series: personal branding

When going through the process of establishing oneself as a consultant, much attention is paid to the concepts of "who are you" and "what do you offer the world." Now that may seem rather esoteric and floofy, but ironically it's the concept of finding my own personal brand that has really helped me cement my thinking about my life.

Through the years, everyone encounters moments of redefinition. Sometimes triggered by a life event, sometimes instigated by the natural rhythms of growing and maturing as a person. But I think many of us have sort of put our heads down and moved through life without a lot of this kind of introspection. It feels more natural to tie our identities to a learned goal - a job, a degree, what our parents wanted for us - instead of integrating our identities and our aspirations. For example, we may strive for corporate successes such as promotion and recognition - but we don't always take a good hard look at how that aligns with our personal passions and values. I keenly remember days in my former corporate life when I sat back and thought to myself, "What on earth am I doing? Do I really care if another [insert product here] makes it to the store? Will this actually impact someone's life and make a real difference?" The irony here, of course, is that I am the consummate consumer and I love the idea of bringing products and services to market! And at the time, I didn't give myself the room to sit back and think about what I'd prefer to do, and how I'd prefer to do it. I just chased the next paygrade and put 110% of myself into jobs that probably didn't register 20% passion.

And the not-so-surprising thing? A LOT of people are talking about this kind of stuff today. The economy has a hangover. The markets are tired. The heartbeat of American consumerism is thready. While we're all looking intently at our pocketbooks and retirement accounts, we're also looking deep within ourselves. Maybe that mortgage or credit card balance isn't really aligned with how we want to live our lives. Perhaps the investment we've made into the career isn't showing the long-term payoff that we thought it might. As companies are faced with "evolve or die" in their business practices, offerings, ways to reach customers, etc., so too are we thinking about our own evolution. We need to figure out how to live right again. Live rich.

I'm starting a couple of series in this blog, the first one about personal branding. What on earth is it? What does it mean? How do we work it into our lives? My expertise comes from a lot of study and reading on the subject (which is far from new), and my own personal journey. I am witnessing a lot of my friends working with this subject matter. So the point is to share what I've learned and how it's become part of my more-authentic life these days. Stay tuned for more.