Global authority in personal branding & business branding Joanne Z. Tan explains what is a personal brand with philosophical & psychological sense of self.

What Is a Personal Brand?

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In a deeply philosophical and psychological sense, a personal brand is established upon the foundation of your sense of self, which determines how you relate to others, to your work, and to your world.

The question is both the most simple and the most challenging:  What constitutes YOU? 

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Expectations, Fears, Illusions

All our lives, we seem to be living up to others’ expectations – parents, teachers, college admissions, bosses, spouses, children, society…

To fit all their expectations, you often contort yourself, you lose touch with yourself – who you are, what you are, why you are on this Planet Earth.  Your own identity is morphed into the reflections of what others think, want, expect, and believe you to be, or what the society values. 

You lose yourself if your life becomes the answer to others’ expectations, and then your life is driven by reactions to fear of failure and a pursuit of illusions. 

When you are not in touch with yourself, you no longer own yourself. You are not shining from within but merely reflecting what is out there. Without a constant self to anchor your life, you follow the whimsical variables. You don’t own your power because you have never discovered your unique values, your simple joys, and your true self.

Results: You are living your life out of reaction to fear – an unhappy life exhausted from pleasing phantom expectations and illusions. Peace, joy, and contentment elude you because you have never figured out who you are, what you are, what brings you true happiness and fulfillment.

If your sense of self and purpose of life is to meet other’s approvals and expectations only, if your sense of empowerment is solely based on money and power to be acquired, your life may very much end up to be “short, nasty, brutish, and wretched”, however much money and power you acquire, as famously described by Thomas Hobbes, based on assumptions about human nature in his 1651 political treatise, Leviathan.

What is a personal brand?

In a deeply philosophical and psychological sense, a personal brand is established with the foundation of your sense of self, which determines how you relate to others, to your work, and to your world. The process of building a personal brand is to first to discover the innermost core of yourself, get in touch with it, reclaim it, and find the meaning and the purpose of your life, your unique value, your passion, your interest, your calling, your belief, … so that you can own your self and claim your power.

Once you own your power, you can live your life that is meant to be, from within to without. Then you can find your niche about whom you will serve and what you will do, to make a living, and live a fulfilled life with peace and contentment. Then you can lead and inspire others as an example, in life and at work, with your products or services, or leading an organization.

Get in touch with yourself

In my work of building personal brands for leaders and business brands for companies, I have been blessed and humbled with the tremendous honor and privilege of decoding their brand DNA.  Many of them have gone through two thirds of their lives through many ups and downs, successes and failures, along their unique meandering journeys.

Sometimes, I ask them to do this exercise: 

“Imagine that you are a 4-year-old, or a 5-year-old.  Stop at that age, and purge your mind of everything that has happened afterwards. Describe that child that was you.”

Amazingly and unsurprisingly, almost all individuals regardless of their personalities, ages, socio-economic status, the most common words used, among others, are: “curious, loving, joyful”. Myself included. (I have not asked anyone growing up from war zones or poverty, pardon me for this omission.)

Invariably, at different stages of our lives, expectations, fears, illusions, disappointments, and traumas, start to take over.

When we get to the stage of having children, we get to see the world through their eyes, which rekindles the original “curious, loving, joyful” self in each of us. 

Why can’t we live our lives, at home and in work, with more joy, curiosity, and love? 

Are you going to live your life till the end through the lenses of fear, “I’m not good enough”, not living up to the expectations, noises of anxiety, illusions, self-doubts? 

Frankly, If you live your life in reaction to your fears, what you fear the most will always control you, and what you fear will always happen.

Discover who and what you are, reclaim yourself, own your power, and start to live your life for yourself, out of belief in your innermost self. – this has nothing to do with being selfish. This is being true to yourself. Then you can be true to the world and to others. Then you can make a difference. That is the purpose of a personal brand. 

There is a gift in each and everyone of you

It may be a gift of kindness, a gift of contentment, a gift of language, a gift using your hands, … Just being yourself without any observable or useful “gifts”, is a gift. There is only one of you on this Planet.  You are a gift of life in your own unique way.

Start to treasure that gift – yourself.

Then you will have peace. 

Then you can have loving relationships.

Then you have a personal brand.

That’s the beginning of truly living your life.

 

©Joanne Z. Tan  all rights reserved.


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