Have You Created a Personal Brand?

Published:  December 14, 2008 in California JobJournal (Cover page); http://jobjournal.com/article_full_text.asp?artid=2534

By Dr. Hubert Rampersad

In life, as in business, branding is more effective, powerful and sustainable than marketing and sales, and an effective way to best the competition. It’s about influencing others, by creating a brand identity that associates certain perceptions and feelings with that identity.

Branding isn’t just for companies anymore. Successful personal branding entails managing the perceptions effectively and controlling and influencing how others perceive and think of you. In today’s instant-message, online, virtual age, a strong personal brand is becoming increasingly essential and is key to personal success. It is fundamental to the positioning strategy behind the world’s most successful people. Icons like Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Bill Gates and, most recently, Barack Obama.

Everyone has a personal brand, but most people are not aware of this and do not manage it strategically, consistently or effectively. You should take control of your brand and the message it sends and affects how others perceive you. This will help you to grow in a specific direction and distinguish yourself as an exceptional professional.

Most traditional personal branding concepts focus mainly on personal marketing, image building, selling, outward appearances, promoting oneself, and becoming famous, which can easily veer into an ego trip and lead to perceptions of egocentricity and selfishness. They define personal branding from a personal marketing (selling) point of view.

Personal branding is more than just marketing and promoting yourself. Your personal brand is the synthesis of all the expectations, images, and perceptions it creates in the minds of others, when they see or hear your name. Consider the images which come to mind when we think of some well-known individuals:

• Most people see Oprah Winfrey as powerful and influential, but also warm and caring.
• Tiger Woods is considered an intense competitor and the greatest golfer in the world.
• Bill Gates brings to mind gadgets, geeks, and philanthropy.
• Donald Trump is associated with ego and a decisive ruthlessness.
• Mother Teresa is the epitome of helping the poor, selflessness and saintly behavior.
• Albert Einstein is remembered as a great and gentle genius.

Barack Obama is seen as a man of intelligence, integrity and vision, who is fighting for change. His passion for change is the pillar of his authentic personal brand, and it is the primary theme of many of his speeches. “America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. . . And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before. . . The true test of the American ideal is whether . . . chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams. . . I don’t want to settle for anything less than real change, fundamental change – change we need – change that we can believe in. It’s change that I’ve been fighting for for over two decades. Because those dreams – American dreams – are worth fighting for.”

Note how many times he references authentic dreams. Barack Obama has succeeded by living according to his dream and doing related work that he loves. It’s important to be true to your own dreams and to become the CEO of your personal brand.

The Genius Within You

Anyone can deliver peak performances and be successful in life, because all of us have the genius within us to do so. Success is not something that will come automatically or something that the world will define for you. It’s what you define in your ambitious dream (hope) and in the way you pursue this dream. Remember what Marva Collins said: “Success doesn’t come to you . . . you go to it.” You must have a dream in life, follow your heart and love what you do, if you expect exceptional success. Take the initiative and the responsibility to develop, implement and cultivate your authentic dream, and keep it at the forefront of your mind each day.

Your personal brand should be authentic. Authentic personal branding provides a roadmap for a journey toward a happier and more successful life. Your personal brand should therefore emerge from your search for your identity and meaning in life, and it is about getting very clear on what you want, fixing it in your mind, giving it all your positive energy, doing what you love, and developing yourself continuously. Your personal brand should reflect your true character, and should be built on your values, strengths, uniqueness, and genius. If you are branded in this organic, authentic and holistic way, your personal brand will be strong, clear, and valuable to others. You will also create a life that is fulfilling and you will automatically attract the people and opportunities that are a perfect fit for you.

If you are not branded in any unique way, if you don’t deliver according to your brand promise, or if you focus mainly on simply selling and promoting yourself, you could be perceived as egocentric, selfish, and a unique jerk – and branding will be a cosmetic and dirty business.

Love and Respect

Love is an important element in this personal branding equation. It is about loving yourself (self-respect), loving others, and loving what you do. You should love yourself in at least equal measure to others or things. This can be found in most religions: “to love others as you love yourself.” Abraham Maslow said, “We can only respect others when we respect ourselves. We can only give, when we give to ourselves. We can only love, when we love ourselves.” Without knowing who you are, it’s very difficult to love yourself or others. You need to make a positive emotional connection with yourself and find yourself interesting before others can do the same.

An organic, holistic and authentic personal brand will help you unlock your potential and build a trusted image that you can project in everything you do; a brand that is in harmony with your dreams, life purpose, values, passion, specialization and genius.

With an authentic personal brand, your strongest attributes and values can separate you from the crowd. Without it, you look just like everyone else.

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Dr. Hubert Rampersad is senior consultant at TPS International. This article is based on his new book “Authentic Personal Branding:  A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful leadership brand’ (Information Age Publishing Inc, 2009). You may email him at h.rampersad@tps-international.com. See also: www.bsa-edu.org  www.pbu-edu.org   Interview in Fortune Magazine http://bit.ly/bUWQQd   Interviews in BusinessWeek http://bit.ly/19foBq  , http://bit.ly/OAUG2  New Books: http://bit.ly/2EIQS6  , http://bit.ly/rT6wU  , http://bit.ly/1bG4I7  , http://bit.ly/19AlCN  , http://bit.ly/9MJRY   Workshop Personal Leadership Branding at MIT SLOAN http://bit.ly/ccIlwy

 

 

 

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PERSONAL BRANDING BOOT CAMP BAHAMAS CRUISE

3 morning classes with afternoons and evenings free to enjoy the cruise

How to Build Great Credibility and a Solid Reputation for Yourself and How to Put YOU above Your Competitors.  How to attract success, build credibility, separate yourself from the crowd, and cultivate happiness.    Master class by Dr. Hubert Rampersad

 Most buying decisions are based on trust, confidence, and the feeling of connection people have related to a product or person. It’s the trusted relationship that counts! Branding is more important than marketing and sales. Don’t waste time and money on marketing and sales by not maximizing your brand. It’s about time to focus on branding. In life, as in business, branding is more effective, powerful, and sustainable than marketing and sales. Having a strong authentic personal and corporate brand is a very important asset in today’s online, virtual, and individual age. It is becoming increasingly essential and is the key to personal and business success.Personal Branding is the positioning strategy behind the world’s most successful people, like Oprah Winfrey,  Michael Jordan, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates. It’s therefore important to be your own brand and to become the CEO of your life. Everyone has a Personal Brand but most people are not aware of this and do not manage this strategically, consistently, and effectively. You should take control of your brand and the message it sends and affect how others perceive you. By of this unique boot camp, we will offer you an advanced breakthrough formula and a new blueprint to build, implement, maintain, and cultivate an authentic, distinctive, meaningful, and memorable Personal Brand, which forms the key to enduring personal success. It’s based on Dr. Rampersad’s new book “Authentic Personal Branding:  A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful leadership brand’ (Information Age Publishing, USA, 2009; Pearson, 2008). We trust you will join us in this World-Class event, and become empowered to manage the challenges facing in the 21st Century. We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Endorsements for: Authentic Personal Branding: A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful leadership brand.

From the book’s foreword by Marshall Goldsmith:  “In Personal Branding, Hubert Rampersad has provided a sorely needed guidebook for knowledge workers. He shows us all how to build our own personal brand – and just as important – how to persuasively communicate this brand to the world… I love his focus on authenticity… My request to you, the reader, is – make this book part of your life.  Don’t just read this book for its ‘interesting’ content.  Don’t be content with a few ‘aha’ moments. Make it part of your life planning – and ultimately part of your life!  If you do, you can become a more integrated and successful person – and better enable your company to help you make a positive difference in our world!” — Marshall Goldsmith is Author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, a New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal #1 business book and the Harold Longman Award winner for Best  Business Book of the Year for 2007. He is recognized by the American Management Association as one of 50 great thinkers and leaders who have impacted the field of management over the past 80 years.

 

From the Afterword by Dave Ulrich:

“Hubert Rampersad has a knack for preparing comprehensive frameworks for analyzing important issues… The four stage model that he suggests proposes an explicit way to turn a desired external identity into something concrete and actionable… It’s a wonderful step by step approach to making out desired brand explicit… The mental models and their related investigative questions will help you know where you are today so you can get to where you want to be tomorrow… This book offers an architecture to turn these ideas into action.” — Dave Ulrich is Professor of Business, University of Michigan, and Partner, The RBL Group. Co-author of the bestselling book “Leadership Brand’ ( Harvard Business Press, 2007). He was ranked as #1 management educator and guru by Business Week, #2 among management thinkers by Executive Excellence, and listed by Forbes as one of the “world’s top five” business coaches.

 

Why attend this Boot Camp?
Building an authentic Personal Brand is an evolutionary and organic process and a journey towards a successful life. Your Personal Brand should emerge from your search for your identity and meaning in life, and it is about getting very clear on what you want, fixing it in your mind, giving it all your positive energy, doing what you love and develop yourself continuously. This seminar provides you a holistic and complete branding framework that will help you to create a powerful, authentic, consistent, and memorable personal brand identity that builds a trusted image of yourself and will help you enrich your relationships with others, master yourself, unlock your potential, and develop self-esteem. By aligning your Personal Brand with yourself you will create a stable basis for your trustworthiness, credibility, and personal charisma. This seminar is an experience that will enhance the core of personal leadership.

 

Who should attend? 

This unique program is geared toward executives,  professionals and anyone who wishes to differentiate him/herself, set him/herself apart from others, position him/herself strongly in relation to competitors, and build credibility and a solid reputation.

 

What you will learn

You will learn how to build, implement, maintain, and cultivate an authentic, distinctive, relevant, consistent, concise, meaningful, exciting, inspiring, compelling, enduring, crystal clear, ambitious, persuasive and memorable Personal Brand.  How to create positive perceptions and emotions in the mind of your prospects (that you are different, special, and unique) based on your Personal Brand. How to build a strong reputation that is aligned with your vision and passion, develop an effective image of yourself that you want to project in everything you do, and  create positive perceptions and emotions in the mind of others.  Remember what Oprah Winfrey said: ‘Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe. ….Hold the highest vision possible for your life and it can come true ….   Go for your highest and greatest vision for your life and align your purpose with the flow of your life. …Follow your passion…Sooner or later, your passion is going to win out and nobody can stop you”-

Fee: US$ 3450 Includes attendance to the session, seminar documentation, certificate of attendance, signed copy of the personal branding book, refreshment breaks, lunch and happy hour drinks

 The fee also includes cost of air travel and hotel accommodation.  When three or more people from the same company register at the same time, every member of the team receives a 10% discount

Please fill out the registration form below.

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A 4-Point Survival Guide for Turning Personal Financial Crisis into Opportunity

The current financial crisis is driving the world into a global recession. There is no job security anymore. Especially in times of financial crisis you need to be independent, become the CEO of your life and redefine yourself in order to create and attract new creative opportunities. This can be realized successfully according to an innovative four-stage authentic personal branding model, that will be introduced in this article, based on the bestselling book “Authentic Personal Branding:  A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful leadership brand’ (Information Age Publishing, USA, 2009). You can get yourself out of this crisis by re-branding and managing yourself effectively and by building, implementing and cultivating your authentic personal brand according to this model. If you are well branded according to this approach, you will master the financial crisis successfully, smartly save costs, generate new revenues, find it easier to convince others and attract the people and opportunities that are a perfect fit for you.

 

This new system will help you to actively grow and distinguish yourself as an exceptional professional. Remember what Albert Einstein said: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity“. Now is the best time to engage in a meaningful dialogue with yourself and build your personal brand in order to better master the financial crisis with your unique value proposition. This innovative personal branding approach will provide you a roadmap to translate your genius, dreams and aspirations into manageable improvement actions and will help you adjust your market offerings to the different crisis needs of various customer segments. Now during the crisis it is a great time to reposition yourself strongly in relation to your competitors, built a strong reputation, develop an effective image of yourself that you want to project in everything you do, and become more creative and innovative. While some individuals fight for survival, this financial crisis is an excellent opportunity for visionary people who like to differentiate themselves, set them apart from others and create an identity around themselves. This makes it easier for others to remember who they are, become known as a thriving and distinguished professional and improve themselves continuously. They develop their own creative responses to this financial crisis instead of following the standard responses of individuals during a recession. They master the personal  financial crisis because they have identified and leveraged their authentic dream, respond to it with passion, know what make them unique, special, different and outstanding, identified their genius, expand their limits based on this, and have faith in themselves and the courage to pursue their dream and personal brand.

 

 Figure 1: Authentic Personal Branding Model (Rampersad, 2009)

Four Points to Master a Personal Financial Crisis               

Building an authentic Personal Brand to response to the financial crisis is an evolutionary and organic process.This process consists of the following four phases, which are the building blocks of a strong authentic Personal Brand (see figure 1):

 

1) Define and formulate your Authentic Personal Ambition; This phase involves defining and formulating your Personal Ambition in an exciting and persuasive manner and making it visible. Your Personal Ambition is the soul, starting point, core intention and the guiding principles of your Personal Brand. It’s the fuel for your brand and encompasses your personal vision, mission, and key roles. It is about developing your self-awareness and identifying yourself and figuring out what your dreams are, who you are, what you stand for, what makes you unique and special, why you are different than anyone, what your values are, and identifying your genius, incorporating an introduced breathing and silence exercise. You are almost twice as likely to accomplish your brand if you write this down. Your Personal Ambition makes your Personal Brand Personal and links this to your values.

2) Define and formulate your Authentic Personal Brand; This phase involves defining and formulating an authentic, distinctive, relevant, concise, meaningful, compelling, enduring, and crystal clear Personal Brand promise, and use it as the focal point of your behavior and actions. First of all, perform a personal SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and evaluate yourself after using the breathing and silence exercise. This will also make you aware of the signs of the financial crisis in your internal and external environment. The result of SWOT analysis is the definition of your personal life style. This relates to your personal ambition and brand objectives. Your brand objectives entail what you want your Personal Brand to accomplish. You also need to determine your specialization, concentrating on a single core talent. Define your main specific services, your key characteristics your single leading and most powerful attribute.  Finally, determine what your audience (domain) is and what their greatest needs are. Your Personal Brand Statement entails the total of your Personal Ambition, brand objectives, specialty, service dominant attribute, and domain. It also includes your Unique Value Proposition. The next step in this second stage is to define your Personal Brand Story (Elevator Pitch), which is the essence of what you want to say about your Personal Brand in order to produce a positive emotional reaction. Finally you should design your Personal Logo, which is a single graphical symbol that represents your Personal Brand.

3) Formulate your Personal Balanced Scorecard (PBSC); Personal Ambition and Personal Brand have no value unless you take action to make them a reality. Therefore the emphasis in this stage is developing an integrated and well balanced action plan based on your Personal Ambition and Personal Brand to reach your life and brand objectives and to eliminate any negative elements. It’s about translating your Personal Ambition and Personal Brand into your PBSC (action). Your PBSC entails your personal critical success factors that are related to your Personal Ambition and Brand and the corresponding objectives, performance measures, targets and prioritized improvement actions to master the crisis and to manage yourself effectively. It is also divided into the four perspectives: internal, external, knowledge & learning, and financial perspectives. Your PBSC translates your Personal Ambition and Personal Brand into manageable and measurable personal objectives, milestones and improvement actions in a holistic and balanced way. Your PBSC is needed to improve and manage yourself continuously based on your Personal Ambition and Brand. It’s an effective tool that you can use to manage and master yourself and monitor your behavior and actions.

4) Implement and cultivate your Personal Ambition, Personal Brand and Personal Balanced Scorecard; Personal Ambition, Personal Brand, and the PBSC have no value unless you implement them to make it a reality. Therefore the next step is to implement, maintain, and cultivate your ambition, brand and PBSC effectively. You have to articulate your Personal Brand with love and passion, be committed to change, and improve your perceived value in the marketplace and yourself continuously. In addition, try to build credibility and become an expert in your field. Get the word out through a variety of media channels, do work you love which is consistent with your Personal Brand and values, gain experience in areas of your brand in which you are weak, promote yourself, market your brand frequently and consistently, make conscious choices about the people you associate with, build a strong network, deliver on your brand promise, and in short live according to your brand promise.  To guide you in this process a unique learning cycle called the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle (PDAC cycle) have been introduced, which should be followed continuously. This is necessary to let your brand awareness grow gradually. This learning process will help you to become proactive, manage your time effectively, and anticipate on the crisis.The introduced breathing and silence exercises will help you calm down and regain control of your mind and body during the crisis.

 This 4-point model forms the key to master the financial crisis effectively. Through this approach you will also be able to make yourself and others happy on an ongoing basis. Please ask for further information about our related master class at: TPS International Inc.; tpsi@live.com

 

 

  

 

 

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