A personal brand

is a story told well. However, that story has to be complemented by what the personal brand delivers. Several years ago, a teacher intimated to me that his friend was looking for people with ideas and just couldn’t find any.

I was shocked. Luckily for me, I had a close friend who generated ideas like popcorn. I had worked with him and therefore was able to tell his story to the person that was looking for people with ideas. When I told that personal brand, when I discussed my friend’s story, a meeting was scheduled and a partnership was created.

It Always Starts With A Brand

For that to have happened, a personal brand had to be in existence. As I have already shared previously, all of us have a personal brand. What we need to do is to make sure that we know it and we own it. My friend had known his brand and was in the process of owning it. It was therefore not a big deal for me to tell his story.

Unfortunately, the story did not remain that rosy. The personal brand that my friend was championing started changing and changing and changing. That partnership that had been created started dying a natural death, and as I write, it is non-existent.

Much Needed Authenticity

I believe that if the first step in creating a personal brand would have been taken into consideration than that personal brand would have remained steadfast. I will say it again: A personal brand is all about authenticity. Once the authenticity suffers, the personal brand suffers too and any engagements that had accrued will also suffer.

1. Know Who You Are

At the end of the day, many people lose focus in life because they do not represent their personal brand to the fullest. This is because they are not authentic. To be authentic in life pursuits, one has to operate from the angel of value addition, and not from the angle of material gain.

Secondly, one has to be unique and stay unique in and of themselves. We are all different and we have been called to operate on different things. The whole wide world is interconnected not just by air, roads, internet, and seas, but by the uniqueness of each individual’s purpose.

Start With You, not The World

Therefore, the first step in crafting a personal brand is to start with the self, not the world. One has to find themselves, find their true north before knowing how they will navigate in the earth. The mistake people make is to look for where the money is as the first calling to life.

That is wrong. In creating a personal brand, money and any gain we are looking for are essential but it should never be the priority. The priority should always be the solution we are giving, the problems we are solving, and the value we are adding.

Knowing You

How do you know all about that? You start by looking critically at yourself. There are simple aspects of the self that can guide you to determine what kind of personal brand that you can build. Remember, this is unique to everyone.

People get scared of doing this because it is not readily going to answer that question: Where is the money? I can tell you that no matter how weird your personal brand is, for as long as it is unique and authentic to you, it has a place here on earth, it has an audience that it can serve.

1. What Are My Gifts and Talents?

I always say that the easiest way to determine your purpose, and by extension, your personal brand, is to look at what you are naturally good at. I mean, why in the world would you have a voice so great that you can sing and soothe but you do not use it?

Why on earth would you have a gift of inspiration but you do not speak? Why on earth would you have a great mind that can interpret designs and so on but you do not use it?

They Are In All of Us

Your gifts are the natural tools that you are equipped with in order to serve this world. Each person has a gift. We wrongly think that only sportspeople like Michael Jordan are the ones with gifts and talents. In building a personal brand that is compelling, start by finding out your strengths.

2. What Are My Skills?

Skills are different from talents. A skill is something that you have been trained at. With the convention of the status quo I discussed in this article, we have very many people skilled at the wrong thing. We also have people who think that if they are not skilled at anything, then they do not matter.

Therefore, they do not build a personal brand. If you wanted to create a compelling personal brand, you have to look at what you have nurtured over the years. It serves your authenticity as well as your passion.

3. What Knowledge Do I Have?

This is straight forward. It comes from your resume. What did you acquire from school? Again, we have a dichotomy here. There are those people who went to school and have knowledge that they did not want. They went there in response to what status quo demanded. Such knowledge cannot be used to build a compelling personal brand.

4. What Do I Have As a “Strength” But I Hate it?

This easily comes from the past two questions. If you are knowledgeable about something but you are not passionate about it, you cannot use that knowledge as a strength in order to build a personal brand. The same applies to your skills.

In building a personal brand, one has to identify what they are not passionate about, even if they do have a Diploma or a Degree in it. It is important to extricate that from your body of strengths. People will easily see what you hate, even if you are skilled and knowledgeable at it.

In building a personal brand, you need to build your strengths. Once you have identified what those strengths are, it follows that you will need to focus on improving on them incessantly and consistently.

Be Passionate and Patient

So, as you can see, a personal brand is not something that is built overnight. It takes time. Start honing those strengths, and start fanning that gift. The more consistent you are, the better. There has to be a very tiny interval between the consistency that you are building.

It is only when this part is done that we shall be confident that the personal brand is now standing on a very strong foundation.