As I plan to relaunch the Branding Shed website and determine our direction for 2007, I have been researching other companies to see what they are doing (which in a way I shouldn’t care about) and I have found that many of them all look the same, talk the same, and think the same. I wonder if they all copied each others stuff. This also happens with churches. I have had hundreds of websites bookmarked which when I started deleting recently noticed that many of those church sites also looked the same and talked the same too!

I want to be different. I want to stand out of the crowd. I want to be what I could have been. Do you ever feel that way? Do you think that you should be different? I think that what keeps us from being unique sometimes is that we see others who are “successful” or that are being recognized by the world and we try and copy them…or maybe we just get busy in the rat-race of life and it is much easier to follow the worn down path instead of making our own. I find myself doing these things instead of focusing on being different, but it’s time for change.

I want to encourage all of us to be what we could be for 2007. I hope that we will find how we are unique and communicate that to our clients or congregations. Don’t let yourself conform to the patterns of the world or let others help you think that breaking the mold is bad. Being different is OK!