Marketing Yourself - Denise Chilton

This was not your typical lecture. Denise presented a engaging talk, where student-participation was a must. The aim of this talk was to improve the way we see ourselves and our potential. Denise began by giving us an overview of her career, and how she got to where she is today. Leaving school at 16, she got a job in financial services. After having a midlife crisis ten years ago, Denise left her job in financial services, and brought a coffee cart and began selling coffees at events and shows. Two years into it, she won a small business award. She is now a qualified coach, who helps people get the lives they want. She showed us the importance of branding yourself as a company, giving us examples such as Coca-Cola, which had a largely negative view and Walkers crisps, which brought to mind the advertising campaign with Gary Lineker. There was numerous activities for us during this talk, the first of which, was us naming 5 adjectives that describe our first impression of her. Another quite interesting activity Denise got us to do was where we given a list of values, and we had to narrow it down to 5 values that are really important to us. She also got us to work in groups, and work out what our unique selling point is as an individual. Denise made it clear throughout the talk that the purpose of the talk and the activities was to make us feel uncomfortable; she certainly achieved this (for me anyway!).
You will never change the fact that people will have a impression about you as soon as they see you, but you can alter what they see and feel about you by the way you hold yourself and your body language. After all, 55% of what we read from a person during a conversation is from their body language, 38% is the tone we say things in and 7% is the actual words.


http://www.denisechilton.co.uk/index.php