How to Cultivate Positive Change in Your Business through Personal Branding
Shifting your personal brand can actually lead you to greater success. While change can be painful, at the same time, it’s the only way for you to continue to grow. And if you don’t grow, how can you change things?
Dian Diaz, brand strategist and self-proclaimed brand geek of The Brand Teacher joined us on the Planting Seeds of Change podcast to share insights from two decades of branding and teaching experience that will help us creative positive changes beginning with our personal brand.
Trust Comes with Consistency
Personal branding is at it’s core making sure your personal presence comes through everywhere it touches your audience. Consistency with how you show up in your brand builds trust in your audience. That’s what draws people to you. When your brand is consistent and your audience gets the same messages wherever they encounter you, they’ll trust you and then want to do business with you. Personal branding is all about building trust.
Bring Forward Your Personality
Personal branding is important because people are doing business with you personally. Yes, it’s your business, but they’re really doing business with a human being. Personal branding applies to everyone from the executive to the stay-at-home mom. If your personal brand comes across differently from the way you want to go with your career or life, it’s not going to take you there. You have to shift it around so certain attributes about you will come through. It’s about taking your authentic personality and bringing it out so it shows up online.
Get Feedback on Your Brand
Survey your audience to find out how you’re coming across. Make sure their answers align with how you want to be perceived and in a way that will lead you to your goals. If you don’t know how they’re seeing you, you can’t make those changes. Get feedback from them and then make changes to your personal brand.
Ask your friends, family, and co-workers. People who you trust will be able to give you insightful feedback. Tell them you’d like to better understand how you’re coming across to other people so you can meet your goals. This will get you started on understanding where there’s a disconnect between how you want to come across and how you actually come across.
Remember that your brand lives in the heart of your audience, Dian advised. You don’t get to decide how others feel. You can only align how you want to come across with how you actually are coming across.
Look at Feedback as a Whole
You will get feedback that surprises you. It may be just one thing one person says that stings. Try to look at feedback as a whole and not only one word someone says. That could be an outlier. You’re not going to make an overall change based on that one thing. That feedback might not even impact how you get to your goal. Instead, look at the aggregate and find themes. You can do something with that.
Accept the gift of feedback and dismiss what doesn’t impact your goals. Focus on your goal.
Be Yourself in a New Position
I’ve seen professionals that think because they’re a professional they have to behave a certain way. We connect with human beings with personalities and we want to feel those connections. If you don’t understand why you aren’t getting the results you expect, it’s simple. It’s being authentic and sharing who you are.
Sometimes we want to go in another direction, but we’re stuck using the same set of characteristics. You shouldn’t not be yourself, but you want to take what matches in your personality with the position you want to move into. If you’re moving into a leadership role, you can still be outgoing, but you might shift to highlight other aspects of you.
Start with Massive Curiosity
Approach everything with a level of curiosity, including yourself. Be inquisitive about how others see you and how well you’ve done your job. Being inquisitive to get feedback that might be a little uncomfortable will be the catalyst for great growth and positive change.
