Identifying My Personal Brand

 I woke up yesterday with my mind ablaze with ideas on how to brand myself, how to present myself to the world as a team development consultant and leadership coach.

I value agency and autonomy above most other aspects of work. When I was fresh out of college, I got a job as an engineer at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. It soon felt like I had entered the workforce as a drone in a massive machine, a mere cog.

My security clearance was taking forever to process. I was given trivial work to do, tasks that seemed unimportant. It didn't take long for me to wish I could have more control of the work I did and how I did it. I wanted to exercise agency in my work.

Well, an opportunity arose for me to go back to school and get an MBA. That's it! I'd become a decision maker, a manager, a boss of others! I'd be the one designing the work, the tasks that needed to be performed, and assigning those tasks to others.

So I quit.

I enrolled in the the MBA program at CSU Fresno. I became fascinated with entrepreneurship, with creating a business to bring value to the world.

(But I never got that MBA. I quit the program so I could go back to work to support my family. But that's another story.)

Entrepreneurship, starting my own business, independence: that's what I craved.

Another way to frame that is a fascination with power. Not powerful people or institutions, but the power exercised by the everyman, the average person in the street---I longed for power over my circumstances, over how I invested my time, over the work I did and how I did it.

That's what I want to focus on here at BKH Labs. How to help people discover and leverage their own power.