Personal Branding. Part 2.
Who's ready for Part 2?! Defining your current personal brand.
For any journey, it's important to know where you are today in order to know how to get to where you are going. Starting to understand what your personal brand is today allows for you to be more conscious of how others are perceiving you, gives you a chance to self-reflect on your work reputation and is an activity you can do often to check in and get feedback on your personal brand (without asking in those exact words).
We can get clues to our personal brand in many places:
Performance reviews. Look at your last few performance reviews. What are the themes? Attention to Detail? Timeliness of completing tasks? Make note of things that you see and you think would be representative describers of who you are at work based on your performance reviews (or other feedback from your boss).
Ask someone. A best friend at work, perhaps! A trusted peer. Someone who works for you. Make sure you trust and value the person's opinion, and make sure they will be honest. Not being honest on this can be sabotaging. Ask them to think of and then write down a few describers of you at work, how people describe you when you aren't in the room.
Self-reflect. What kinds of assignments do you get? Is there any thread of similarity that could define how someone perceives your abilities? Recognition - what is that given to you for? What do people email you about when it's not day to day work tasks? How do people react when you come into the room or speak in video meetings? Start to put together a view of how the messages you are getting define how you are perceived in your job today.
Let's do this with pen/pencil to paper or fingers to keyboard. The act of writing it down is powerful.
Any revelations when going through this?
