[MUSIC] I'm CK Gunsalus, welcome to course two of Professional IQ, Preventing and Solving Problems at Work. In this course, we're talking about building your professional brand, your professional identity. You have a set of foundational tools and skills already, and you probably think you're pretty good at some of the other skills. There are things that you can learn in this course that will make you even better, techniques, concepts, ways to practice things that you may already know, ways to sharpen them, ways to get better at them. So what are the things that we can help you with or that you'll learn in this course? Well, we'll talk about listening and asking questions to make you a stronger team player, to make you a stronger asset at work. We'll talk about, what are the techniques involved in rapport, building rapport, building relationships, and paraphrasing. We'll talk about what are some techniques for aligning with people to help reduce conflicts, reduce escalation. And how do you have conflicts at work when you do encounter them? How do you think about them? How do you navigate through them? What do you do if you mess up and need to apologize? What do some of the cognitive biases, the errors that infect all of our decision making? How do you recognize them and most importantly how do you prevent them. All of these things factor in to professional skills that build on top of the subsitive and foundational skills you already have to make you a better more effective, more valued professional. One who's invested in, and one who advances in work. >> From a personal perspective, my brand is part of what I do and what I bring to my clients on an individual basis. Not only with new clients but with existing clients because they keep calling me back because of the service I provided for them in the past. The ability that they have to trust in the advice that I'm providing and the services that we are providing as teams. And a lot of that hinges on the brand that I'm bringing to my clients, and how I present myself to them. Making those first impressions, how we provide our deliverables. Everything that I do especially in the deliverables once we get to that part of the engagement has my brand on it. I mean if I'm signing off on something, I'm really putting my brand out there for others to evaluate. So when they're purchasing services from our firm and I am part of that engagement team, they're also purchasing the knowledge that I've acquired over the years as well, and how I represent myself. And how I deal with the individuals and my clients, and how we approach them. And you can even expand that into the staff that we, the teams that we put together in the staff, and that everybody generates their own personal brand. And ultimately those projects come together as one deliverable buts it's a combination of all of our brands and all of the input that we've had over this, the period of the engagement. And we need to make sure that we've delivered accordingly with respect to what the client's expecting but also with respect to what the reputation of the firm expects as well. [MUSIC]