What’s up everyone, we’re talking about your personal branding journey this week, going from who you were to who you want to be next.
If you haven’t listened to the four stages of personal branding, that’s on Episode 176, where we kick off this season and start you on your journey.
WHAT IS THE BRANDING JOURNEY?
How do we get from who we used to be to where we want to go with our personal brand? We’re going to answer a few questions today. I know that when I was getting into my journey as a personal brand, figuring out how I wanted to tell my story to the world, get my name out there, and build my reputation, it was definitely a journey.
The things that come along with us and the roadblocks that we run into are all in our minds. It comes from our history, and our history is sometimes at odds with our present-day and what’s going on right now. It is definitely at odds with where we’re planning to go.
What I mean by that is our identity is changing. It continues to change. It is hard to remedy how who we used to be is changing because it’s been a part of us for so long. I want you to think about who you have been in the past, how you would typically have introduced yourself.
LOOK TO YOUR PAST FOR YOUR PRESENT JOURNEY
What were the jobs and the skills you had on your past journey? What were those strengths and weaknesses? Think about all those things that made you unique, all those things that contribute to your resume that was a part of your reputation and your story. Think about who you used to be. It may be a little bit of who you still are because obviously, you don’t lose those things.
Now answer that question: who were you? To me, it’s a bit like the Ghost of Christmas Past. If you’ve ever seen the Christmas Carol, whether the show, the movie, or the musical, there is this thing called the Ghost of Christmas Past. It’s all those things from the past that come back to haunt you a little bit.
That’s how I think about this. Who you used to be is an integral part of your identity and who you plan to be. What I want you to do is leverage those skills. We’ll talk about how to do that. Outline who you were and what those skills were. These are the skills I had. This is how people would call me in terms of my title or what they would describe me as, in terms of introducing me to other people. What am I good at, what am I known for?
WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN
Write all those things down for who you were. Now think about who you are right now and how you want to help people right now. What are you capable of helping people with right now, based on your current skills that you have confidence in? What is that? Is it different from who you were?
If not, then figure out what it is that you’d want to change to make it different. If you’re listening to this and you’re branding yourself, you’re usually on a journey to something you are chasing. Who you are now is important because sometimes it’s very confusing.
You might be at a point that’s so in the middle of who you were and what you’re chasing that it is confusing and you can’t even figure out who you are now. I’m going to go through this list. There are going to be a few identities I want you to write out and describe.
One is who you were, and the second is who you are now. The third is who you are becoming, and the last is who do you need to be to others in the future?
WHO ARE YOU ON YOUR BRANDING JOURNEY NOW?
We’re going to think about who you are now. Let’s say that you were working a corporate job. Let’s talk about me because it’s a little more specific. I was working in corporate. I worked in brand strategy for eighteen years before I jumped into being an entrepreneur. For me, I understood branding, marketing, and media. I had some skills, a lot of it related to corporate clients. That was who I was.
To get more specific, the last three years my job was working on clients that were fast food joints, specifically Jack in The Box. I was working on that account. When I entered the consulting business, I was debating this idea of, “Well, am I the restaurant marketing guy? Is that my thing?”
That debate became confusing to me because it was who I was the last few years. In a grander scheme of things, I was the marketing guy for retail. I was a marketing guy for consumer products. In general, I was a marketing guy.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
DON’T NICHE DOWN FROM WHO YOU WERE
When you get into specifics and people ask you to niche down, and you’re trying to do that for the who you are right now, it gets confusing. To niche down, you start to look at who you were. I think to pick a niche, you have to look at who you are becoming.
When I looked at who I am now, I thought, “Well now I’m trying to be an independent marketing consultant that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses, but that skill set is different from working in corporate marketing.”
I had to learn my client’s business. I had to learn their challenges and how to solve them using tools and skills that I understood, and also using tools and skills that I had yet to learn. I was this “in transition” person, but it was what I was now for sure. I was no longer doing corporate marketing.
The problem with that is when you’re in the middle of who you are now, sometimes you have a skill set that’s missing. You might need to get out there and develop some new skills or learn how to apply your old skills to your new role, your new identity. That’s where I was. I had to learn entrepreneurship and small business, and understand how I could help them with my past skills.
YOUR BRANDING JOURNEY NEEDS YOUR PAST SKILLS
That might be where you are right now. Maybe you have left who you were as that person and who you are now is trying to help somebody, but you are still learning how to work with that person. What are those skills that you need to be helpful? What are your services, and how do you set up that offering? What is your offer?
That’s the hard part about who you are now, but I’ll tell you, the light at the end of the tunnel is that this is something you can clarify simply by being open and finding people you trust to work with. Work through that with them and start to develop and figure out how you can help people the most.
TAKE ACTION AND DO THE THINGS!
Instead of overthinking it, you just need to try it. Get out there and try to help people in different ways. As you try different things, you’ll start to realize that there are certain things that you just enjoy more or that you’re better at. Maybe there are skills you want to bring to the table that you didn’t know. If you can learn them, you can apply them to these clients. That’s the “who you are now.”
Who you are becoming is this Ghost of Christmas Future. It’s this vision you have for yourself and who you want to be. What’s hard is trying to chase that is confusing because you want to introduce yourself to people like that thing you want to be next, but you have massive imposter syndrome around not actually being able to deliver upon that goal.
You don’t have those skills yet. You are not that person yet. You are not an established authority in that space yet to where you could own who you are becoming.
THE BRANDING JOURNEY EVOLVES
What I would say to that challenge is to live in the who you are now while developing the skills you need and the relationships you need to be who you are becoming. You don’t need to try to pretend that you are something you are not. It’s okay to live in the who you are now, but to get to where you’re going, there are a couple of things that you can do.
One is to pick up some new skills. When you picture the person that you are becoming, what are the skills that they have? Compare them to what you have and say, “Okay, what do I need to accomplish to get to be that person that I’m trying to be?”
Also, what is the perspective that I need to develop to get there? What are your opinions on the topics in this space and for the people who you want to serve for the person you’re becoming? Start to develop that too. It’s not just the actions and the things. It’s how you speak, how you explain, and how you teach the things that you want to be teaching people in the future.
For example, I was teaching people general marketing for small businesses. However, I wanted to get into this personal branding space and podcasting space, but I had to get better at it. I was learning those things but also sharing my opinions on those things as I learned them so that I could develop my own point of view, my own perspective.
DON’T BECOME A CARBON COPY OF SOMEONE ELSE
What you don’t want to do when you’re becoming something is just to be a duplicate copy of someone else who you see as that future vision of what you want to be, a carbon copy of someone else. I need you to show up as you applying all your past experience.
The only way to do that is to get out there and learn some things from these other people that have been there before. Try them, learn, and then apply it and come up with your own perspective on it.
That and your experience with that is what’s going to be the special sauce in the who you are becoming and getting there faster, actually trying things, having opinions, failing a little bit, winning a little bit. You can explain those failures and wins to people in a real contextual way because you’ve actually done it.
ERADICATE IMPOSTER SYNDROME
When you’ve done it, when you’ve experienced it, and when you come up with opinions on it, you start to eradicate that imposter syndrome because you’re actually doing it. You’re actually becoming that person that you want to become so that who you are will start to transition it into that naturally.
It doesn’t have to be a set goal that happens in two months or one month, but you do have to have that vision of who you want to be and be striving to get there through skills that you’re acquiring and the perspective that you are developing. If you can do those two things, you’re on your way.
WHO WILL YOU BE IN YOUR BRANDING JOURNEY?
The last piece to apply to all of this is figuring out not just who you need to be, but who you need to be to other people. What that means is not just the skills you want to develop to be who you want to be. If you actually wanted to help people as that future you, who would you need to be then?
Would you add new skills to that list? Would you need to actually be working with more people to have enough experience, to help that person? Who do you need to be to them? Who do you need to show up as?
Maybe your future customers need to have confidence in your opinions. They need to have confidence in the work you have done. They need to have confidence that you understand a system and you’ve become consistent in that system so that they know you can deliver results.
What do you need to do so that other people are going to align with who you are becoming? The best way to do this is to not just think about the things you want to learn, but think about what it is that the people you want to help need and how can you help them the best.
BECOME A PROBLEM SOLVER
Maybe everyone is having troubles and struggles with this topic or this thing. You don’t know the answer, so you go in and you try to solve it. You work through it and you work at it and you help people with it until you get to a point where you consistently can say, “You know what, I’ve solved this problem, or I have a pretty good solution for it. Now I want to try to deliver this over and over and over again.”
The difference is it’s coming from real-life problems that you’ve seen people have as opposed to things in your head that you’re just strategizing. I actually want you to get out there in the field, try things, and get out there and help people.
When you can deliver on that consistently in a way that you can explain, suddenly you have a curriculum. You have a set of steps, a set of operations that are going to give people a result. When you can deliver results, you are now owning your identity and living in who you want to be. You can set goals for the future beyond.
However, let’s picture you as the who you are now, who you are this day in the present. Every year or every few months, you’ll continue to adjust this scenario. Always be developing new skills, growing, and adjusting who you’re serving.
YOUR PAST IS PART OF YOUR BRANDING JOURNEY
Those are the four things. I don’t want you to lose the who you were, but you shouldn’t go backward. I don’t want you to start doing the work that you used to do anymore, but I’d love you to take those skills, bring them with you and then murder the person you used to be, not the skills, just the identity.
Bring that with you as experience, history, and knowledge, and then apply that to who you are now. Bring with it that curiosity to become who you want to be for yourself and for others.
That’s the road to being uniquely you for being an ownable personal brand in your industry that is authentic, that has been there, that doesn’t have imposter syndrome, that believes in what they are selling, that believes in how they are serving and is actually making an impact in the world.
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MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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Talk soon!