The power of discovering your authentic personal brand

As a leader and manager, chances are you’ve probably considered your personal brand. Awesome, just know discovering an authentic personal brand that resonates requires some serious internal sleuthing.

It’s tempting to focus solely on accomplishments, talents, and skills. But truly effective business leaders know that our creative right brain, intuition, and being aware of what truly brings us alive are the ingredients that create an authentic personal brand.

You could be the highly effective leader who’s also a trapeze artist, poet, soccer coach, or a long-distance runner in your spare time! All of these can be part of the fabric of your personal brand.

The deep and rich process of discovering your authentic personal brand will help you:

Increase your overall self-awareness,
Truly recognize your value as a leader, and
Give you the confidence to walk into any room.

Start by asking yourself some simple, but very important, questions. Also ask trusted peers for their feedback. Let their positive feedback land, as well. It’s fuel that helps you grow yourself, your skills, your managerial acumen, and your company’s bottom line.

Embrace even your qualities you may think of as “negative.” For instance, you may have gotten the feedback that you are “forceful.” Be curious about what this means for you. Sometimes, being forceful helps you get things done. Case in point: Steve Jobs had a prickly personality but didn’t hide who he was. Would he have had the same impact if he had pretended to be someone else?

Here are some of the questions I ask clients to consider when working on discovering their personal brand:

What’s important in the work I do?

What am I most known for?
Do I enjoy this work and want to continue doing it?
Am I highly skilled at it? What do I really love about it?
How can I keep my skills sharp and increase them?
Have I survived failures? What have I learned from them?

Who is my “tribe?”

Which of my peers do I admire?
Which leaders/managers are my role models?
What character traits make them so highly effective?
How do I gain mastery as a manager? Or a mentor?

What are my qualities I admire most?

Pick the top seven values that are key for you. To help you get started, here are a few examples: credibility, empathetic, candid, optimistic, flexible, transparent, persistent.
How can I embody and leverage these values as a leader?

As a business coach with a branding background, I’ve discovered that the personal branding process is very similar to the process for branding an organization. Most importantly, at the heart of both is authenticity. You don’t ‘create’ your brand, you discover it.

“I truly do feel that my coaching sessions with Debra allowed me to evolve both as a manager and as a person. She took both inward and outward-looking approaches; assigned self-reflective exercises to define my core values and an outward focus on techniques to build relationships with my team, ensuring I create an environment of support and trust for them.”

— Melissa Carmichael, former Product Design Manager at SurveyMonkey

“The great value in Debra’s coaching lies in her highly personalized suggestions. There are many principles in good management, but which ones are most applicable to you? Debra’s style felt more akin to “massaging” the issue with me until the concepts fell clearly into place. This made me feel greater ownership over the solutions and made me confident that she was always addressing what was most important to me.”

— David Lee, Ph.D., Head of Assay Development at Color

“I have recently been promoted to a managerial role. As I navigate in this unknown territory I am very appreciative of the great insights, guidance, help, support, feedback, and encouragement I receive from my coach Debra. She is a great listener and she selflessly invests in my development and growth. She shares resources with me to help me brainstorm, learn and practice new skills. I always walk away feeling encouraged and positive. I feel blessed to have this opportunity and to have been paired up with such an amazing coach and mentor.“

— Aleksandra Doeing, Senior Manager at Capital One

“I value Debra for her insight into difficult situations. She is amazing at actively listening and teasing out an actionable plan. She has also helped me craft team building activities for an amazing offsite that helped bring my team closer.”

— Xin Yang, Engineering Manager Fleet Firmware, Samsara

“Debra’s coaching skills are profoundly effective. She asks the challenging questions and helped me to find the solutions that worked for me. Her approach is both persistent and graceful and she knows just when to challenge and when to encourage with her positivity. The coaching with Debra has been a valuable investment in improving the way I work and the final results.”

— Nina Mullen, Founder and Landscape Designer, Mullen Designs

“Debra is an excellent coach. She came at the right moment and with the right approach. Her capacity as a listener and her very precise feedback when asked, allowed me to find clarity in a very delicate moment.“

— Alejandro Pacheco, UN Development Programme