Archetypes are extremely useful in business. Here are some ways you can use them:

• Once you find the main archetype that fits you, you can build a much stronger personal brand. For example, if you’re a chief executive, you might evoke the Hero, the Ruler or the Magician – or some other archetype.
• Before you launch a new product or service, you can find out which archetype it evokes among potential customers. The strongest brands all evoke one archetype clearly, e.g. Nike (the Hero) and Innocent Smoothies (the Innocent). Evoking one archetype consistently will make your marketing campaigns much more effective.
• The same applies to companies, e.g. IBM (the Ruler), Easyjet (the Ordinary Guy/Girl) and Chanel (the Lover). Your business will be more successful if you evoke one archetype all the time.

By evoking one archetype strongly and consistently, you enable potential colleagues, customers and investors to grasp what you’re all about quickly and instinctively. Some will be strongly attracted. Some will be repelled. This is part of the process of identifying those who want what you do and are prepared to pay for it.

Please note that you don’t have to evoke the same archetype as your product or business. In fact, it’s good to have a variety of archetypes present in a team of business people, just as it is in a family or a sport team. Entrepreneurs and chief executives often evoke a different archetype than their product or company.

For example, Steve Jobs was known as The Wizard of Cupertino (i.e. the Magician). Apple began by evoking the Outlaw archetype, hence the logo consisting of an apple with a bite taken of it, recalling Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden. Arguably, Apple now evokes the Ruler, charging content providers a 30% commission for the use of its walled garden.

At the most basic level, the archetypes provide a shorthand that enables people within a business to understand what they, their company and its products are all about. This level of clarity makes it much easier for people to choose you.

* The second edition of Brand You will be published by Financial Times / Prentice Hall in August 2012. http://brandyou.info

There are plenty of techniques and exercises designed to boost your confidence. I tried a few of them, but it was a big effort. If I didn’t keep telling myself how great I was, then the mask would slip and I would feel exposed. Fortunately there’s another approach, which comes naturally and works extremely well. Let’s take it step by step.

Each of us has been born with a particular set of talents: natural abilities to do something well. You can discover your talents, but you cannot change them. The most important thing is to discover the talents you love to use. The first exercise in our book Brand You* will help you do this.

Things also become much easier when we pay less attention to the self we’ve been so worried about. It’s a very limited vision of who we really are. This bundle of cells, thoughts and emotions will only exist for a few decades at most.

I believe we’re part of something infinitely greater and more powerful, which Vedantic philosophy calls the Self with a capital S. To use a popular metaphor, we are both the wave and the ocean. The wave is tiny relative to the ocean. Both are water.

A practical way of going beyond the small self to the big Self is to use our talents to serve other people. It all comes down to love. We use the talents we love to use to serve others. When we do this we often feel inspired and joyful. We may lose track of time. We lose the small sense of self and experience the Self with a capital S.

Two examples I like to give are colourblindness and public speaking. I was born partially red-green colourblind and I can’t change that. I can’t read the London Underground map very well, let alone fly an aeroplane. However, I have discovered a talent for writing and speaking about subjects that I believe can really help people.

When I first tried public speaking, I was terrified, as most people are. I tried all kinds of techniques to boost my self-confidence. Looking back, I was trying to build up the little self, which is futile. Even if we succeed, all we’re left with is ego – the idea that our small self is as good as or better than the other small selves out there.

Then I made a breakthrough. I discovered that, if I focused on the people I was aiming to help, then I forgot myself (my self). The words flowed. There was a sense of connection between us in the room, whether there were five people or 500. Even time felt different. An hour in front of an audience felt more like a few minutes.

When we stop worrying about the self, things happen much more easily. It’s the Self that makes everything happen, sometimes through us. Our role is to do what we love in a way that serves others.

You may have a similar experience to mine in totally different situations. It will be when you apply the talents you love to use, to an activity you love. Other people may tell you they don’t know how you do it. You may not know yourself (your self).

Using your talents to serve others is an act of love. When you do so you will forget the small self and experience the big Self. For me, that’s true Self-confidence.

What are your thoughts/feelings on this subject? Please write them below, or join the discussion in our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/PaddlingDownstream/ All are welcome.

* www.brandyou.info

I experienced this for several years. Then, just over six years ago, I started working with David Royston-Lee, who is a business psychologist. He showed me a series of exercises that have helped many people to overcome this problem by ‘finding their flow’. We included them in our book Brand You.*

Imagine you’re sitting in a canoe on a river that flows towards everything you’d love to happen in your life. The most important thing is to make sure you’re paddling downstream. Doing the work you love is an essential part of that. The first exercise, on page 29 of Brand You, helps you discover the talents you love to use and the way you love to use them.

Finding your flow is good for your health, your relationships and your finances. As our friend Nick Williams points out, people who do what they love and love what they do are highly attractive. Goals may come and go, but we can paddle downstream for the rest of our lives. I encourage you to discover the talents you love to use and the way you love to use them. It will change your life.

Happy New Year!

*See http://www.brandyou.info.

Their mission is to get as many people as possible “to take 10 minutes out of their day to sit in the here and now”. I’m all in favour. If everyone did so, the world would be a much happier, healthier and more peaceful place.

Mindfulness meditation is thousands of years old. However, it’s only now spreading rapidly in the West, and may one day be as popular as yoga.

You can learn basic mindfulness meditation for free, at places such as Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. In the UK, some people get their introduction to mindfulness on the National Health Service. (The National Institute for Clinical Excellence approved the use of mindfulness in 2006.)

However, Headspace steer a middle course between religion on the one hand and medicine on the other. In terms of the archetypes that David Royston-Lee and I discussed in Brand You, Headspace strongly evoke the Ordinary Guy or Girl. Their aim is to reach a global market.

Their marketing is very, very good. Richard worked in advertising before leaving to find the meaning of life and discovering meditation. Andy abandoned a degree in sports science to spend 10 years as a Buddhist monk. One consequence is that he can juggle orange balls while explaining how thoughts appear randomly in the mind. The chocolate meditation also proved popular.

Although I’ve been meditating for years, I learned a lot, both from Andy’s presentation and from the exercises. If you’re looking for a solid introduction to mindfulness, with some entertainment thrown in, I can highly recommend it.

 http://www.getsomeheadspace.com/

On Friday night I gave a talk for Executive MBA students at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. One of them asked about the relationship between stereotypes and archetypes. Having done some more homework on the subject, here is my answer.

The origin of the first word is French. A stéréotype was used for solid-block printing. According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, its modern meaning is “an oversimplified, standardised image or idea held by one group of another”.

Archetypes apply to individuals and are much more useful. The word archetype is derived from Ancient Greek and means “first moulded as a model”. Carl Jung identified archetypes as inherited memories represented in the human mind by a universal symbol. We recognise these symbols instantly and often unconsciously. Archetypes are very powerful, whether you are marketing a product, a company or yourself.

Archetypes help people to understand what you can do for them. As David Royston-Lee and I explained in Brand You, once people recognise your main archetype, they know what to expect from you. For example, if you evoke the Ruler, you might be able to help them establish order. If you evoke the Magician, you might transform their situation. If you evoke the Hero, you might rescue them from disaster.

It’s best if you evoke one main archetype consistently in your work. However, you can also evoke one or two subsidiary archetypes which will appeal to a particular audience. The important point is that they should be authentic. You must be naturally attracted to them.

For example, an entrepreneur might evoke the Creator above all other archetypes. However, he or she might also evoke the Ruler to some extent, which investors will find reassuring. It will give them confidence that their money is being looked after. In a business based on sophisticated know-how, the entrepreneur might also evoke the Sage.

Understanding and expressing your archetype(s) can help you to build trust and attract new opportunities like never before.

Many of us have yet to ask ourselves these questions. We are too busy working to pay the bills, and enjoy ourselves whenever we have the opportunity. However, once you start to figure out why you are on the planet, life becomes much easier. Knowing your purpose points you in the right direction. Jobs and businesses are vehicles for you to pursue your purpose. If your vehicle crashes or breaks down, it’s time to find a new one.

Discovering your purpose doesn’t happen overnight. Some people argue it’s a life-long pursuit. My co-author says we’ll only really understand our purpose when we die. I agree with him to the extent that things always make more sense with hindsight. I can see how events in my life which seemed chaotic at the time have contributed to my development. They brought me to where I am today. They enable me to do what I do now.

It’s comforting to note that even Albert Einstein felt he had a purpose, but wasn’t 100% clear about it. This is one of his best-known comments on the subject: “Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes here for a short time, not knowing why, yet somehow seeming to divine a purpose”.

So far I have been talking about your personal purpose, which only you can discover. However, there is a deeper purpose, which Eckhart Tolle describes very well in his books and talks. He calls it our primary purpose. It can be described in various ways, such as awakening or discovering who you really are. Once you learn to be present and observe your thoughts, as I did at the age of thirty-five, you realise you are not your thoughts. If you can observe something, it’s not you.

So who are you? You are the observer. Everything else comes and goes, including your thoughts, your emotions and all the cells in your body. The more present – or mindful – we are, the more easily we can observe what is sometimes described as ‘the passing show’. We no longer take things so seriously. Life becomes far more enjoyable. We are also much better at creating what we want when we are no longer lost in a fog of thoughts and emotions.

When I heard Eckhart speak in London last Saturday, he said that being fully present reconciles your primary and personal purposes. That makes sense to me. As he put it, “Your entire life consists of the present moment. It will never not be now.” I do my best to be present as much as possible during each day. The more present I am, the clearer I am about what I should do next. Things tend to go smoothly and work out well.

*http://brandyou.info

However, during the technology boom that ended in 2001, some search firms began to charge one-third of the placed candidate’s first-year cash remuneration and first-year equity vesting. In 2004 Heidrick & Struggles made a profit of US$128.8m on the warrants it had received in lieu of fees for placing Eric Schmidt as CEO of a start-up called Google. Eric, Larry and Sergey also seem happy with the outcome. Google is an extreme case, but it shows what can be done

Not all companies want to issue warrants to their executive search firm. Tax is also a factor. In the UK capital gains are taxed more lightly than income. My colleagues and I have been experimenting with charging a cash fee and reinvesting up to half of it in equity. We have done this when recruiting a finance director for a private company and a chief executive for a public one. The results so far are very encouraging, so we are keen to do more of it.

There’s lots of doom and gloom in the press about the European economy, and Britain in particular. However, I keep meeting entrepreneurs who are doing exciting things. It’s great fun to work with them and help to make it happen.

Further information is at www.purkiss-company.com .