Hi everyone, so the playwright Oscar Wilde is credited for saying be yourself, because everyone else is taken. So it's a great starting point. Two, as Tom Peters suggests, creating your own personal unique brand and strategizing how to market that brand. Sometimes though, starting the branding process might feel like a really big obstacle to overcome. It actually is pretty common to feel overwhelmed at this stage of the brand development process. So we are including a template with some questions and prompts to get you started on your way. Think of this as an ongoing project, it´s something to which you can and really must should add evidence, revisions and updates. Remember that foundational habit of reflection will help you to not only start this process. But most importantly revise it, as you add new artifacts, you gain new experiences, you're involved in more projects and so forth. So in addition to some of the elements of personal branding about which we've already spoke. Here there are a few questions to ask yourself and remember too, you can use your assessment grids. To gather some information, to determine how elements of your brand might be assess by expert evaluators to do some soft assessment. And gather really good solid evidence and artifacts to add to your T portfolio and E portfolios to support this claim that your brand is making. So first of all be sure that your personal brand is about the authentic you. And not exclusively about positions that you've held and not necessarily about projects that you've led. Although certainly elements of those details will be there. And by the way, I have to correct, actually have to correct this issue on my own LinkedIn profile. It talks a great deal about the universities for which I've worked. And as I said, I'm proud of those affiliations but it really doesn't say a great deal about me, so it's a good reminder for me as well. So here are some questions. Have you created a brand that can translate across multiple venues? We know we have social media, we know that social media might change, right? The actual names of the outlets, but social media will exist. So for the time being, think not only about social media outlet but also what that might look like on different platforms. For example, phones, tablets and computers. Make sure when you're developing on your personal brand, you use relevant keywords. Remember we discussed the importance of keywords in course two. Because we want to make sure that your personal brand is searchable. And then speaking of keywords, can you distill your personal brand into a personal brand statement? So some people might call this a personal brand elevator pitch. And it is sort of a 30 second quick description of what your personal brand is all about. And it's actually more difficult than you might think. We all tend to be generally speaking, we tend to be verbose when we talk about ourselves. Mostly because we don't exactly know how to capture that unique part, so we over explain to compensate for it. So to avoid doing that and to move you towards a personal branding process, here's a few prompts to get you started. What do you do better than anyone else? What are your professional values? How do you think your manager or supervisor or past manager or supervisors would describe you? And then what about your colleagues, how would they describe you? What are the unique attributes of your work style? How do you solve problems or get results, do you prefer to work in groups? Do you prefer to work on your own and can you say why? And then if you have to work in one scenario when you prefer the other, how do you manage that? How do you [INAUDIBLE] compensate and work to your best anyway, no matter the scenario? For example, can you be a self starter even if you prefer collaborative group work? So for example, I'm teaching a not for profit leadership course and we asked students to think of someone they consider a leader. If you did the same, what attributes does that person have and do you have them too? What are your short-term and long-term goals? So that can really be a vague question. So it might help to think in terms of one, three, five year blocks of time. Organizations have mission statements, what's yours? And then in what areas do you take the most professional pride? What's your personal elevator pitch? Could you describe your [INAUDIBLE] grant to someone in 30 seconds or less? And just a little digital literacy 101, have you completely investigated your online social profile? If your professional brand, no matter how you make and expertly craft it. Is in danger of becoming charter spy, perhaps a sloppier personal brand. And the personal brand needs to be reevaluated and you should consider ways to align them. And this is of course not to suggest that you can't have a private face and identity. But be careful to not cross private with public, it's really important. So use these prompts to create your own brand, add to them, modify them and make sure to keep that brand current. As with you resume, it's far easier to add new projects as you go along. Let's just try to remember everything when a new opportunity presents itself. Good luck with this process.
