Don't Be Afraid to Upgrade Your Personal Brand

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By Mo Bunnell

Below is a transcript of this video, modified for your reading pleasure. Have a question that you'd like answered? Drop us a line!

Whether you're in professional services, and you have a personal brand out in the marketplace, or you're working inside an organization, you've got a personal brand inside that organization. No matter who you are in any of those scenarios, there can always be improvement about your personal brand.

Here is the barrier we see people have about improvement: they don't want to let go of what they've got, to improve and grab on to something else. Let's say you're providing professional services. I hear this all the time, where somebody goes, "Man, I want to start doing this meaty, sexier, less commoditized work over here, but man, I'm worried about promoting myself that way, because I might mess up. I might not be able to bring in as much of this work now that's keeping me busy. I'm afraid to leave this, to go to that."

Instead of viewing this as on or off, like a light switch, "I've got to leave this to go there," view it like a dimmer switch. Make all your proactive engagements, speaking at conferences, the kind of organizations you'd like to talk to, how you get in the door using your lead-gen techniques, if you're this external person, make all of those proactive things about your new brand. Then you can still, as long as you need to, take the business that comes in under the old you. View it like a dimmer switch that's going to change slowly over time, so you can be proactive here and reactive there. And that lets you very quickly move from one to the other.

You can use the same approach with your internal personal brand. Start volunteering for projects that get you that big bonus, or get you that big promotion over here, while you're still delivering great work for what you're hired to do now. People promote people that are already doing the jobs that they want to get promoted to, not ones that say they want to. Do that little extra in either case to be proactive about where you want to take your career.

Now, if you want more detail, we've got an entire chapter on positioning yourself externally. And the same tools and techniques can be provided internally! We've got an entire chapter, Chapter Three, that gets great detail about how you define your brand, how you communicate your brand, and how you find people that want your brand. Chapter Three in The Snowball System. You're going to love it.

As with all of our videos, we hope this one helps you help your clients succeed.