In the last BRAND New You show, I gave you my definition of personal branding which is:
“what people feel, think and say about you when you’re not around”.
But how do get people to feel, think and speak about in the way you want them to?
That’s what I cover in this show as I take a deep dive into understanding what personal branding really is all about.
So let's get started
Now you may have noticed, that I emphasize the word BRAND in the title of the show. I do this because the title actually has dual meanings.
The 1st meaning is related to the desired outcome that I want for you, as a result of listening to this show which is to create a brand new you.
I don’t mean someone different than who you are, but instead, I want you to become <strong>more</strong> of who you really are, not other people's definition of who they think you should be.
Many of us, through no fault of your own, mistakenly identify ourselves with your J.O.B. and maybe even our titles.
But we are more than some fictitious title. Somewhere buried deep down inside “in places we don’t talk about at parties” is the real you waiting to be discovered.
I want to help you find that person through the tools and tips we will talk about on this show. That’s meaning one.
Meaning two directly relates to, you guessed it, personal branding.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions that surround the topic of personal branding. I’m clarifying some of those misconceptions during this show.
Origins of personal branding
Some people believe that personal branding is just a logo, other’s believe it’s a marketing scheme, I’ve heard people say it’s a fad.
Well, I can tell you it’s not a fad. It’s actual been around for a long time since 1937 in fact.
Personal branding was first discussed in Napoleon hill’s book which was first published in 1937:
Now the book itself is largely about your mindset and how your limiting beliefs are holding you back. Mr. Hill compares and contrasts the mindsets of “rich people” vs. the no-so-rich people in order to draw his conclusions.
It’s in his analysis of these case studies where I believe the seeds for personal branding are planted. Mr. Hill discusses many of tenets of modern day personal branding.
I won’t go into the details, and if you haven’t read the book I highly recommend you check it out.
Some of you may believe that personal branding was started by Tom Peter’s, the well-known management guru, when he released an article in Fast Company magazine back in 1998 titled:
In the article, Mr. peter’s he discussed the importance of treating yourself as a brand in order to advance in your pursuits and your career.
While published a little bit later than Mr. Hill’s book, This article is largely credited with starting the modern-day movement if you will call, personal branding.
So I ask, can personal branding be a fad when it’s been around for over 75 years?
Now with the publication of Mr. Peter’s article came a lot of good discussions around thinking about yourself as the CEO of the company ME, Inc.
Unfortunately, these discussions quickly became murky and muddled as people often tried to jump right in and implement the strategies discussed in the article.
Sadly, they missed the point. Personal branding needs to always start with an internal assessment to discover who you are and where you fit both personally and professionally.
Without understanding this, it’s very difficult to create a BRAND new you.
Having said that, I understand why they skipped right to the end game. It’s human nature really. We want to get somewhere, we discover new tools, we pick out what we like and usually what it is easy to implement and we move forward.
And as I already mentioned The problem with this approach is that we skipped some important steps along the way.
You see I believe that personal branding is a three step process; Perceive, Believe, and Achieve.
Everyone wants to skip right to achieve. But if you don’t do the first two steps, your results will be murky and muddled.
Let me explain
3 steps of personal branding
Percieve – to become aware or conscious of (something); to come to realize or understand.
In order to start the personal branding process, you must first become aware of and realize that you have a brand. Let’s walk through a few examples.
You are in a meeting and a senior leader walks in. How do you feel?
Next visualize yourself in another meeting. This time, you are there because you were volunteered to participate in a project. In walks the project manager. It’s someone you’ve never met but from what you’ve been told, you don’t hold this person in high regard.
How does this person make you feel?
The last scenario, picture the same meeting room, with the same people in it. Got it? This time, you walk in. How do the people in that conference room feel about you?
Probably a little difficult to think about right? Will their perception of you, be the same as your perception of yourself? If not. Why not?
You see we all have perceptions about ourselves and about other people. These perceptions are based on various character traits that we display conscientiously or conscientiously.
Character traits can be good or bad and they are usually related to some underlying values or beliefs that we hold.
We perceive these traits in others by watching and observing their behaviors, attitudes and how they interact with the world around them.
Examples of traits, include Honest, Loyal, Kind, loud, rude, mean, greedy, optimistic, pessimistic, conceited or playful.
There are literally countless numbers of character traits that people display on a daily basis. And it’s those observed traits, help us form perceptions about others.
But what we never ask ourselves as individuals, is what traits do we display daily and what perceptions do others hold of us.
Now, what about our interactions online.
The same rules apply. Things that you post, Tweet about, Like, or friend all play into the perception that others will develop about you. Even something as simple as a picture of what we did last weekend can speak volumes about you to someone you’ve never met.
Consider this, What perception would you have of someone who posted pics of themselves at a drinking party all weekend? You know the pics talking about.
If they did once, you might be able to shrug it off. But what if they posted about it on multiple occasions? Would your feelings, or perception change then?
Now how about this time we are reviewing pictures of someone who attended an industry conference over the weekend. They tweeted, posted and liked, learnings from the conferences, quotes from the speakers.
In all of their selfies they are dressed in casual attire, maybe a sports coat if it’s a guy. Again this is someone you’ve never met but you are forming a perception about this person from pictures you found on the internet.
I’m also willing to bet that you started to form a perception of both these fictitious people as I was talking.
Now For fun, pretend you are a recruiter or an employer. Remember from our first show that 93% of recruiters now review your online profiles before calling. Both These two people have applied for a job with your company. Who are going to call first?
This is the reality of the internet today. If you’re not paying attention to what you post online, others will.
And if you think having nothing show up in your search results is a good thing, think again. Nothing showing up indicates that you are not keeping up with the latest trends.
The perception is this case can be that you are lazy and unwilling to learn new things. This is why in the last show I asked you to Google yourself. Are you starting to perceive?
Now imagine the perception you could create if you were able to align your online self with your real world personality.
This is why I say that personal branding starts with perceive. It really is about our feelings towards others based on our observations of them. It’s how others, whom we’ve never formed perceptions and feelings about us.
So personal branding is really about how people feel about us which will translate into what they say about us when we are not around.
What do know how others feel and think about you? It’s an important question and not an easy one to answer. Until you know this, achieving goals may be impossible.
If I’ve done my job correctly, you are starting to or hopefully have become aware that you do have a brand. And that brand is speaking volumes about you every day.
If you can perceive this, we are ready to move to the next step in the process.
Believe
Believe – accept (something) as true; feel sure of the truth of to think or suppose
A lot of people want to believe that personal branding is a logo. This misconception is “backed up” by the dictionary that refers to branding as an identifying mark, or an image.
Let me say this one time so as not to be misunderstood.
Personal branding is not a logo.
You can’t go pay someone on **48hourslogo.com** to develop a logo for you and BAM, you have a personal brand. It doesn’t work that way.
People think this because a logo can call to mind your feelings about a particular brand. When you see that logo you are reminded of your personal experiences and your observations with the brand.
It takes multiple interactions to form those feelings, those perceptions. At some point, you will begin to associate a logo with those feelings.
When that happens, the logo now elicits those feelings whenever you see it. Think about this for a minute.
What are the first words that come to your mind when you hear these words: Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks.
If you’re a Starbucks fan I'm guessing you could smell your favorite coffee just at the mention of the word. If you’re not a fan of any of three I mentioned then you also had a similar but opposite response, right?
Fan or not, These feelings are ones that you’ve developed over time and you believe them to be true. You also have certain beliefs about yourself both personally and professionally.
Do others hold the same beliefs?
If not there is a misalignment between your beliefs and those of others that may be holding you back, that may be limiting your opportunities and your career.
Let me ask you some personal questions.
- – Do you feel stuck in your current position?
- – Do you see others get promoted but not you?
- – Do you feel you are qualified but can’t understand why others don’t see it?
If you ask yourself these questions there is most likely a misalignment between what you believe and what others perceive.
In order for you to get past this, to be able to move forward, you need to know what others perceive. Because what they perceive is also what they believe.
This is the heart of personal branding. This is the hardest to get a resolution to, it’s the most difficult part to understand. It’s why you can’t just skip ahead to achieve. Because to be able to achieve, you first need to believe.
Believe that you have a brand and understand what others believe that brand to be.
So how do get past this? The answer is so simple that it will seem understated, and frankly crazy. But it’s the key to you understanding your brand today.
You need to ask.
But you don’t just ask anyone. You need to ask people whose opinions matter the most to you. Make a list of these people, 10 – 15 if you can get there. Ask them how they perceive you. Ask them what think about you, how you make them feel.
You can do this in a couple of ways.
First ask them directly. I don’t recommend this approach, but it an approach you can take. Asking in person can put pressure on some people and they may tell you what they think you want to hear. This will not help you.
However, it is also possible that some people you talk to might be perfectly ok with telling you face to face. In these cases are you willing to accept what they say?
The second way is to send an email to them. Most people will be more receptive to answering an email than a face to face conversation.
Personally, I sent emails.
I asked two questions in my emails.
1 – What are the top five words or phrases that come to your mind that best describe what I am known for?
2 – what are the top five skills and traits that you think about when you hear my name mentioned.
Now you may be saying to yourself, no one is going to answer those questions. I had my first response back with a 1/2 hour.
I sent my email to 15 people and I heard back from 10 of them. That a 67% return folks. Not bad for something so personal to ask of others.
The responses I received both confirmed some of my beliefs and surprised me as well and I did find some misalignment between my beliefs and those of others.
As I reflected on their comments and my interactions with them, I could easily see how their beliefs were formed in areas where we were misaligned.
They had created a perception of me, based on experiences and interactions with me. This lead them to develop a belief and an associated BRAND of who I am and how I add value in any given situation.
And guess what? Those pesky misalignments between my thinking and theirs turned out to be the areas of development that were holding me back, that were limiting my options.
It took me awhile to come to this reality, that My own self-limiting beliefs were keeping me from what I wanted, where I wanted to go.
Understanding this came with the realization that I had a brand in other people’s eyes and that my brand needs to be tweaked if I wanted to Achieve my goals both professionally and personally.
Achieve
Achieve – To reach or attain a desired objective, level, or result by effort, skill, or courage accomplish or bring about.
What do you want to be in five years? Too long, ok how about three years? Next year?
I mentioned earlier that most people want to jump directly to this step. They make some goals, they start down a path, only to later discover that the path they chose was the wrong one for them.
So they quit. They go back to their life of mediocrity and say that personal branding is marketing scheme and a fad. The reason they quit is because somewhere along the way they hit one of those misalignments we identified in Believe.
You can’t answer where you want to be in 5 years, 3 years or even next year, without first understanding where you are today. Once you know how others perceive you, you can begin to actively manage those traits that they believe you display.
Maybe you exhibit a bad trait. Just by the simple act of knowing that others perceive it as bad can make you change your behavior.
The key to achieving is to align your behavior with your goals
You can tweet that if you want
Right in the definition of achieve are the words effort and courage. You will need both as you begin to build your brand. But this can only come from conscience and deliberate actions on your part.
Some of those actions will include aligning your offline self with your online profile to develop the comprehensive brand of you. The goals you want to achieve in life are right in front of you. As you strive to achieve them you must seek to understand how you are perceived by others.
Only then can you put in the right effort, on the right tasks and align your behaviors to achieve your goals.
Professional golfer Tiger Woods once said “ the harder I work, the luckier I get”. What he didn’t say was that he was working on very clearly defined goals that were aligned with his personal brand.
So my challenge to you is, go out and be lucky. If out how others perceive you. Send emails to your trusted advisors, ask them the questions I asked mine. I think you’ll be surprised by the results.
Your thoughts
So what are your thoughts on personal branding?
If you would like to share your opinion, send an email to rlrhoten@gmail.com Use the subject line ’personal branding’ and let me know what you think.
Or head on over to ryanrhoten.com/podcast. In the middle of the page is a SpeakPipe button.
Click it and you can record a voice message and send it directly to my inbox.
Easter Egg
Hey, thanks for sticking around. I’ve got things two easter eggs to share today.
First, I want to give a shout out to Mark Mason from the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast. Mark works a full-time job and does internet marketing in the margins of his life.
Mark – if you’re listening I just wanted to say thank you. Your challenge to me to the podcast movement was exactly what I need to get myself moving and push away a lot of the self-imposed roadblocks I had placed in front myself to getting this podcast off the ground. So thanks once again.
Next up, I have a special offer for you. In the show, I made a movie reference (scroll up to find it).
For The first two people who leave an honest 5-star rating and review for the show on iTunes, and send me an email correctly identifying the name of the movie, I’ll send you a copy of Jon Acuff’s book Quitter.
In order to qualify, you need to complete both actions. This is only for the fast action takers as I only have two extra copies of the book available.
If you believe you are an action taker, this is your chance to prove it. Good luck!
