30 Dangerous Personal Branding Habits

Which of these bad personal branding habits have you struggled with?

Of the list that follows, here are a few that have bitten me in the past, and occasionally come back to haunt:

Over-staying in your comfort zone

Break this habit by replacing it with a good one: once you start feeling comfortable with where your personal brand is at, take that feeling as a warning sign that you need to come up with new brand-building ideas and start executing on them.

Trying to do everything by yourself

Just because it’s your personal brand doesn’t mean you need to do all the personal branding work. If you’re serious about your brand, get assistance and expertise from people who can execute better than you at specific tasks.

Letting yourself be overwhelmed into inactivity

Being overwhelmed is a result of a lack of priorities and a lack of organization. The most common example today is probably the ever-overflowing email inbox, a situation now made worse with the addition of social media messaging and cellphone text messaging. In this example, figure out which messages are most important and act on those ASAP while blocking everything else. Once you’re done, go through the latter and block as much as you can permanently. For more specific ideas, google ‘organize inbox’.

And now for the complete list…

30 bad habits

1. Outright lying.
2. Being inauthentic or just fake.
3. Not delivering on promises, or just things you said you would do.
4. Not following up.
5. Aiming for quantity, not quality.
6. Not measuring what you do, which makes it that much harder to know what you really achieved or not.
7. Spending too much time measuring, or getting caught up in analysis paralysis.
8. Not listening enough to your audience.
9. Too much self-promotion.
10. Navel gazing (too much self-focus).
11. Not dressing the part.
12. Being too aggressive.
13. Over-staying in your comfort zone.
14. Lacking confidence i.e. not being aggressive enough.
15. Not having a plan.
16. Lacking focus.
17. Being inconsistent.
18. Unintentionally frustrating potential brand loyalists.
19. Switching tools, systems and/or methodologies too often.
20. Too much branding reuse such as excessive cross-posting on social media.
21. Trying to do everything by yourself.
22. Over exposure.
23. Lack of exposure.
24. Unnecessary hyping.
25. Having unrealistic expectations.
26. Building unrealistic expectations in others.
27. Letting yourself be overwhelmed into inactivity.
28. Spending too much effort online, not enough offline.
29. Spending too much effort offline, not enough online.
30. Not spending enough effort anywhere.

Any other suggestions for the list?

Author:

Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.