How do you feel about marketing yourself?
Does it feel too self-focused, conceited or arrogant? Whenever I write about personal branding, self-promotion or anything along those lines – I feel like I’m coming off a bit shallow. But marketing is a powerful tool for a reason. Corporations spend millions and millions of dollars on marketing efforts to create a brand, distribute the awareness of their brand, and of course to promote products and services. It’s a natural and essential part of business. Today I’m going to talk about the human side of the marketing coin – marketing yourself.
Self Promotion: The Road to Getting Known
To me, self promotion is a bit awkward at times. But no matter how we slice it, everything we do shapes our personal brand in one way or another. It’s a matter of us owning the promotion ourselves or allowing others to define who we are from their own perceptions or misconceptions of us. If we don’t own it, we risk being labeled in a light that doesn’t accurately represent who we are.
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Adversity is a bully. I’ve had many, many bouts dealing with one particular form of it; prejudgment. As you’re aware, this can negatively shape how people treat you, respect you and can limit your opportunities. The effects once put me in a bucket jumping in effort to avoid being missed, looked past, avoided, dodged, side-stepped, juked, hurdled, and any other action word that defines evasion.
Eventually I had a turning point. I realized that I couldn’t just pass the blame on everyone else…I had to take some ownership. Like a company going out of business from failing to bring appeal to their customer’s, I was failing to be adaptable. This realization brought me to the discovery of personal branding. I learned quickly that presenting myself in a more universal way saved me much of the hassle involved in overcoming the obstacles that ignorance put in my way.
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