The Business of Being YOU , livre ebook

Tablo Pty Ltd - Fleur Brown

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

102 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

No longer just for CEOs, celebrities, and the socially savvy, building a personal brand is now everyone's business. In today’s era of brand you, customers search your virtual identity before they meet you, unqualified competitors work to outrank you online, and the global marketplace compels you to select a specific field of expertise. Drawing on two decades of Public Relations, reputational management, and personal brand-building, Fleur Brown shows you how to take control of your commercial destiny to create your own authentic, unique personal brand.

Sujets

Communication persuasive

Marketing et communication

Economics

Advertising

Business

Promotion

Marketing de contenu

Informations

Publié par	Tablo Pty Ltd
Date de parution	09 juillet 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781922309051
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Why I wrote this book
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it … improve it, make your mark upon it. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. Steve Jobs
I see you in my office each week, and in your boardrooms. I talk with you on the phone, in cafés, and at community barbecues. You are smart, successful, articulate, talented, and speak passionately about what you do.
You have a lot to say if I ask the right questions. You have big plans and aspirations.
But you are frustrated by what your competitors are up to. They haven’t worked as hard as you, yet they are getting all the attention. They are overconfident, cocky, and selling image over substance.
Why are they soaking up all the oxygen from your space?
Nevertheless, you keep working quietly and optimistically behind the scenes. You have faith that hard work will win in the end.
When I see you a year later at the same event, you feed me the same lines.
I talk with you about doing more to get out there, about being more visible, about claiming your expertise, and building a platform for your message. You listen—however, you are reluctant to act. Instead, you valiantly defend the importance of keeping a low profile.
These are some of the reasons you give me for staying in the shadows:
“It’s not my role.”
“I don’t have permission—my employer wouldn’t like it.”
“It’s better to ‘fly under the radar.’”
“It would just telegraph my moves to the competition.”
“I don’t have time.”
“I feel guilty.”
“It’s not about me.”
“I don’t want to look silly.”
“I’m not ready yet.”
“I’m not good enough yet.”
“What if I make a mistake?”
“That sort of thing makes no difference to my bottom line.”
These excuses may feel real to you, but they are just words you use to disguise your fear of standing out.
So, instead, you dim your light. You stay in the back room and complain about those who don’t. But you never feel sufficiently acknowledged for your hard work.
What does self-doubt cost us?
Professionally, I help others promote their business brands. Quite often, this requires the promotion of the leaders, experts, and brand ambassadors.
Of course, organisational brands themselves can’t speak. And no one is usually overtly interested in a brand (aside from advertisers). Most of us are interested in other people - the voices of our leaders, experts, and customers.
And this requires visibility.
It often amazes me how uncomfortable many are about stepping up and being in the spotlight, even when a commercial or professional imperative is so clearly present.
More disturbing is how devastated those same people become when others receive the acknowledgement they feel that they themselves could have had. This is one of the harshest penalties for remaining invisible: seeing others make claim to the space that you have worked so passionately for. The famous author, Henry Miller, puts it best:
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That's why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers . Henry Miller
Public acknowledgement—of your skill, talent, contribution, or expertise—is part of a fair reward for labour. While most of us are comfortable giving it, we still need to get a lot more comfortable receiving it.
What you do is important, so now it’s time to get out of your own way, and get out there. Yes, you!
What is a personal brand?
Some dislike the term personal brand: "A person is not a brand," they argue. And it's true, as multi-dimensional human beings, we are all much greater, deeper, and far more mysterious than just a brand .
Nevertheless, we all also have a reputation—one that becomes our personal brand by default if we lack the ability to manage it. Our personal brand (or, if you prefer, our professional profile) constantly changes and evolves. The semantics of what that reputation effect may be called, however, is far less relevant than the impact it has on our livelihood, career, and sense of personal satisfaction.
Our personal brand is never the result of just one thing, such as a media profile, a string of public presentations, or how we portray ourselves to our social following. Instead, a personal brand is the sum of all the parts of our reputation. To paraphrase Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, it’s what people say about us when we’re not listening. It’s why they do or don’t recommend us for a promotion, send a client our way, ask us to speak at a conference, or to participate in a media interview.
In a business sense, this Brand You is what we are known for professionally, and, hopefully, it is also what we are known for being good at.
It may surprise you what others think you are really good at. Brand You doesn’t always relate to your immediate role or the business brand you currently work for. And that can be a good thing because it means your personal brand is portable; it travels with you through many different career opportunities.
I would like to see the Pope wearing my T-shirt. Madonna
The truth is you are already something of a branding expert. Even if you’re not in the marketing game, you may spend more time than you think promoting others’ brands, for example, talking up your company at a corporate breakfast, convincing a new staff member to join your team, or thinking about how your new product or service will be received by customers.
Importantly, building your brand profile will provide you with not only greater recognition, but also greater rewards, such as: Acknowledgement —giving and receiving acknowledgement for your work and achievements is important. Improved business prospects —a higher profile can deliver a boost to your current and future business ventures. This could be increased revenue if you have your own business, a promotion if you’re in a corporate role, or the ability to sell something you’re passionate about such as a book, product, or an invention. The bridge to a new future —after spending some time in one area, it’s easy to feel trapped or boxed in. We can become labelled as only being good at one thing, which, even if that used to make us happy, in time it can feel a little claustrophobic, as if we could never break free of that particular label. Even though I will discuss both playing into and drawing strength from that label, once you have a strong brand profile, you then have license to do something a little bit different, as long as you use that previous profile as a bridge to the new you. Personal satisfaction —fame and fortune are nice, but these are not an end in themselves; most are engaged in their work for much deeper reasons, such as we may feel we have a message or a gift that we feel compelled to share with others. Lifting your brand profile increases your ability to do so.
Building a personal brand is a game – and it can be a fun one. It’s not only a game of talent, skill or even diligence. Sure, those factors all contribute to our success. But as many high-profile people demonstrate, the greatest factor in our success is self-belief – being willing and ready for profile opportunities when they turn up, which they will.
This book is part inspiration to get started (the first few chapters), and part self-help manual (the rest of the book). The Business of Being You is designed as a beginners guide that anyone in business can follow; you will find lots of simple tips and tricks you can apply immediately for effective profile-building. Some sections may not be relevant to you right now - for example, not everyone will choose to begin building a media profile. However, those chapters are there for reference later on, when you may need them.
Are you ready to play?
You are not your job
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
When I left the corporate workforce, it took me six months and a sojourn around South America to shake off an identity crisis. I had already created my own venture—a public relations agency—which gave me an employment story to keep my ego at bay. However, I needed to wait for my business partner to exit her corporate role before we could officially kick off the new business. Desperate to fill the void, I spent my first few months of so-called unemployment in a frenzy of confected activity.
I had been in the habit of filling every waking hour generating output for others. Stopping work felt to me like coming down off drugs.
I initially planned to use the time writing a book. Instead, I rushed in to help launch a new business for a friend of a friend. I wasn't passionate about the venture, and he turned out to be a tough taskmaster. After a couple of months and a few hundred hours of unpaid work, I craved a rest from his relentless demands. When I stopped responding for a few days, I received a series of aggressive phone messages—the final ones at 7am on a Saturday morning—waking me up to the reality that despite being unshackled from the workforce, I had once again become a slave to someone else's agenda, simply because my ego had demanded that I attach my identity to some form of work.
Life was continually nudging me towards my own ventures. However, I was hardwired to seek others’ approval, and it took another decade of rude awakenings for me to learn to generate my power and status from my own interests and passions—not other people’s.
Many I know are workaholics, prone to filling any empty spaces in their lives servicing others’ agendas. Of course, this tendency is known by many different names: ambitious, passionate, hardworking, and successful. Do these sound familiar?
This focus may serve us for a time, by delivering a decent salary, an impressive job title, the gratitude of our boss or co-workers, and something to brag to our friends a