I recently did a presentation and during that presentation, I mentioned the “hill to die on” or “finding your voice and what’s your hill to die on” and to my surprise, most people hadn’t heard of it.
I thought many of you might know that I taught English to postgraduate students for quite a few years, so I love English and I love English grammar, and I love idioms and I’ve been sprinkling that all over the place and I thought I wonder how many people are familiar with it.
Are you familiar with it? “Your hill to die on”
Basically, what it means is that you have real conviction about something that you will stand by and that you’ll defend that point of view, and it’s a great tool for finding your authentic voice, really finding what you’re passionate about and the conversations that you’ll have.
For example, for me a hill to die on is that I believe that without strategy in business, it’s going to be really tough to survive. I mean I’m a business strategist so that stands to reason, but that’s a hill I’ll die on, I will defend that point of view.
The staggering rate of small business failure is enough to make anybody crazy, but a huge number of them get into strife because they don’t have the necessary strategic planning and infrastructure.
The webinar that I delivered was actually about creating a social media blueprint, which of course is all about strategy and having a plan and having every tiny piece of content that you produce strategically linked to your business goals. Because as business owners we often put in a truckload of work into our social media.
If we’re active on social media, you might find that it can be overwhelming, but it really doesn’t need to be, so long as you’ve got a strategy!
So that’s one of my hills to die on
The opposite can also be true too. You hear people say “Well that’s not a hill I die on so I’m not gonna defend that point”. That could go either way but when you truly believe something, you’ll defend it with great authority.
So I’m gonna ask you, what is a hill you would die on?
Or, what is something you really believe in?
You’ll often find that your “hill to die on” is often why you’re in business in the first place, because it’s something you truly believe in.
It’s Simon Sinek that says “Find people who believe what you believe because that’s where we really grow and we really connect”.
So, what do you really truly believe in? What is a hill you would die on?