This week I decided to tackle a task on which I had long procrastinated: Updating my LinkedIn profile (or to be precise, just my headline and About section so far, so you know, check it out because I finally did it. ).

This week I also finished Season 1 of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer re-watch. And those two things made me think of The Wizard of Oz. Let me see if I can weave that together.

I changed a LOT of my Headline/About, but one description of how I work that I kept in my About language was, “I help leaders find answers already inside them.” I kept that in because when I look at some of the testimonials I’ve gathered from people with whom I’ve worked, one theme is that they were stuck, and I helped unstick them. Sometimes, for sure, I had new ideas that they unstuck themselves to pursue. Just as often, though, I asked them the right questions that helped us figure out what their gut was telling them. And to interrogate that gut to make sure it was their expertise and lived experience informing what the gut had to say, not biases and pure pattern-matching.

Ironically, I need that help when doing things like updating my profile. I know I’m not alone when I say that talking or writing about my work can be painful. For the 12 years I was doing BlogHer, I gave LinkedIn (and my CV) no more than rare, cursory attention. And when I was thinking about branding or marketing or positioning it wasn’t about me, the individual: it was about BlogHer…the mission, the community, proving the market.

When the BlogHer phase of my career ended, updating my resume, website copy, and/or LinkedIn profile was the one kind of writing I consistently hired someone else to help with. Even though I’m a writer. Because blurg.

Still, no writer I hired to help ever told me something I didn’t know about myself, somewhere inside. I needed time (and perhaps an external co-sign) to figure it out, to accept it. But it was always inside me.

Just like Dorothy always had the tools to go home, and Glinda swears that if she had told her that earlier she “wouldn’t have believed me.” (I mean, you could have at least TRIED. Thanks for nothing, Glinda!)

Just like so many clients I’ve worked with do indeed already have answers inside them. Sometimes we need permission. Sometimes we need hear an idea that’s close, but not it, so we can course-correct to the right idea. Sometimes we need a sounding board. Or someone to help us expand on our germ of an idea.

And sometimes, we need resources, or reaction, or even time for others to catch up.

Which is what I thought about when finishing Season 1 of Buffy this week.

See, it has a bad reputation among Buffy fans. It’s a mid-season, 12-episode arc, and yeah the monsters look cheesy, the production values aren’t stellar, the tone veers wildly. But most of all, IMHO, it suffers from being compared to later brilliant seasons.

Every ingredient that makes people lifelong Buffy fans is right there all along in Season 1. The snappy dialog, the poignancy, the creative re-framing of adolescent angst, the concept of chosen and found family, the ass-kicking heroine, the values of teamwork and sacrifice and forgiveness and making amends and caring about the greater good, the idea that no one is their worst character trait or action. It is all in there.

And once they got cooking, there was no stopping them.

And maybe that holds true for us too…if we believe.

What question do you continue to wrestle with, but already know the answer to? What high bar are you holding yourself to before trying something, when so many others just leap in? What are you telling yourself isn’t quite good enough…yet…but should really get out there in the world so you can get the resources and reaction to make it better?

I watched Season 1, episodes 11 (Out of Mind, Out of Sight live recap) and 12 (Prophecy Girl live recap)…which aired on May 19 and June 2nd, 1997, respectively. These are the final two episodes of this short 12-episode season, and the season ends with a bang. While Season 1, Episode 1 starts with Buffy wanting anything BUT the responsibility of being the Slayer, which has been a lonely isolated journey until this point, Season 1 Episode 12 ends with what becomes known as The Scooby Gang (yes, mostly of meddling kids). By season-end, she has grown the Gang from being her Watcher, Giles and two fellow teens (Xander and Willow) to include another teen (Cordelia, the mean popular girl exhibiting unexpected valor), another adult (Jenny Calendar, just your average techno-pagan, no big whoop) and and immortal (Angel, the vampire with a soul, although we don’t know why, yet).

The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Episode 11 is that we all need to be seen and heard. Isolation leads to madness. Or at the very least, anti-social behavior. All the corporate leaders who want to erase empathy and inclusion from the list of things they need to include as a business considerations are setting themselves up for rude awakenings.

The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Episode 12 is the overarching lessons every single season: Teamwork and sacrifice, not superpowers, beat the big bads of the world. Every member of the Scooby Gang (even the extended gang including Jenny, Cordelia and Angel) contributes to defeating the Season 1 big Bad, the Master. In fact, when Buffy is lying there dead, Angel, for all his super vampire strength cannot save her because he has no breath as a vampire. No, it takes good old human Xander to give her good old-fashioned mouth to mouth and CPR. As for sacrifice. Buffy is prophesied to die, and yet she accepts that it's her destiny to at least try to save the world. Her willingness to sacrifice herself for that purpose, even as a 16 year old girl who wants to live, is the sacrifice at the heart of beating the prophecy and indeed saving that world.

Thanks for being on this ride with me. I miss blogging (clearly). Tell me, what was your blog back in the day? What was your favorite blog back in the day? And do you blog now, or get your blogging kicks via some other channel?

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