I conducted two personal branding workshops in the past week. A very pertinent question came up in the first workshop which I addressed in the second through sharing resources and tools to help.
“I love the idea of personal branding but I don’t know what I’m really good at. How do I know what my true differentiators are?”
This was a great question asked by one of the women at an event on Women’s Equality Day organised by Oberoi Realty for their employees at which I was the keynote speaker.
That’s when I realised that I need a module in my personal branding framework to help people “discover” their unique gifts to the world. So before you can define your personal brand, design your personal brand expression and deliver your personal brand every day, you have to discover what your personal brand should be based on.
How might you go about discovering your unique strengths?
Some of us may have had the good fortune of parents or teachers helping us discover our talents. Others may have stumbled upon it themselves. A few might have been born knowing exactly what their special gift to the world was going to be. But for the rest, we have to do the hard work of self-discovery ourselves. Three tools can help.
DIY 360
The Johari Window
Your personal highlights reel
DIY 360
One of the best ways to discover your unique strengths is to ask! Ask family members, friends, co-workers, bosses, juniors. Feedback from the full circle of people around you will be eye opening. Here’s a simple way to go about it. You can set-up a survey using a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. The important bit is to get feedback from as many people as you can convince to do this for you and then analyse the feedback to see the themes emerging that reveal your unique gifts.
The Johari Window
For those wanting a more rigorous approach to self-discovery, the Johari Window, a wonderful tool from the world of psychology, can be used.
It’s a simple four box matrix that plots what’s known to you about yourself, and what’s not known to you about yourself against what’s known to others about you and what’s not known to others about you.
The resulting four quadrants are:
The Open Arena: fertile ground for personal brand development
The Blind Spot: important aspects for self-awareness
Hidden Areas: potential gems to be brought into the open area
Unknown: scope for self-development
If you’re a Miro user, you can use this handy Johari Window template.
What I love about using the Johari Window framework is the potential of finding hidden gems - what others see in us that we don’t see ourselves that can become our biggest differentiators.
Your personal highlights reel
This third method is a fun one. I heard about it from one of the interviewees on Deepak Jayaraman’s podcast Play to Potential and have written about it in a previous edition of the newsletter.
Ask 20 people from your circle to share one vivid story about when they saw your most brilliant self in action. What were you doing? How did you impact the audience? How did you make them feel? Ask them to write the memory down and share it with you. You can then string together all the stories to create your personal highlights reel. You are bound to find your signature specialness as the red thread of these stories. The personal highlights reel is also a great emotional boost when you are feeling down. Just read through the stories and you will slowly get your mojo back!
So there you go. Three different ways to discover yourself before you can define your personal brand!
Over to you now:
How well do you know what your unique gifts to the world are?
Which of these tools resonate the most with you?
Are there other ways to discover your strengths?