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PERSONAL BRANDING IS MORE THAN A SOCIAL MEDIA POST

It’s very tempting to think of personal branding as your LinkedIn Profile, Instagram posts or Facebook updates. Yes, they’re the concrete manifestation of your personal brand and if you want your business life to rise to the levels you dream of, you need that kind of visibility.

But here’s what you need to understand.

If you go straight to the ‘doing’ bit you risk:

  • Getting stuck, because you haven’t thought through how you like to position yourself.
  • Confusing people, because you randomly share anything that comes up as soon as you create an update (instead of being consistent).
  • Creating incongruency, because you haven’t aligned everything that makes up your personal brand (and you might not even be aware of it).
  • Losing inspiration, because at some point you realize you don’t have the proper plan to build your personal brand on.
  • Feeling overwhelmed and insecure, because you’re afraid you’re not doing it right or that you haven’t deserved your place yet.

In any case, thinking you can simply do this ‘on a gut feeling’ won’t get you there.

You can’t start with the fun parts of painting the house and decorating it, if you haven’t even built the house and its foundation yet.

So, what to do instead?

You need to get really clear on:

  1. Who you choose to be
  2. How you choose to show up
  3. What you wish to say & do

Let me clarify what this means.

Who do you choose to be?

Personal branding covers the area of ‘identity’. Your identity is the core focus when you build your personal brand. Now, it’s easy to say: “I know who I am! Why would I need to define my identity?”

Here’s why: because who you think you are now, might be stopping you from who you want to become. If you have a dream for the future, you can’t stick to your current sense of self. You can choose to become that person you’d love yourself to be. YES.

“Start with the end in mind!”

as Stephen Covey said. This means letting go of labels that you identify you now. Labels that served you for a while but might not serve you anymore. It’s about detaching from these labels, beliefs, and convictions to make space for new ones.

You’ve guessed it: this is a constant process of developing yourself. Of taking charge of your own personal growth. It’s no wonder personal branding is a skill related to personal leadership.

How do you choose to show up?

Identity relates to the parts that are within you, meaning your dreams, values, skills. HOW you are relates to the area of personality: all that you radiate and can be perceived by others. Yes, there’s an overlap, but I consciously make this distinction.

To make it simple, your personality is how you are, how you show up. This is mainly the energy you radiate and you show that through your facial expression, gestures and poses, clothing, language, digital presence, and so on. We’ve created our on reality over time. Everything we do is filtered through our brain.

As Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it so well:

“Your personality is your personal reality.”

Your personal reality is not the truth. It’s only one option of the reality. Over time, you’ve created a way of showing yourself around people that you believe to be ‘you’. It’s not. In fact, there’s a range of personality traits hidden inside of you that are merely underdeveloped but might really help you to move forward.

What do you choose to say and do?

A solid brand is not known for its products, but for its look on life, related to what they do. Its philosophy. YOU are representing yourself, you are your personal brand. What’s your look on life? What’s your message for this world? And how does that relate to what you do?

Your message is vital. And by aligning it with who you are, how you show up for this world, you have the potential of seriously making impact.

YES, that requires manifesting it. That requires the doing part as well. LinkedIn, Instagram or whatever social platform. Yes, it includes marketing like creating fabulous free-bees and making sure you keep communicating.

But it primarily starts with YOU.

Hope this helps!

 

Much Love,

Michelle

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