ETA process helps leaders know themselves and who they serve, plus how their unique genius can improve the world.
Personal branding for executives meets your audiences’ expectation that you do the heavy lifting for them.
To get your staff, team members, industry peers and even patients to engage with you, your audience expects you to demonstrate that you are in tune with their interests, attitudes and opinions, that you understand their personality and, yes, their values.
Both the people you work with every day and the ones you aspire to meet are hunting for points of connection. They want you to show them why they should connect with you.
When you do the heavy lifting of personal branding for executives, your audiences will be more likely to want to hire you, promote you, collaborate with you, give you a board seat, invite you to present … and the list goes on. To what do you aspire?
Fortunately, the ETA™ process from Revealing Genius is available to help. This time-proven process is a great (and even fun!) way to do the heavy lifting required to have a strong, consistent personal brand.
When you expend the energy to excavate, tell and affirm your professional brand, you’ll not only come to better know yourself and your key audiences (or “beloved avatars”) but also better know how to describe the transformation you—and only you—can make in the world.
Get to Know Yourself
The first step in the ETA process—excavate—is the one that will help you clarify who you are and what you stand for. From going through the process myself and from observing what happens to my clients when they stop “swimming in the sea of sameness” by identifying what makes them stand out from everyone else, I know that excavating is energizing!
But what exactly is involved in this step of the process, you ask?
One thing we at Revealing Genius will encourage you to do early on is to make a regular practice of working on your professional brand. Mark time on your calendar each day, week, month, quarter and year to take key brand excavation and renewal action steps.
Another thing we recommend is doing the work on your professional brand a little bit at a time. Leaders like you in healthcare and other industries are busy people. So creating your professional brand can be made easier by working on it for 10 minutes a day or 30 minutes a week, as examples.
Here at Revealing Genius we’ve got lots of exercises and tools that other executives have successfully used many times. These will help you hone in on who you are and what you stand for. You can try out three of them by reading this earlier blog.
Who Do You Most Want to Serve?
Just as important in the ETA process as knowing yourself better is pinning down exactly who is your ideal audience—the kind of person you most want to serve. At Revealing Genius, we call this person your “beloved avatar.”
In marketing and branding thinking, a beloved avatar is a research-based profile that depicts the bullseye audience or person.
When you’re building your professional brand, everything comes down to who you very most want to hear your message, who you want to serve and have in your orbit, and who you want to attract into your world. Who do you get out of bed in the morning thinking about serving?
Maybe some examples will help to clarify this idea:
- A medical researcher’s beloved avatar could be “patients with diagnoses needing new, effective treatments.”
- A ghostwriter’s beloved avatar could be “someone who is alive with purpose and vision.”
- A church music director’s beloved avatar could be the members of her congregation.
- A hospital supply company’s CEO’s beloved avatar could be “hospitals that are helping people get well again.”
Being specific about your beloved avatar is key. Remember, your audiences want you to do the heavy lifting and provide them with reasons to connect with you. We hinted at this at the beginning of the post, but now take a moment to answer a few key questions:
- What does your beloved avatar value most?
- What does your beloved avatar’s day look like?
- How old is your beloved avatar?
Answering these questions well means you’re doing the heavy lifting for the people you want to serve—and thereby making it easier for them to connect with you!
The Transformation Only You Can Make Happen
Finally, your key audiences expect you to be able to tell them what you can do for them—that no one else can. Being able to articulate this can be hard work. But doing so is also incredibly rewarding.
We call this statement of how you—and only you—can serve your beloved avatar your “transformation statement.” Some people call it your “elevator pitch” but we think that “transformation statement” more powerfully describes the idea that this is how you describe how you change the world for the better … in your unique way.
So, what is it that you alone can do for your beloved avatar?
If we turn back to the examples from the previous section, a medical researcher might be able to serve people with a diagnosis requiring new, effective treatment so they can “reap the benefits of safe and affordable, even life-saving, cancer care.”
A ghostwriter might be able to help their beloved avatar of a person who’s alive with vision and purpose so they can “confidently share with the world what matters to them most.”
A music director might be able to help her congregation members by providing world-class music “so they can tap into what makes their spirits soar.”
A medical supply company might provide supplies to hospitals that are helping people get well again “so they can boost their success rates and secure funding for future work.”
See how powerful this is?
Of course, once you have defined these key things—who you are, who you serve and the transformation only you can create—you must hone your messaging. Your audiences expect you to do that part of the heavy lifting too.
The ETA process is set up to help with that as well. When you leverage the ETA process from Revealing Genius, you’ll be able to answer “yes” to these questions about how you’re communicating your professional brand:
- Is my messaging clear?
- Is my messaging distinctive?
- Is my messaging consistent across all delivery channels?
Doing the heavy lifting of creating your professional brand is so important and so rewarding. Revealing Genius and our time-proven ETA process can help lighten the weight of it. We look forward to working with you.
