THE KEYS TO PERSONAL BRANDING

I was working with a series of clients last week, all of whom work for the same big company, and a numer of them have issues with personal branding. This is a nice, voguish term for thinking about the impression we make on others. Reflecting on the strategies we put n place I think there are just two key secrets to doing this successfully:-

• Communication, communication, communication: With our ‘brand’ we are trying to communicate the essence of who we are, what our values are and what we have to offer the world. One of the key things to dong this really successfully is to ensure that the messages you are seeking to ‘sell’ are true and congruent with who you are. We are all too familiar with the slimy politicians who want us to buy some image that we just know is only skin deep. There are three reasons for making it real:-
  • It takes a vast amount of energy to maintain this false façade, and we all have better things to do with our energy, and
  • We are at our most successful when we are fully aligned with our true selves, and
  • Human beings have a hard-wired bull sh1t detector! (We literally have a programme that scans for incongruities, which we are predisposed to believe no matter what words we hear. More on this another day)
    
• Rapport: this is the name for what we do when we blend with those we are with. It is a legacy of evolution that, like a herd of grazing gazelles, we have sensors that scan for anything that isn’t a fellow gazelle. We can’t afford to let those lions creep up on us can we?! So we are always subliminally alert for whether people are like us (and therefore by definition ‘Safe‘) or different and ‘Dangerous‘! We do this in many, many ways
  
  • Do they talk like us (same language, same accent, same pace, same volume even)?
    
  • Do they look like us (same skin colour, same clothes, same height)?
    
  • Do they do what we do (odd habits or mannerisms, manners, hobbies or interests)?
    
  • Are they the same as us (colour, race, age, sex, background, education)?
    

  This is why it was always important to have gone to the ‘right’ school, college etc, because that made you ‘one of us’.

Now I am not suggesting that you can necessarily change the items in 2 above, but understanding their impact and how this mechanism works can help you to avoid situations you don’t want to get into and put people at their ease, whilst you are communication who you really are. The thing is once we feel we understand a person, they get a ‘Safe’ sticker (rather like the gazelles don’t run away from the birds that land amongst them). It is so easy to trip other people’s mechanisms and get attacked, it has certainly happened to me! Hopefully this will help you to stay safe….

“The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.” Richard Branson

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 08:19 and is filed under Business Change, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.