Hasta La Gadget!

It can be hard to get ahead in today’s competitive business environment, but one way to go from unknown to expert and stand out from the crowd is showcasing what makes you unique.

That’s where personal branding comes into the picture. Branding is the art of standing out: a set of characteristics, values or qualities which set your proposition apart from other products or individuals. Simply put, it’s your reputation.

In today’s competitive environment, personal branding is critical if you want to be seen as a leader in your field. Your opportunities expand when you have a strong personal brand and it helps to carve out your niche as a thought leader and expert.

Personal branding is how you market yourself to others; it’s what you’re known for. You need to be very intentional about creating a brand which resonates with your audience, otherwise other people will create it for you and potential business opportunities may slip through your fingertips.

Think about who you really are
It’s worth taking some time to think about who you are and what you stand for. Have a think about the ‘one thing’ that sets you apart from your competitors.

The personal brand you adopt forms the essence of your communication and the voice of your strategy across every platform. For example, Disney = magic, Apple = innovation and Richard Branson = entrepreneurship. Mine is inspiration, and it forms the core of my business.

Find your niche
It’s also important to think about your area of expertise, define your niche, and stick to it. Don’t be vague when define your niche as it will dilute your brand and confuse your audience. My niche is public relations and social media, and everything I do comes back to this platform.

Owning your niche will add value and consistency to your brand. It will also build credibility and trust among your audience. This personal trust flows over to trust for your business, which in turn may lead to new business.

If you invest time in building your personal brand it will help build your business or career. When you share your knowledge freely you will be able to watch your opportunities skyrocket.

Get your brand out there
It’s one thing to have a strong brand, but it’s not much use if no one knows about it. Start networking with your audience, publish articles, join groups on LinkedIn and start a blog. Make you and your brand known to your audience.

Social media offers an amazing opportunity to promote your brand and set yourself apart from your competitors. LinkedIn and Twitter are fantastic platforms to share insights about your industry and watch your online following grow.

Remember you only get out what you put in, so make a concerted effort to get your name out there. Before long your reputation as a thought leader will speak for itself.

Continually investing in your personal brand will ensure you stand out from your competition. It is through elevating yourself above others in your industry that will make people clamor to work with you. When managed well, your personal brand is an asset that can make all the difference to your business.

About the author
Catriona Pollard is the author of ‘From Unknown To Expert’, a step by step framework designed to help entrepreneurs develop effective PR and social media strategies to become recognised as thought leaders and influencers in their field. www.UnknownToExpert.com. Catriona is also the director of CP Communications, which merges traditional PR tactics with cutting-edge social media strategies that engage consumers as well as business.

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Starting today, Broadway’s “Lola,” TONY-winning performer for his role in “Kinky Boots,” Billy Porter will be taking a three month break from the show to revisit his talents as a solo performer and director.

Starting with a concert on Jan. 28, as part of the “Lincoln Center Presents American Songbook Series” in New York City, Porter will perform songs from his 2014 jazz-inflected album “Billy’s Back on Broadway” with a one-night only event recorded for the “Live from Lincoln Center” TV series.

My 15 year old son is very quiet and does not feel at ease with kids his own age. He struggles at school and when he comes home he plays on his X-box all evening. I sometimes find empty bottles of vodka in his room. How can we help him avoid relying on alcohol to ease his unhappiness–which unfortunately is a pattern in our family?

There is a brilliant article on the Huffington Post about addiction that challenges the notion that it is primarily a chemical/ drug issue. In the post, author Johann Hari describes his journey to better understand what drives addictive behavior.

His findings are revelatory.

Hari says, “If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe.” He quotes professor Peter Cohen who says, “We should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.”

He goes on to say that “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”

When I posted this article on my Facebook page, there were numerous comments, primarily from people who said they have understood all along that drug and alcohol addiction is not simply a matter of brain chemistry. There are too many people who have addiction in their genetics who have yet been spared that difficult journey.

Hari points out that despite as many as 20 percent of soldiers in Vietnam using heroin, 95 percent of them simply stopped using (most, without rehab) when they were taken out of the “terrifying cage” of war and returned home.

Rats who were left alone and given unlimited access to water laced with heroin or cocaine for 57 days became addicted. But when they were taken out of isolation and placed in “Rat Park”–a lush cage with tunnels and colored balls and yummy rat food– they returned to a normal life after minimal symptoms of withdrawal. As Hari says, “The good cage saved them.”

All this is to say that, your son is not destined to follow in your family’s addictive footsteps. He will, however, need help stepping out of isolation.

What does he love to do, other than zoning out in front of a screen? If he seems to have no interests, think about who he was at the age of seven. Did he love animals? Was he always out on his bike? Did he enjoy drawing, or making music? We can often uncover hidden passions by recalling the things that brought joy when we were children.

Your son may indeed be an introvert, but there are many teens like him who open up in one on one friendships. Look for activities outside of your home that are stimulating and fun, even if you do them together. Hiking with the Sierra Club may be something he enjoys. Helping at an animal shelter or tutoring at-risk kids can help him feel valued. Taking part in a computer programming workshop might be his thing, and could expose him to kids who may also feel more comfortable with machines than people.

The important thing is to gently steer him out of isolation and into activities that connect him with others, in ways that feel safe and manageable to him.

The digital world has brought many advantages, but it has also made it too easy for kids like your son to fall deeper and deeper into a solitary existence. Addiction is a powerful force, but more powerful yet is human connectivity. While addiction is a highly complex issue, it is always in our best interest to know ourselves as essential members of the human race. I wish your son the peace that comes from understanding he is unique, special, and valued.

Susan Stiffelman is the author of Parenting Without Power Struggles: Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids While Staying Cool, Calm and Connected. She is a family therapist, parent coach and internationally recognized speaker on all subjects related to children, teens and parenting.

To learn more about her online parenting courses and support, visit her Facebook page or sign up for her free newsletter.

Do you have a question for the Parent Coach? Send it to askparentcoach@gmail.com and you could be featured in an upcoming blog post.

I remember the first time I glimpsed porn. I’d returned to my Minnesota hometown after modeling overseas to find a video my boyfriend had been viewing in my absence.

“I had to do something while you were gone,” he said as I sobbed. “Would you rather I’d cheated?”

He apologized, but nothing could erase the image of the voluptuous naked woman from my mind. I was 19 then — young, naive and grappling with an eating disorder. I felt foolish for overreacting to his porn use. But had I been?

A few months later while working on a college paper, I began cutting myself some slack. Research showed, I learned, that heterosexual men found their partners less attractive after viewing pornographic imagery of women. I rushed home to my boyfriend: “See? I was right!”

Over a decade of personal growth later, I no longer worry that my partner will lust after another. Learning to embrace my body and sexuality played a key role in my recovery from the eating disorder and changed my views on sexuality as a whole.

I now see value in monogamy and non-monogamy, open marriages and traditional, and engaging in our fantasies, whether they involve “vanilla” sex, threesomes, ten-somes or extreme BDSM. Our sexuality is our own, and beautiful as long as we don’t hurt anyone.

By most people’s standards, I’m liberal regarding sexuality — yet, I still avoid porn. I have an addictive personality and love sex and my high sensitivity to real-life turn-ons. In other words, I’m a prime candidate for porn’s complications, such as addiction and sexual dysfunction. For me, the risks aren’t worth it. I also respect that not everyone agrees.

On Girl Boner Radio I routinely interview porn stars, some of whom I consider friends. I also discuss the dark side of pornography with experts, such as Gabe Deem, a former porn addict turned counselor and public speaker. Of the many questions I hear from listeners, variations of “How do I deal with porn?” are among the most common.

While some people feel that porn enhances their sex lives and relationships, continually more are suffering from the downsides. If porn only brings you benefits, fantastic! Watch on. If not, or if you’re unsure, here are some ways you can keep it from interfering with your health and happiness.

1. Treat it like fast food. I don’t mean gobble it down with soda — I’m talking healthy frequency. Like fast food, porn is designed to be highly stimulating, convenient and, arguably, addictive. Just as a diet of namely fast food can reduce your taste for nutritious fare, watching porn routinely could lower your ability to enjoy natural sexual intimacy. If you want to use porn, make it a treat, not a staple. If you can’t, see #6.

2. Choose your turn-ons wisely. What we focus on during arousal creates pathways and patterns in the brain, says neuroscientist and author of Wired for Intimacy Dr. William Struthers. In other words, we can choose what turns us on. Consistent use could make porn the only thing that arouses you. Have sex without thinking about or viewing porn most often. If you want to be turned on by your partner, fantasize about him or her. That little thing called imagination? So important.

3. Know the difference between porn and reality. If mainstream, hardcore porn mirrored real-world sex, we’d all naturally crave anal sex and gang bangs, and women would squirt with every climax. (Just ask Cindy Gallop, the creator and CEO of Make Love Not Porn.) Recognize the differences between porn and real sex. Maintain realistic standards.

4. Know your personality. If you have an addictive personality or high sex drive, take added caution with porn. Recent research published in JAMA Psychiatry shows that these factors increase your risk for dependency. Invest your compulsiveness into healthier ventures, such as pursuing your life passions and cultivating intimacy with your partner.

5. When in doubt, leave it out. Even if you aren’t experiencing obvious problems due to porn, it could be zapping your enjoyment of sex, according to a recent Archives of Sexual Behavior study. If you’re not sure how your porn habits are affecting you, give it up for a while. If a break seems daunting, you may want to start one pronto.

6. If it’s problematic, seek help. Like most addictions, porn dependency instills shame, which keeps many sufferers from getting help. Whether you’re grappling with addiction or milder problems you can’t seem to manage, seek support from a qualified expert — not someone who buys into the “boys will be boys” mentality. Women are susceptible to porn addiction, too, and accepting any hurtful behavior as “normal” won’t help.

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Remember the glory days of the 1990s, when our interconnectedness — the ever-tighter embrace of Disney characters, the Swoosh, and the Golden Arches — was endlessly hailed? It was the era of “globalization,” of Washington-style capitalism triumphant, and the planet, we were told, would be growing ever “flatter” until we all ended up in the same mall, no matter where we lived. Only a few years later in a twenty-first-century world that, from Ukraine to Libya, Syria to Pakistan, seems to be cracking open under the strain of religious-political conflicts of every sort, isn’t it curious how little you hear about that interconnectedness? And yet, through time as well as space, we couldn’t be more linked (and not just online), as the Charlie Hebdo murders and the response to them indicated.

Think of the Parisian killers of that moment as messengers from the European past. After all, the place we have long called “the Middle East” was largely a post-World War I European creation. The map of the area was significantly drawn, and a number of the countries in the region cobbled together, by and for the convenience of European colonial powers France and England. Jump slightly less than a century into the future and what one set of powers created, a successor power, the last “superpower” on planet Earth, helped blow a hole through in 2003 with its invasion of Iraq — and the damage is still spreading.

In the rubble of American Iraq, that old European “Middle East” has collapsed in a paroxysm of violence, chaos, and religious extremism (hardly surprising given the circumstances). And on a planet that’s been “globalizing” since the first European ships with cannons appeared off the coasts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, how could that crumbling region not send a message back to the world that created it? That message has been arriving regularly in rusty cargo vessels, as well as in Islamic State videos aimed at the Muslim communities of Europe, and two weeks ago in the outrages in Paris. Now, the Middle East is threatening to blow a hole in Europe.

It’s a grim irony that TomDispatch regular John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, takes up in his new piece, “The Collapse of Europe?” The disintegration of the Middle East is visibly blowing back on Europe and its hopes for an integrated future. It will certainly be blood-drenched years before we can hope to know what shape the post-colonial, post-European, possibly even post-superpower Middle East might take. In the meantime, the shape of a Europe in which the right (and in some places, the left) is rising amid an upswelling of Islamophobia remains remarkably undetermined.

The European Union, that great integrating experiment of the last century, may now, as Feffer writes, be tottering. There is, however, at least one new form of “integration” that might be emerging. In France (which, in seeming imitation, if not parody, of the post-9/11 Bush administration, declared “war” on Islamic extremism in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings), Belgium, Germany, and possibly elsewhere, national security states built on the American model are being strengthened in the American fashion. We may, in other words, be seeing the sinews of a new, increasingly integrated global security state taking form amid the ruins of the old Middle East and at a moment when the European Union threatens to dissolve.