Does Your Personal Brand Attract Your Kind of People?

Image by Sarah Richter from Pixabay

Having reflected on a brand relaunch I attended recently, I started to think more deeply about my personal brand. In many ways my career has been about helping organisations become more aligned with the kind of brand they want to cultivate with their customers.

My own personal journey has been about living life on the outside aligned with my inner world - the internal vision, values, beliefs, talents, passions and so forth that I hold - so that the things I care most deeply about are the things I get to express authentically in the world.  Now I help others do the same.

For many, the word brand belongs with a marketing function, and a rebrand will typically involve some of the senior folks in an organisation, the people who have more strategic roles, and this usually happens when the organisation wants to change something about the way they are perceived in the market. 

The vision and values of an organisation are clearly linked in with this, as should everything else be in an organisation – from the language and visuals used to attract and recruit new employees, through to the types of questions being asked and evaluations being used to ensure the right kind of people both are attracted to and retained by the organisation over the longer term.

The experience customers have with the organisation, be it a service or product they use, or person or bit of technology they interact with, or a billboard they see, should be aligned with and embodied by the direction setters’ strategic thinking about how they want the organisation to be perceived.

If a company values diversity and inclusion, for example, I should see this in the people who represent the company; I should experience inclusion within the company if I work for them, or in interacting with the company as a potential associate or client.

If a business wants to appear relevant to the next generation, it needs to employ people who also want to be relevant to (and are interested in) the next generation. So that those people dress, talk and act in ways that both honour their own authenticity and generation while connecting with the younger age bracket.

If an organisation provides a particular service or product, then it needs to live and breathe those services and products internally. For example, if a training and development company isn’t training and developing its own people, and being led from the front by the key decision makers demonstrating their own commitment to continuous growth and learning, it all smacks of a certain lack of commitment and sincerity.

In reality, most people (employees and customers alike) confuse brand with nothing more than a new “strap line”, colour palette, visuals, and fonts. Tremendous amounts of work and money go into new livery, shop fronts, uniforms, leaflets, websites and so forth but little else of substance happens.

At the event I was attending, I got to hear about the new strap line and I got to see the new look, but I had expected reassurances about maintaining all the things that we loved about their work, while showcasing some of the newer and cutting edge things coming down the line.

I listened to a case study about the return on investment a client got from using this company’s products and then we split into conversation groups about issues we were currently facing in the workplace which, while valid, didn’t seem to obviously connect in with the re-brand’s key focus.

None of this is unusual, and nor was it uninteresting or unproductive, but I mourned the opportunity to really be captivated by the brand and excited about its future and the ways in which I might be able to leverage and promote it in my own business.

That said, there’s never actually any opportunity wasted. As I listened to all the discussion at the event I was attending, it helped me really gain clarity on what I love. While I used to thrive on coming in and giving organisations a great shake down, to see what was on-brand and what wasn’t, what it actually helped me orientate towards was getting really clear on my own personal brand.

Nine years ago, I set out on the deliberate journey to align my outer and inner worlds. I worked hard to identify my own passions, needs, talents, beliefs and so forth, as well as shake out all the unhelpful skeletons in my own closet; many of the unhelpful and dysfunctional ways of perceiving things and reacting.

Along the way I learned new communication skills to hold and communicate my personal boundaries, I learned new ways to deal with high conflict personalities and I learned a great deal more about the human psyche and trauma, among many other useful things.

I now need to relook at what I present to the world through my online presence, the way I speak about “what I do” when people ask and any other aspects needed to attract more of the people and things I really enjoy getting engaged with.

While I might be able to see where other people or organisations are out of synch with what they say they stand for, I also want to make darn sure I’m in alignment and that my own personal brand shines through in that way more often than not.

On any given day, I know different parts of me can be in the driving seat depending on what else is happening in my life, and old unhelpful stories come up. It’s my job to recognise those for what they are and shift to a more productive state, which is something I can now do with more and more ease.

I know that I want to help others’ align their outer and inner worlds so that they are able to gain clarity, inner peace, wisdom and confidence to achieve whatever their essential or authentic self wants to achieve, I also know I have to do that from a place of groundedness and profound insight.

While I genuinely love helping people discover their unique gifts, talents and contributions - and helping them uncover and move past any roadblocks to achieving their goals in all areas of their life - I can only do that if I am living the same way. Because I so highly value that perspective, being in a place of alignment is a must do for me, it’s as important as breathing.

And the results for me are becoming evident in the many life changes that have occurred along the way. There are some new circumstances and people that I’ve attracted in recent years, and some old ones I had to let go of, in order to be more “me”.

What about you, are your outer and inner worlds on the same page? Is your personal brand one that actually exudes the real essence of who you are rather than some other version of you that you shaped yourself into in order to be accepted long ago? Do you truly attract “your” kind of people into your life, or are you always stuck in a dynamic of having to prove yourself to key figures?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Who is in the Driving Seat – My Ego or My True Self?, Trust That It’s Absolutely Okay to Not Know Where You’re Going, Ways to Reach for Growth Rather Than Reacting With Old Conditioned Constriction, Put Mature Parts of You in the Driving Seat for Better Results and Are the Most Loving, Courageous and Compassionate Parts of You in the Driving Seat? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.