In this post, I want to talk to you about the number one key to success when it comes to building your personal brand. Personal branding has been something that I've been kind of involved with for the past several years. I’ve been really investing time, money, and resources into learning, like taking online courses, for my personal development and to get inspiration for my personal brand.
Where can you get inspiration for your personal brand?
I’ve been learning and getting inspiration from some of the people that I follow online as well as some of the other non-online, old school personal branding mindset and mentality coaches of the world.
There's books like The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill. There’s pretty much an endless amount of books out there for self-help and personal development. You can get anything from Tony Robbins to any of the people that you follow on social media, or maybe some of the websites you might have seen online.
There's a lot of inspiration out there when it comes to personal development mindset and success. I’ve taken personal branding online courses from some branding people that I follow, and it’s really helped me a lot when it comes to my online business and building my personal brand.
Let me know what results you get and what your personality type is in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you. 🙂Watch the video here:
Why do you need to invest in your personal development?
If you’re reading this or if you’re new to personal branding, then there's a reason that you're trying to find more content on the subject, maybe there's some things you haven't thought about. There's lots of things I haven't thought about that I thought I knew. By seeking that education and guidance, it allowed me to improve over time.
No matter what field you’re in, you always need to be reaching out for that next level and improve yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to stay stagnant. You’re going to stay in the same spot.
This is exactly the problem I had a couple of years ago when I decided to leave the corporate world and focus on my online business. I wasn't in the right mindset to really push myself to into the markets, the niches, or the topic and subject matter that I really wanted to involve myself with.
I really wanted to involve myself with technology, personal branding, and entrepreneurship, but I really didn't understand how I wanted to identify my target audience because I didn’t really understand what my personal strengths and direction was.
It's really opened my eyes to how important it is to really understand, not only your audience, but more importantly, yourself.
So, getting to the key…
What is the key to building your personal brand?
The key is to know yourself.
Before you even understand who your audience is, you really need to understand who you are.
It sounds very cliché or you might say, “Oh, I already know who I am.”
But that's the number one key to personal branding, and It’s very simple. However, it can be very complex because people often miss that step.
They try to create a course and sell it. They try to follow the same footsteps as some people online but fall short because they're missing that key ingredient. You really have to know yourself. If you really want to show up and be confident, then that's something you must do.
What tools can you use to find out more about yourself?
16personalities.com
One helpful tool that I used to get to know myself better is a website called 16personalities. I took it a couple of years ago, and it was eye-opening.
They have a free personality test that’s based off the Myers & Briggs personality types. It helps you identify your weakness/opportunities that you can improve upon. But most importantly, it helps you identify, at the core, what your true strengths are.
This can help you identify, not only where you should be focusing more of your time, attention, and energy, but it also will allow you to focus more on your target audience and being able to bring your best self each and every day.
MBTI® assessment
Another tool that you could use it the full Myers Briggs Type Indicator assessment. I recently took a full-blown Myers Briggs test from a corporate type of executive career coaching firm, and it was awesome. It was awesome because it confirmed the free report that I got from 16personalities, but it also went deeper.
You really have to give these tests a try. You'll be reading the results and say, “Wow, I never knew that about myself,” or “Wow, this is creepy because I actually really, really hit the nail on the head.” It’ll cover things like what you tend to lean more towards to with your communication style, your leadership style, or just how you like to handle problem solving or creative work.
Strong Interest Inventory
Another tool is a strong interest inventory profile report. So, if you Google “strong Interest Inventory”, you’ll get a bunch of websites that can give you free reports.
It’s good to look at these because they’re more career-oriented. It’ll show where you fall in line with a particular career based on your personality and your natural tendencies. It’ll tell you if you lean more towards a personality type that are associated with certain professions. There's tons and tons and tons of data that have been collected over the years to build these things.
All these have been very eye-opening for me because it's confirmed the things I’ve been doing for the past couple of years in addition to the tactical work that I do every day, and that is, I enjoy and love teaching. I love branding and marketing.
You have to have a certain passion to do things. If you don't have it at your core, it's not going to work long term.
So, taking the time to take one of these tests is really going to be beneficial for you because you're going to see what makes you tick, what your tendencies are, or at least confirm some of the assumptions that you already have about yourself. Chances are, they’re correct.
