Personal Brand: Got One?

What is your personal brand?

I was challenged last week by the thought introduced by Brian Tracy in his book TurboCoach(chapter 20, for those of you following along at home). "You may be surprised", he says, "to learn that you are your most important product." And as a product, each of us has a reputation, an image, things that people attribute to us. "It is not a question of whether you should have a personal brand image, for you already have one. Rather, it is a question of whether you choose to consciously create your personal brand or merely leave it to chance."

If you think about it, it's absolutely true. We think of this on a personal level - we are so often counseled in our youth to "guard our reputation". We diligently work to build a body of work as we seek to enter college ("the well rounded application") and then continue to build on it as we go through school, seeking either greater schooling or that first job.

And then, for many of us, we simply seem to fall off the map. Why is this?

Because we abdicate personal responsibility for our brand. We simply start to coast rather than build - and as Tracy points out, "There's only one direction you can coast."

As we work, our reputation becomes enmeshed in that of which we are working as well as other factors: the politics of where we live, the department and career in which is work, the functionality of the company we are in. Suddenly, it feels as if our reputation is not so much under our control as it is under the control of factors which we don't control: the manager who manages poorly yet takes all our credit; other departments which take all we do and still maintain that we do it badly; the coworker whose poor efforts tarnish the efforts of the department. Too often, we slowly begin to settle for the brand that is determined for us.

Our brand never goes away, of course; it's just that we lose the belief that our input is as important as that of the factors around us.

This sort of thinking, if left alone and applied to its logical extent, will leave us in 20 years somewhat surprised that we have absolutely no brand, no reputation, outside of the one which we had when we came in - the items we "used to do" - along with whatever the factors around us have given us.

What to do? That's what we'll discuss this week. But the most important fact for today is to simply become aware of the fact that, whether we like it or not, we each have a personal brand.

And that it is our job to consciously manage it.