It might have been fifteen years ago when I first heard about Personal Branding. "Oh, gag me!" had to be my first reaction. Personal Branding sounds gross. It sounds like another grovelly, 'look how awesome I am' business weenie tactic. Every few years we hear about some new way to brown-nose better than anyone else and say or be anyone you think the business world would like you to be.
Personal branding is one more way to praise yourself in the most grovelly and unseemly way. Spare me!
If you describe yourself as a Results-Oriented Professional with a Bottom-Line Orientation, then you have really lost track of who you are. You're slapping the same tired adjectives on your resume or LinkedIn profile that millions of other people slap on theirs. You're saying "See, boss? I know the lingo!" Your real self disappears under the weight of all that corporate zombiespeak. We can't even see you. You could be anybody, one of the faceless masses. Why would you want to do that to yourself?
If we get serious about personal branding and use the question "What is my brand?" to dive into a deeper exploration, we can learn amazing things. When the question "What is my brand?" is a pathway to the real question, "What do I want to accomplish in my lifetime?" then we get to the heart of the matter. Your brand is just the outward reflection of who are you, so -- who are you?
What do you want? What path are you on? Where are you planning to go? The easiest thing for a stressed-out business or professional person to say and to believe is "It's not my plan. I follow the market demands."
Market demands? That's a monumental declaration. It says that your career runs you, rather than the other way around.
A job or a career is a way to support the rest of your life and a way to express who you are. A job in the best case is a place to plug into your power source, your creative channel and grow your flame. That's not airy-fairy talk - it's real. When you work at a job where the people get you and you get to bring yourself to the projects without being hampered at every step by fear and bureaucracy, you blossom.
That's when you learn, when you feel that you're in the current moving fast with the water. You've alive then. That's what work is supposed to be.
Your brand is the expression in words of your purpose, not just your degrees and your years of experience. Anyone who is interested in knowing you or working with you had better be interested in where you come from and how you see the world - or why bother? You don't have time for people who want to squash your flame under a strict job description at a defined pay grade where the rules are set and you fill a cube in an ice cube tray. You have a lot more to bring to the world than that!
If you take a job that doesn't grow your flame, use it is as a springboard to find one that does. That's what you owe yourself, and the people who love you, and all of us. It's what we all owe one another.
You might sit down to update your LinkedIn profile on a rainy Sunday afternoon and get sucked into the questions "What do I want to say, here? Well, what do I want? What am I driving toward in my career, and for that matter in my life?" That would be a good day. The questions, of course, are more important than the answers.
