Successful People Create and Nurture Their Unique and Powerful Personal Brand

Positive personal impact is one of the keys to career success that is part of my Career Success GPS System.  As a career success coach, I help my clients create positive personal impact.  I discuss in several of my books: Straight Talk for Success, Star Power, I Want YOU…To Succeed, Your Success GPS and 42 Rules to Jumpstart Your Professional Success. 

If you want to create positive personal impact, you need to do three things: 1) create, build and nurture your unique personal brand; 2) dress for success; and 3) know and follow the basic rules of etiquette.

Have you created your personal brand yet?  What is it?  How do you use it to help create your career success?  If you have already created your unique personal brand, please leave a comment sharing your personal branding experiences with us.  If not, listen up.  Here’s how to do it.

I get lots of questions about how to create, build and nurture a personal brand.  I always advise my career success coaching clients to focus on the Three C’s of branding.  Your brand needs to be clear, consistent and constant – meaning that people need to be able to easily understand your brand, your brand must be consistent with who you are as a person and you need to stay on brand all the time in all you do.

I’ve found that clarity is the C that gives my career success coaching clients the most trouble.  Here are four simple questions that can help you clarify your personal brand. 

These four questions are simple, but require some thought. 

• What?  What do I do?
• Why?  Why is it important?
• How?  How do I do it?
• So What?  Why does this matter in the long run?

Let me use my Common Sense Guy brand as an example.

• What?  I help individual people, teams and entire organizations succeed by applying their common sense.
• Why?  Common sense is often overlooked.  Most problems have simple answers that can be solved by the application of time tested, common sense principals.
• How?  I coach individuals.  Facilitate team building workshops.  Analyze organizations and suggest and help implement strategic changes.
• So What? Individual, team and organizational success require constant renewal.  Common sense says it’s important for people, teams and organizations to periodically review their goals and aspirations, as well as their progress in reaching them.

Can you answer these four simple questions about yourself?  If so, you have created your personal brand.  Now you need to build and nurture it by making your actions consistent with it, and making it a constant part of your behavior.

The common sense point is simple.  Successful people create, build and nurture their personal brands.  You can create your unique personal brand by answering the following four questions.  1) What do I do?  2) Why is it important?  3) How do I do it? 4) Why does this matter in the long run?  These questions may seem simple at first glance, but they can help you summarize what you want to communicate about yourself to the rest of the world – and that’s a great start on creating your personal brand.

That’s my take on personal branding and the four simple questions of What? Why? How? So What?  What’s your take?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with the rest of us.  I really appreciate and value your thoughts and comments.  Thanks for reading.

Bud