Making Personal Branding More Personal

So here we are, developing our personal brand (and if you’re really ambitious, you’re also working on a jingle to go with it).

Wait, what was that? You’re still struggling to define your personal brand? You still haven’t figured out a way of compressing all of your awesomenosity into a single tagline? Well, at least you’ve started to think of all those things that make you so full of awesomenosity and… Wait, what was that? You haven’t? Because you don’t even know how to start doing so? It’s too overwhelming?

Yes, personal branding can be a bit overwhelming. We’re supposed to compress everything employable about us in a sound byte that we’ll be repeating on résumés, business cards, and restaurant waiting lists. (“Table for two for Joey JoJo: Real implementations for real results.”) And we’re supposed to start the process by sitting down and writing all our attributes on a blank sheet of paper. Before you know it, that blank sheet of paper is staring back at you, unflinchingly waiting for you to say something interesting about yourself, ominous in its silence and its…blankness. So what do you do? Where do you start?

You can start by making the open-ended rubric of “List great things about yourself” more specific by structuring it with some basic questions. When working on my personal branding statement, here are some of the things I was asking myself:

• What am I good at?
• What do I actually enjoy doing?
• What are my passions and interests?
• What are my professional goals?
• How do people I know generally describe me?
• When I’m not trying to impress HR managers, who am I really?

I found this exercise helpful because it gave me a little more structure to work on instead of just randomly listing all the things I thought were employable about me (“good writer, fast worker, make great guacamole”). Because, let’s face it, once you’ve filled that sheet of paper with all your greatness, then you’re overwhelmed with the prospect of having to whittle everything down into five or six defining elements from which you’ll distill your branding statement.

But by structuring your efforts around the right questions and categorizing your responses into usable blocks of data, you’ll start to uncover some consistencies and patterns. For example, here’s what I came up with:

• What am I good at? Writing, editing, creative writing, marketing writing, technical writing, making people laugh, motivating people, tormenting loved ones, making guacamole
• What do I actually enjoy doing? Writing, playing guitar, killing drum sets, taking an idea and making it happen, making people laugh, helping people, tormenting loved ones
• What are my passions and interests? Writing, taking an idea and making it happen, making people laugh, music, playing gigs, karate, helping and motivating people
• What are my professional goals? To one day manage a department ruthlessly, help develop ideas into actual results, to write for a living, to make people laugh for a living, to open for Polysics at The Palace
• How do people I know generally describe me? Writer, insane, energetic, quirky, doofus, reliable, self-starter, multi-talented, multi-grain
• When I’m not trying to impress HR managers, who am I really? Reliable, quirky, creative, down-to-earth, silly, a tad frivolous

So now, a few things kept coming up: I love tormenting people (my friends call it my Big Brother Complex), I’m insane, and, oh yeah, I seem to like writing, making people laugh, and helping. Voila! I had three defining (not to mention, employable) elements that seemed integral, inseparable parts of who I am!

I then began weeding out the things that won’t help my job search, or can be lumped into a broader, inclusive category. Employers won’t be thrilled that I’m a part-time tormentor of souls, so out goes that one. And while my musical endeavors are definitely a passion, that’s better to lump under a general category of ‘creativity’, of being able to start with an idea and produce a result out of it.

By the time I finished distilling my long list into six defining elements, I discovered that I was a versatile writer, I was humorous (or at least, thought myself to be humorous), I liked to help people, I was resourceful, I was good at turning ideas into actual results, and that I was professional but quirky. And I’d done so by simply asking more specific questions and structuring my responses.

One more thing: don’t be afraid of expressing who you are. I was initially hesitant to professionally acknowledge that I was quirky, silly, and a bit frivolous. But the sad reality is that my quirkiness is an inseparable part of who I am. (Seriously, how else do you explain me randomly mailing a zucchini via interoffice mail to a co-worker?) And while some attributes might turn some employers off, you shouldn’t hide who you are for fear that you will alienate them. Whatever your personal quirks are, don’t divorce them from your professional persona—assuming, of course, that your quirks don’t involve wanton destruction of company property.

Like any significant endeavor, personal branding can be managed through a clean process. Don’t see it as this insurmountable, overwhelming task. Don’t see it as a mountain you somehow have to climb in a single, giant step.

Instead, see it as a simple process of asking yourself the right questions to uncover who you really are and what you really want to do, and of finding the commonalities in your responses to distill your five or six defining (and preferably non-destructive) elements.

For more quasi-helpful and tediously brief advice, please follow my Twitter feed at inventingsilva.