Personal Branding

Personal branding is a deceptively simple concept. 

It is how the world receives you. 

Simple, right?

Crafting this brand is both the easiest and hardest task you’ll ever take on. And you’re doing it—whether you realize it or not.

How can it be easy and hard?

It is fundamentally easy because your personal brand comprises everything that you have ever done as the world sees it. Much like the mermaid thing is the face of Starbucks, you are the face of your personal brand. 

When we look at this deeper, your brand is impacted by your audience. 

Let’s look at Donald Trump since he has a polarizing personal brand that will make for an easy contrast. 

There are people that love and idolize Donald Trump, treating him as the second coming of Christ (this is only a slight exaggeration). If you are picturing people praying towards an image of him with the Secret Service carrying him out with his fist in the air after his ear getting shot with an American flag billowing in the background as an eagle screeches, you may fall into this category. 

On the other hand, there are people that spitefully hate Trump and everything he stands for. They hate his politics, they hate his egocentricity, they hate how he embodies many patriarchal ideologies, they hate that he got away with paying off Stormy Daniels. They might look at that same image of Donald Trump with a pitchfork in his hands, horns growing out of his toupee, and flames erupting in the background instead of an American flag. Maybe even some maniacal laughter instead of an eagle screeching. 

But how can one person have two completely polar brands? 

It comes down to how his audience perceives him. 

The same happens to your personal brand, albeit on a much smaller stage. 

Your personal brand is not only comprised of everything that you have ever done but also how your audience perceives what you have done and what they have seen and experienced you doing. 

For instance, I would generally expect people to receive me as a very kind and caring person. But I can easily think of two people that would categorize me as a giant asshole - a brand that is pretty challenging to correct. 

One of them because from her perspective I broke a mug over someone’s head at a party… My friend and I had gotten massive mugs from Spencer’s to bring to parties -his, a massive black mug with a gold dollar sign handle and mine, a massive stein with TMNT on it—he was heavily intoxicated and I was by him when the handle of his mug broke off in my hand, throwing the mug in his direction.

From her angle, it probably looked like I shattered the mug over his head in a drunken rage—which, yeah, would definitely make me the asshole in that story.

I didn’t, for the record, break the mug on him, but perspective is everything. 

While that branding of me was due to an individual’s perception of a moment in time from the angle in which they saw it - sometimes your actions really do justify people’s perceptions. 

Because with the second… well... I was an asshole. 

I was generally picky in school with the girls I was willing to talk to and was giving one of my best friends a hard time about a girl he was interested in. I said she had weird toes and apparently she was in earshot at the time as we were eating lunch in the cafeteria. 

Numerous years later, they were talking and she told my friend I was an asshole and about her hearing what I had said. 

We hadn’t really interacted much at all so to her, highly justifiably, my personal brand was that I was an asshole. 

I have learned from my pea-brained high school ways just a hair and haven’t picked on anybody’s toes since. 

Managing the perception of an ever growing audience is where personal branding gets hard. 

While you may have an explicit vision of the personal brand that you want to create, you may have to fight varying perceptions of your brand or previous versions of yourself that may impede the direction you are taking your brand. 

While you can work dutifully to reimagine your brand, there will always be traces of your previous brand floating out in the ether. Those traces will surface and it is your job to continue to fight for the brand identity you are working to create and to not be stifled by the remnants of your past. 

So if personal branding is how the world receives everything you do, then your job isn’t just to be a certain way—it’s to manage the gap between who you are and how you are perceived.