“My word is my bond.”
“Love and light!”
“I eat my competition for breakfast.”
Recognizing the importance of your brand is paramount to lifelong success. The type of person you choose to be is reflected in the decisions and actions you make every day. Your professional and personal brand is what people think and say about you; you can positively influence this by choosing to be a person of good character.
There are some steps you can follow to best recognize and, if necessary, realign your brand. Luckily, researching and finding blogs or pieces of information is the first best step I can suggest – so, well done!
Researching character traits and considering the phrases you’d like people to use when describing you will definitely help. Understand that if you want to be recognized as this specific brand, you need to be that person every day, in every way.
- Audit your Social Media and your name search results. Assessing your current brand and recognizing the steps necessary to get where you want to be is essential. Take a personal inventory of all your social media accounts and audit each one. Keeping your personal life personal is job #1. Job #2 is to make sure that what is searchable for your name reflects the professional brand you choose. This is an excellent habit to get into, I suggest doing it quarterly.
- Collect feedback. Communicate with people in your circle, and ask them for their feedback and implement changes that serve your purpose. Consider the words that people use to describe you, if the words they share do not feel good, or could feel better now is the time to assess and align. Checking back with these people regularly is a great way to measure the impact of the changes you’ve made.
- Consistency is key.
Maintaining your brand is important, whether it is personal or professional, people should be able to recognize you in all platforms as being the same person. Keeping the same or a similar photo across all your professional networks is a good idea, it is best not to update your profile pictures constantly. If you are hoping to be contacted when opportunities become available, I suggest you ensure that your contact information is current and readily available on your social media accounts.
An example, if your brand is that of ‘a person of integrity,’ it means following through with commitments and honouring your word. Needless to say, having integrity means that people can trust you because you do what you say you’re going to do. Hence, in an employee/employer relationship, it means that when you say you’ll give 2 weeks’ notice before you leave, you do that. It means that if you say you’ll complete a task by a certain time, you do it before the deadline. Moral of the story, having a personal brand of integrity means that when you say you’ll do your best, you actually do your best.
We each get to pick our character, and we each get to influence our brand. To maintain good character, we need to build good habits, and always align our behaviours with the person we choose to be. I suggest you take 20 minutes to consider the brand you want to have and identifying which character traits will support that brand. Over the coming days, if this is a priority, you’ll start to recognize which decisions do and don’t align with the person you choose to be. There are a lot of resources and tools out there to help you build your best life – but what that looks like, well, that’s up to you.
*I support job seekers who are legally entitled to work in Canada and who are willing to commit long term to their new employer. I focus on supporting Saskatchewan – people and companies. If you are interested in finding work within Saskatchewan or are looking for quality people to hire in Saskatchewan, please reach out to me at Dawn@sourcingpeople.ca. I’m happy to help where I’m able.
