You can’t be a professional without a personal brand. What will yours look like?
The phrase “personal brand” has been around for a while now, but to a lot of people it still just sounds like so many syllables of irrelevant corporate jargon. Well, it might be jargon, but it’s not irrelevant — and taking charge of your own personal brand is often the difference between accomplishing your greatest career goals and staying stuck at the bottom of whatever totem pole you’re on.
That said, what exactly is a personal brand?
Put simply, it’s how people think about you in terms of your professional strengths and weaknesses. Depending on where you turn for advice on how to build and maintain your personal brand, though, you might be overwhelmed by information on the topic.
For instance, are the ten golden rules for building your brand more important than the seven ways it can define you? And once you get that figured out, are you ready for the “ultimate guide,” or is the “complete guide” maybe more your style?
Undoubtedly all the above contain helpful information. But if you’re just now being exposed to the idea of having a personal brand, all you really need to know are the answers to these two questions:
1. Do I really need a personal brand?
You don’t just need one, you already have one. It’s familiar to every single person who knows you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a student, a corporate CEO, or a member of a black ops military unit — everything you do that contributes to what people think about you adds up to the brand that is unique to you. It will follow you wherever you go, so you want to make sure you’re on top of what it is.
2. What is the foundation of a good personal brand?
Hint: it’s not the number of social media followers you have. While popularity, along with agreeableness, professional skills, and even the languages that you speak (along with tons of other attributes) all factor in, your personal brand is built around a single trait that will either make or break you: integrity.
Leveraging the answers
What does integrity really look like? It looks like keeping promises, knowing when to say “no,” ensuring you can deliver before you make commitments, meaning what you say, and avoiding association with people who lack integrity of their own. Basically, it looks like being authentic and honest.
Sometimes it also means making sacrifices. In the world of business (not to mention life in general), we all get plenty of opportunities to choose between something we think we’d like to do and something we think we should do. Having a personal brand people respect and can rely on means taking the high road when it comes to those types of decisions. If you find yourself in doubt about the right choice, choose the path that seems harder — that’s what integrity looks like.
Whether you want to call it your personal brand, your character, or your inner value system, there is something (often subtle) about you that people inherently recognize and store in their brain alongside your face and name. It’s up to you what that something is, but if you want to succeed — make it integrity.
