A thought

came to me a few days ago about a personal brand and ever since I have been leaning on to that thought. I captured that thought on one of my social media channels as follows:

A time is coming and now is when you will be engaged not because of your academic papers, but because of your personal brand. Bank that!

As the thought developed more in my mind, I went ahead and penned an article about it here so as to expound and explain it further.

It Might Not Be Obvious

It will be foolhardy though to assume that people know and understand what exactly a personal brand is. In fact, there are very many misconceptions out there about a personal brand. I wrote about that in this article, to capture just six major ones.

If we are to continue with this thought, it reminds me of what I predicated quite a number of years back. I said that the next biggest revolution that is going to visit the world is the revolution of purpose. I still stand by those words, but I am digressing.

Benefits of A Personal Brand

A personal brand is something that is making people who were erstwhile strangers work together as if they have known each other forever. It is through a personal brand that your reach to your audience grows exponentially.

Growth and development and opening of new markets and opportunities in the modern work world will largely depend on your personal brand than on your academic papers. After all, our academic papers form just but a fraction of what our personal brand is.

Getting Lost in the Crowd

We, therefore, need to understand crucially what a personal brand is and be about the business of building one. In this day and age, the most accomplished person, the most experienced person and the most educated person will always remain obscure without intentionally crafting a personal brand. It is that important.

The Core Of A Personal Brand

I am saying that because if you do not know what forms the core of your personal brand, you will go around hoping that the world will notice you and your efforts. That used to happen a lot in the decades that have gone. These days, there are just many of us and the world is filled with so much noise. If you do not craft your personal brand, you easily get lost in the crowd, your experience notwithstanding.

1. Your Value Add

As mentioned in the article previously, a personal brand is not about colors and logos. Those are aesthetics that come at the very end of showing your personal brand. There are three major things about your personal brand that you need to put in perspective.

• Knowing your brand,
• Owning your brand and
• Showing it, in that order.

When you know your brand, you get to know what solutions you are providing. Once again, let me say that you cannot do all things, neither were you created primarily to do all things. You were created to do something and that’s why you are passionate about it more than any other thing.

What Are You About?

A personal brand is therefore about what solution you are providing. It is about how caring you are and that is exemplified in what you have created, or what you are creating in order to solve a particular problem. A personal brand positions you as a hero who is up against a villain that is messing up the lives of the people that you love.

Hero and Villain

So the first thing you need to understand more than anything is that you are a hero. You need to understand what you are up against and you need to understand what tools you will use to defeat the villain. My villain is ignorance of potential. This results in poverty and people living way below their privileges. Therefore, my brand starts from the place of going against this villain with different tools.

There is one tool that helps me to stem this villain out of people’s lives, and that is informational inspiration. “To speak a word in season to those who are weary” is primarily what I do on a daily basis. I will talk about the weary in the next article.

Connect With Your Purpose

As you can see, a personal brand is directly connected to purpose. Purpose must be known, but purpose is shown primarily through a personal brand. If someone stopped you on the road and asked you, “Tell me, what are you about?” If you gave them the correct passionate and inspiring answer, that would be your purpose.

But guess what? When someone tells someone else about what you are about, it will be because they have encountered your personal brand.

What Defines You As A Hero?

A hero will always have a characteristic of compassion towards the people that he wants to deliver. At the same time, that hero will always have the characteristic of ruthlessness towards the villain that his disturbing his people. These two things need to be known before they can be exemplified in the personal brand.

In the previous article, I talked of a certain marketer whom I could not agree with. All he wanted was to push my podcast and give me numbers, but he did not want to even bother listening to one podcast episode. How in the world would he know what I am passionate about and what I am against? How would he up my personal brand without that critical piece of information?

Authenticity

As you sit down to craft your personal brand, take into consideration what solution you are offering, what value you are adding. In addition to your compassion and love as a hero, look at what you are good at, what you are skilled at and what you excel at. With those, form necessary solutions to the problems that your audience is facing.

If that is done, you will be well off the mark in crafting a personal brand worth of repute. We shall pick this up in the next article.