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Career Success And Personal Branding: Self-Promotion 101

Written by Natalia

career successIt might surprise you, but personal branding is much more important for your career success than you think. No matter how hard you work and how good you are at what you do, if you don’t pay attention to your personal branding, achieving career success will be rather difficult.

Personal Branding and Self-Promotion

What’s the connection to career success? Why do we need to promote ourselves in order to succeed?

It is a fact that there are a lot of people (most of them women) who truly hate to talk about themselves; what they do, what they know, what they have to give. They believe their advertisement should be their work. They think that self-promotion is like bragging. I know, I am one of them! (at least I used to be – I’m making progress)

But it isn’t like that at all! The truth is that self-promotion is about demonstrating your value. And demonstrating your value is about building your personal brand.

And don’t forget: every time you are applying for a job, you are selling yourself. The ‘product’ is you! And like any other product, you need a good advertisement.

This is why my choice for today is Margaret Buj’s article on ‘career attraction’. Her article is meant to help people who feel awkward advertising themselves. She provides five tips for promoting ourselves with ease and confidence.

You Need to Change Your Perspective

Authentic self-promotion is about giving and sharing. You are not bragging; you’re giving and sharing your gifts with the world. You’re sharing ideas that can change a person’s life.

Self-promotion is about strategically building your personal brand to ensure that those who can help you accomplish more in your career will know not just who you are, but the value you have to offer and how you’d like to add more of it.

The truth is, people aren’t going to know how talented and accomplished you are unless you tell them! If those who can help you accomplish more in your career don’t know who you are and the value you have to provide, it doesn’t serve anyone.

You can read the whole article here: “How to Promote Yourself with Ease and Confidence”

Even if you won’t be able to implement all of these at once, with one step at a time you’ll be one step closer to your career success.

However, I’d like to endorse the statement in the closing paragraph of her article: “Letting the fear of being criticized determine what you do is a surefire way to never achieve what you want in work or in life“. What a valuable lesson! If you manage to adopt this way of thinking in your life, you can’t even imagine how much happier you will be and how free you will feel! It’s the only way of pursuing your dreams and letting them come true…

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Filed Under: Career success, Leadership, Success Tagged With: building your personal brand, Career Success, career success and personal branding, Leadership, Personal Brand, Personal Branding, self-promotion, self-promotion for career success, self-promotion tips

What Does Your Personal Brand Have To Do With Career Success?

Written by The Career Success Doctor

The term ‘Personal Brand‘ doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means, but it is certainly important for career success. I used to think ‘Personal Brand’ was all about visual image, but in fact there’s a lot more too it than that. I also used to think that having a PB meant I had to use exactly the same photo of myself everywhere. Some personal branding experts do claim this is true, but I’ve found a little variation actually works fine. After all, we are all of us complex people with more than one face. If I want people to get a sense of the real me, then different photos will give them a much better of idea of what I am like.

First, a little story…The Career Success Doctor Gets A New Look

Late last week a friend texted me with a special last minute offer: to go for a photo pamper. £30 for a manicure, makeup done, hair done and a photo done by a professional photographer. Ah yes, and wine and nibbles thrown it. Seemed a cracking idea for a Friday afternoon, so I signed up with alacrity.

We had to take several outfits to be photographed in, and it’s extraordinary how different each one felt in front of the camera. Once we had been made over, we trouped in and out of the studio, into the changing room, quick slurp of wine, back in for more poses, different backgrounds and different seating arrangement. Then a wine-fortified wait while the photos were uploaded for our viewing and selection.

The Career Success Doctor In PurpleWe knew we would be sold additional photos, and we were, but it was so nicely done, and the photos were so good, it was worth it. And they gave us more wine to facilitate the selection process.

It was fun, it was social, and the results were very pleasing. (I’ve included a few here so you can judge for yourself)The Career Success Doctor Being Playful

And I decided to count it as my weekly Creative Date (which I am doing as I follow Julia Cameron’s ideas for opening up the creative juices – see my post last week on Creative Dates and Creativity).

Anyway, back to personal branding.

I now have some cracking, recent photos I can use. Working for myself, I don’t need to look formal and staid. They are not qualities which people normally use to describe me anyway, and many of the photos I have had done in the past didn’t feel true for me because they didn’t show my fun side. They felt inauthentic, or as one friend said ‘creepy’.

Authenticity is a key part of your Personal Brand

If your Personal Brand isn’t authentic, if it doesn’t ring true for you, it won’t last.  Business Week recently published an article on the Personal Brand which made this very point. Being inauthentic drains your energy, because it’s hard work. The Business Week article also talked about ‘sharing yourself’ – making your gifts and expertise available to other people. I think this is a particularly important point for women. We do tend to hide our lights under the proverbial bushel, and one way of shining without seeming to boast is to show your talents in the service of others, so they can boast on your behalf. This then becomes part of your Personal Brand.

At the same time, you have to balance the need for authenticity against the culture and style of the organisation. In the long term, if there is a real mis-match between the two, you probably won’t enjoy working there. We get the greatest enjoyment at work when the organisation’s values are aligned with our own – something I wrote about in an article published recently in Changing Careers.   If the organisational dress code (implicit or explicit) is a dark suit and shirt, and these either don’t suit you, or don’t feel right, then you will need to be in a very powerful position to get away with anything less than a dark suit and shirt. If the organisation says its values are honesty and customer service, but they lie to customers and outsourced the customer service to a very cheap, rather poor call centre in the Far East years ago, you have to question whether this is the right working environment for you.

When you make living by your personal values a part of your Personal Brand, things start to flow. When you give up your own values for the sake of someone or something else, things become more of a struggle. Work feels like effort. The career feels like a weight upon your shoulders.

How To Find The Personal Brand That Supports Career Success

In my opinion there are two aspects to your Personal Brand: visual and behavioural. One way of dealing with the visual side is to go see an image consultant – someone like Sam Bell at Pixie Bell http://pixie-belle.co.uk A lot of image consultants focus on what they know from the book, without considering the inner you which wants to shine through, so if you do see an image consultant, which is well worth the money, then make sure they think about who you are, not just what the books say you should be.

The behavioural side is rather different. You need to go internal – spend some time thinking about who you are and what you stand for. Consider your talents and expertise, your dreams, and what it is that you love in life. How would you describe yourself? How do others describe you? Who are your role models, and why? What do you like to read, to do with your spare time, if you have any – and if you don’t have any how two you feel about that? The  best way to do this is ask yourself the questions and write down the answers. Although my ebook, How To Have A Career That Really Works For You wasn’t written with personal branding in mind, it actually gives you the questions you need to answer, with worksheets and exercises for you to follow.

December is a great time to do this thinking. The days are growing shorter in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly if you live in Northern Europe or Canada, and we naturally turn in towards hearth and home, as we prepare for the year to turn. Why not take the time now to decide how you want people to see you, feel about you and experience you, so that you start 2014 knowing exactly what it is you want to tell the world about yourself?

And if you need help with identifying your personal brand, feel free to get in touch.

Filed Under: Career success, Success Tagged With: Career Success, Changing Careers, Personal Brand, Personal Branding

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