Career Advice

Personal branding has become essential for communicating your value and establishing yourself as a trustworthy person in your industry. However, it can be confusing to understand exactly what your personal brand is and how you should present it. Some may even wonder why they need a personal brand in the first place. Having a strong personal brand can help you attract the opportunities and people you are looking for, and there are a couple of steps that you can take to start improving your personal brand today.

Fly High Coaching’s Porschia Parker-Griffin interviewed marketing and branding expert Stacey Ruth for their Career 101 Podcast about what personal branding is, how you can start your personal brand, and how you can improve upon the personal brand you already have. In this engaging conversation, they provide all the information that you need to start working on your personal brand today. Fly High Coaching also provides several resources like the Ace the Interview Guide to help you improve the skills that will help to further strengthen your ability to promote yourself to others authentically and effectively. Below are some of the key takeaways from their conversation together. Take notes!

• What is personal branding?
  • When it comes to answering this question Stacey says that it is all about how we influence others, how we grow our personal impact in both our organizations and in the world, how we want to be perceived, what we want to be known for, and how we want to be remembered. Having the right personal branding is what will attract the right employees, opportunities, businesses, and clients. It is how you will build trust and create a positive name for yourself.
• Professional vs Personal Brand
  • Stacey defines a professional brand as the personal brand of a professional individual. A personal brand does not require you to be in any kind of professional setting, but if you are looking to create more of a “professional brand” there is going to be some overlap with your personal brand since your personal experiences are still going to influence who you are professionally. It’s hard to separate them, especially today with social media and how connected we all have become, it’s hard to create that separation even if you tried.
• What is a personal branding statement?
  • There are many different ways to think about this, some people treat it as a tagline or mantra, but Stacey likes to think of it as a purpose statement. What do you uniquely do best? How do you uniquely help? Who do you uniquely help? Ultimately, we are here to help each other and that is what your personal statement should convey.

• What to Avoid/ Biggest Mistakes People Make
  • Being Inauthentic: I am sure we have all seen people on social media or in professional settings who come off as disingenuous or even “cringey” with how they present their personal brand. Sometimes it might feel overly fake or “put-on” and that can have the opposite effect you want for your personal brand since the goal is to build trust. To avoid this Stacey recommends making sure that you are being authentic and not just presenting what you think your “best self” should be. What you want to do is present your best self including your learning experiences that might have come from not-so-great moments that you were able to grow from. Building on those experiences creates an authentic story that shows your talents but doesn’t come off in an aggressively positive or disingenuous way.
  • Lacking clarity or patience: People might try to emulate others that they see are successful, which is a great place to start off. However, continually changing your brands focus to match what others are doing can end up confusing others about who you actually are.
  • Lacking commitment and consistency: Having a strong commitment to yourself to continue your growth and be consistent is key to developing your personal brand. It’s a daily practice. Don’t expect fast results and have patience with your growth.
  • Launching too soon: If you launch your brand before you have done the work and the diligence to understand it and be clear about it, you can end up undercutting yourself and it’s a lot harder to rebuild a brand than it is to have patience and launch when you’re ready.

• How can having a strong personal brand help someone in their career?
  • Stacey says that it’s a necessity! We all already have brands but taking over the management and control of your brand means that you can choose the direction you go in and how you set yourself up for success. If you aren’t in control of your own brand, then that means you’re defaulting to letting someone else control it. You can take the power into your own hands by taking courses to help you Land Your Dream Job and utilizing other resources that you find to help your brand. Stacey emphasizes that the importance is to know what it is that you want and how your purpose, desires, and talents all play into that. The only way to create fulfilling growth is by taking ownership of your brand.

• What advice would you give to people who want to improve their personal brand?
  • Stacey says that first, you should look at whether you need to. The tell-tale signs that you need to improve your personal brand are if you are not attracting the opportunities that you want, the RIGHT kind of clients you want, or the team you want. Then it might be time for a brand refresh.
  • Start with you. What are your values? What are your strengths? Your talents? Your passions? Where do you really feel like you can serve? What do other people say about you? What do they tell you? What are your superpowers? What is your archetype? Really learn about you before you decide how to express that to the world. Then from here, you can figure out who you’re serving, how you’re serving them, and what they really want. Where is the gap that you can fill?
  • Increase your visibility. If people see you, then they get a chance to know you, then they get a chance to love you and trust you. The visibility is unique to your skillset, it could be speaking, writing, blogging, or even creating a movement. There is no better way to increase your visibility than to connect with other people and serve other people.

Hopefully, with these tips from Stacey Ruth and the resources from Fly High Coaching, you will be able to start building your personal brand today!  Listen to the podcast here!