How infuse your personality to create an aligned personal brand

How infuse your personality to create an authentic and aligned personal brand.

More and more people start to speak about the importance of branding and building a personal brand for your business.

I think that there are too many rules, shoulds and shouldn’t when it comes to your personal brand. Yes, you need to know your audience, yes, you need to have your brand statement figured out, and yes, you need to know what problem you solve with your products and services. But do you know what you stand for? Do you really know yourself? Do you know how do you want to be seen in the world? Do you live according to your values? Do you even know what your values are? All these are very important questions that you can answer only through doing deep self-discovery work. It’s absolutely vital for building an authentic, aligned, and sustainable personal brand.

To my mind it’s a never-ending journey of self-discovery, trying, experimenting, and pivoting, until you find what is aligned and feels right for you. Taking action and trying will build your courage to put yourself out there, as well as build your confidence. Adopting other’s people strategies might work for some people, but it didn’t work for me for example, that’s why I kept carving my own path and searching for answers. It’s how I ended up discovering website design and rebranding my business model from scratch.

It goes without saying that self-discovery work is the foundation of your branding. Because it’s you who run your business, and you need to enjoy your everyday work and feel proud about what you do. Because when you don’t, how the hell are you supposed to keep going when things get tough? When you don’t see immediate results? When do you fail?

There is so much noise on the intent these days, everybody tells you what you need to do, what is the right way to create the content, and what is the right way to run your business. But who knows better than you how would you like to do things??

Another danger when you’re not willing to do the self-discovery work is drowning in comparing and watching other people, as you don’t really know what is aligned and acceptable to do for you. You can try other’s people methods, and strategies, but most likely they won’t work for you. And you will end up beating yourself up and wondering why you’re not as successful as other people. But believe me, if beating yourself up was working, wouldn’t you and your business be perfect by now?

Don’t forget that you’re a unique human being, a miracle of the universe, and only you know what is right for you. As much as we would like to find a formula or quick fix to run and build our businesses, often it’s a road that leads nowhere. Unfortunately or fortunately there is no quick fix or a “right way” to do things. You need to embark on your journey, get lost, embrace your journey and adventure and find out what makes sense and what works for you. It’s the beauty of not having a formula, you can invent your own path and your own rules.

If you find the courage to be vulnerable, ask questions and search with curiosity and an open mind, you will find your unique way to build your personal brand for your business, express yourself through it and connect to the right people and run your business with joy.

How my journey of building a personal brand looked liked

My journey of building a personal brand was very far away from a smooth one. I used to have a lot of self-doubts, fear, and anxiety and felt lost very often. It took me a lot of courage to choose to listen to my gut, and inner voice and let them guide me. I chose to believe in myself, embrace my journey and see where it will lead me.

I used to follow many people who spoke about personal branding and help people to build brands. I even used to work with a branding coach to build my first French language business. And I discovered the time that most of the approaches were not deep enough, there was not enough stress on my personality or self-discovery work, but just some general work on defining my ideal audience, my offer, my brand statement. But what about me? What about my values? Is it me who decided to choose my niche, or is it something that was dictated by my education and that I had some experience in it? Or maybe my limiting beliefs didn’t let me dream big, and dare to find my true life purpose?

And the answer was for me that I exactly chose to teach language as I had a diploma and some experience, but deep down in my heart, I knew that I wanted to do something different. But I was so afraid to admit it.

So after building my first business, I realized that I hate teaching, and I was blocked as I had my brand, and website ready. I ended up having a lot of anxiety, fear and unwillingness to show up and create content. I think that I still learned a lot, developed my skills, and it’s what led me to my starting my second business. It’s proof that everybody’s journey is different.

If you too feel lost, anxious, and not really sure how to show up, or what type of content you can create for your business, you feel that you don’t enjoy what you do, or lost yourself imitating others. It’s exactly the time to question the way you do things and look inside to find all the answers. We all have answers inside of us, we just need to be open, ask questions, be curious, be willing to try, quieten the noise, do inner work and take action to find the answers.

How you can uncover all layers of your amazing and complex personality?

The most important thing is to start thinking about what you value in life and why? Defining my values was huge for me. I have never thought about my values before. I mean I had some vague idea of what my values were, but never went deep enough to clarify them. I will be speaking about values in more depth in my future blog posts. For example, my values are authenticity, courage, curiosity, freedom, fun, mindfulness, self-care, self-development, persistence, and skillfulness. They can change and evolve over time, so it’s a good practice to come back to your values from time to time and contemplate.

Now it’s your turn to sit down, clarify your values, and put them in order or priority. Go really deep and write down why did you choose this or that value.

Values will guide you like a compass through your life, give you a sense of direction, inspire you to keep going when things get tough and let you live fulling life right now at this moment before you can achieve your huge goals, or even if you don’t achieve them.

Values are not strict rules, they just provide guidance. Every time you face a big challenge in your business, you can always come back to them, to come back on track and to remind yourself why do what you do. Your values glue together the tinniest little actions to your biggest long-term goals.

Knowing your values and living by them every single day is absolutely vital for building an authentic, and aligned personal brand.

Define your strengths

Have you ever thought about what your strengths are? Maybe it’s a love of learning, appreciation of beauty, excellence, interest in how everything works in the world, critical thinking, and honesty. Was there something you had been always good at doing?

Think deeply about your strength, and write a detailed list. The question that can help you is: What are the top 100 questions that fascinate you in life? And why?

Have you already experienced a flow state in your life? When? What you were doing during these moments? A flow state is a state of full engagement in the task when you lose the perception of time. If yes, name these activities and think whether it’s something that you can build your business and personal brand around, even if everybody around tells you that this niche is over-saturated and that you need to choose something more realistic.

What is your zone of genius and your domain of mastery?

Your zone of genius is a belief that guides you every day. Everyone’s zone of genius is unique. It’s a mix of your natural talents, abilities, passions, skills, and strengths where you find ceaseless inspiration, and seem to not only come up with work that is distinguished and unique but also do so in a way that excels far and beyond what anyone else is doing.

But in order to define it, you need to know yourself, be willing to work on your skills, improve them, and constantly challenge yourself to be able to perform at your peak.

You need also to think about the domain you would like to master. In what domain would you like to help people, to make a difference, to serve the world? It can be even a mixture of several domains like I did, website design, coaching, and writing website copy. Take your time to think really deeply about it.

If you feel even lost than before try this techniques

Everything that I mentioned before can sound quite overwhelming, and abstract. It’s okay to feel lost. There are some other things that helped me tremendously to discover the domain I would like to develop in. And helped me to build an aligned personal brand.

Try to do small gigs. Find tangible, real projects to work on so that you could confirm for yourself that the domain you chose is really something that you will enjoy in the long term and will stick to it.
Don’t be afraid to experiment, pivot, and try things out. Because before you do, it stays a theory.
Meditation helps me to deal with unhelpful thoughts and feelings, gives have some space, quietens the outside noise, looks deeper inside, and learns to be in the present moment.
Journaling is a really powerful tool to speak to yourself, understand yourself better, and process complex thoughts and emotions while you’re on your self-discovery journey.
Daily contemplation, is when you mindfully and intentionally think about your business direction.
Get inspired by reading good books. Almost everything we’re told and experienced by other people in the past. So why not learn about their experience and take some nuggets of wisdom for yourself? Speak and connect to like-minded people who are on a similar journey. It can feel lonely sometimes.

Create a visual representation of your personal brand that feels like you, that you feel proud about

Your website and brand identity design is only the reflection of you as a person, your personal brand and your business.

It’s important to do the inner work before you jump into website creation, or even before choosing your brand style. If you don’t do the work, you will end up wasting a lot of time changing your colours, fonts, and logos every time you need to show up or create a piece of content. It’s such a useless use of your time, and it creates a lot of overwhelming. You can use this time better, and do more impactful things for your business rather than changing colour every single time you need to post something on social media.

As soon as you do some inner work, you can start getting inspired, and find photos that you love aesthetically, and websites that you’re absolutely obsessed about. Analyze what exactly you love about them and why. It will help to craft your own style that reflects and represents you, your brand and your business 100%.

You need to love and be proud of the visual representation of your business. It will inspire you and you will be more willing to show up. Make sure that you’re ready to stick to it, and don’t change your visual style every week. It will help you to be consistent and become recognizable by your audience. It doesn’t mean that you can’t change your style over time and evolve. It’s natural for us as human beings to evolve, grow and change.

How to stay on track and be consistent

You can stay consistent and show up with the best energy when you do what you enjoy and when you’re being your authentic self. There will be both good and bad days even when you do what you love. But when you remind yourself about your values, and your purpose and have fun you are more likely to stick to what you do and keep going.

It’s important to balance creating content that you enjoy, and that your audience needs. You start creating consistent content when you feel good about yourself and when you’re vibing with your life. When you create what YOU WANT, but not what everybody else is doing.

Because when you’re not proud of what you create, when you don’t feel good about it, and don’t believe in it, how your audience suppose to trust you and buy from you?

Final thoughts

Building a sustainable personal brand that feels true and aligned with you is hard work. It takes time, but it’s so worth it.

You need to get in touch with your inner self, and clarify your values, strengths, your zone of genius and your domain of mastery before you even think about your ideal audience, your brand statement, your offer, and visual representation of all this. It’s the foundation of everything.

Running your business, creating content, creating services, and showing up will be so much easier once you’re clear about who you’re and what you’re standing for.

I hope that by now you realized the importance of your inner work and self-discovery journey to help you to infuse your personality into building an aligned and authentic personal brand and business.

Resources