Your personal brand is built upon all your factors—even the ones that you feel everyone else shares. The unique aspect is in the layering. Imagine yourself as a wheel, and each quality (your needs, values, interests, strengths, personality, freak factor, education, work experience, and so on) is a spoke. You look for the point where they all meet, and you build your brand on that unique point of intersection.
Through this process of self-assessment, you may be realizing that some areas require your attention. Maybe you now understand that you need a different path of training. Or maybe you are discovering a strength that you haven’t yet tapped in your life.
Entering the personal branding process makes you take a hard look at yourself so that you can build your brand into who you want to become. In order to do that, you need to be a lifelong learner and continue to invest in yourself.
Take the time to understand who you are. Take the initiative to enroll in a course about something that you would like to learn. While you may need to invest monetarily, your investment of your time and emotional commitment in making sure you get the education and develop the skills you want, need, and deserve is critical to your growth.
In the business world, success is often measured by the Return on Investment, a term that measures the profitability of an investment. When you apply this concept to your learning, ask yourself – Will learning this help me in the future? It sounds like an easy question but sometimes the answer is hard to see because you may not know how learning something now will be exactly what you need in the years to come. Remember that skill building programs, interesting public speakers, and attending an amazing art exhibit are all investments in yourself.
Don’t skimp on the investment in who you are; give yourself the time and tools you need to identify where you want to go and how to get there. Investments in yourself will pay off in the long run.
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