Peer to Peer Magazine

12 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | WINTER 2016 BEST PRACTICES Create and Build Your Personal Brand Create and Build Your Personal Brand How To Create Your Brand Creating your personal brand is a lot of work. However, once you get started and block out time for self- reflection, the hard work will pay off in gaining a professional competitive advantage. Here are the steps you should take to create your brand: Determine Your Strengths: Most of us focus on our weaknesses, but, when we're defining our personal brand, it is far more productive to identify and foster our strengths. Your strengths will ultimately pave your career's trajectory. To determine your true strengths, find a quiet place away from all distractions, and have a brainstorm. Use your experiences, talents, so skills, education, training, achievements and passions to help guide you in this process. Choose strong and accurate key words to describe each strength, focusing on making your descriptions meaningful. 1 In a competitive job market, having a personal brand can mean the difference between being hired, promoted, given a role on a high-profile project or being passed over. Take the time to define your brand, and then take action to build it into something you can leverage into the right opportunities to grow. by Elizabeth Greene and Kelly Harbour The goal is to walk away with five strengths. If you are having trouble narrowing down your list, only use the key strengths you enjoy most and feel are the most helpful in defining your personal brand. Define Your Core Values: There is nothing more powerful than aligning who you are with what you do and how you do it. Values help to define your sense of purpose and the direction of your personal brand, acting as guidelines for evaluating choices and defining how you relate to co-workers, bosses and clients. The process to get there is similar to defining your strengths: Start by finding a quiet place and then ask yourself: "What in life is most important to me?" Once you have wrien down several words, ask yourself: "What does this value mean to me?" This process helps narrow down your first word choice to its underlying value. The goal of this exercise is to have two or three core values that best represent your brand. Create a Personal Brand Statement: Clarifying your unique strengths, passions and values gives you a great direction for creating your personal brand statement. Think of your personal brand statement as your tag line, which briefly states who you are in a powerful and succinct manner. It's a great way for you to showcase how you stand out from the crowd! To create your personal brand statement, take your top values and your top strengths, add your main objectives, and weave those elements into a sentence or two. That sounds simple, but it takes a few aempts to get it right. Practice writing a few different sentences, and change things around until it sounds right. Run your personal brand statement by your friends, family, mentors or anyone you feel would offer you valuable advice. Be open to editing until you are happy with the statement. How To Build Your Brand There are four parts to building a personal brand: create awareness, build credibility, build relationships 2 3 Access the ILTACON 2016 session materials and recordings for "Stand Out from the Crowd: Building the Brand Called You" at www.iltanet.org. WANT TO LEARN MORE? Building the brand called YOU STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD #ILTACON #ILTA044

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