Dave Saunders — Be the Brand

What does a personal brand really mean?

The importance of your personal brand, whether you’re working a 9 to 5 job, own your own business or even if you’re a well-known public figure, is absolutely essential. In fact it doesn’t matter if you place importance on your personal brand are not. You have one that comes into play each and every time you interact with another person. It stands to reason that caring for and cultivating that brand helps you to build better relationships and to live a more fulfilling life.

Such bold statements are all well and good but what value is there in a personal brand and what does it mean to you?

In its most basic form your personal brand represents your relationship with another person. Your brand is also based on how another person sees you. The only way another person can get a feel for your values and how you relate to them is by observing what happens when you interact and by what they witness when you interact with someone else.

Whether those interactions occur face to face or online through social media each exchange is real enough to either reinforce an existing perception or alter it. Reinforcements or alterations to your brand can happen quickly or slowly. Those changes are hard to predict so it’s best to remain focused on your true values and core being and allow your brand the play itself out with each person.

When you seek to act in congruence with your core values, the fruit of your efforts will, or at least should, remain consistent. Not everyone will see that fruit in the same light–you will have a raving fans, the occasional rabid enemy and many others in between–but through your consistent attention to your core values you at least not have to worry about managing the frame of more than one brand.
Your personal brand is the fruit of how you express your core inner being. Ask any farmer and you’ll be told there’s nothing you can do to turn the apple into an orange.

If you want a different crop, plant different seed.

Apart from that, and the fruit happens on its own as long as you care for the roots and manage the plants according to their needs.

Returning to your personal brand, what happens when you have a brand problem that resulted from you acting out of congruence with your core inner values? That’s a fruit problem and trying to manage the fruit is known as “image management.” When spin doctors try to alter a tarnished image, or argue over things like the definition of the word `is’, do you ever buy it?

No amount of image management will change and apple into an orange.

Lucky for you you’re not a tree. To change your fruit, you need self awareness, a little vulnerability and a willingness to make the decision to replace one room with another. No wonder most people seem to rush towards the image management option.

Your personal brand is the end result of how your values affect what you do and how you form and maintain relationships with others. It’s not your job to control how others experience or perceive that end result, but simply to cultivate the roots and actions that come from within. The more you surrender to that, the more you will be comfortable with your personal brand and the more you’ll find yourself to be attractive to the people you’re intended to encounter and serve.

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