You Are What Others Say - Conspiracy of Reputation

Over the course of several months I have written about how reputations are an outgrowth of the activities, responses, and stands taken by leaders engaged by stakeholders in a going conversation. In recent days, I even refined my Profile to reflect this focus in the phrase – “You are what other’s say you are!” To me this statement is very true, but I’m not as sure about “you” - my readers, owning a similar stand – given I’ve not explained my reasoning for making the statement - directly.

So the here goes. Over the next several days or however long it takes, I will sketch out my ideas on what I conceived such a “self”. In the long run I intend much of this blog I will have edited into a book, so I would hope to receive some feedback, or not.

Over the last 30 or so years I journeyed through a series of degrees, special courses, seminars, and groups in search of an identity from which I would thrive – only to learn it is not to be found – only made! Most recently I’ve engaged in activities such as Men’s Groups to Landmark Education, here in Chicago. Each activity along this wondering added or contributed to my understanding of how to build a self in active conspiracy with the world. Some very abstractly – spiritually – even religiously contributed to my general intellectual approach. Others where much more tactile: Landmark. Their courses are activity based: weekend retreat like seminars, with 100 to 350 people that come together for 30 or so hours of intense conversations, exercises and other activities with the possibility of follow-on activities, if you choose. I only mention this because the frame I’m building for our use in reputation building partly owes some of its definition to those activities.

The more important source for this construction arises from my ongoing readings in philosophy which began in my days while attending Yale. The Ironist Poet (Richard Rorty), reincarnation of Fredrick Douglas (Cornel West), the Lonely Prisoner (Michel Foucault) and Ideal Speech Guy (Jürgen Habermas) authored these themes, mashed up in my thinking. Aside from the melding fragments and traces of these intellectual titans coherently into the NLP programmatic experience I will situate this strategy frame work for a social media space, and to an online strategy to build reputational standing: a virtual self of honor.

So our building blocks are the experiences received from a NLP self help educational practice, and four world class philosophers all focused on methods, purpose and social formations in rigorous and thoughtful ways. That this means is all I have to do is arrange these contributions in an aesthetically interesting way that speaks to a strategy to adopt – what people see in us or say about us is not always what we want them to see, and the gap we want to effect positively.

This “effect positively” leaves much open much that can be written. In the next post I will focus on several of the features that need effecting. Remember, that much of this has been said before and my aim to cast my insights on the social media space because of its limited history and constraints.