Your personal brand is built in the smallest decisions

I strongly feel that building your personal brand is important. Not only to use it as a leverage to achieve your goals, or to actively seek opportunities, but to simply preserve who we truly are. In the world full of opinions, it's easy to lose ourselves, to second guess our intuitions, to simply be a part of the herd rather than owning and standing by what we feel.

When I say a strong personal brand, I don't mean to materialize who you are. A personal brand here is how people see you, how they feel around you, and most importantly how you feel about yourself. I could have used "a strong personality" instead, but it doesn't really deliver the depth. Personality is superficial, something which can easily be overlooked. A personal brand in my opinion is something which can't be ignored, something which has a bigger impact and it's much more than what you see on the surface.

So what do I mean when I say 'personal brand'?

It involves everything that makes you 'you'. The smallest of ways in which you react to a situation, the way you handle an argument, the way you deal with different types of people, the things you believe in, your values, your habits, it's everything through which you tell the world who you are. Your personal brand should not be limited to what you have studied, what job you do, or how much money you have. It should have more dimensions to it, people should know you beyond what you do, they should know who you are as a complete person.

You should be building a personal brand to add richness to your identity. If you or anyone thinks about you, what is it that they recall? Do they only recall you as someone who they met in school, or someone who is doing a job in a particular field? Or when someone spends time with you, even if it is brief, what do they take with them about you?

It's really your choice if you wish to build yourself or not, but if you decide to do, it's going to be a testament that you take yourself seriously, that you take your life seriously, and that you are not just moving through it aimlessly. If you are someone ambitious then I think you get what I am trying to say. 

Building your personal brand doesn't always have to be online, it's totally your choice. It can be offline too, if you have a social circle, or if you simply have people around you to interact with, you can really build your personal brand through moderating that path too.

So a personal brand is basically what different dimensions you have, like what are your interests, what you enjoy doing after a tough day, or how you treat people around you, the more aspects you discover, the richer your personality becomes, and the stronger your personal brand is. You can't be only about waking up, going to office, and coming back home. There has to be more about you that you need to discover, that people need to know!

And therefore the first step towards building a personal brand is to communicate. Communicate about things that matter to you. Whether it's your opinion on certain subjects, or just sometimes non-verbal communication that talks about your style, or your body language. Consistency in communication is important, deciding the frequency of how much needs to be told is up to you.

Second is to sometimes listen to what people have to say about you. They might tend to show you certain weaknesses which you never realised you had, and so it's very important that you listen, you ask yourself whether it's true or not, and whether you would like to do anything about it.

And third is to always be true to yourself. To keep listening to how you feel about something, to keep analysing what your intuition is trying to tell you. The more you start listening to the very first thoughts in your head, and the more you start scrutinizing them, you will learn to trust your decisions.

It's very simple, building a personal brand shouldn't make you feel exhausted, it should make you feel empowered, it should make you feel seen. It will only make you feel exhausted when you are trying to be someone else, when you do things because everyone around you is doing it.

Go ahead, be consistent in ways that will shape your personal brand for good. Take yourself as a project you are constantly working on, and take yourself more seriously, it's time that you start owning who you are and be confident in who you are becoming.

Because if you ever felt that you want to do something meaningful with your life, that you don't want to let it go waste, that you really want to be your best, and that you just want to be proud of yourself, you need to first build a personal brand. When you let yourself know who you are, when you let others around you know who you are, opportunities align themselves. And when that happens, you start seeing exactly what you want from life and you start working towards it without just beating around the bush and playing the guessing game as to what you want from life.

That's all for this time!

See you again on Saturday!

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