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Brennan's Notes

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What is Personal Branding?

  • If you asked five people who know you what they think you’re good at or what they think makes you unique, what would they say?
    • Would they give you the same answer that you might say about yourself?
  • Personal branding puts the intention and the focus in your reputation, and ensures that other people see you the way you want.
  • Your power in your career directly corresponds to your ability to make and maintain influence.
    • Building influence requires a strong and compelling personal brand.
  • What is a brand? A brand is an expectation of an experience.
    • It helps people understand what they’ll will feel when working with you or serving alongside of you.
  • Your personal brand is your reputation. It’s your legacy.
    • It tells people what they can expect from you.
    • Personal branding is about finding a sense of control, and gaining options for yourself.

Creating Career Opportunities

  • When you look at your career and where you are right now, can you honestly answer the question of how did you get here?
  • Did you design it or did someone design it for you?
  • Personal branding gives you is the opportunity to take a moment, stop where you are and ask yourself, where do I want to be going forward?
    • When thinking about the personal branding process, it takes the randomness out of your career and allows you to articulate a game plan and a strategy that helps you make smart decisions.
  • You might take a moment now and think five years out, who do you want to be in five years?
    • What are you passionate about? Who inspires you? What skills and talents do you have that you would love to grow?
  • Take an inventory of where you are and what you would love to do with your career and what it might take to get there.
    • You’ll find is you’re going to be able to move from a reactive career into something that’s much more intentional and much more proactive.

Building Influence

  • Perhaps you’re looking for a new job or you want a promotion, or looking for some additional tools and resources in the job that you have.
    • If you don’t have a clear and strong value proposition, a personal brand, then it’s really difficult to positively influence those people who are making those decisions about giving you that job or those resources.
  • The people who have those opportunities are your target audience, and you need to be positioned correctly for them.
  • When you’re clear about your value proposition, about your target audience, and the goals that you have, then you’re able to build influence. Building influence with the decision makers and collaborators in your workplace means you’re able to identify and respond to their needs, but you also have a strategy for how you want to be known.
  • No personal brand is worth anything unless you have credibility.
    • There’s no shortcut. The formula for building credibility is that values plus action equals credibility.
  • You have to start by being really clear about your values.
    • What do you believe in? What is so core to your moral fibre that, if it wasn’t there, you wouldn’t be you?
    • What do you believe in that you would fight for?
    • And then, how are you showing up? How are you behaving that’s consistent with those values?
  • You have to be able to tell people what you stand for and then show action.
    • That’s how you get credit. That’s how you get credibility.
  • A lot of people are doing really good work, and they’re making really good decisions, living a life of integrity, but not telling people why.
    • You’re not attaching that action to the value, and you’re not getting credit.
  • In the world of personal branding and career advancement, you do need credibility to build influence.

Defining Your Current Brand

  • Personal branding is about the way you’re perceived by others.
    • It doesn’t always matter what you think it matters what your audience perceives.
  • There’s a lot of judgment in personal branding.
    • It does matter what’s in your heart, but if other people perceive you as pushy and noncollaborative, they might make decisions that affect your career and your company’s future based on that.
  • If you were to ask 10 of your closest colleagues or friends, or business associates, how would they describe you?
    • Would they describe you as someone who’s collaborative and approachable?
    • Or might they say that they feel like you kind of take over in meetings and don’t really solicit a lot of input from those around you?
    • How would you like to be remembered, and is that the way you’re known today?
  • These are some questions to start asking yourself, to get an idea of who you are in terms of perception at this moment in time.
    • You can’t go back and change it because yesterday, so it’s really about taking a stake of time right now, to understand what your perception looks like.
    • Take some time and think about what questions you might ask to assess your reputation.

Begin With the End in Mind

  • Imagine that we’re standing at your funeral. Your friends and family are off to one side and they knew you intimately.
    • Think of those that worked with you or served with you or were part of a community with you. How do we remember you?
    • What is it about your life that we’re recalling at that moment when we’re saying our goodbyes?
    • How did you make us feel? Were we happy to know you and are we rejoicing and celebrating your life?
  • Or, are we walking away asking ourselves: what is it that you stood for?
    • Maybe we don’t feel like we knew you.
    • How do you want us to feel at the end of your life?
  • If you can think about the end, the literal end of your life, you get to turn the lens backwards and re-engineer from this day to that day.
    • It’s (probably) a long ways off, but you get to think about how you want to live today, tomorrow and the next day, to meet the reputation that you desire for yourself.
    • Every step you’re going to take, every relationship, every choice, every business decision, is going to move you in the direction of the reputation that you want at the end of your life. That’s the power of this exercise, as uncomfortable as it is.
    • Words, emotions, expressions, capture them so that you can start building a strategy to move your career in that direction.

Identify Your Target Audience

  • Promote and position yourself to audiences specifically who will find you relevant and compelling.
    • You have to figure out your target audience. Who are the people or the communities or the companies, or even the industries that need to get you?
  • You can start by thinking of the people you have the easiest time working with.
    • Who do you kind of click with? Who do you sort of feel in sync when you’re working with them?
    • And if you’re looking for a job or you’re looking to change jobs, that target audience is also going to include people in other companies or outside of your immediate circle of influence.
  • But you have to take the universe of potential audiences from everyone down to these specific people: the people who are looking for someone just like you, who are looking for someone with your skills and your traits and your values.
  • Once you identify who that audience is, then it even gets more tricky because people have two sets of needs.
    • We have functional and we have emotional needs.
  • Example” Let’s say I’m looking for a cup of coffee or a tasty treat. Starbucks has coffee, so the functional needs are met.
    • But the reason I go to Starbucks and I’m a loyal consumer of their brand and product is because they meet my emotional needs.
    • When I walk through the door, there’s a sense of community and it’s kind of kitschy and people know my drink, and I know how to order and I enjoy their product. So not only am I getting a cup of coffee, but I’m getting a sense of community and culture that I attach to.
  • When you’re thinking about your target audience it’s really important to understand what do they need.
    • Maybe they need you to be on time and on budget and have certain technical skills, sure, but what do they need to feel from you?
    • What emotional connection can be made to be able to build a relationship and to be able to build influence? You have to figure out what that person or community or industry needs to feel.
    • A lot of times, it’s not that hard. A lot of people want to feel safe. They want to be able to trust you.
    • They want to feel a sense of collaboration or affinity with you.
  • But pay attention when you’re talking to your target audience or you’re interacting with them, or you’re researching them online:
    • For instance, what buzzwords or hints do you have of what they need to feel?
    • Then you’re going to think about how do I make myself attractive to that target audience?
    • How do I put myself in the best light, in the best situation to start that relationship?

Position and Market Strategy

  • Your personal brand is not about what you are. It’s about who you are.
    • And that’s why strategy is important, because your personal brand is not defined by your uniform or your job title, your certifications, or your resume.
  • Your personal brand tells your target audience what you stand for, what you believe in, and how you can offer them value.
    • Some people approach personal branding because there’s a challenge.
  • Maybe when looking at how you are today and how you want to be known, there’s a big gap. You need a strategy to fill that in.
    • In some cases, your current brand and your desired brand line up really nicely. And if it all ended tomorrow, you’d be remembered the way you want.
      • In that case, a strategy’s going to help you stay the course to keep you consistent in your behavior and appearance online and in person to reinforce that brand.
  • Defining your personal brand really necessitates consistency, not perfection.
    • It’s about where you are today. What challenges have you experienced because of your reputation?
    • Have you hit roadblocks that a strategy needs to address?
    • Are there opportunities maybe you’ve passed up because you didn’t feel confident and you weren’t ready to lean into that but now that you know what your desired reputation’s going to look like, you want to take advantage of those opportunities?
  • Your strategy needs to have a starting place and an ending place and it needs to have metrics along the way so that you can measure success and make course corrections if you need to.
  • Here’s an example of what a metric might look like:
    • Let’s say over the next 12 months, you want to be positioned for partner in your firm or you want to be included in more of the important conversations that management is having.
    • Think about what’s it going to take for them to see you as credible and relatable and somebody that they should include in those conversations?
    • Speak up more in meetings. Raise your hand and offer your opinion.
    • Participate on the company blog and add your voice to the conversation.
    • Network internally a little more strategically so you can build influence with people who are inviting people to those meetings.
  • When those things start happening and you see the results in the metrics, then you know you’re on the right path.
    • And if it doesn’t work, you’re going to change direction and you’re going to try something else, always keeping your desired reputation in mind. It’s about step by step to building that brand.

Networking Your Brand

  • Intentional networking places emphasi on designing a networking strategy for you that meets your personal brand goals.
    • One of the first things is that oftentimes when we think about networking, we look to connect with people we call decision makers.
    • These are the people who can transact with us, hire us, offer us that promotion.
      • And of course they’re important to our strategy, but there’s other types of people that we want in our network who are going to add value to our strategy.
    • The second category are what I call information sources.
      • These are people who may or may not be decision makers, but they know stuff. And they have insight and industry information.
      • Maybe they know a lot about trends in different areas of your business and they can really add value when you try to be competitive in your positioning.
    • Another type of person I would look for when you’re out networking are supportive people, people who are encouraging who are going to be your allies and your advocates because it takes a lot to build a personal brand and getting a support system in place is really important.
  • When we look at networking as a concept, it’s all about win-win.
    • The networking relationship has to be mutually beneficial.
    • It’s not just about what I can do for you or how you can help me, it has to be reciprocal.
    • So when you identify who you need to know and where they are, then your networking strategy allows you to build relationships to connect you to those people or those communities.
  • Networking is a relationship tool, it allows you to highlight your value proposition and stand apart from a competition in a way you design.
  • Three tips for building an intentional networking strategy:
    • First, be a resource, focus on building the relationship and meeting your contacts where they are, not just by focusing on what you need.
      • For example: helping somebody in my network connect to a colleague that they’re really trying to get in touch with or providing some type of resource that maybe I don’t even charge for.
    • The second point is stay in touch with your network.
      • Don’t just think of networking as a onetime thing that you use to get something. This is about building a relationship and it will come back to reward you over time as your career grows and you find additional ways of building synergy with those contacts.
    • And third always be genuine, authenticity and genuineness is critical for networking.
      • If you show that you’re real and human and you have hopes and dreams and you have questions, people are going to want to help.
      • They’ll want to help be part of your journey. If they suspect that there ulterior motives or somehow you’re not being genuine, then that helps us put the guard up.
      • Show your authenticity and engage your network in helping you build this career and this professional life for yourself that meets your objectives.

Summary

  • Your personal brand gives you focus and intention.
    • It takes the randomness out of how you’re going to show up, the relationships you’re going to build, and where you’re going to go in your career.
  • Personal branding is all about you personally.
    • While there are formulas and metrics, your path is yours alone, and you must feel confident in your values in order to make this work.
  • Start by taking inventory of your current brand.
    • Don’t judge it, just accept it and understand it, but develop a strategy and work that strategy.
  • Use your personal brand to help you make critical decisions from deciding what company to work for, to what wardrobe makes you feel most confident, to what the banner on your blog should look like.
    • Filter everything through this question, will it get me closer to my desired reputation and my legacy?
  • Let your brand evolve and mature as it’s supposed to.
    • It is about the process, not about getting to the finish line.
  • If you need some additional resources, you can certainly check out my book on Amazon, “Reputation 360: Creating Power Through Personal Branding.”
  • Everyone has a personal brand by design or by default. Don’t leave it to chance that other people see you the way you want them to.
    • You can build influence and direct your reputation, so start today, and take control over your personal brand.