There are many resources dedicated to ‘The Brand of You’ – whole industries in fact – self-help guides, business schools, books, gurus, and magazines.  They’re all dedicated to helping you figure out who you are, what it is you are good at doing, and what you need to ‘fix’.   But, if you’re on a journey to accomplish any personal or business goal, figuring out ‘yourself’ is the most inherently personal quest you can ever embark upon, and: only you can do the work.

I would argue the following:

1)      You have to start alone, with a premise of who you are and what you do well.

2)      You must boldly embrace your premise, go forth into the world and put it into practice.

3)      By trial and error, you will see where you were right, and when you fail, you will learn where you made mistakes.

That’s the real truth.  You are not going to figure this out by (just) meditation, or a Tony Robbins seminar, or polling your friends and family.  You can do those things of course, but without putting this into practice you’ll never know for sure.

The other caveat is that we are (hopefully) changing and growing and gaining skills all the time.  We evolve and adapt.  So this kind of self inventory must be done regularly, and your self-premise must be altered regularly.

I’ll recap some pointers from the ‘Brand of You’ from Fast Company’s article in ’97 by Tom Peters, a fellow business consultant.

1)      What do you bring to the table, what makes you different?

2)      How do you quantify it? What do you do that adds “remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value”?

3)      What do you want to be famous for?

4)      How do you communicate? This will help you figure out how to brand yourself (ex: are you a Teacher, Writer, Talker, Illustrator?  What is your mode of communication?)

As  a sidebar, there is a new edition of the book ‘Brand You’ coming out in August 2012, and I will post a review at that time.   I like that they are taking a look at some mindfulness exercises, archetypes, and personal appearance – some topics which are usually pushed to the side for more concrete or internally focused topics such as what you can DO or what you WANT.  Here’s the link to their site.