Accelerate Your Career Through Personal Branding and Marketing Yourself

How often do you use the term “marketing” when you refer to your talents and achievements? As we start a new decade with ongoing challenges and new norms for doing business, more than ever it is necessary to embrace this concept. Know your value and strategically market yourself—your talents, accomplishments, and value—inside your organization and outside within your profession, industry, and community. The demands we face today include an unpredictable economy, a competitive and specialized marketplace, globalization, changing demographics, and strong leadership skills by all levels.

To be successful, it is critical to set ourselves apart and get comfortable talking about ourselves in this way as well as become an effective storyteller. The first step is to change our mindsets and embrace personal branding as a required competency for taking charge of our careers and executing a successful career management strategy. A core competency that can become so authentic, it feels effortless and second nature. We may not even realize we are doing so.

To do this effectively, we must be prepared to talk about ourselves in this way, conducting extensive personal due diligence; package our talents and accomplishments, showcasing them, leveraging them; and present our value internally within our organizations and externally within our chosen fields, industries, and communities.

A strong personal brand contributes to our success. Knowing our differentiator and actively enhancing our visibility within our organization and industry is necessary to ensure we are accelerating our career in our chosen direction. Do you put yourself in a position to meet new people and reconnect with existing contacts? Do you actively and strategically build your personal brand, live and virtually? Branding and marketing ourselves empowers us to own our careers and seize leadership opportunities we aspire to achieve.

As we identify, create, and articulate our personal brand—the mark we’d like to leave behind—do we display our passion and purpose with polish and poise? Are we able to stand out and differentiate ourselves with clarity, consistency, and command? Do we project authenticity in a way that engages and influences others? There are three commonalities of successful professionals:

1. They know their worth—the value they add to their role, team, and company.

2. They know what they want. They are goal-oriented and have vision and focus.

3. They know how to ask for it: They effectively advocate for themselves.

Establishing, articulating, and enhancing your personal brand enables empowerment and results in a powerful executive presence. Talent and knowledge are essential, but they alone will not take you to the next level. Our ability to understand the power of communications, perceptions, relationships, and influence allow us to effectively leverage them. Become an effective storyteller, the most powerful form of communication.

The fact is we can all achieve this kind of success. Acquire tools and techniques to take your career to the next level by leveraging your personal brand.

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Key Objectives

**1) Acknowledge the importance of personal brand and embrace a new mindset to feel empowered to take charge and own your career.

1. Learn how to establish your personal brand and market your talents, accomplishments, and value using the 3 Ps marketing technique:

• Preparation: Identify and define your brand.

• Packaging: Create and build your brand.

• Presentation: Articulate and enhance your brand.

1. Begin to create an action plan with steps for moving forward.

These 3 Ps are effective techniques for establishing your personal brand and marketing yourself. By practicing them, you will achieve a fulfilling and focused career. The best person to manage your career is you, and the best person to market your talents, accomplishments, and value is you. Once you create an effective branding and marketing outlook, you will find it to be a natural process that you do not even realize you have engaged and will master the art of personal branding and marketing yourself.