Get the confidence that results from building your professional brand.
Authentic personal branding helps executives and leaders calmly and effectively deliver great results.
It helps other people with this too—including my mom. Let me tell you a story about her that illustrates the connection between calm assurance and top performance.
My mom is a tiny woman—just about 5’” tall “on a good day” as she says. She’s a skilled and seasoned organist and pianist, and one day I went to hear her play for mass. Her music was nothing short of amazing! The congregation recognized this and clapped when she was done.
After the service, she asked me what I thought. All I could think of to say was that I thought I had witnessed a woman at the top of her game.
Her response both surprised and inspired me. She smiled knowingly and said, “Yes. Yes you did.”
Mom wasn’t arrogant or proud. But she was confident in the quality of what she had delivered that day—and what she regularly delivers to her audiences. Mom owns her personal brand genius—not with chest-high bluster but with the kind of calm assurance that supports her in regularly delivering on her brand promise.
Ask mom what she does and she’ll answer with a well-crafted elevator pitch, “Through my music, I enable my congregation to peacefully pause and reflect so they can tap into what makes their spirits soar.”
Deeply understanding her unique reason to serve, Mom is well prepared to talk about what she does best in the world. She does so with the kind of calm assurance that surely helps her play so very well for her audiences. Do you aspire to building a professional brand you believe in so deeply that you’re like my mom—thoroughly energized about what you do while at the same time calmly certain that you are on-purpose and delivering on your life’s work? Read on.
Authentic Personal Branding and Calm Assurance
First let’s take a moment to look more closely at the phrase, “calm assurance.” Calm means “not showing or feeling nervousness, anger or other strong emotions.” In turn, assurance means “confidence or certainty in one’s abilities.”
Authentic personal branding helps people feel calm and confident because they have excavated what they are uniquely poised to do in the world. They use this knowledge to help them set their priorities—and to calmly and confidently go after the next milestone in their careers.
The research supports the benefits of finding calm assurance in your work.
For example, Forbes magazine reports that research conducted by TalentSmart with more than a million people found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions to remain calm and in control. That’s so much easier to do when you know your purpose!
Other research published in an article in the Harvard Business Review found that 94% of the more than 700 respondents reported that of the 18 states of mind studied, calm, happy and energized are the three that drive the greatest levels of effectiveness and performance.
Finally, this article from The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “Calm helps you focus on what you need to do and get it done much more quickly. Calmness can also impact your creativity.”
Authentic Personal Branding Supported by ETA Process
Building your professional brand clearly has lots of potential benefits for leaders. But how can you take productive steps to clarify your purpose and attain the calm assurance that goes with knowing who you are and your unique reason to serve?
Here are two key ways to approach this:
- Learn about and apply the time-proven ETA™ process. This process has three steps. “Excavate” is about uncovering your purpose. “Tell” is about developing messages to express your brand effectively in many different situations. And “affirm” is about the ways you practice your brand—so, for example, you’re ready with a solid response when someone asks you, “So, what do you do?” A great way to learn about the ETA process is by reading more posts like this one on the Revealing Genius blog. Another is to sign up for our 7-Day Summit. A third is to sign up for our monthly newsletter by adding your email to the box at the bottom of this webpage.
- Spend time steeping in your brand. When you go through the ETA process, you’ll articulate your core competencies, write an “elevator pitch” and use science-based assessments to better understand your unique brand. I recommend surrounding yourself with your brand collateral to build your confidence in it. I also suggest taking a new science-based assessment at least once a year.
When you use the ETA process to do authentic personal branding, you’ll find calm assurance in your brand, just like my mom has about her organ performances. And that quiet confidence also will light you up and aid you in performing at the top of your game.
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