7 Steps for Building Your Personal Brand

Recently, I’ve received a few emails and LinkedIn messages from recent graduates and soon-to-be graduates asking me about how to package themselves for the job market. This challenge is really personal branding in disguise, which is a topic familiar to successful entrepreneurs, authors, and celebrities, making it just as relevant to recent graduates as it is to professionals looking to attract more attention within their industries.

To start, a definition of personal branding from Wikipedia:

“Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.”

In short, marketers and business owners have come to accept that the value of a brand is held mostly in intangible assets, with some sources estimating that physical assets now account for only 40% of a brand’s worth. The other 60% is composed of brand perception, brand  personality, and brand loyalty. This is why people pay more for Apple products or why people say “hand me a Kleenex” as often as they say “hand me a tissue.” The brands that connect with consumers in meaningful ways have a huge advantage over brands that compete on a product level alone, and the profits of major brands speak to that in very clear terms.

Much of these concepts translate to personal branding. If you are trying to attract the attention of a recruiter for example, how you present yourself is just as important as what you present about yourself because the static in the job market is enormous. In 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that the average number of job applications hovered around 118. Anecdotally, that seems low, but that is still a large volume of candidates to compete against. Everyone is submitting a resume and a cover letter (a product). If you want to get hired, you need to stand out (with branding).

To get you started, here are 7 steps to launching your personal brand.

“He seemed so happy.”

On Dec. 15, 2006 seventeen year old Chad Huggins walked into the McGuffey High School locker room. He took his .22 caliber rifle—standard issue for anyone on the rifle team—with him, and he never came out.

Bullying is all too commonplace, with one study estimating that 1 in 6 children are bullied. Based on the fan mail that I’ve received, many of my readers were bullied themselves, and I’ve made no secret of my bullying experiences. Elementary and middle school spent in a Pentecostal private school with class sizes rarely exceeding 12 is a special kind of hell for the kid that doesn’t fit. High school was a little bit better, but I still had to run the third of a mile from my bus stop to my doorstep on more than one occasion, and I spent countless bus rides pretending the Linkin Park in my headphones was loud enough to drown out the abuse spewing from the backseats.

I made it out though, and I owe a lot of that to jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu helped me to reconcile those memories and empowered me with a sort of self-confidence that was never within reach when I was younger. Jiu-jitsu answered a lot of my internal questions about self-worth and potential, and it gave me a suit of armor that can never be taken away from me.

One of my high school bullies actually ended up at the police academy with one of my instructors. When the bully found out that my instructor knew me, the bully started to laugh and tell stories about how he tormented me on the bus.

The Kids Aren't Alright

Publishing the Cauliflower Chronicles was the culmination of five years of work, a plan that began when I was 18.  The steps in between the start and the finish changed as I grew up, adjusting for an ever-changing outlook, but the finish line remained the same: publish a book.  Make it.  Succeed where so many fail.

And I did, and it would have been a sweet victory, but the fights that I wrote about in the Cauliflower Chronicles were long over.  The cuts and bruises had faded, and I found myself writing about a version of me that was far away, that no longer existed.  Immaturity oozed from the pages, and pettiness punctuated too many of my sentences.  I was young, and I thought about life the way a young person does.

Young isn't the right word.  Untested may be more appropriate.  I think that we often count young people out because we subconsciously believe that they haven't been tested, that they haven't seen what we've seen, that they just don't know how things really are.

10 Rules for the Abandoned Generation

The Abandoned Generation is the generation of twenty-somethings who are about to graduate or have recently graduated from college. We grew up being fed a blueprint for success: get good grades in high school to get into a good college so that you can get good grades in college and start a career.  We heard this blueprint repeated over and over at home and in school.  We believed in the blueprint.  We graduated with degree in hand, ready to change the world, but there were no jobs.  The economy collapsed. and the blueprint became irrelevant.  Many of us were passionate and talented and driven, but any posting for any job yielded hundreds of applicants from multiple generations and multiple disciplines.   Entry level began to mean two to four years of experience, and many employers that previously demanded bachelor's degrees began to demand master's degrees simply because they could.