The other day, I read a post that got me thinking about my own Personal Branding journey. Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute wrote about how Walt Disney’s dreams lead to Disney World and challenged his readers:
What do you want so badly that you’d ignore all the nay sayers, tune out all of negativity, keep getting up every time you get knocked down and when you close your eyes… you don’t see what might be, you see what WILL be? And… when are you going to start making it a reality?
That’s really important for all of us who are intent on branding ourselves. Because personal branding isn’t about setting yourself up to do something for which you don’t have a lot of passion. It’s about figuring out what your dream is – and setting yourself up to achieve it.
For me, I realized early on that all I ever wanted to do was work in innovation. And since there are a few companies working there, that meant I couldn’t get into those companies without putting in extraordinary networking effort. So this introvert had to put down all the books she loved, and learn how to meet people and develop relationships.
Easy or hard to put yourself out there
To be honest, that was a really uncomfortable thing for me to do. To walk into a gathering of people I don’t know, and to put myself out there to get to know them – pure torture. (It still is.) But I do it because I’m absolutely sure that I want my dreams more than I want to be comfortable at home reading my books.
So, if you’re branding yourself, you need to ask what you want enough to make yourself uncomfortable? What would you put yourself into a new situation for? What would you give up your free time for? What would you do for nothing if it would get you on the road to where you want to go? What is your unique vision for yourself?
Personal Branding doesn’t work if you want what everyone else does in life. It works best if you figure out what you strongly and uniquely want for yourself out of life.
And because Personal Branding requires you to sacrifice your free time and go beyond your comfort zone – it needs to be something that you really desire.
Because there will be naysayers. And you will fair – and have to pick yourself up again to start over. So if you don’t view your ultimate goal as worth the discomfort, you’ll probably never be strong enough to achieve it.
Author:
Katie Konrath blogs about creativity, innovation and “ideas so fresh… they should be slapped” at www.getfreshminds.com. She works for leading innovation company, Ideas To Go.
