3 Ways to Destroy Your Personal Brand in One Day

  • 0 min read

You’ve spent a lot of time building your personal brand. Don’t ruin all of your hard work by doing any of these things:

Lying

No one likes a liar. And those folks who have built a well-respected personal brand tend to be the ones that fall the hardest when they’re caught in a lie (Tiger Woods, anyone?). You probably haven’t built your personal brand around being dishonest, so even a small fib can hurt the brand you’ve built.

Posting something incriminating

Thinking about posting a picture from that recent bar night with your friends? What about a ranting letter to the editor online? These can affect your personal brand in a negative way—even if you don’t think anyone will see it. Privacy settings and usernames only protect you to a certain degree, so it’s important to think, “What if this content become associated with my professional brand?” before you post. This includes blog comments, social media posts, and shared videos.

Doing something stupid

With so many services keeping online public records, you can’t hide anything anymore. If you make a bad decision in your personal life (or even, at times, professionally) it will be posted almost instantly to an online news source or law enforcement agency’s website.

Hopefully, knowing how these bad decisions can affect your personal brand and career will help stop you from making them.

Picture of Heather R. Huhman

Heather R. Huhman

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert and founder & president ​of Come Recommended, a career and workplace education and consulting firm specializing in young professionals. She is also the author of#ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), national entry-level careers columnist forExaminer.com and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

The difference between the words you recognize and the words you actually use — and what that gap says about how you learned them

The difference between the words you recognize and the words you actually use — and what that gap says about how you learned them

Global English Editing
Psychology says older adults who scroll the most in the evening usually aren’t the loneliest people in the house. They’re often the ones who found it, quietly, the safest substitute they have left for calling someone directly.

Psychology says older adults who scroll the most in the evening usually aren’t the loneliest people in the house. They’re often the ones who found it, quietly, the safest substitute they have left for calling someone directly.

The Blog Herald
People who feel like they’re “too much” for every partner they’ve had usually aren’t — they’ve just been with people who wanted less of them than they deserved

People who feel like they’re “too much” for every partner they’ve had usually aren’t — they’ve just been with people who wanted less of them than they deserved

The Vessel
Keeping the counter clear while cooking is partly a private habit and partly a quiet form of consideration — a way of leaving the kitchen usable for whoever moves through it next, without needing to say so out loud

Keeping the counter clear while cooking is partly a private habit and partly a quiet form of consideration — a way of leaving the kitchen usable for whoever moves through it next, without needing to say so out loud

Global English Editing
Commercial body sprays may smell harmless, but the synthetic chemicals they contain have been linked to hormone disruption and serious health risks

Commercial body sprays may smell harmless, but the synthetic chemicals they contain have been linked to hormone disruption and serious health risks

The Vessel
People who are truly pleasant and kind but have no close friends often spent years as someone’s emergency contact and no one’s everyday one — and the gap between those two roles is where the loneliness actually lives

People who are truly pleasant and kind but have no close friends often spent years as someone’s emergency contact and no one’s everyday one — and the gap between those two roles is where the loneliness actually lives

The Vessel
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore