Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken.
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| Figure 1: Personal Branding |
Personal branding is a revolution in the way we manage our careers or businesses. It's a way of clarifying and communicating what makes you different and special and using those qualities to separate from yourself from your peers so that you can greatly expand your success. Personal branding is the strategy behind the world's most successful people. People like Oprah, Madonna, Richard Branson and Bill Gates. It is the difference between an ordinary career or business and an exceptional one.
It is only a matter of time before your peers or competitors jump on the 'brandwagon.' So uncovering, building and nurturing your brand now will ensure that you get out in front of the pack and experience professional success beyond your dreams.
According to Difrisco (2011) Personal Branding,
- Helps to define who you are and what you are about (or why a patient should choose you)
- Is a way of associating great value with a product (the product being you)
- Is not about getting a prospect or employer to choose you over your competition.
- It is about getting them to see you as the only solution to their problem
Learning from Class:
Lecturer started the lecture by stating that students needs to act as professionals now on wards because the students including myself will be in industry within one years time. With lectures explanation students realized today's lecture going to be revolves around Personal Branding. Lecturer stated "Creating a brand called you " helps each individual students or person to selecting a job as well as to further progress in career. After stating above artifacts lecturer asked some questions as stated below,
What is a brand?
As lecturer stated brand gives some leverage, advantage or distinguish over the others.
What is a Personal Branding?
This basically says how you brand your self. How you distinguish your self from others. A particular person needs to communicate well to a third party as "Who I am and This is how I'm different from others". This process known as "Branding Your Self" in general term.
After explain answers for the above questions lecturer said as students we need to crate a Logical Brand for our self. People need to self aware them self to convince that the him/her self is unique than the others capabilities in business environment. Basically it should be self awareness about them self that compromised with unique Strength and Weaknesses. Out of that list people need to identify what are the strengths that would actually appeal more to the others or organizations. According to my listed strengths I recognized that I can work under pressure (robustness) which is good capable that I have as well as lecturer stated that fear for public speaking is one of the biggest threat that affecting to a persons capabilities. Beside that according to lecturer there were two type of people whom like to work as a team and they perform well when working on groups as well as the other type was people who working along since they prefer that because of its more productive to them than working on groups.
After specifying above artifacts lecturer showed us a slide which contains a quote by Claude M.Bristol which state "Every person is the creation of himself, the image of his own thinking and believing". Above statement basically explain that persons image basically reflects from the persons thinking and believing. As persons view point "How other people to see your themselves".
After that lecturer stated an important point as "Creating a Brand is all about expressing yourself with sugar coated where it sometimes distinguishes from the persons actual reality".
Before concluding the lecture, lecturer discussed about various way which a person can market him.her self;
- Personality - Realistic, Conventional, Social, Enterprising, Investigative and Artistic
- Networking/Social Groups - It is important to have contacts with well established people and as students we can network in Toastmaster's Club, Lion's Club, Rotaract Club etc. Also, there are professional associations like ISACA, BCS and CSSL which students also able to enroll in.
- Presentation of oneself - Conducting and maintain a personal website
- Attire - It is important to dress professionally
- CV - Curriculum Vitae
Reality of the Lecture:
From this lecture I understood my strengths and weaknesses as well as the tasks that I'm more capable of. I gained knowledge about branding and it's benefits and how well personal branding that could be used to out stand my self from my competitors. This personal branding is more applicable for enterprise level engagements where it requires my self to stand out from others as an example in a scenario like an interview or to get new positions throughout the professional career.
References:
Difrisco, M.G. (2011). Personal Branding. [Online]. Available at: http://www.how-to-branding.com/Personal-Branding.html [Accessed 20th August 2012]
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