is probably a thing. Right? And this is where a whole lot of people get stuck. You might be feeling that you're aware of the problem, but you're torn between this idea of stability and the desire for change. And that is completely normal because stability, you know, means predictability. It means kind of safety, right? And change can be scary. It can mean, you know, it can mean change. It can mean shifting. It means things in a different way. There's this level of fear mixed with curiosity. So you have curiosity about what could be next, what it could look like, how could I be more fulfilled, how could I have a be deeper meaningful, you know, energydriven level of a career. But it's kind of there's this ball and chain of fear that's attached to it at the time. It you could just call it analysis paralysis really when it comes down to it. I always say that if perfectionism and fear of failure had a baby, it would be analysis paralysis, right? Analysis paralysis is really kind of rooted in perfectionism, having it figured out, having the answer, and then this level of fear of failure. And so, as you're thinking about and contemplating in this stage of contemplation, these are the sorts of things that come into mind. And so, here's what I encourage you to do. Do a selfassessment. You have to think of your career not as a ladder. You have to think of it more as a web. This is a quote that um a guy named Paul Pressler who used to be the CEO of GAP Inc. I was working with him um redesigning the Banana Republic logo and um actually an icon for Apollo. And he said, "Phil, great careers a lot of times are more like webs than they are ladders. " And I always remember that. I remembered this and quoted him for 25 years. It was an amazing quote because

especially with creative professionals, a lot of the times when we progress or make changes or transformations in our careers, they're not entirely linear. A lot of times they're an associated jog to the right or to the left where we're taking a skill set that we had or that we've been using in a small way in something that we've been doing or we've been developing as a side hustle and that informs our change, our transformation to something else. You want to take inventory of your skills and this is both functional skills. What can you do? Like what apps do you know? What you know capabilities do you have? And also this is an important one a lot of people forget which is your soft skills. What are your people skills, your presentation skills, your management skills, your you know your client skills, those communication skills, writing skills, what are those soft skills, not necessarily just the functional skills like what do I do? Soft skills are more like how do I act? How do I inter interact? Um you want to take a an assessment of your experience, right? So, your past jobs, your past roles, your past titles, you want to assess your interests, right? I like to I was on Christo's podcast a number of years ago and I was talking about how when you graduate from school, the career guidance counselor always asks you, "What are you passionate about? What are you passionate about? " And you should make that your career. The problem with that is that passion carries all this amazingly huge amount of weight and it's very scary to think about defining what your passion is and putting a pin in that, right? What's easier to do is to think about it in terms of curiosity. What am I curious about? What are the things that have been drawing me? What have I been putting on, you know, in my inspiration folder? What are the things that I'm, you know, reading about in content or drawn to that are slightly outside of what I'm doing, but something that's kind of drawing me or feeding my energy? Think about it in terms of what am I curious about? So, assess that. Start to capture that and think about it in a different way. You also want to assess your values. What is it that you value? What kind of a culture do you want to be in? If you're starting to go out on your own, what kind of culture do you want to build for your own company? And then the other thing I I try to encourage people to do is think about it in terms of energy. You either have an activity or a career or um you know a vocation that feeds your energy and energizes you or it drains you. And so what are the things in what you've been doing or the experiences that you've had that have really fed that energy and then what are the things that have been draining that energy? You want to capture those and assess that because those are the sorts of things that you're going to be using in order to make the decisions in these transformations or in these pivots that you're thinking about. Now I want to share with you a couple tools that I have around um self- assessment. One is the personal brand wheel. This is a framework tool that I developed for building and getting a 360 degree view, a 30,000 foot view, however you want to describe it, of your personal brand. And when you start going through a u a career transformation, a career pivot, using this tool, the personal brand wheel, can be really helpful in assessing where you are, what you have, and what you may need to pay attention to or build a little bit more. I wish I had this tool when I came out of my last corporate thing in burnout in 2016 and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't even know what all the moving parts of a personal brand were. This is the kind of tool that's super helpful. And if you go to phipvandusen. com/pbw for personal brand wheel, you can download this tool. It's a PDF. It's got a number of pages of kind of prompt questions and descriptions of how you use the tool. It's very handy. Um, another thing that you can do is you can journal. Journal and writing for me anyway has always been a really great way to process my thoughts and to um undergo kind of go through reflective selfassessment. So, writing and journaling um can be really helpful, especially for creative people. It seems to work really well. Um there's also passive reflection, and this is one that not a lot of people think about, and because we live in such a fast-paced world, and you know, at any moment, we just like we pick up the phone and we're bored for two seconds and like suddenly we're scrolling. Sometimes it's good just to sit still. Sit still, think, feel. Don't do anything. Go sit out in nature. Go to a park. Sit on a bench for a half an hour and don't do anything. Don't pick up your phone. Just see what comes up. Right? Self assessment doesn't have to be action. Sometimes it can be completely passive and just based in reflection. That's one of the ones that people don't talk about a lot. It doesn't make for

great content, but it's one that sometimes and I found can kind of uh give you more answers than any kind of active assessment kind of tools or actions. Um, another thing you can do in terms of uh, you know, a tactic or a tool for self assessment and that is get some coaching. Get some outside uh, kind of perspectives on what it is that you're doing. Another way you can get outside perspectives is to leverage your network, your peer network. Kind of share with them where you are and where you're going. Excuse me. [snorts] And um excuse me just a second. Sorry, kind of recovering from a bit of a cold and I suddenly got a itch in my nose. — [snorts and clears throat] — um reach out to your network and there are kind of make use of the observations of others. Share with people where you are, what you're thinking about, what your curiosity is and see if you can get people to reflect on what they know about you, how they experience you, where they've seen your strengths are, where they see maybe some of your opportunities or challenges are. We have blind spots. This is the biggest reason why most creative professionals can't for the life of themselves design their own websites or write their own website copy because we don't have perspective on ourselves. We can't assess. We can do this for clients day in and day out, right? We can because we have an outside perspective on what our clients are doing and how they're positioning themselves and communicating what it is that they do and what they offer. We can't do that for ourselves. So, you really have to have an outside perspective. and leveraging your network, your peer network is one of those things that's a great tactic for self assessment in this stage of change. And then, as I said before, pattern recognition. So, you want to think about how what patterns you've been seeing across your past roles and what you've doing and your experience of those roles because you're not choosing a job yet. direction just yet. You're just clarifying what's going to inform your direction. Okay? Going to say that again. You're not choosing a job yet. You're just clarifying your direction in this process, in this stage of preparation. So stage number three is called preparation. You're not jumping in yet, like I said, but you're getting ready. Okay. This is the stage that separates thoughtful transitions from reactive transitions. Now, like I said, sometimes circumstance forces upon us, you know, actions and preparations that we have to have that we weren't expecting. Those outside events kind of force us to be reactive. But in the preparation stage of change and transformation, you really want to be more thoughtful about it. And the mindset here is that this preparation stage is progress. You don't have to jump right to action and say what am I doing? How am I changing? You know, what am I applying for? How am I, you know, kind of building my next thing. Preparation is progress and you have to give yourself credit for that. And again, stillness and reflection can be really strategic and yield real truths about where you're going to go next. This is some examples. Here are some examples of what preparation looks like in mid-career. It could look like I just mentioned kind of a selfassessment. It could also be a risk assessment. So this is real and like I said necessary in mid to late career transitions or transformations is you have to assess risk. Do you have financial runway? So sometimes making pivots or transformations take months not weeks of financial runway in order to make that change. I suggest that people have nine months to a year of financial runway if you are making a major career um transformation. I know that's a lot and it's a lot to ask and there are people who've done it with less but in order sometimes the changes that you make take a while to take effect and to have people understand that you've made this change and that you're operating in a different way and also to you know kind of gather attention visibility to what it is that you're doing. Having that financial runway is impos important. Also one of the things that you know preparation looks like in mid-career is kind of starting to do side experiments. So this you don't instead of making huge leaps or huge decisions sometimes side hustles are the way to go. Meaning maybe

you're starting to moonlight or freelance from your full-time gig. Maybe you're starting to do smaller, if you're self-employed, smaller self-directed side projects that are exploring that secondary skill set or that other skill or direction that you're looking to develop or move into. You could be doing strategic partnerships. So, that's collaborations with others peers in your network, working projects that are maybe outside of your normal skill set or getting involved in something that's going to inform what your next change or your transformation is going to be. you. It could be education. You could be taking some um courses, things like my brand strategy 101 course where you're starting to uplevel your skill set so you're thinking in a more strategic way rather than a tactical, you know, kind of deliverable sort of way. It also could be um a side experiment or a uh kind of a movement or attention to your V-shaped skill sets. One of the things I talk about a lot in Bonfire and coaching is T-shaped versus V-shaped skill sets. T-shaped skill sets are great when you're employed. Your employer loves the fact that you do one thing, you do it really well, you know everything about it, you deliver that thing. That's what agencies and corporations want [clears throat] from their employees. They want T-shaped skill sets. when you're self-employed or you have your own agency or you're, you know, soloreneur or you're moving into consulting or coaching or something that's kind of a broader range of what it is that you're transforming your career into. You really need to start and develop V-shaped skill sets. So that's the one thing that you're super great at and that you're transforming into and now focusing on. But you also need to learn a little bit of finance, communication, a little bit of bis business development, a little bit of client management, a little project management. There's a lot of things that go into being more independent and having that level of professional agency that go beyond a regular T-shaped skill set. I've done videos on this and so if you search my channel you can definitely find those. And then the goal of all this is the goal is to become to test these ideas before committing and that is one of the major aspects of this stage of preparation. Some of the practical areas in this to focus on are um this idea of the career web side jog right. So, how do you explore related job categories? If you're a designer, how do you explore copywriting? If you're a graphics person, how do you explore product design or UXUI or, you know, what is that kind of secondary related skill set that you have that could inform this career transition or this career web side jog? Um, if you're looking for other full-time employment, this could be um using consulting or freelancing as a bridge to that. Or maybe you're doing strategic partnerships or collaborations with others as you moonlight that is going to, you know, kind of inform or act as a bridge to another sort of full-time employment. There's also an aspect of internal repositioning before external change. So you have to kind of think about it in terms of how am I writing my own personal brand positioning statement in a different way. How am I going to rearchitect what that looks like and have it ex inform this change that's down the road but doing it before that excuse me. Do you have any skill sets that are gaps in your skills that need to be closed? Right? Do you need to learn more about writing or possibly speaking or presenting? Do you need more financial skills or marketing skills? Maybe you need to develop some kind of understanding of video or audio or um you know production or editing. It could be AI. For a lot of us, for all of us is AI because the tsunami of AI that we're living through right now, there's no one who knows everything or can even purport to know everything. I guarantee you that we're all learning. We're all trying to catch up on that. It could be team management. Think about the skill sets that you might have that need those gaps that you need to be closing. You want to remember that this is not that early career hustle. It's a very different kind of mindset of how you're going about it. You're taking stock of your experience and your credibility and you're positioning yourself in a different way. One of the things that I've always done in my career, I've gone through, like I

said, a whole lot of different pivots and transformations and side jobs in my career is that a lot of my career pivots were not planned, meaning they were forced on me. They were circumstantial. I was laid off or there was a reorg and I found myself out of work or there was a relocation or a family event. A lot of those things were not planned. But the pivots, the transformations that I made, those career web side jogs that I made were always strategic. Meaning I had prepared for them. I thought them through and I really made an informed decision about which direction I was going to go and how react to that circumstance. So again, I want you to think about it this way. Career pivots or transformations aren't always planned, but they can be strategic. If you go through these assessments and really think about how that next thing is going to further your movement in your career web. Okay. Now, stage number four is a big one. This is action. You guys tracking with me? Yeah. Okay. Midcareers making a huge career pivot. Um, so I want to hear more about that. Um, and Jorge, make sure to put question before your question in all caps. I'll come back to it. Um, so this is where you're saying to yourself, I'm actively changing how my career works. At this point, this is where visible change starts to happen and where it begins. One of the things you want to focus on is upskilling and staying relevant. So this is that continuous learning stage. Continuous learning in creative professional careers these days is complete non-negotiable. If you want career longevity insurance, you have to continuously learn. And the best place to do that right now and we all know the answer to this is AI literacy. You have to focus on skills that enable leverage and agency in your career. AI is that thing right now. Here's a quote I want you to kind of take in. AI won't take your job if you make it your job to learn AI. AI is not going to take your job. But you have to make it your job to learn AI. Because here's the thing, we're creative professionals. When you know the computers came around, desktop publishing, you know, was a thing decades ago. Everyone, the sky was falling just like it is today. This is the pers this is the benefit of being as old as I am is that I have perspective decades old perspective of how these events kind of happen in uh in our industry and the zeitgeist that goes around them and this zeitgeist that we're living through with AI and the fear and the trepidation that we're going through with this was exactly what happened with the design printing publication industries creative industries when the computer came around Quark Express, right? Quark, Illustrator, Freehand, all of these things that made desktop publishing a thing and everyone thought, "Oh, now there's going to be everyone can, you know, type set. No one's going to need designers. " Well, guess what happened? It actually made us more important. But what was important was that we learn the tools. We have to learn the tools to survive in our career. And that's exactly what's happening with AI. If you want to survive and flourish in your career, learn how your career and what you do is um affected by and made uh better by using AI. This falls into right now it falls into a few categories. The ask engines, right? Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Learn how to write prompts. Learn how to get out of those engines what you really need to get out of them. This is something that takes a little a lot of experimentation, study, and thought. These tools are incredibly powerful, but I guarantee you, you are not using more than 20% of what they can do right now as it relates to your industry. And so, think about that. Really dive into that and embrace that. I would recommend that you in whatever tool that you think is the best for you like chat or whatever, buy a premium subscription, not like the super expensive ones, but like the 20 $25 a month ones. So you don't have any limitations on what it is that you do. You also get increased functionality in the fact that you can enter in your personal brand ethos, your background, all that sort of stuff, and it remembers it and it will and you can build custom cheap BTS, etc. So, um, get in there and embrace it. The next kind of category is generative

engines. So, this is things like Notebook LM or Adobe Firefly or Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. The list goes on and on, right? Tons and tons of generative engines. And they all have their own kind of strengths and their own, you know, best use cases. And so getting in and experimenting with those is also important. And then there's also the AI influence on all sorts of other SAS products and apps. For instance, I pay for Descript, which I use to transcribe my YouTube videos and to transcribe my podcasts coaching sessions and turn them into summaries of coaching sessions and action plans and all this sort of stuff. Des I use it to edit video, of course, because you can edit text and it just edits the video for you. Descript has incredibly increasing and I haven't been paid to do say this. It has incredibly strong um uh capabilities that are informed by AI that didn't exist two years ago. Uh Adobe Creative Suite, right? Every single aspect of the Adobe Creative Suite has AI that's now being built into it. web development, email automations through kit, all sorts of funnels, AI is permeating every single SAS and app. And so learning how to use those in an effective way is one of those things that's going to build career insurance for you and fill a skill gap that everyone is struggling with right now. There's also learning strategy or kind of focusing more on a higher level of deliverable, a thinking deliverable and intellectual deliverable. This is where things like brand strategy 101, which is my signature brand strategy course, which takes your skills as a creative professional and upskills them dramatically. So, you are moving what I like to call to the tip of the spear and getting to where all the true decisions are made in a business that can affect getting you more work. And I'm not going to go into it in depth now because that's a whole another live stream. Um, but learning brand strategy or some sort of more intellectual deliverable as opposed to a product deliverable, an edit, a graphic design, a website, all that sort of stuff. um is one of those things that you can really upskill um and build some level of agency um for yourself. Also, marketing skills. This is a place where a lot of c creative professionals um you know work for themselves but they you know they do them for themselves but learning them in a more formal way can give you a whole lot of leverage in your career because they're applicable in so many different places. And that is marketing skills and growth skills. Because if you upskill yourself in these areas, not only will it help you grow your own business and your own career, but then you can also use them with your clients. And that again gives you this level of agency and career insurance and helps you in that transformation by making you stronger through it. Email marketing. Okay. Paid advertising. If you started a paid Facebook ad thing right now or Google ads and offered that by clients, almost [clears throat] everybody I know, excuse me, hold on a second. Everybody I know who has a Facebook ads agency is killing it. They have more work than they know what to do with. If you learn how to work Facebook ads, everyone thinks Facebook it's dead. It's not. If you learn how to run Facebook ads for clients, you will never go hungry. I'm just going to put that out there right now. Um, new business development, how to get new clients, sales funnels, etc. Account management, how do you manage accounts and projects for clients? Um, also your, you know, your financial acumen feeds right into kind of marketing and growth skills. learning budgets, learning software, learn how to read a financial sheet, learn how to do financial planning, how to do uh project planning for more complex projects with a lot of moving parts. Those sorts of skills are skills that could be really um trans they're great transportable skills from one vertical of a career web to another. Um also thinking about — [snorts] — um fractional roles. So could you act as freelancer, consultant, coach, or fractional um kind of role for a company that doesn't have the either the need for a full-time person or the budget um is one of those things that if you learn how to do that, learn how to establish consulting or

retainer relationships, that's another thing that can really kind of um insulate you from any kind of negative u career. your environment uh um tumultuous events. Um and then you have to remember that pivoting is evolution and not eraser. You know, you're not erasing anything. You're taking your skills, you are repositioning them, and you're upskilling because it's an evolution. It's not like a light switch. You it the the the process of doing those things is progress. The next thing I want to talk about is leveraging your network because career change and career transformation does not happen well alone. Your network is always going to be the most underutilized asset that you have. Developing a peer network and using that peer network in a really effective way is one of the things that I would say 95% of creative professionals do not do well. [snorts] highly recommend if you're thinking about and going through the process of a career transformation or approaching it is to reconnect with former colleagues, former clients, former bosses, former mentors or establishing a mentor relationship or a coaching relationship. The next thing is strategic partnerships and that is you know collaborating with and maybe engaging in kind of lowrisk entry points to um to what it is that you want to do in your career transformation. Start playing with it the side hustle approach. Now, the next thing that I want to talk about is personal brand positioning. And just like if you've ever worked with clients and talked about brand positioning, it's essentially where do you operate? What is it that you offer? Who do you offer it to? Why are you better? And why are you different? And I like to think about it or talk about it in terms of building a personal brand through this kind of visualization of pillars that I have which is credibility, [snorts] building to visibility, value and authority. If you think about building your own personal brand and positioning your personal brand this way, it kind of helps and it's easier to think about this way. You want to establish your credibility and that is documenting what it is that you know, your history, where you've come from, what is the experience that you're bringing to the table. The next is visibility. How are you going to show up? become visible to the people in your industry? Whether that's people who want to hire you for full-time job or it's clients that you want to get or it's peers that you want to collaborate with. How are you going to raise that level of visibility for yourself? How do you get seen? Because people can't work with you. They can't hire you unless they know that you exist and that you're showing up in their feed regularly. The next one is value. Value is what is it that you offer? What is that product? What is that service? What is that transformation that you're offering others that's going to change their business, change their life? What is it that you're offering? What is that value that you're bringing to the table? And then as you create those transformations, that builds to a level of authority. What it is that you're known for, what it is that is the halo around you that people recognize as your superpower. I think about personal brand positioning this way. capturing and documenting your credibility, bringing that to the market and making it visible, building that author, that value by creating those transformations in people and building to a level of authority. And the key actions that you need to take in order to start making that sort of thing happen are updating your website. These are tactical things to prepare yourself or take action within a career transformation or career change. Update that website. And like I said, it's really hard to get perspective on your own website. Creatives struggle with this and it takes them forever and they put it off and they hem and haw and they noodle and it doesn't change much. Get some outside perspective, some peer eyes on your website and update that website, especially the copywriting to start to tell that story of your career transformation and that career journey that you're going through. LinkedIn, you want to make sure that you're editing your LinkedIn profile. And I want to make this really, really clear to you guys. I'm going to do a live stream about this soon. There has been a massive shift in the citations that LLMs

are returning, meaning the answers that Chad GBT, Gemini, Perplexity are putting out. When someone asks it a question, when someone asks those engines a question, it's they're it's spitting out citations from a whole range of sources, right? The web, Google, YouTube, all that. The number one citation source is Reddit. The number two, and this is brand new because it's moved up a number of places, is LinkedIn. And so you have to edit your LinkedIn profile for SEO or AEO, ask engine optimization. So it shows up in citations in chat GPT perplexity because that is the new Google search. These AI engines are So, you have to make sure that you're editing your LinkedIn profile for AEO, for SEO. And it's a very different way of approaching a LinkedIn profile. It's not a resume. You're basically doing it for search. Another key action that you can take is your portfolio. How are you highlighting your past competencies? Are your case studies, are your portfolio pieces up to date? I bet 75% of you the answer is no. And the other piece of it is how are you showcasing what your other competencies are, where you're moving to, where you're thinking of transitioning to or what are you transforming into? How are you illustrating that in terms of your portfolio? What are you putting out there to become visible that's going to signal to the world that you're moving in this new direction? And then there's content. So if you're not new in content, number one, start. People are talking about like, you know, have we met peak content? Yes, we have. But the problem is that over 50% of it on the web now is produced by bots. It's produced by AI. So really human content that showcases you as a person and your personality is more important than ever because the web is being taken over by AI bots and it's very recognizable. So developing a level of content or visibility around you as a human as a personal brand is more important than ever. And so if you haven't done it don't be discouraged but start. And if you are doing it, focus more on the human side of you. You're notice this on LinkedIn. If you go on LinkedIn a lot, you'll notice that more and more people are actually posting things that look more like Facebook posts on LinkedIn. And there's a reason for that. They are establishing themselves as human beings with feelings, with insights, putting a face to this LinkedIn profile, not an avatar, a true face, a personality, a journey. And they're doing that because so much of what we're seeing and scrolling through and being, you know, kind of hit with these guy these days is really generic AI bot generated slop. And so try to bring that personality side to it. And then you want to keep in mind your storytelling. So how are you telling that story about yourself? You're not explaining the gap. gap between where you were and where you're going. You're not saying, "Oh, this ended. " What you're doing is you're starting to narrate your evolution. You're starting to share and articulate your journey of transformation for people. Again, it kind of brings that human side to it. This is the one thing I want to say about this is that this is actually the hardest thing to do. It's very hard to be transparent and open yourself up and be visible in a human way on more business-like social media platforms, but it has huge benefits. Okay, now we're moving on. Number five, the last stage of change and transformation is maintenance. And this is how do I make this whole thing sustainable, right? these changes stick? Most people completely underestimate this stage. There's a thing called identity lag. And that is that when folks go through career trans transformations a lot of times we have defined ourselves and this happened to me. by our business card or by the company that we work for or by our title or by our salary or the number of people report to us. We have kind of established a level of identity within a construct. And when you start to move into a pivot or transform your career, you're stuck in the old identity construct. You have identity lag as you are moving into the new thing. This sometimes manifests itself as imposttor

syndrome. Like how can I say that I'm this thing? I feel like a complete fraud. I you know I'm everyone will see through the mask. I don't have the credibility that I need to be this new thing or to move into this new thing. There's a crisis of self-image. But this is where the maintenance of this change comes in is that you really have to kind of you have to fight that. And sometimes again getting peer feedback or getting coaching around this can really help. The more senior you are in your career, the more advanced tougher imposttor syndrome gets. I've coached a number of senior executives and companies and suffer from imposttor syndrome. You wouldn't ever think this more than people who are much more junior than them. So mid to late career making these sorts of pivots or transformations is tough because you have established a level of identity in what you used to do. And when you're trying to think of yourself and act in a different way and transform into another, you know, web of your career, it's hard sometimes to look at yourself and really internalize you're being different in a genuine way. And because of that, you may develop a level of inconsistent momentum in what it is that you're doing or what it is you're trying. Doubt starts creeping back in. Right? — [snorts] — And another thing you may get hit with is decision fatigue. And this is another thing that um uh getting a peer network can really help with is that there are so many decisions that you need to make when you're pivoting or transitioning in your career. There's so many things to build. There's so many options, different directions that you can go and getting outside perspective and advice and you know experience from other people can be really helpful in minimizing this level of kind of decision fatigue or a decision lack of clarity or lack of confidence in your decisions can be super helpful. And so maintenance requires cons, you know, continued goal setting and also accountability. So the goals that you have and you're setting for yourself in your transformation and accountability to those goals. It really requires peer support like I said and those sorts of feedback loop back loops and perspectives that um you need uh confidence in decision-m like I said and then also that ongoing continuous learning to discover new tactics um and new resources and new ways of going about things. The thing to remember and I said this before is that no one transforms alone. You have to find the peers at similar stages of transformation. You have to find coaches or mentors. You have to you know uh you have to continue your education and sometimes that comes with you know interacting with other people because transformation does not have to be nor is it easiest when it's a solo endeavor. And now I want to share with you just a little bit about a community that I built called Bonfire, which is a mastermind community for mid to late career creative professionals and entrepreneurs. And if you don't know anything about mastermind groups, let me tell you just a little bit about them. So this is Mark who's in Bonfire right now. Bonfire has been going on for a little over two years at this point. He said, "The industry has changed so much and my career has plateaued. " And then a lightning bolt hit me and I came across Bonfire and I suddenly realized I had to change things to get different results. You can keep doing what you've always been doing and get the same results you've always been getting or you can change things. And Bonfire is a mastermind community. We meet on Zoom four times a month. Two of them are mastermind sessions. One of them is an office hours, open office hours conversation session and the next one is either a visiting expert or because I bring in all sorts of experts to talk to the group or uh it's a um inspiration session called pasture and you get mentorship and coaching from me. You get an instant overnight peer network who's going to help you in your career transition and transformation. And you get goal setting and accountability, a trusted peer feedback loop. Your confidence will be raised in the decisions that you're making and you may be um kind of um exposed to decisions that you didn't even know that you had to make. And then there's also opportunity for partnerships and making a greater level of progress that way. A guy named Zach who was in Bonfire said that Bonfire helped me build my

personal brand online and gave me the kick I needed to start putting myself out there without fear of failure or judgment. And before I knew it, I landed a full-time teaching role of designers at the university level. Zach was a individual contributor in a corporation and he wanted to make a transformation and by coming into bonfire within a matter of months actually he had landed a full-time teaching role at the university level and that's the sort of transformation that can be facilitated by participating in a mastermind group. This is an who also had a similar experience. She said, "After being laid off, I was at a crossroads. After joining Bonfire, within months, I landed an incredible role as a creative director. If you're a creative pro navigating a career transition, I cannot recommend Bonfire enough. " So, these are just a few of the testimonials of people who have actually been in Bonfire and experienced real transformations for themselves. So, membership, not membership, embers because it's, hey, Bonfire, right? Get it? It includes group coaching from me. Like I said, two times a month. They're mastermind sessions where you can get individualized help and group coaching on your um your challenges, your goals, where you want to get in your career. One time a month you have office hours. you're visiting experts or inspiration session. And then you have access to all the session recordings of everything that we do. So if you ever miss one or you want to go back and kind of rehear what you know was presented, then those are available to you. There's also a private online community. So this is on the circle platform if you're familiar with that. It's kind of like a private Facebook group on steroids, but it's behind a firewall. So only the people from Bonfire can get in there and access all the tools and resources and recordings within it. There's a fire milestone success map which gives you an idea of like what the process and stages are for your growth that are recommended. There's also a huge resource library with hundreds of videos, playlist, tools, downloads, templates, checklists. I mean, it just goes on and on. It gives you basically everything that you need to make this sort of a career transition. And then you also get super hyperdiscounted access to brand strategy 101 which is my as I said signature brand strategy course. And then you get this level of peer feedback and accountability which as you heard as I went through the content today is so critical to making a career transformation. It's just amazingly critical. Joselle was in Bonfire still is. and she said, "I came in with three clients and in 12 weeks I had 10. One of them is even coming from inside the group itself. It's really amazing. " Laura had another experience. She said, "I was recently promoted. " She had actually just made a transformation. Um, promoted to associate art director and Bonfire was a huge part of making that happen. It happened while she was in bonfire and the feedback that she got when she made that transition was super helpful and Philip's mentorship gave me the confidence and I confidence I needed to tackle some tough decisions. Again, super helpful to Laura in her uh career transition and pivot. Sonia um longtime member of Bonfire said, "I had goals of building and communicating my brand, but I was struggling with how to do it. Now I've got more confidence because I can bounce ideas off of peers I trust. The peer aspect of giving you confidence and faster forward momentum when you're considering or in the preparation stage or in the action stage of going through a career transformation cannot be understated. The membership for Bonfire for four sessions a week, access to all the resources, access to me is $97 a month if you pay quarterly. And generally people pay quarterly because it, you know, it you want them to come in and develop relationships with you. Super affordable. Um, and I highly recommend you take advantage of it. If you go to phipvandeson. com/bonfire, you can learn more about um membership in Bonfire and the different levels of membership that are available to you. Like I said, it's inside the circle platform. It's a private community and there are forums, there are chat rooms, there are, you know, resource centers that are all organized very um logically so you can access and find things easily. and tons of resources as I said checklist tutorials playlist. So if you go to bon philip van dusen sorry been talking for over an hour and

I'm starting to flag sorry about that. So if you go to phipvandusen. combonfire you can learn more about it. Um, and if you have any questions after you read through that stuff on Bonfire and you're serious about joining, I'd be happy to do a Zoom with you one-on-one and talk about your membership in Bonfire. Just hit me up, connect with me on LinkedIn, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn and say, "I'm serious about joining Bonfire. I'd like to have, you know, 20 minutes of your time and we can discuss whether it's a good fit for you. " Okay? So, definitely check that out. Um, and you can get some one-on-one facetime with me if you are in fact um, interested and serious about joining Bonfire. And the thing I want to leave you with now is that this sort of transformation pivot is a process. It's not a single decision. It takes time. But the sooner you get help, you need to get that. help sooner than you think you actually need it. Because once you get stuck, it's a lot harder to get unstuck. What you want to have is kind of the help and the peer feedback and the support that you need as you start to go through this process. And also recognizing where you are, where you fitting in these five stages of preconception. Number two is contemplation. Excuse me. Number one is pre-contemplation. Number three is preparation. Four is action. And five is maintenance. Wherever you find yourself in these stages of change, knowing where you are gives you power and it gives you the ability to kind of understand the steps that you need to take and what you need to focus on. And there is no need to rush unless circumstances have made this kind of more critical and you're more in a stage of reacting than kind of processing and going through it at your own pace. So you want to assess where you are and then you want to choose and focus on those next steps that you need to take. And with that I'm going to open it up to questions. So, I'm going to scroll back through um the chat and take some questions for a little bit. I hope you guys enjoyed the presentation. I hope that was helpful. And I hope that I didn't like position I wasn't watching. So, I hope I didn't position myself behind my slide the entire time. Um all right, I'm going to take that off the screen. Um so, these are my socials. So, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn or Brand Muse or whatever um threads, you can do that. Um, okay. So, I'm going to scroll back through the questions and I think a couple people asked questions before they wrote question on it. So, hold on. Um, okay. Paul Roose, this a good question. Um, he who knows AI is going to take your job or your contract. The trick question is how can you get to know what is the problem that executives are struggling with and how that can be solved using AI. The thing about this Paul is that AI is going to be put to the task of everything that we've been doing. So it's actually not a new question. It's not a new solution or a new product or a new service that they need. It's how do you use AI in the processes, in the services, and the products that you're offering, but to offer them at a higher level with more speed, with more support, with more credibility, um, with more level of quality than you were before. And so, kind of woven into this today anyway, was the fact that I was talking about career transformations and pivots. And so thinking about what it is that you're going to be doing and then how AI can come in to help that out is an another piece of the pie. But even right where you are right now as we as creative pros and entrepreneurs start to figure out how we can use AI, it's not like there's a brand in my opinion, this is my opinion, there's not like it's there's an entirely brand new problem. Yes, there are things that are new possibilities in generative AI that you can do that you couldn't do before. But the stuff that I think for the most part we're concerned with is how do we use it in order to make our product, our services better. Um, and I don't think that's I don't think there's a new question that has to be addressed. It's not like there's a

secret that AI is going to address and we have to figure out what the secret is. That's what I'm trying to say. Um, okay. Um, Arsh says, um, I'm a motion designer switching to UX motion. Um, I make motion based on user psychology. My branding words are e-motion designer. Please help me if I'm in the right direction. Okay, so this is an important thing Arash and that is that you I understand you're wanting to create a new job title category for what it is that you do. Using the word like emotion designer will work for your website. It'll work for your social media as a talking point to describe what it is that you do, but I highly recommend that you do not use it on your LinkedIn profile. um as it relates to any of your social profiles because when it comes down to being findable by ask engines and SEO, you want to use terminology that is what people search for. It's the exact title of the you know the category and industry that you're operating in. If you are doing UX, motion design for UX, that's how you put it. And you look at other motion designers who are doing UX and you look at how they list their job title and that's what you use. If you're using it for content or social or your website and you want to kind of make it you want to brand yourself in a unique way to be memorable, I totally get that. But don't use emotion designer as your LinkedIn profile descriptor because it's not what people search for and you want to be visible to search engines. I hope that was helpful to clarify that. Um, Scrolling, scrolling, just looking for the word uh question. So if anyone um is getting that question missed, let me know. Okay, Jorge, uh you said, "How do you position yourself clearly without pigeon holeing your work or limiting what you can grow into? " Jorge, you've been in this a long time because I know I think you said you've been in it 25 years, right? And this is one of those things that is really, really hard for people who are mid to late career creative professionals is that we want to be known as credible for our entire portfolio of skill sets. And you know this as well as anybody else, which is that if you try to be everything to everybody, you're nothing to no one. Right? That's the wrong way of saying it, but essentially you can't be everything to everybody. And so I understand you're wanting not to pigeon hole your work, but also when it comes to personal branding and visibility and being remembered, you have to put a stake in the ground because you have to be known for and discoverable for one particular superpower. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't surround yourself with a whole halo or ring of other things that you're completely competent at, but you want to make sure that you're discoverable for a particular thing. And the more uh the tighter you can make that definition be, the more people are going to be able to find you. And that's a key. I'm going to tell you a really quick story. Marty Nummire who uh ran a design agency in Southern California. Well, actually it was in um Silicon Valley and he did all of Apple's earliest packaging. When Apple was selling CDs and DVDs of their products, right? And they came in a box, right? The software, etc. Apple, he was doing all of Apple's packaging. And he got known for being the software packaging guy. His agency did amazingly well. incredibly smart guy. He's been on my podcast. Check out the podcast episode. It was awesome. And um Marty's an amazingly smart guy. And when I had him on the podcast, I said, "Marty, you know, you are known for all of this incredibly influential Apple packaging. " And so, how did you had an agency, but you did a lot of other stuff. You did brand identity. You did website design. He did all of this range of

things. But he said yes, but on our website and when we gave pitches, we only showed the software packaging side. It doesn't mean that when people came to us and wanted brand identity or brand strategy or CPG packaging or whatever that was that we said no, we didn't say no, we only do, you know, high-end software packaging. They're an agency. They want the work, right? They need the revenue. They got to pay bills, right? So, but they became known for one specific superpower that they were famous for and people still came to them for all of the other stuff. So, that's how I would that's how to position and answer that question is you can position yourself clearly around a particular superpower, but it doesn't mean you can't have a revolving halo of satellites of other um great skill sets that you have and can offer. And if you are if you're pivoting and you're growing into something else, highlighting or starting to tell a story or making more visible what that transitioned, you know, that transformative product or or identity that you're going to have and starting to surface that and highlight that more as you make the change. That's okay. but you just don't want to kind of become known as or put yourself out there as this massive generalist because you don't want to pigeon hole yourself. I hope that's helpful. Um, okay. So, this has been great you guys. I've been, you know, been run for an hour 20 and if anyone else has any other questions, I'd really, you know, I'm open to answering any more if you want to pop them in there. I know there's about a 10 15 second lag or whatever between um questions and what I see in chat here. Uh one thing to know is if you're watching me on LinkedIn is that I can't see LinkedIn chat and I can't respond to LinkedIn chat. So if you're ever on LinkedIn and you see my event coming up on LinkedIn, make sure to watch me on YouTube, watch me over here because then you can engage in chat because I can't see it on LinkedIn which is unfortunate. Um, Arresh says, "Can anyone join Bonfire? I'm not a strategist and I don't understand nuance of personal branding. " Uh, yes you can. Generally, it is for mid to late career creative professionals. Generally, if you're right out of school, it's probably not the best fit because you're not focusing on the sorts of things that other people are focusing on. The members of Bonfire are usually small agency owners with, you know, five to 10 people in their agency or they're freelancers or solo um practitioners. Some are actually employed in companies. Others are looking to build their personal brands from scratch. They're just starting to do content. They may have had a number of years in the industry and now they're looking to transform. They're looking to expand. They're looking to fill in those skill sets um to become more of a V-shaped skill set so they can um you know become more visible, build more authority, attract a higher level of client. The people in Bonfire, a number of them have taken the brand strategy 101 course, but they aren't purely brand strategists either. But what they're doing is they're learning and upskilling so they can move to a higher level of competency and operate at a higher level in their industry. And so um if you've had a number of years of experience, Bonfire would be a great fit for you. And if you're curious about it and you want to talk with me directly about whether it would be a good fit, connect with me on LinkedIn. shoot me up a hit me with a DM and say, you know, I was a give me your screen name that you were on in YouTube and I'll remember it and um we'll set up a Zoom and we can talk about it. All right. And anybody else who's here who's interested in joining Bonfire, I'm going to put this up here. Hold on a second. Um if you're interested or curious about what Bonfire is about, um go to phipvandusen. com/bonfire. Learn more about it. And again, if you're interested in talking about it, you can also use the contact form on my website to um to set up some time to talk with me if you're very serious about joining. It's an amazing community. It's the thing about it is, and I want you to understand this, there's not like 50 people in it, right? It's intimate. It's it kind of revolves around like 10 to 20 people. So, it's like you get in there and there's high quality people in there and you can build true friendships and relationships with people in there. I know a number of other, you know, graphic design and, you know, kind of influencers or coaches and consultants have really massive communities of 100, 200 people. And I've gotten people who came from Bonfire from those communities to Bonfire because in

these other communities, they just felt like a number and they, you know, were on page seven of the Zoom and they didn't feel like they were seen. They couldn't really, there was such a revolving cast of characters in the community that they couldn't build true relationships. they didn't they couldn't develop a level of trust in the people who were giving them feedback and those are the sorts of things that in Bonfire I made it a priority to keep the group intimate. So that's why I vet people who come into it and make sure that they're going to be a good fit for the group because it's a very important kind of group relationship and dynamic that goes on. Um, and the other thing is that there's a probably the majority of people who are in Bonfire right now have been in it since the beginning. So, they've been in it for over two years. They've built some great relationships with each other, but also new people are coming in and being welcomed into the fold. It's an incredibly welcoming uh community, but the people who've been in Bonfire for a while see the value in it and they stay because they keep growing and keep benefiting from it. Yeah. So, definitely shoot me a a um a DM or use the contact on my web page. All right. Um Okay, you guys. Well, this has been awesome. Um, the cork works is a guy named I'm gonna out you Peter who's in Bonfire and uh Bonfire Peter's been in Bonfire for a long time. Peter was actually in one of the original guild masterminds that I ran. Amazingly talented photographer and videographer um who adds an incredible amount of value to the group. Peter is a superhero in my book and he's uh he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the power that he's seen um you know and the growth that he's seen in the members and people in Bonfire. It's a transformative. If you're looking for a career transformation, I tell you Bonfire is the place to be. It is a it's going to add rocket fuel to your understanding of what's possible. All right, you guys. This has been awesome. It's really been great seeing you. Um I'm super happy that you came and you spent some time with me today. If you have any questions, hit me up um on LinkedIn or in uh the contact page of my website. And I'm also going live uh every week for about the next six to eight weeks. So, I'm going to be covering a lot of really great content. One of the things I'm going to be covering is a little bit what I said about LinkedIn and AEO and SEO. It's a dynamic change that's really going to that people in our industry and who are doing what we're doing in terms of building our own careers. This is insight and news and a trend that not a lot of people know about. And if you get in there and really start leveraging it, it can really help you. Because one of the things to remember, and this is like a total aside, one of the things you have to remember about AEO, generative engine optimization or ask engine optimization, that is showing up in citations when someone asks a question of Chat TPT or Gemini or whatever. How do you get your name, your website, your content recommended by Chat GPT? Right? That's the goal these days because even when you do a Google search, the whole thing above the fold right now is AI. It's all Gemini generated, right? And the thing you have to remember about AEO or GEO is that it generally recommends or answers with like one or two sources, right? So, when you do a Google search and you say personal branding or like graphic design near me and then it'll return, if you live in the New York metro area, it's going to return, you know, a page of like 500 agencies, page after page. So, people are going to have to kind of choose and pick and find and discern like who it is that they should contact. Google search returns pages of results. When you ask chat GBT or Gemini or Bard a question, it'll return like one result, one expert, maybe two. Right? When people join my free Facebook group, which I'm actually sunsetting, is that when they join that group, I would always ask them, "How did you hear about me? " 90% of the time it's YouTube, right? Because that's my biggest presence, and I've been on it for 10 years now. And so increasingly the answer that I'm getting is I found you on chat GPT. Gemini. And so this one particular guy I asked I said can you tell me what you were searching for when I showed up on chat GPT because this was like a year ago and this was like just becoming a

thing and I was kind of surprised that I had. And so he said I was searching for um let me remember what the question was. um how um how you can succeed in a market when you're not a category leader, right? And so a video of mine was the top result was the only result that Chad GPT gave him and the video topic title the title of the video was almost exactly what his question was. So, how I had phrased the topic of the video directly reflected the question that he was asking and that's why I came up. And that's the kind of thing that's really important to recognize in searchability is that how you title things needs to be what people are searching for. how you title your content and to Arashia's point, how you I'm I hope I'm pronouncing your um name correctly and how you title yourself like what title do I give up myself? What do I use on my descriptive about section on LinkedIn? Am I using terminology that's directly related to what people are searching for? That's one of the highlighted things and one of the really important things about LinkedIn and to recognize right now is that LinkedIn is the second most highly cited platform for answers in LLM searches. And which means the short answer is that you got to start showing up on LinkedIn in another way because that's going to increasingly um uh improve your ability to show up in what is becoming the dominant search engine in the world. That's it. So, um it was awesome seeing you guys here today. And again, if you're interested in Bonfire, just hit me up on my contact on my website or on LinkedIn. and it's been great seeing you. I don't know if I know a number of you don't live in the US, but for the ones of you who are living in the US, like half the country is about to get hit with this huge winter storm, ice storm. So, hang in there. It's been great to see you. Um, and uh, I appreciate you. If you haven't connected with me on social, please do. And I'll be going live again next Friday. So, get on my email list, see the announcement for the next live stream, and come hang out with me. And with that, I hope you guys have a great weekend, and I'll see you next week. Take care.