Develop your personal brand over time with useful tools and good teachers.
Building your personal brand is easier if you do a little bit at a time—the same way people practice a variety of yoga poses on a regular basis, building flexibility and strength in each session.
Developing your personal brand really can’t be a one-and-done affair. Just like a yoga students risk pulling a muscle if they stretch too far too fast, you will get better results if you approach building your personal brand with regular practice, good tools and the guidance of good teachers.
Complimentary Personal Branding Tools from Revealing Genius
Yoga students often use a mat, blocks and calming music to help them learn. Similarly, building your personal brand benefits from using tools, especially ones that make you pause and inspire you.
One useful personal branding tool that will give you a reason to pause and do some work toward building your personal brand is our e-newsletter. In each monthly issue, the newsletter delivers a healthy dose of inspiration, plus tools you can put right to use. (Subscribe with the link at the bottom of this page.)
For example, a recent edition of the newsletter included a link to my “Great Work of Your Life” interview with Liz Bryant. An award-winning television journalist and founder of Liz Bryant Business Etiquette, Bryant grew up in a home where manners mattered. Trained and licensed by The Protocol School of Washington, she’s created a thriving business doing what she loves best—offering training, coaching and courses on such topics as Zoom etiquette, job interviewing and international business diplomacy. Her advice was recently featured in Southern Living magazine.
To be sure, Bryant’s story provides inspiration to work on building your personal brand!
That same issue also included information about personal branding tools, including the Revealing Genius blog post, “5 (of 10) Questions That Can Help You Excavate Your Brand.” In fact, the Revealing Genius executive branding blog is a second tool you can use to help you pause and be inspired to work on building your personal brand. When you subscribe to it by entering your email under the “Get Notified” header on the right side of this page, you’ll get an email notification each time a new post goes up.
A third tool for building your personal brand is our complimentary guide to answering with conviction and purpose the age-old, seemingly innocuous business question, “So what do you do?” Wouldn’t you love to be able to answer that question well?
Our guide introduces the time-proven ETA™ process and its key steps of “excavate,” “tell” and “affirm.” It includes a list of questions to help you dig into excavating your personal brand and a list of sentence starters to help you affirm and gain confidence in your unique reason to serve. To get a link to this resource sent to your inbox, enter your email on our homepage to the right of the “So what do you do?” header.
Personal Branding: You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
Building your personal brand, like practicing yoga, benefits from being done with other people, including a good teacher. Sure, some people do yoga on their own in a special space at home. most people practice yoga more often when their classmates keep them accountable for coming to class. And most people progress more quickly when a good teacher is guiding their efforts.
When it comes to personal branding, similar things hold true. For example, during our 7-Day Summit, participants volunteer readily to be on the “hot seat.” Participants know that being in the hot seat will get them amazing and actionable feedback on one piece of their brand collateral, such as their LinkedIn page. They’ll get to talk about what they have done with the collateral so far and share a unique brand story that no competitor could tell equally well.
Next during the hot seat exercise, the person’s classmates review the collateral piece and provide positive feedback. Then, the summit cohort has a lively Q&A with the hot seat volunteer about how that brand collateral piece might be improved to better help people answer questions like:
- Do I understand at what you are the best in the world?
- What’s the No. 1 key takeaway message?
- Can I explain what problems you solve?
And, parallel to having a yoga teacher, I’m on hand to guide the summit and for 1:1 coaching after the summit ends.
People benefit so much from excavating their personal brand, from learning how to tell other people about it, and from building their confidence in it by using affirmations. If building your personal brand sounds like a natural next step for you, I hope you’ll schedule an exploratory call.
