Early in 2019, Shelley Carter approached me about sharing a keynote at the Gatineau-Ottawa Agile Tour conference. I’ve never been to Ottawa nor spoken at that conference, so I said yes. I asked Shelley to share the theme with me, it was: "Imagine the Future - Lessons from our Current Selves". And as a keynote, I tried to come up with a presentation topic that would align with the theme. I submitted some ideas and I was honored to have been chosen to deliver a keynote there.
I eventually came upon telling my story around brand-building. How I had, over the years, approached building my personal brand. The focus of the talk was that everyone should build their personal brand as part of their career and professional journeys.
While the conference obviously has an agile-centric flavor to it, I wanted my keynote to resonate with literally anyone, regardless of their profession. And, based on the feedback from attendees, I think I met that goal.
If you’re interested in getting a copy of my presentation – you can find it here.
The WHY?
After the conference, one of the attendees emailed me a question. It seemed that he was fuzzy on the WHY behind the importance of creating your personal brand. And it dawned on me that I might not have clearly articulated it.
I can easily think of the following seven reasons for the WHY behind your personal branding—
1. Helps in crafting your journey map – having a focus on developing your brand forces (or encourages) you to develop a roadmap for your journey. Things like assessing your current skills, filling in gaps, and developing a vision for the journey all come into focus. It also helps you discover your vision, values, and purpose. Meaning it’s hard to plan your journey if you don’t have a goal or destination in mind.
2. Hopefully, it gives you confidence – as you begin walking down your branding journey, I hope that you gain momentum. You gain confidence. And you gain an understanding of Imposter Syndrome and how to overcome what you perceive to be your largest weaknesses. Once you begin investing in your brand, it starts taking on a life of its own.
3. It opens up doors for you – I can’t tell you how many opportunities have open up for me as I’ve developed my brand. Writing opportunities, speaking opportunities, consulting opportunities, the list goes on and on. As I’ve “put myself out there”, the doors have opened for me. And many of them are complete surprises.
4. There is power in your network – a huge part of building your brand is building your network. For example, I began building my LinkedIn network in April 2005. Right now, I nearly have 12,000 connections. All of them are part of my professional network. I’ve worked very hard to carefully grow the network and it’s helped me innumerable times in getting jobs, exposing my consulting capabilities, and growing my brand awareness.
5. It is a career risk reduction play – I haven’t “applied” for a job in quite a few years. As I’ve built my brand, people have approached me with roles and opportunities. No, I’m not saying hundreds of jobs have come my way. But, when I needed to move onto something, there always seemed to be an open door or two. And those were influenced by my brand-building efforts and the skills I’d built along with it.
6. You discover your authentic self – there’s something wonderful about discovering your own personal WHY. And, once you’ve discovered it, to be true to it in guiding your personal and professional journey. This level of authenticity becomes your lens in viewing every step and course correction as you stay aligned to your True North.
7. It places the emphasis on the one person you can trust – Yourself! Often, we can fall into a trap where we place our confidence, faith and trust in others. Other people, organizations, and companies. I’ve found that, while these folks might help us in our journey, the one constant in our personal and professional journeys is ourselves. So, why not focus and invest in ourselves…first?
Wrapping Up
I’m really glad the GOAT asked me to present. And I’m glad I explored my personal branding topic.
Before developing the talk, I’d simply walked my branding journey without intentionally thinking about it. As I developed the talk, I realized how important my branding efforts have been to my journey.
One thing I didn’t talk about above is the recommendation I made to folks in the talk about journaling as a tool to find your way. I write about how to start that here.
Anyway, I’d strongly encourage everyone to think of themselves as a brand and to invest in it continuously. I’ll leave you with this Jeff Bezos quote to consider…
Branding is what people say about you when
You are not in the room…
So, what will folks say about you and YOUR BRAND?
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.