How to build a personal brand: part 1

It’s simple but it’s not easy.
The process of building a personal brand can be summed up to 3 simple steps, 3 answers you must find to the questions:


1. Who am I?
2. Who do I want to be?
3. How do you get there?

The questions aren't complicated but the answers may be...

Who am I?

The same way a good salesperson must know their product inside out and, more importantly, believe in it, you have to know perfectly well what you are “selling”.

There’s the need for that nasty word nobody likes and few take seriously: “self-knowledge”. This is a long and continuous process, since we are always changing. It may also, in some circumstances, be quite uncomfortable.

The discomfort comes from two sides:
- the chance of discovering something about yourself that’s difficult to admit or like;

- the difficulty in being objective in our self-analysis (other people’s problems are always sooo easy to solve; your life on the other hand is complicated and full of nuances, right?)

One of the ways to get this elusive objectivity is to make choices.

There are a number of self-knowledge exercises and practically all of them make you write things down. What you put to paper is a choice you make at that moment and that has some meaning.

Practical example:
Grab a pen and paper (or open up Wordpad on your pc. It’s not the same thing but it will do…) and answer the following questions:
- what do I do naturally well?
- what have I learnt to do well?
- a hero (living or dead, real or imaginary)
- what do I want to be when I grow up?

Write the first thing that comes to your mind.
Common I’ll wait…





done?

If you were able to answer, congratulations! You just gave your first step to unplug the "complicater" in your head.

If you still didn’t manage, let the ideas marinate a little bit longer and when you come up with an answer, write it down (it doesn’t matter if it’s a pretty answer or if it sounds good). Make a decision.

And now the fun part: analyzing what those choices say about you, if they are relevant to your personal brand and if you can reveal them to the world without shocking your mother, father and cat (or if the answers are so real that it’s worth shocking half a world). But this isn't a psychoanalysis session, so let’s move on.

The self-knowledge process moves in hiccups. 

You stop, you think, you discover something.
You act on that discovery.
New questions come up, dissatisfactions that lead you back to the need to stop and think.
If you have trouble stopping may I suggest this anti stress kit. Just place it against a wall.


The second stage is to transform these self-discoveries into elements that can be used in your personal brand and that can be communicated to others:
- A unique value proposition
- A set of differentiating skills/talents that can be included in a CV, for example
- A list of characteristics you possess and the results that can be gained from them
- What really motivates you
- Etc.


All of this prepares you to move into the second step: answering the question who do I want to be.
And that will be the subject of a future post.

Thanks for reading all the way through, for your comments and for sharing this post on Facebook!

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