Managing Your Personal Brand

Photo by Gjon Mili

Action is the foundational key to all success.
                                     --Pablo Picasso

You might also be interested in Life Skills Coaching.

Managing Your Personal Brand, which is a blend of personal and career counseling, is one of the most popular topics for individual coaching.

In a dynamic, ever-changing work environment, your success depends a great deal on how well you market yourself, and promote your capabilities and accomplishments. In other words, you need to manage your personal brand. 

The purpose of this program is to increase your effectiveness by enhancing your ability to influence others and communicate the value you add to your "clients." You will learn how to forward your career goals by applying strategies used by name brand companies to differentiate themselves, build customer loyalty, and grow their business.

Here are the steps involved in defining and actualizing your personal brand: 

Step 1: Conduct a Personal Brand Audit
The process starts with an analysis of how you currently perceive yourself, how you believe others currently perceive you, and how you would like to be perceived in the future. A gap analysis is used to reveal where to focus your brand-building efforts.

Step 2: Formulate a Personal Brand Positioning Statement
Writing a Positioning Statement defining your unique capabilities helps you distinguish your brand in terms that are most relevant to your target audience.

Step 3: Develop a Personal Brand Strategy
Determining what concrete steps to take to reposition yourself and close the perception gap is the focus of this strategy.

Step 4: Design an Influence Network Map
Creating a visual representation of the relationships you have with stakeholders who are critical to the success of your project, team, or career enables you to refine your influence strategies.

Step 5: Create a Personal Brand Communications Plan 
Communications planning involves defining the goal(s) you want to accomplish—being specific about what you need from key stakeholders, why you need it, how you need it, and by when you need it.  Then deciding, what’s in it for them to deliver what you need.

Step 6: Express Your Brand Essence Visually
Images that illustrate your core attributes are incorporated into a cohesive brand narrative that tells the story of who you are, and what can be gained by working with you.

Step 7: Declare Your Brand Promise in a Vision Manifesto
In the same way that a name brand company expresses and reinforces its brand through the products and services it delivers, your personal brand becomes real for people through the ways in which you engage with them and the quality of work you produce.  This final step is a commitment to implement a specific career goal with a detailed action plan for achieving it.