Following Your North Star: Why Having a Personal Brand Matters

For the past year or so, I’ve been pushing the Learning House team (including myself) to consider our brand and better understand who we are and who we want to be. We developed the Learning House Way, redefined our mission statement and figured out our Big Hairy Audacious Goal for the next four years. The next phase in our efforts has been developing a new logo, and I am pleased to announce that our website now reflects our new logo. More changes are coming as we continue to focus on making Learning House the premier online services provider in the space, but I think the new logo really speaks to our commitment to excellence and our dedication to helping students achieve the outcomes they want to create a better future for themselves.

Branding: It’s Not Just for Corporations

While I am proud of the Learning House brand and am thrilled we are continuing to redefine who we are as a company, branding is not just for companies. Personal brands are just as, if not more, important.

As people who read this blog regularly know (or should know), I listen to a lot of podcasts. From Michael Hyatt to Tim Ferriss and others, I always feel like I learn something new or am encouraged to view life in a different way. In short, these podcasters help me on my quest to achieve my best self.

One thing they all have in common, and it’s in part why I admire them, is a clear sense of their personal brand. When you listen to Michael Hyatt, you know he’s going to give you no-nonsense, practical advice about how to achieve more. Some other podcasters I listen to focus more on fitness and how to master incredible physical feats. Still others focus more on the motivation behind why people get in their own way, and how to overcome that. All of them, however, know exactly who they are and what they want to accomplish. They live their brand.

The Importance of Having a Brand

Branding, especially a personal brand, can feel like a marketing buzzword, but as with so many other concepts, I think it actually has a broader application.

Branding provides a blueprint for who you want to be, and a North Star for keeping you on track. This is covered extensively in the Unstoppable Course we offer here at Learning House, although we don’t refer to it as developing your brand. But the first few weeks of the course are dedicated to people developing short- and long-term goals, developing their own mission statement and, ultimately, defining their purpose. Then, we revisit that purpose throughout the course so people can refine it if they want, depending on what they’ve learned about themselves.

This is true of any kind of branding. As we are going through the process of rebranding Learning House, we are thinking through our story: Who are we? What do we want to be? How do we want to conduct ourselves as a company? The answers to these questions will help define our behavior moving forward. Transparency, for example, is integral to our brand, so much so that we made it one of our colors in the Learning House Way. That means that we are transparent not only with our partners, but also with employees, even when it’s uncomfortable. Having a defined brand makes planning a course of action easier, because you have touchstones along the way to know whether the actions you want to take fit with the brand you’ve already defined for yourself.

Staying Aligned

Not only does a brand help you define what you want to do, but it also helps other people understand who you are and what you’re about. Derek Jeter is one of my favorite baseball players, in part because his brand was one of integrity and hard work. When all around him were being accused of steroid use, he stayed quiet and continued to do his best. No accusations were ever lobbed against him, in part because he kept his behavior consistent with his brand. He had lived his brand for so long that it was easier to trust he hadn’t cheated. Contrast that to his teammate Alex Rodriguez. At one point, his brand was like Jeter’s — built on integrity and love of the game. His actions didn’t live up to that brand, as it came out that he had repeatedly used steroids and, unlike Jeter, he didn’t retire with a city sending him off. Instead, he was forced to quietly stop playing in the middle of a season, with no fanfare.

It’s not only personal brands that need to stay aligned with values; corporate brands do as well. Enron is a great example of this. Enron’s publicly stated corporate values included communication, respect, integrity and excellence … all things Enron very actively did not live up to, instead choosing to operate secretly and dishonestly, defrauding people of their life savings. Enron pursued what it believed would bring happiness: money. But it lost sight of what its brand and its values were, and in the end, imploded.

Having a personal brand helps you define who your best self is, and then take the actions needed to be that best self. It doesn’t mean every decision you make is perfect. We are all works in progress. But it should provide a roadmap for good choices.

One of the reasons we have been so transparent about our values is so that our employees, partners and the rest of the world can hold us accountable. While I do not pretend we are perfect, we are always trying to be better. If you work for a company that you feel takes actions that do not align with the brand, leave. That is a company that will not be successful.

Living Your Brand

That doesn’t mean living up to your brand is easy; I fall short every day. But I continue to take actions that help me live up to my brand. One of my goals, for example, is to educate others and help them be the best they can be. I am in an industry that helps me do that, and I carry that passion over to the team members here at Learning House. Even in my personal life, I’m always sharing something, be it a book, podcast, movie or life lesson, that I think will help whoever I’m talking to. (My wife and kids can attest to this!)

So how can you live your brand?

First, define it. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I recommend starting by thinking through what is most important to you. Is it money? Happiness? Fame? Helping others? These are questions only you can answer.

Once you’ve thought about what is important to you, see if you can find a common thread. If you answer money, job success and power, for example, then maybe what you really want is security in the world.

After you’ve identified the threads, think about your goals, especially long-term goals. What do you want to achieve in the next year? Five years? Ten years?

Then, think about what legacy you want to leave. What do you want people to say about you when your name comes up in conversation?

Take all this information and distill it into one or two sentences and you have your personal brand. While this can certainly evolve over time, the major concepts should remain the same.

Then, once your brand is defined, you can evaluate all actions in light of that brand. The Four Seasons, for example, has built its brand on exceptional customer service. The Four Seasons will go to the ends of the earth to make something right for a customer, and it empowers every single employee to do whatever it takes to keep a customer happy. This makes decision-making for employees easy, because they know the highest purpose and ultimate goal of the brand.

The same is true for me. If I’m faced with a difficult decision, I can think about my brand. Will this action help me live my brand? If so, then yes, I should take it, even if it’s hard or if I’m unsure of the outcome. If it won’t help me live my brand, then I won’t do it, even if it is extremely tempting.

I am not perfect at living my brand — I don’t think anyone is. But I am committed to it, and that makes me a happier, more productive person. What’s your brand? How do you think you live your brand every day?