Authentic Personal Branding: No One Can Compete With You at Being You

‘I help leaders cope with the complexity of the modern workplace, whether that is to succeed in the big projects that save jobs or transform performance, or to make incredible acts of individual courage. I believe work can be more than just a job; that our days can be energising; and that organisations can be about more than just money.’

That’s what I ended up writing when I took my own medicine after I ran a workshop for a group of emerging leaders. And, to be honest, the medicine tastes pretty good!

I’m writing as I travel back from delivering a workshop on – among other things – personal branding to an amazing group in London (they also have some AMAZING views from their building – check out the picture).

The personal branding part of the workshop created lots of echoes for me.

It involved revisiting a piece of work Nicole Brigandi and I did many years ago, and one of the things that surprises me about the work I did in the first few years of my business is… that I got it mostly right. And Nicole and I really did with this. (Watch us deliver a workshop based on this content, if you like, in full, here)

Also echoing from the past is a practice I picked up from Vegard Olsen when delivering workshops with him for coachingpartner: the habit of always DOING the exercises I was about to ask others to do.

When I was preparing to share Nicole’s and my definition of how to create a personal pitch, I realised that I needed to do the exercise again for the first time in a while. (That’s because one stage of mastering your personal brand, as Nicole and I agreed years ago, is that you have to evolve it when things change for you.)

And so I used our prompts and created the above.

And you know what: I like it.

Like any personal pitch, it has its limitations in trying to encompass something too complex for a couple of sentences.

Like good personal pitches, it might make you think of someone you could connect me with, or help me come to mind when someone talks about the challenges or opportunities they're facing.

But unlike many personal pitches, because of the formula we created together, there’s a lot of ME in it.

And good brands are based in authenticity.

So remember: no one can compete with you at being you.