Discovering your personal brand purpose with simple questions

The best way to describe your “personal brand” without going into a Wikipedia definition of the term would be:

“What would people say about you if you weren’t in the room?”

You could be “the guy that made a lot of money doing XYZ”. Or “the woman who owns and runs the organization XYZ”. Or even “an incredibly helpful person who you should get in touch with”. Of course, those mentions could also take a negative turn and work against you.

I’ve already taken the liberty of defining the term “Personal brand” in another blog post on Essentialize Marketing. Give it a look if you need to understand its importance and benefits in detail.

But for now, let’s just say you’re an upstanding person and there isn’t something for people to complain about you when you’re not around. So generally, you’ll have a mix of words and phrases describing you, what you do or how you are as a shortened description or image.

That is the very definition of brand image for businesses. Thus, personal brands have:

• a brand identity
• a perceived image
• a voice
• its own set of values
  

Who are you?

As an individual, you have interests, strengths, weaknesses, and experiences that form your character. And despite ever-evolving personalities, you can define yourself using certain key identifiers that are relatively constant. Maybe you could do a SWOT analysis to figure out a direction? But there has to be another way…

You are definitely a combination of your personal and professional interests. Like being adventurous, trustworthy or an animal-lover could be personal. And professional attributes like being a marketing strategist, an athlete, or a business owner. Putting together an honest, clear, and holistic representation of your results in your personal brand.

Funnily enough, most of you already promote your personal brand without actively trying to understand it.

Your digital behavior on social media, your career, and your stance on social, cultural, and world issues is already showcasing who you are, what you like, and where you stand, to your network. This may be enough to propagate the growth and success of your brand if you are a specialist in your field or a generational talent.

Those who excel at being exceptional in their respective fields are treated as experts and valuable voices on those subjects. These experts are recognized and trusted and there’s inherent value in their inclusion for panels, consultancy, or as a representative for their field. As a result, they require little to minimum effort in establishing or propagating their personal brand. Yet even they spend considerable efforts in promoting and polishing their brand image.

Now, you’ll definitely have questions about your personal brand:

Where do you begin?
How do you uncover your personal brand?
How can you align it with your purpose?

These are the answers I was looking for myself, and it took some time, a few mistakes, and a lot of introspection and patience to get those answers! As a framework, I used the Purpose Venn diagram to structure my search for my personal brand and purpose.

Even if you are in the minority that hasn’t seen that diagram, you definitely have, at some point, wondered about your purpose.

You must have thought of the career path you are on, or the personal choices you make and whether it moves you closer to or farther from your best self.

I decided in 2017 to run myself through this exercise and then created a set of steps. I did it to help others get closer to uncovering their brand and getting some clarity about their own purpose.

Here’s the shorter version:

If you want to dig deeper and want to go for the longer version, it’s right here:

The easy questions

First, ask yourself a few questions to get a sense of yourself:

• What are your strengths? 
  
• And, What do you get paid for?
  
• Further, What do you love doing?
  
• Lastly, What do you care about?
  

Down the rabbit hole…

Now, did you find any connections in the answers to the questions above? If you did, then you are closer to knowing your purpose than most. If not, we can supplement the above questions with the following to devise a better approach to understanding your purpose and your personal brand:

• What are you passionate about? i.e. what are you good at and love doing?
  
• What is your mission? How does what you love help solve an issue or address something you care about?
  
• What is your profession? Are you getting paid for what you are good at?
  
• What is your vocation? Not to be confused with profession, vocation is about how you can have a positive impact through service or use of your skills.

A notch deeper perhaps…

You must now begin to notice patterns in your responses to these questions. The overlaps are starting to form, which is great! If you press further, you will be just a step away from defining your purpose and personal brand. Keep looking for overlaps between the answers to the questions above. Those are the central tenets of your personal brand. If you need help connecting the dots, ask yourself the following:

• How does the work you do capitalize on your personal and professional strengths? Do you love what you do for work?
  
• Can you leverage your interests and strengths and earn income on the side? What would you be doing? How would it help meet a need?
  
• How does what you do for a living, have a net positive effect on people’s lives?
  
• Are your personal and professional strengths aligned with your values, interests, and preferences? How, so?
  
• How can you use your talents, skills or the necessary experience to help address deficiencies in your community, network, or the world?

Are you there yet?

Your purpose must be getting clearer once you answer these questions. And in the process of uncovering your purpose, you understand yourself better and are a step closer to your personal brand.

Lastly, you must clarify objectives for your personal brand based on the discovery of your purpose. Set SMARTER goals that put your purpose to use and benefit your career, and your life.  To summarize:

• Define your personal brand as a combination of your interests, values, goals, strengths, potential, and skills.
  
• Set your personal mission and vision and align it with your purpose
  
• Understand how your purpose is applied in your life and why/how it defines you and your brand.
  
• Look to acknowledge how you can benefit the world around you with your purpose, shared through your personal brand

Conclusion

A strong personal brand can help boost your career, complement your business, and even open doors for you in areas of your expertise. Establishing authority is now everyone’s game with personal branding. So if you feel there’s any particular topic on which you have the necessary skill, and you feel passionate about it. Then look at its financial viability, carve out your purpose and uncover your personal brand.

If you are looking to develop your business’ brand, then you can also check out this blog post with 5 brand development exercises that can help! Lastly, you have to take in ethical marketing principles into consideration as well while building your brand. You can create deeper ties to your goals and results by doing this.