4 Knowing what I have to offer − personality
Your personality, combined with your values, strengths, knowledge and experience, is what gives you your unique personal brand. No-one else will be able to offer the same combination of factors.
In Week 2, you considered the relevance of a ‘brand personality’ and the human personality traits that might be attributed to a product or organisation. In this section, you’ll consider which elements of your personality you might incorporate into your own brand.
Activity 4 Describing myself
Imagine you’re at an event where everyone is meeting for the first time and someone asks you to describe yourself. What would you say? Focus on your personality traits; for example, you might describe yourself as humble, direct, charming, passionate, irritable or odd! For a useful list of prompts, look at David Ball’s ‘Big Long List of Personality Traits [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’.
Write one or two short paragraphs in the box below:
Discussion
How did you find this exercise? Easy, difficult, enlightening? People respond to this exercise in different ways and can often be too modest or self-deprecating in their descriptions. Did you focus on the aspects of your personality that are positive or did you highlight some of the negatives?
When developing your personal brand, the positive aspects of your personality are the obvious ones to share, but is there anything you can learn from the negatives? For example, that characteristic that you are describing as ‘shyness’ could actually be highlighting your ability to observe, listen and analyse.
This activity provides more information to consider/include when developing your personal brand, but to position your brand effectively, you need to know what you’re aiming for. In the next section you’ll focus on what you want from your career.