Build Your Brand Through Developing Your Self-Awareness

  • 1 min read

A key component of developing your personal brand is to understand your strengths and weaknesses. It can be difficult to step outside of our self-perceptions and take a critical look at ourselves, but the process of doing so is imperative to increasing our self-awareness and focusing our brand towards areas where we are confident we can be successful.

I teach courses in human relations, with the key aspect of these courses focusing on developing the self-awareness of my students.  Throughout the course, students take weekly assessments to cultivate a deeper understanding of their personality, stress type, communication skills, and conflict and decision making styles.  What I love about teaching this course is that it results in students having a much deeper awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to have more productive relationships.

So how do you begin to develop your self-awareness?  A good place to start is to take assessments that will help raise awareness of the various aspects of your natural personality.  Below are some of the assessments that I have used – give them a try and see what you can learn about yourself.

Mindtools – is a great site that with many free resources and assessments that will help you better understand your leadership and management styles, decision making effectiveness, and how well you manage stress and your time.

SimilarMinds – what this site lacks in explanatory resources, it makes up for in assessment options!  This site is a cornucopia of personality assessment including the Jung/Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram.  After you get your results – just Google them and you’ll find tons of explanations of your type results!

Queendom — is a site full of great assessments to help you develop an understanding of your personality and communication skills.  They also have lots of career assessments.

Check out these resources and begin your journey of developing your self-awareness. This exercise will truly help you better understand your personal brand.

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Michael Spinale

Mike Spinale is a corporate Human Resources leader at a healthcare information technology company located outside of Boston, Massachusetts and is an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University. He has over eight years of experience in HR and management including career counseling, recruitment, staffing, employment branding, and talent management.  Mike has dedicated his HR career to modern views on the field – HR is not about the personnel files – it’s about bringing on the best talent, ensuring they’re in the right seat, and keeping them motivated and growing in their careers. In addition, Mike is the author of the CareerSpin blog where he offers advice and opinion on job search, personal & employment branding, recruiting, and HR. Mike is a certified Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Babson College. He is also a board member of the Metro-North Regional Employment Board, a board which sets workforce development policy for Boston’s Metro-North region, and an active member of the Society for Human Resource Management and the Northeast Human Resources Association.

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