2. Who am I - Who knows me?

So the second week of the digital course is done. This week we had two topics: self-branding and communication. Everything started on Monday with a lecture about self-branding by Anna Ikonen, one of our mentors. Actually I thought I already knew quite a lot about this topic, due to a course we had last year. But then I realized that I knew what an elevator pitch is, and that’s about it. But during the lecture I got some new perspectives and ideas, which I’m going to work on.

First of all there’s all the tools that can be used in branding yourself. Social media, videos, blogs, articles… There’s probably so much I don’t even know that exist! I only use Facebook and then of course LinkedIn. Now I realize I should be more active with especially updating my LinkedIn profile. But after this course I will be! In fact, I’ve already done some updating.

Then Anna said: "It's not even important to know who you are, it's about WHO knows you". This is one thing that I believe we should keep in mind. In order to get work, we have to network. Connecting with the right people is the key nowadays. But it's also important that the people you're connecting with knows the real you, all your skills, your experience and why YOU are the best human being EVER! Well there's no need to be that excited, but you know... :)

After the lecture our group did this mind map kind of thing that everyone wrote down different skills they thought the others had. Okay, this explanation was really bad, but below you can see the picture of my personal mind map so you get the point. We’ve already worked together earlier, so you’d think it would have been easy, but actually it was a little tricky! But I think everyone had some skills they should be proud of. 

What the girls thinks about me!

After the first lecture we got a task to do our own pitching video. I believe I know what my best skills are, and it's easy to tell about them face to face. But try do it in front a camera, alone (with the dog staring at you), and get it to sound good. Not an easy task at all! 

So I downloaded this movie maker that's free for Windows users, so I could edit my pitching video a little. It was so, so, so bad! The stupidest thing was that I didn't get any music in the video, because the movie maker had no own music to be used. I couldn't download any music to this video because of the copyrights. So below is what I got finished. Not quite happy but "no can do". 

On Thursday we had the second lecture, about communication. Actually I believe we knew quite a lot about this topic too, because of the communications course last year. The biggest advantage of this lecture was learning about it in English. And of course "kertaus on opintojen äiti", so it's good to fresh up the memory a bit.

Anyways communications are a part of our everyday life, both in the personal and the professional life. This slide from Anna's presentation below tells like everything about the communication process. The quality is bad, but shortly: The sender encodes the message that the receiver decodes. And it's very important to get the receiver to really understand the message. 

Ah, very bad quality...

What I think what is the most important things to remember would probably be what will be said, how it will be said, when it will be said, where it will be said and who will say it. Those are the basics in communication. It doesn't matter if the communication is on evenings between you and your family or at work with your coworkers or customers. We have to learn how to encode different kind of messages. 

Here I consider my week done, and this is how I'm going to spend the rest of this Sunday! Have a nice next week!

Lazy Sunday!