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Personal branding is essential to career success. The concept emerged around 25 years ago, and in that quarter century, it has evolved from a basic tool into a multifaceted mindset for living a fulfilling and authentic life—and for having a career that propels you to achieve your goals and fulfill your purpose.
Effective personal branding requires a lot of introspection. That’s because your brand is not created. It’s unearthed. Focused self-reflection is essential to uncovering the brand called YOU. But personal branding isn’t all introspection. In addition to looking inside yourself, you need to validate your thinking with feedback from others. That’s because your brand is held in the hearts and minds of those you seek to influence and impact.
When it comes to the introspection half (which you should accomplish first), there are six drivers of your personal brand on which to focus: values, passions, superpowers, differentiators, purpose and goals. For each of these components, spend time getting clear. Self-awareness is the key to successful personal branding (it’s also the #1 leadership skill according to employee engagement expert Mark Crowley). Together, these personal brand drivers help you define and refine your authentic brand. With brand clarity, you can live your unique promise of value and integrate it into everything you do so you can stand out from the competition, achieve your career aspirations and increase the joy factor at work.
Let’s focus on unearthing the six drivers of your personal brand:
- Values – your operating principles or non-negotiables. Your values are core to who you are, and they impact how you feel and behave.
- Passions – the things that bring you joy. Your passions give you energy. When you talk about them with others, you light up.
- Differentiators – those things that set you apart from others who have similar aspirations. Think of differentiators as your secret sauce. They help you make a unique mark on all that you do.
- Superpowers – the things you do better than anyone else. These signature strengths allow you to deliver exceptional value to stakeholders.
- Goals – what you want to achieve in your career. Goals can be short-term, midterm, or long-term. They help you focus on what’s important and ignore distractions.
- Purpose – your why. It’s not what you do or how you do it, it’s why you do it that’s foundational to your personal brand. Your purpose guides you and helps you feel fulfilled.
If you’re working with a coach, they can help you uncover your brand by asking you powerful questions and sharing meaningful insights. A mentor or colleague can be helpful too. But the first step is to learn the ropes, and that’s where this series comes in.
In future articles, we’ll delve into each of these personal brand drivers, and in the final installment in this series, we’ll focus on the other half of the self-awareness equation: input. You’ll learn why candid, continual feedback is essential to successful personal branding throughout the span of your career. Follow me here at Forbes so you can be notified about the other articles in this series.
William Arruda is a keynote speaker, co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and co-creator of BrandBoost - a virtual, video-fueled course to help you grow your self-awareness and amp up your personal brand.
