Written by: Akanksha Agarwal, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
You do not want to make the mistake of creating a personal brand identity and regret it after a couple of months or years. Do you agree that your goals and desires right now come from a sense of individuality? And they can be the unconscious fuel to create an identity in personal life and in business?
If you look back at your life and business experiences, you'll know that desires change and even identities evolve.
Creating a personal branding strategy around a specific identity is the biggest mistake business owners and entrepreneurs can make. Once you take on a specific identity, your intellect functions only in that context. Now, with time and more profound experiences, there’s a huge possibility that your perception of something might elevate and you evolve as an individual and as a business owner. When this happens there’s always an inner conflict that people find difficult to handle. This conflict sometimes pushes them to engage in actions that are compulsive and not conscious or stop taking actions at all and get into a passive mode.
Due to social media influence and things being said by so-called experts in this very unregulated industry, there is a high probability that if you focus too much on creating an identity then you create something just to fit in and that isn’t true for yourself.
Striving to create identities means striving to create boundaries beyond which you cannot perceive and experience anything. Real growth, especially inner growth stops right there!
In the world we live in, we don’t need any more labels or identities. It's time to share our truest selves, not a persona shaped by multiple influences.
So, the million-dollar question is, what do we need so that our inner genius is aligned with our outer actions and we create a personal brand that attracts the most exciting opportunities?
1. A Personal Brand Expression(s)
Instead of creating any identity, create a personal brand that is a full expression of how you really (like really) want your ideal audience to experience you. You don’t need a personal brand to impress millions but to connect with the people you'd love to work with at the highest level.
Your brand expression is essentially your superpower, your key message(s). It's not necessarily your service, but the why and how behind it.
But there's a caveat. Social media has become an official medium for expressing just about anything – particularly psychological dramas. With reels, TikTok, and other ways to express themselves, everyone is expressing just about anything.
And therefore, before expressing, to really connect with your ideal audience, especially if you are a coach or consultant, what you need is,
2. An elevated perspective
There are possibly hundreds and thousands of service providers like you so why should anyone come to you for your services? The truth is, people don’t buy your services, they buy into you. They want to be in your presence and experience your brand.
But to get to that point, you need to bring a perspective to your services that no one else has ever brought. Your audience must see you as a higher possibility in their life and in their business. And the obvious question that might arise is, how to bring in an elevated perspective. Well, for that you need:
3. Clarity
Clarity is not confidence. You might be inviting a disaster by confusing clarity with confidence. People can fake confidence but they can’t fake clarity. They might memorize a brand pitch but clarity is something that you exude. It comes by diving deeper and understanding what it is that you really value.
Trust me your values can often be influenced by what you’ve heard or what you’ve seen, what your coach once told you or what an influencer in your industry said, or what you heard in a Ted-Talk. No, it’s not!
To achieve that clarity, you need to create a distance between yourself and your thoughts & emotions. Because basically, your thoughts and emotions are driven by your past experiences and the impressions you’ve gathered. To see things the way they are, without exaggeration or prejudice, this distance is paramount. The intellect that is based on memory can only inform, it cannot transform.
I appreciate it’s much easier said than done but each one of us as humans is blessed with that capability. The only question is, are you committed to finding your own true brand expression? If the answer is yes, I know you’re moving toward long-term intentional brand success! A personal brand strategy that is created on the foundation of these three points will always be successful. This is something I work on with my clients first before we move to the next step of creating personal branding assets.
If you have a question, send it to my team at info@akankshaagarwal.com and I’ll try my way to revert back as soon as possible.
Akanksha Agarwal, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Akanksha is South East England's leading ally in the pursuit of exceptional leaders seeking personal brand-building, scaling, and positioning content and assets. Through her process and visual storytelling, she discovers her clients' most incredulous selves, unlocking all that is possible for them in business and life. Creating a safe environment for her clients to be an expression of their true selves, Akanksha sees the potential in every leader and entrepreneur to elevate their perspective and express themselves beyond compulsions & expectations. This is when they give themselves permission to lean into their inner genius and see how much more they are capable of and worth.
