Use the time-proven ETA process to boost your passion for your personal brand and help position you for the future.
When we at Revealing Genius help you do executive personal branding, one of my favorite moments will be when you realize who it is—deep down inside yourself—that you most want to serve.
That’s because knowing your “beloved avatar” will help you—like it has helped many healthcare leaders—go beyond the basic marketing tenet of “know your customer” to the kind of passion and big-picture thinking that will help you deliver on your executive personal brand and position yourself well for the future.
Audience Isn’t Quite Enough in Executive Personal Branding
This idea of knowing your customer certainly isn’t a new one in marketing. The best brands know their success is about deeply understanding their audience so they can serve customers better. They look at such demographics as how old their best customers are, where they live, what gender they are and how much they make. They look at psychographics, too—what their customers and potential customers value, what they fear and what attitudes they hold.
But when Revealing Genius supports a leader in doing executive personal branding, we take this key idea of audience a step further. We help our clients—experienced executives in healthcare—lay out details of their “beloved avatar,” that person for whom they would get out of bed at 5 a.m. every day to help.
Inspired Executive Personal Branding
You are likely those healthcare leaders who is already very good at what you do. You’ve mastered things like leading your team well, getting great financial results and regularly supporting improvements in patient outcomes.
Yet I’d venture that getting fuller clarity about who you most want to serve will inspire you to be even more passionate about your work.
Maybe you’re in your line of work because you believe deeply that you need to pay it forward. A medical company helped your five-year-old childhood friend overcome a serious illness, and now you’re driven to likewise help others. In that case, you might define your beloved avatars as young children with this disease and at risk of contracting it. That’s something you can get passionate about!
Or maybe you have an amazing ability to orchestrate healthcare logistics and compliance issues in your state in a way that makes it possible for fantastic blood cancer doctors to more often save lives. In this case, you might define your beloved avatars as highly trained, dedicated and field-leading hematologist-oncologists in your state as well as the patients they serve. Once you have clarity that these are the people you’re helping, you’ll get out of bed every day determined to clear the way for them to do their jobs better.
I have watched talented healthcare executives become even more passionate and driven to be the best at what they do after they articulate in detail exactly who they aim to serve. This could be you when you undertake executive personal branding using the ETA™ process from Revealing Genius.
ETA Process and Executive Personal Branding
Some healthcare leaders don’t undertake executive personal branding because it seems daunting. Fortunately, our time-proven ETA process breaks it all down into three big steps: excavate, tell and affirm. Within each big step in the process are multiple smaller steps for discerning what you do best in the world and for whom, plus helping you believe in your bones that you are making a big change in the world that only you can make!
You can get more on the ETA process from several posts on my blog.
Shifting from ‘Audience’ to ‘Beloved Avatar’ for Executive Personal Branding
It may seem ironic that another benefit of knowing exactly whom you most want to serve is that it can attract new opportunities.
For example, here at Revealing Genius, we are very clear that our beloved avatar is experienced healthcare leaders—and often healthcare leaders in transition. But when I tell other people about our target audience, they’ll often say, but can’t the ETA executive branding process also help me in my field? And I can honestly say, “Yes, we can!”
Let’s think about this in one of the healthcare contexts we discussed earlier in this post. If you’re a leader with logistical and compliance skills that help doctors in your state do their best work, what would you say when a healthcare system in another state asks if you could do the same for them? If you’ve zeroed in on your executive personal brand, you’ll have full clarity about what you do, who you serve and the transformation that you alone can facilitate. This knowledge will help you discern whether the out-of-state offer is something you want to take on.
Revealing Genius offers many ways to tap into your professional brand, including clarifying your beloved avatar. To get started, be sure to check out our Excavate Your Brand webinar, 7-Day Summit and daily email series. We look forward to working with you.
