What’s your reputation? When someone mentions your name, what comes to mind? Are you dependable? Playful? Depressing? Encouraging? Do you bring out the best in the people around you? Do you tend to talk about people behind their backs? Do you focus on the good and beautiful things in the world? Or do you tend to stir up controversy wherever you go? Do you help activate people’s dreams to become realities? Or do you complain about things you can’t change?    Chances are you have a different reputation amongst different people groups… If you ask my friends from high-school.. Man oh man. Not good. Very different than if you were to ask my friends from church about me.    What might your kids say about you? What about your spouse? Do those closest to you get the best version of you? Or do they get leftovers?    Maybe you don’t even care if people like you… Maybe you’re just looking for respect. Maybe you’re finally wanting to have power over people under you at work… Or maybe you’re terrified of that responsibility. Maybe that’s literally the last thing you’d ever want, and you just want to skate through unnoticed.    Our reputations are complex things… There are hundreds of different inputs that affect people’s opinions of us.    If you research creative work on reputation you’ll find all sorts of quotes from famous people that are actually kind of discouraging.    Benjamin Franklin saying, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” GREAT! That’s encouraging… It takes a thousands breaths to blow up this balloon and only one prick to pop it!    Warren Buffett says, “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.”  Man… that’s depressing. Perhaps it’s so depressing because it’s actually true!    How many famous figures have fallen from grace due to one bad night or a handful of mistakes, that perhaps any of us would make in the same situation. Justin Bieber has made the news for ridiculous things in the last 5 years, but so would YOU if you were in his shoes. If I was 18 and had $265 million in the bank and had paparazzi following me around… I’d be on the cover of TMZ every morning.    Here’s the thing about reputations: Reputations can be suffocating. Whether they’re positive or negative, they can actually keep us stuck.    Reputations as the dumb kid. As the good girl. As the all-American athlete. As the fat girl. As the boy that can’t read. As the big-wig CEO or as the dad that never follows through. As the workaholic mother that never makes it to the soccer game. As the sweet girl you can take advantage of. As the brainy kid you can cheat off of. As the prude Christian. As the tough guy with the cool motorcycle.    These labels follow us. They quite literally brand our brains with these words… They nestle in deep, and we end up living our lives either in SUPPORT of those labels or in REACTION to those labels.    We either like the reputation and we live the rest of our lives trying to maintain / support everyone’s idea of us.. Making sure everyone still believes we’re successful, or we’re still the cool kid we were in high-school, or still the pretty girl that’s always in shape.    Or we live in reaction to them. We got a label in college that we’ve spent the rest of our lives trying to scrub out. A teacher in 3rd grade embarrassed us in front of the class so we spend the rest of our lives obsessively studying and getting top-of-the-class GPA.   There are ditches on both sides of this road. Both of these things can be unhealthy.    The truth is: We shouldn’t be living our lives in support of or in reaction to any labels someone spoke over us in the past. It will limit our lives to the lane we’ve already established. No room for growth or adventure or redefining ourselves. We stay stuck. We carry around those labels. We still remember the name of the person that first said it.    In a media-driven culture like we find ourselves, it’s easy to REALLY care about image. I care about image. If someone shows me a set of pictures of me, I care which one they’d post. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, I curate my image that I put out on Instagram. Of course I do. There are things I wouldn’t want posted. Some things I love posting. I’m painting some grandiose picture of what my life looks like. That’s where we find ourselves. Our Instagram feed becomes some style board to describe our personal brand.    It’s a weird situation I find myself in, as the owner of a branding agency… But a big shift we’ve taken over the past year is placing less of an emphasis on the visual / perception management of just helping businesses appear shiny or new or better than their competitors, and actually focusing on the heart of their organizations.   Instead of just focusing on reputation, we’re focusing on character.    Abraham Lincoln once said that “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”    He’s saying that our character is that actual object that casts the shadow of reputation. Our character is the substance.    Even better is Thomas Paine’s writing on this. He says, “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God knows of us.”    Character is who you are when no one else is around. Character is the decisions you make when no one else is watching.    The beautiful thing here is that you are in control of your character. Anne Frank said “The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”    It’s up to us. Reputations can sort of get out of control, and they can be impossible to maintain. But character… That’s something we have jurisdiction over.    If we have ridiculous thoughts, we can steer our thoughts. I have quite literally slapped myself out of unhealthy trains of thought. Sometimes when I’m laying in bed and drifting off to sleep, if I’m going down some rabbit trail, I’ll force my eyes back open and try to reset my brain. And it works.    We’re in control of what we put into our brains, we’re in control of what comes out of our mouths, we’re in control of how our thoughts affect our emotions, and how our emotions affect how we act.    We literally become the things we meditate on. We obsess over things in our minds and we end up becoming manifestations of those things. What if we meditated on good, beautiful, hopeful things? What if we guided our dreams to be larger than they previously were? What if we set our sight on things above? What if we refused to settle for the silly dreams that culture and society hand us?    Maybe we could actually elevate our minds and lift our character a bit higher…    What’s at stake here? Basically your life. And how much you enjoy your life.    What’s at stake? The story you tell yourself every morning.    It’s what you set your heart on and the direction your life ends up taking.    What will they say of you at your funeral? I pray it’s far deeper and more beautiful than any surface labels or reputation… I pray there’s a character that inspires the next generation to live life to the fullest.    I love you guys, make it a good day.