Who are You? Who, Who, Who, Who?
A guide to discovering ‘you’ by determining your personal brand.
A few years ago, I came close to hitting rock bottom at work. I was doing pretty well with a growing team, happy stakeholders, work getting done and receiving great feedback overall. However, I was getting passed over every promotion opportunity that came along. I was close to quitting till I had a conversation with a colleague from HR. I was asked to think about my personal brand and I thought to myself “Here we go again with some bull s**t from HR!”. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a go.
A Google search is where I started as one normally does.
“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room - remember that. And more importantly, let’s discover why!”. Chris Ducker
Amongst several quotes, references and articles, I found a Personal Brand Workbook from PwC that piqued my interest. The very first line in the workbook said ‘Welcome to your personal brand experience’.
It was not till 8 weeks later when I appreciated why the personal brand ‘experience’ proved to be far more important than what my personal brand turned out to be. Here’s why, along with an approach I’d recommend.
Distil Your Strengths
According to Gallup, traditional workplace development focusses on finding and fixing people’s weaknesses. Developing our strengths help us become more confident, productive and self-aware. So start by looking at your strengths. I would suggest doing this in three ways.
1. An ‘Inside-Out’ View
“To find yourself, think for yourself”. Socrates
Ask yourself what your superpowers are. What do you do better than others? This may be your ability to build credibility and trust, the incredible way in which you spread positivity in the most dire situations, or your uncanny way to simply get things done.
2. An ‘Outside-In’ View
Ask your team, your peers, your leaders, people you work with regularly and ones you interact with occasionally the following questions.
What do I do better than others?
What would you come to me for?
What adjectives would you use to describe me?
3. A Strengths Assessment
CliftonStrenghts Assessment is a great tried and tested way to outline your talents. The online test will measure the intensity of your talents in each of the 34 CliftonStrengths themes. These 34 themes represent what people do best. They categorise all that’s right with humankind — distilled down to 34 different themes!
As you assimilate the ‘inside-out’, ‘outside-in’ and ‘strengths assessment’ views, you start to get a pretty good view of what makes you unique.
Tap into Your Values
We all have a set of values that guide, motivate and direct us in everything that we do. They are a compass, a checklist, a set of characteristics and behaviours that determine how we act and what we expect of others.
“Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same but you leave ’em all over everything you do.” Elvis Presley
Identify your top 5 values. James Clear has a core-values list that will help. You will be surprised at how hard it is to pick the 5 values you will put above all else. However, you will learn a lot more about yourself as you go about doing this.
Dig Deep into Your Passions
Many of us aren’t fortunate enough to earn a living off something we are passionate about. But all of us can integrate our passions into what we do.
“Finding your passion isn’t just about careers and money. It’s about finding your authentic self. The one you’ve buried beneath other people’s needs.” Anonymous
I like jazz. On the surface, I listen to a lot of it, enjoy reading about it and am trying to be a jazz musician myself. As I dug deeper I realised that a big part of my passion for jazz is in fact rooted in my fascination for improvisation. Every performance of a ‘jazz standard’ is refreshingly different. It involves creation of something new but based on a number of constructs. And this at its core is what excites me in a work situation when we are say creating a new product line or pitching a new idea!
Define Your Purpose
As you start to get a better view of who you are through your strengths, values and passions, you aim to go back to the future.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”. George Bernard Shaw
Visualise and articulate what your big picture is. Reflect on what’s been important to you, what you would like to achieve in 5 or 10 years, what you would like to be proud of and what are you likely to regret.
I found out a lot more about myself in those 8 weeks than I’d imagined! I played it all back to my colleague in HR who to this day I look up to for guidance and advice. We had a long conversation about several other topics related to building on your personal brand and making an impact, how the way we communicate impacts our brand (non-verbal, tonal, verbal), the importance of networking, presence on all forms of physical, online and social media and the constant need to re-brand from time to time. Several months later, I was promoted into a bigger broader role.
It was down to three things.
Know who you are
Be who you are
Don’t be afraid to let people know who you are
No amount of branding or marketing yourself will make a difference if you do not first discover ‘you’!
“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken”. Oscar Wilde