Personal Branding: A Leader's Tool for Career Change

I just returned from a wonderful careers conference in California, the annual Association of Job Search Trainers Conference. One of the keynote speakers was Greg Giesen, founder and facilitator of a 3-day, 2-night intensive leadership development workshop called Leading From Within. Greg shared some key career leadership nuggets that you can use in personal branding:

1. "We are all here for a purpose. When we are clear as to what that purpose is, we can then have a context for living." William Arruda, founder of the Reach Branding Club, starts with the concept of a vision and mission, and funnels that down into a purpose and goals for daily life. How many of us take the time to think about our life's vision, mission, purpose and goals? Corporate America does this consistently - it's the framework for how they choose to do business and what they want to accomplish. Why not apply this same model to our career and life?

2. "We are all leaders, all the time and in all facets of our lives." Taking a leader's ownership of our career, as well as all other areas of our life (personal, family, spiritual, social, emotional, intellectual, and physical), demonstrates to everyone our leader-like orientation to life. This instills confidence and trust, and boosts self-esteem. Are you the driver in the "car of life", or are you the passenger? Real security can be found in determining your course and taking focused action to get where you want to go, rather than feeling like you are a victim of circumstances or fate.

3. "There is only one way to live our lives and that is as authentic leaders. The only way to do that is to know our authentic self." Personal branding is all about discovering our authentic self and then leveraging that knowledge into career choices and actions that are in sync with who we truly are.

Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, states in a recently released, 2-minute Flash video on personal strengths that fewer than 2 out of 10 of us "play to our strengths" in our jobs. He further goes on to assert that this is largely due to what we believe about ourselves. Why not try to find out what that is?

While we're at it, why not find out as much as we can about our authentic self - our interests and passions, personality and behavioral style, values and motivations, purpose and goals, and so on? Personal branding and career assessments, along with the guidance of a professional career counselor or coach, are a sound return-on-investment (ROI) for discovering what career is right for you now and how to land a job in that field.

Perhaps you already know what career field you want to be in, but just don't know how to pull it off. Read my article on Career Transition Tips for Gazelles Who Want to Be Zebras for more job-search strategies.