Create Your Powerful Personal Brand.

Lately I have been spending quite a bit of time coaching clients who are looking to understand how their interactions with others affect their relationships. They have asked how they can cultivate more meaningful relationships as they’ve been forced to remain indoors and maintain relationships from afar.

Here are responses to some of the more common questions I have been receiving, as well as effective strategies you can use RIGHT NOW to grow relationships by building a powerful personal brand based on trust, loyalty, and SERVICE.

1.   How important is one’s personal image in their professional pursuits? 

It is critically important that you build and maintain a powerfully meaningful personal brand as your brand reputation enables you to form and maintain meaningful personal and professional relationships.

2.   How does one’s personal image reflect/relate to our inner "world"?

Your image is really your reputation, what other people think of you. It is a really helpful exercise to learn about your brand and how authentic you are by writing own a list of 5-6 one-word adjectives of how you want other people to think of you.

Then go ask several (5-7) people who know you well, care about you and want to see you succeed what are the 5-6 one-word adjectives THEY would use to describe you.

This list of your descriptive adjectives is in effect your reputational brand, collectively what other people think and say about you. How authentic or true to your brand you are in how you live your life is measured by how closely your desired attributes/list of adjectives you use to describe yourself matches other people's beliefs about your brand.

3.   Does one’s image have an influence on our relationships? 

Absolutely. What other people think about you directly impacts how they decide to have relationships with you. Are you a giver or taker, are you introverted/extroverted, how do you prefer to communicate best with other people, are you there for others in their moments of need/crisis? 

4.   Is personal branding a topic that one must be aware of and work to develop for career and professional success? 

Yes! I give presentations all the time on these topics of personal branding, organizational branding, relationship building teamwork, emotional intelligence, serving clients. Let me know if you would like to discuss this further. 

5.   What can one do to build a strong reputational brand? 

The most powerful effective strategy you can employ to build and maintain a powerful reputational brand is by what you invest in (not take out) of your relationships.

For a starting point of reference, watch Adam Grant’s amazing TED talk Are You a Giver or a Taker .

To that end, here are some immediately actionable best practices to help you cultivate an amazing brand:

§ Ensure every encounter that people have with you is unique, invaluable, and memorable (the three pillars of strong brands)

§ Become indispensable in your relationships. What you put INTO your relationships matters most, so be sure to share interesting, useful articles, resources, white papers, business networking groups.

§ Inform people of upcoming online events they might be interested in attending.

§ Be a Facilitator and make appropriate introductions that benefit both parties that you connect.

§ Start your own networking group. Can be professional relationships, or self-help groups. The key consideration here is that YOU own the responsibility for facilitating the groups’ relationship development dynamic.

§ Create “demand” for yourself:

o  Become a Subject matter expert by publishing. Start by authoring articles on LinkedIn, then submit guest articles to your local paper or journals of any professional Associations you belong to.

o  Submit proposals to speak at conferences, sit in on a panel discussion.

o  Identify Your Unique Value Proposition. A twist on your personal “pitch” your UVP is a 2-3 sentence statement of the value you bring by explaining what you do, and who you do it for. Answers the question someone would ask “What’s in it for me?” in terms of having a professional relationship with you.

o  Your “Product” Features & Benefits.

§ Define your ideal professional relationship connection in significant detail so you have a blue print for identifying who you want/need to meet. Be strategic in your relationship cultivation and helps you identify people that you can cultivate WIN-WIN relationships with.

§ Provide people with endorsements, recommendations, testimonials.

§ Offer to coach, mentor, sponsor others.

§ To test the correctness of your approach get into the habit of asking yourself: “What strategies am I using to find potential relationships, and what am I doing to cultivate stronger relationships?” In other words, you are constantly testing what works for you, and what’s not working.

§ Invest the effort to research the challenges people face that you are working with, trying to hep, and build strong relationships with. What are their fears, what keeps them up at night? Then go about striving to help them as best you can. It’s called being a Servant Master and demands we practice emotional intelligence and empathy in all of our interactions.

Ethan Chazin, MBA

The Chazin Group, LLC