Stories about your journey, vulnerabilities, and strengths define your personal brand, but you must control the narrative while selecting the message you’d like to convey that will best reveal your personal brand. The message you choose for yourself, not the one others decide for you.
Your personal brand is a mix of your image, physical appearance, and demeanor; your behaviors, including your ethics, morals, and values; your personality, thoughts, experiences, and emotional patterns; your skills, formal or informal education, expertise, general or specific knowledge in your industry; and your experience, the exposure to several circumstances and the learning effect that they might have had on you.
Would you have found some common threads if you had recorded the opinions of your family, friends, and colleagues? Would most of them have said, for instance, that you were an ethical person in so many ways, that you are always honest, have integrity, are dependable, know right from wrong, and take responsibility for your actions?
Would 80 percent of them agree, or just 50 percent? What would the other 50 percent say? Do you have a different demeanor in the public sphere than in your private life? Would your interviewees’ opinions differ if they knew you as a friend or colleague? Or if they met you then, in college, or now as a parent?
Is there consistency among those opinions? Have they changed over time? Are the opinions more favorable to your goals then or now? Start paying attention to how others perceive you in casual conversations, with indirect questions, and notice how you are
included in or excluded from certain situations or initiatives -at work, as a parent in school activities, church, or community.
I encourage you to journal or record your progress and your discoveries. Journaling is very productive because having all the information in our minds only takes up unnecessary space. Also, we tend to forget details and observations. You can write or record, whatever suits your personality better. It is a beautiful opportunity to go back and reflect on all those “moments of truth” or “aha” moments when you realize something about yourself that you were unaware of.
You are now in the driver’s seat. You can work on your personal brand in the way you choose to present yourself to the world. Remember: This is a judgment-free zone. You and only you can assess the changes and progress of your journey and your personal brand.
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