I’m really excited to share these with you because they will accelerate your personal branding journey and help you build your personal brand and create your brave and bold life in 2024. So before I get into the steps, I just want to kind of ground us in what a personal brand does for you. A personal brand does many things and I’m just going to talk about it high level.
So when you are building your personal brand, ultimately it is helping you unleash your potential because where you are right now, you are probably not living up to your potential and you feel it, right? You don’t feel as fulfilled as you would like to feel. So it helps you unleash your potential. It also helps you live on purpose, living purposefully, living out your purpose in this life.
It also helps position you, okay? So, in the marketplace, instead of being undifferentiated, the personal branding journey helps you become the preferred person for your people, okay? It takes you from a realtor or a consultant to the realtor or the consultant, right? For your people. It also helps you create the possibilities for yourself.
You are creating opportunities for yourself when you’re embarking on a personal branding journey. You are also, when you build your personal brand, you are also, it also protects you. Okay, so what am I, what do I mean by protects you? So the marketplace is always going to change. Right. There are always going to be changing times.
There’s always going to be an, you know, changes in the economy. Um, and Oh, by the way, let’s hope that we never have to live through another pandemic again, but there who knows, right? It helps protect you in those times. Your personal brand will allow you to pivot. throughout your life. And lastly, and of course one of the things that we all think about is it helps us create profit, right?
It helps us monetize. It helps us create money for ourselves. And so that is what a personal brand does for you. Okay, so let’s get into these steps. First and foremost, you have to decide to commit to building your personal brand and going after your brave and bold life in 2024. You’ve probably heard this, but you’re one decision away from a whole new life.
You’re one decision away from having everything you want, okay? You know you want a new reality for yourself. Okay, whether you are someone who wants to build their personal brand so they can monetize it into a business Someday and maybe leave your nine to five or your day job Or if you are a business owner entrepreneur who already has a business But knows that you need to build your brand in order to help you With your business strategy so you can get to the next level you must decide okay, because Investing in your personal brand, investing in going on a personal branding journey is an investment, okay?
It’s an investment in you, it’s an investment in your future. So you have to decide to commit to doing the dang thing. Where do you want to be in one year? Where do you want to be in three years? What do you want to create for yourself? What sort of life do you want to be living in a year from now? In three years from now, five years from now, who do you want to be?
How do you want to be different than you are today? You have to decide to commit to building your personal brand. Deciding is the number one thing us leaders need to be doing, right? Decisive leaders. That is what we do. So if you are in a place where you are ready to change your life, building your personal brand will help you get there.
So when we decide and we do the dang thing, we first have to decide and then ultimately we have to Arrange and rearrange our life in order to have time and space and energy To be working on our personal brand. What does that mean? Well, that means we are probably going to have to say no to lots of things in our life And we have to get really good at it in order for us to take the next four steps.
So the next four steps that I’m going to walk you through, it’s going to be super high level, but I call them the foreseeing your future roadmap. Okay. Foreseeing your future roadmap. Okay. So let’s dive into the four steps to foresee your future. Step number two, after you’ve decided, is about getting real with yourself and getting very clear of the core of who you are, okay?
This is the deep work that most people skip. Most people who are building a personal brand, most people who are building a business, they skip this part. And this is the core. This is the real deal. This is like your soul. This is the real deal stuff. If you think about the most incredible personal brands, they are real leaders.
They lead themselves, they lead others. And what I mean, what I mean by real is this, I have an acronym for R. E. A. L. What it is, is you are relatable, you are recognizable, you are energetic, you are empathetic, you are aligned, you are authentic, you are always learning, and you are loving. You are leading from love, and you are serving others.
Every great personal brand is a real leader. There is something about their authenticity that attracts us to them. The second highest vibrational emotion is authenticity. It is literally a magnet. When someone is clear on who they are, and they lead from their real leadership, they lead from their true, real selves, and they are very clear on who they are, what their vision is for this world, what their mission is, who they serve, what their story is, what their core message is, what their values are.
You can just, you just are attracted to those people. The second step is a huge step and this often takes a long time. This is a step of discovery and uncovery. Okay, I say uncovery, I don’t even think that’s a word, but what it is, is literally peeling back the layers of all of the things that have told you that you have to be like this, or you have to be like that, or you have to use these words, and you can’t dress like that, all of that, okay.
Your core, your soul, who you are at your core, is what we need to uncover and discover. Whatever word you want to use. The thing is, it’s already inside of you. But, what I see is a lot of people don’t want to put their real true selves out there because they’ve been told it’s too much or too little or not right or whatever it is, okay?
So the second step is really getting real with yourself and getting very clear on the core of who you are because that is your differentiation. So the third step is to be or to become a creator, a bold creator. When you are building a personal brand, you’re creating your platform, you’re creating a body of work that helps you position yourself with credibility, with influence, and ultimately with authority.
Well, how do you do that? Back in the day, you did it solely with getting press, right? Getting featured in traditional media, getting on stages, and there was always a barrier to entry to do that. We still want press. We still want to position ourselves with the traditional media, but that’s not what comes first.
What comes first is creating your own platform, creating your own stage, creating your own airwaves, creating your own written form content. in order to position yourself as the expert, as the thought leader, as the go to person. So here’s what I want you to think about. You are creating the blank show.
Insert your name for the blank. Yes, you are going to create the blank show. Your, your name. Insert your name in there. Now, you may be thinking, oh, I don’t want to make it all about me. Okay, if you’re one of those who have that thought, that’s very natural. But when we’re building our personal brands, we are not We’re not saying, look at me.
We’re saying, come along with me. Okay? We are building our personal brands in order to position ourselves to help other people, and to be of service to other people, and to show other people what is possible. While that might be something that you have to move through, What you’re doing when you’re becoming a bold creator is you are creating your platform.
You are creating your platform to position yourself to then go in to being able to get on the stages of the traditional media, if you will, to get on the traditional media airwaves, which then further allows for credibility. Lastly, what I will say about this third step of becoming a creator is also a mindset, okay?
And I think this is probably the most important thing to think about. When we are embarking on building our personal brands so we can monetize them into a business or so it can, um, help us take our businesses to the next level, we have to remember that we are creators. We have to think like creators.
Versus consumers. And when we are creating for other people, we have to understand what consumers want. What your people want from you when it comes to content. Right? So, we may have to learn new skills. We may have to go on video, we may have to create content that is different than what we feel the most comfortable right now creating, but we have to think like creators.
We have to think like the media. If you’ve never thought about it that way before, this will be a big shift. But there’s no better way to think like the media than to create your own media and create content. Because if you want to think like the media and think like a creator, You have to create content in order to start to do that.
Also, we are creators of our own opportunities for ourselves, and we are creators of our own life and business. And so, there is a mindset shift, especially if you haven’t looked at creation in this way before. But when we’re building our personal brand, we are creators, we are creating a body of work that positions us and draws our people into our world and ultimately into our community.
So if we’ve decided to build our personal brand and go after our brave and bold life and we’ve gotten real with ourselves, and gotten very clear on the core of who we are and why we do what we do And what our core message is and what our story is and what our vision is and our mission and we’re becoming creators And when we create content and put it out there It’s drawing our people into us.
The fourth step is to become a master bold Connector, making connections with your people, connecting with your ideal people online, connecting with your ideal people offline, making connections with them and truly wanting to learn about their story and where they’re at and connecting with them on the things that you have in common and connecting with them on a deeper level over time.
Because ultimately what you’re doing in this entire process is you are building relationships. You’re putting yourself out there so you can reach your people and once they come into your world, online or offline or both, making deeper connections with those people and connecting the dots with what you can offer them and what your message is.
And making connections for those people that are also connected to you. Right? In order to build a personal brand and a business that lasts over time, oftentimes we are meeting people who may buy from us when we have something to offer, but we might not even have anything that they need or want. Yet, we can be a connector for them to someone else.
So, becoming a master at making connections is so critical when you’re building your personal brand. And lastly, step number five is to be a community builder. When you are putting yourself out there, you’re connecting with people. You’re inviting people into your community. You’re inviting people into the world that you’re creating because you’re like minded people.
Building community is so important. You can build community offline. You can build community online and ultimately you want to build your community around your personal brand and invite those like minded people into your community and then ultimately nurture your community and bring people together within your community and connect people within your community.
So there you have it, my friends, the five steps to accelerate your personal branding journey in 2024. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you had some aha moments. I hope this is helpful, and I hope that you take these steps, sit with them, think about where you’re at currently, think about where you want to go, and decide Take these last few days at the end of 2023 and think about and decide to commit to building your personal brand and going after your brave and bold life in 2024.