Personal branding is about re-inventing yourself as a marketable product. It’s about how you project yourself to the outside world, and how the world learns to recognize you by the unique set of characteristics you project.
Personal branding improves the way you are perceived and creates lasting impressions, both online and offline, on customers, bosses, colleagues, friends, acquaintances and family. It’s a personal makeover plan, and a powerful tool for calculated self-expression.
Once upon a time, only high-profile people like celebrities, politicians and sportsmen cared about improving their image through personal branding. But in today’s digital environment, where every business and every individual has equal access to public exposure on social media platforms, personal branding is almost a necessity if you want to rise above your competition and be counted as someone special.
In this multi-part series on personal branding, we will begin with Phase 1 of the self-development strategy by asking the most basic question: Who Are You?
Like any business enterprise that begins with a `vision’ or `mission’ statement, you must have one of your own. And this article will guide you step-by-step through the process of knowing what that is.
So put on your thinking cap, get some pen and paper to jot down notes, and let’s get started!
WHO ARE YOU?
This is probably the toughest question to answer in the whole world, but unless you have a clear understanding of who you are, you won’t be able to convince the world that you’re indeed that person. And your personal branding strategy will crumble under its own weight because you didn’t build a strong foundation based on accurate self-knowledge.
The easiest way to tackle this self-examination process is to break it down into several actionable parts.
STEP 1: List Your Values
>>> It’s a confusing thing to be asked to list your personal values because it is not something we really think about. Our value system kicks in quite unconsciously, when we’re about to take any important decision in life, but we rarely bother to find out what exactly they are.
Well, here’s your chance to look inwards and try to articulate what yours might be. Don’t restrict yourself to any pre-conceived notions about what your values should be. There are no right or wrong answers to this one, as long as you’re honest with yourself.
The easiest way to tackle your values is to ask yourself what makes you happy or sad. Every life event that makes you feel a particularly positive or negative emotion has a value at its roots.
For example, if you really enjoy playing board games with your kids and taking them to the movies on weekends, `family’ is probably an important value for you. If you feel guilty about not telling your wife that you were drinking beer with your buddies instead of going to Lowes to look for a new refrigerator for your home, then `honesty’ is probably another one. And so on.
So make a list first of some recent events you remember that made you happy and a list of events that left you feeling sad, upset or stressed. Ask the question `why’ for each of them, and soon your core values will emerge.
STEP 2: Prioritize Your Values
>>> Now that you have a list of your core values, the next step of the process is to prioritize them.
Why do you need to prioritize?
Because situations constantly pop up in life that put one value against another.
For example, you may have an important meeting on the same day your 12-year-old girl expects you to show up for her dance recital. And `ambition’ and `family’ are both values that are important to you.
Unless you know which is more important between the two, you might fall into a pattern of making choices that leave you feeling unhappy and dissatisfied in the long run. You could build a very successful company with 7 years of hard work, but still not enjoy any real sense of fulfillment because you ignored another core value that is also very important to you: `family’. And when you look back and realize the big mistake you made in not balancing ambition with your family life, it is too late to mend fences with the people you love.
Prioritizing values does not mean that you always choose the one at the top of the list. What it does is help you balance the most important ones, so you don’t get stuck in the rut of always choosing one at the cost of another.
In the example above, if both `family’ and `ambition’ are at the top of your list, you’d probably try to shift the business appointment if possible to another day and go to your kid’s dance recital. However, if the meeting is too important and you have to attend, then you’d also remember to make it up to your daughter in some other way at a later date, so neither priority gets ignored.
The result of prioritizing values is that you never lose sight of the big picture, and take decisions that help you stay centered, focused and relatively stress-free as you pursue your life goals.
STEP 3: List Your Passions
>>> Values and passions are not the same thing. For example, `family’ can be a core value, but `family’ is not a passion.
Spending hours in your garage, working on your antique car is a passion. Making little pieces of jewelry out of rocks and sea glass is a passion. Studying astronomy and experimenting with your telescope is a passion.
Passions are things you can completely lose yourself in without realizing how much time has passed. Passions are things you always want to know more about and master because your heart, mind and soul sync up and rejoice when you’re involved in those activities.
Listing your passions help you create a personal brand, because nothing describes a person as well as his or her passions do. Often times, these passions already correlate to your line of work. For example, you build apps for a living because your passion is technology.
But if you didn’t follow your passion early on, when you chose your profession or business, listing them still helps you know who you are. And how they might be incorporated into what you already do.
For example, you could start a YouTube channel with tutorials on glass jewelry-making and build your personal brand as a designer with thousands of followers on that social platform, even though your day job is that of a History teacher in middle school. Creating a personal brand in such a way could open doors for you in the arts department – the place where you always wanted to be!
STEP 4: Take A Personality Test
>>> Personality tests are sets of techniques that are used to accurately and consistently measure an individual’s personality. They are methods devised by psychologists to assess personality on a deep, scientific level.
There are 2 basic kinds of personality tests: a) Self-report Inventories, like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and b) Projective Tests, like the Rorschach Inkblot Test.
Taking a personality test is an important piece in your personal branding exercise because science can help you establish and fully understand you who are. And the results will help you achieve your career and personal goals thereafter in multiple ways.
I am a firm believer is Personality Tests and I always advise people to take any many as they can. (Read my article on Personality Tests by clicking here.)
Myer-Briggs Type Indicator is the world’s most widely used personality test with roughly 2 million people taking it every year.
My favorite however, the one I consistently use as a tool to hire, build and motivate employees in my own media company, is the Disc Test. You can take the first level for free by clicking here.
STEP 5: Ask Others To Describe You
>>> Personal branding involves self-knowledge – and knowing what others think of you. Before you formulate a branding strategy for yourself, you have to know how you already come across to the world at large.
Talk to friends and family you trust and ask for an honest, no-holds-barred-and-no-hard-feelings-afterwards sort of review of your strengths and weaknesses. Take what they say on board, and soon you will notice commonalities in things they like and don’t like about you.
The point of this exercise is to a) See how closely your own estimate of yourself matches up to the estimation of others b) Note the dissimilarities between the two, so you can work on fixing what needs to be fixed and build on traits that are already winning you admiration and recognition in your close social circles.
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