The Secret to Transforming Your Personal Brand

Any failed or successful business owner will tell you, building a brand is not something that is done overnight. In an era where start-ups rise to fame just as quickly as they crumble to dust and where things can unintentionally go viral in a matter of hours, it is easy to forget the importance of patience.

Patience is the bedrock on which any venture should be built, whether it is building a business, learning a language, developing a personal brand or sculpting your beach body.

Due to the rise in access to technology, instant gratification is something that is often expected by consumers. A two second delay in webpage loading times can be the reason a sale is lost, a bad review is submitted, or a lead is not converted. Consequently, the sometimes unrealistic time-sensitive demands of fickle consumers can pressure business owners and executives into making decisions favoring short-term benefit over long-term strategic goals.

Similarly, it can be easy for individuals to forget that improving a personal brand is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time, effort, and commitment to become self-aware, assess your behavior and transform how you are perceived by your peers. Follow the steps below, and with patience, you will achieve success.

1. Find Out Who You Are: Building a personal brand can be exhausting without truly understanding your strengths/weaknesses and how you are perceived by your peers. Take advantage of performance reviews and actively gather feedback from your peers to help increase your self awareness. You’ll either validate what you already know about yourself or learn lots of new things which you may or may not like. Ultimately, you will come out more self aware which will help you formulate a development plan for your personal brand.
2. Define Who You Want To Be: Once you have a clear view of how you are perceived, you can identify which traits or behaviors you would like to emphasize and which you would like to improve upon. One of the easiest ways to define the direction you want to take is to emulate the traits of your mentors and role models. Draw inspiration from their successes and failures and define a set of traits and behaviors that can help you build your brand. However, keep in mind that it is important to not force yourself to become someone you are not. Focus on what feels natural to you.
3. Consciously Transform Your Behavior: Once you have identified the behaviors that make up your ideal personal brand, it is time to take action. Make conscious decisions to behave in ways that are aligned to your ideal personal brand and work towards building it. Consistently exhibiting traits of your defined personal brand will change the way you are perceived and with patience will transform your personal brand.
4. Remain Persistent: Transforming your personal brand requires a commitment to progress into a new and improved version of yourself. Changes in your behavior can be received negatively or positively by your peers and it is important to take on this feedback and adapt. Remain conscious of these perceptions and don’t be discouraged by unexpected negative observations.

“When things don’t happen right away, just remember, it takes 6 months to build a Rolls-Royce and 13 hours to build a Toyota”

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