Focus On Your Branding “Develop your YOU Brand - Part One”

There are three parts you need to focus on when assembling your personal strategy. Let take a look at part one “Develop your YOU Brand”:

During the development of "YOU Brand" you need to ask yourself these basic questions.

What are my values?
What do I love?
What do I dislike?
What do I love to do?
What am I really proud of?
Who would I like to be ?
What is important and valuable to me?
What do I want to be known for?
Who are my mentors?

Yes these are very basic questions. However, sometimes these are the most difficult to answer. You must answer these questions and be true to yourself and your honesty will really show in your brand.

Once you have created your brand, it will serve as the basis for everything that connects people to you and your brand, logically, spiritually and emotionally. Brand is soul deep. Your image is very important, of course, but an image is just a reflection of your brand and your personal core values. Remember: the idea of branding yourself goes far beyond promotion and marketing yourself to others. The bottom line is it come down to YOU.

"The core of branding, beyond telling truth, is to be true to yourself." as said by Dr. Seamus Phan says in his book, DotZen. This is the most important part of your development stage of your YOU branding. This is where you determine who you are, what you are all about and what you stand for. So look at yourself in a mirror and really take a hard look at yourself, what do you see? This requires a lot of reflection and deep inter thinking about you. But this does not have to be done entirely by you.

Validate yourself. Go to your close friends and ask the how they perceive you. Make sure to ask more than one friend to do this. Then compare this with how you look at yourself. You may find that your friends have very good insights into your character, traits and attributes that you may not have noticed before. Some of the time we are blinded to our own personality characteristics and flaws. We always think we have flaws and we really a false perception of who we are. We may need help from our friends occasionally in our attempts to validate ourselves.

The foundation of a good brand is authenticity, consistency, and clarity. This holds true for your personal brand as well. Use these three parts when building your foundation as your guide when taking a look at your brand. By really taking a look inside yourself during this process and working hard to define who you are, what you stand for, and your brand message will become clear. It will be clear to others because it is clear to you. A clear message is a message people can trust, honor, and will show your integrity. Personal branding can evolve overtime, but will remain essentially consistent to your core foundation.

Thank you for your time,

Jim Cobb - Google Me