Unleashing Your Inner Leader: An Executive Coach Tells All

CHAPTER 5

Personal Brand: How Do Others See You?

Personal branding is your unique promise of value. It is composed of your strengths, values, target audience, results, and benefits. Building and using your personal brand is not a check-the-box activity; it is a lifelong commitment to precisely and concisely telling the facts about you, on a daily basis. Doing it often will make it a natural part of you, in other words, a habit. Perceptions about you are constantly being reinforced by your audience. If they are good, keep them; if they are incorrect, you must work hard to change them. You are 100 percent in control of your personal brand. Your personal brand allows you to put your mark on everything that you do.

CASE STUDY

Meet Chin, an auditor by education with experience working for one of the top four accounting firms in Los Angeles. He has been a partner in the firm for seven years. The firm selected a few key partners to go through a personal branding training program, and I was the coach who was going to help Chin through this program. When I first met him, he was excited to have been chosen for this elite group but had no idea what personal branding was or what it could do to help him. He had heard the buzzwords and intellectually understood the concept of branding in general, especially as it relates to large companies having a brand, but was cautious, confused, and a bit distrustful of the whole personal branding process. It was going to be an interesting engagement for ...