Just Be Yourself – Be Your “Personal Brand”

Corporate mumbo jumbo: “Your Personal Brand”

Real people: “Just Be Yourself”

To just be yourself is perhaps the best piece of advice that can be given to anyone embarking on their online (or offline) entrepreneurial journey. Some like to call this “growing your personal brand”.

That this brand is something to be grown is a bit of a misnomer to me. We are already a brand. We all have a personality. We all have unique qualities, abilities, and tastes. Dare I say we even have flaws (I can imagine “Prune Your Personal Flaws” becoming the new buzzwords).

Therefore, when we are advised to grow our brand, what’s really meant is: let your personality seep into your work. Because at the end of the day people invest in people. People crave the human touch. Especially in an increasingly filtered and airbrushed world. We crave to see someone who’s real. Warts and all.

Your brand if not something that suddenly appears when your start your company. Everyone already has one. And you’ve been working on it as long as you’ve been alive. The difference is some of us choose to share our brand, our personality, with the wider world. Be that in business, social media, or a written blog like this.

If we make that choice, we inevitably want others to benefit from our work. Thus, we need an audience.

“Growing your personal brand” is often use interchangeably with “growing your audience”. I guess that’s because as you let your personality, your brand, seep out through your work, your audience will be drawn to you. Your 1000 true fans (see Kevin Kelly’s must-read blog post on the subject) will love you, for being you.

So, whatever you do, don’t try to be somebody else, somebody you’re not. Your audience will see through that. Just like they see through those corporate buzzwords like: Core Values, Push-Back, Leverage.

Your true fans want to see the real you. You have no choice but to be yourself.