Timothy Maurice Webster is an international personal brand philosopher focused on the pillars of brand leadership: Values formation, Style Manifestation and Positioning the brand amongst stakeholders. He believes, ‘Your brand desires to work for you while you are asleep.’
Personovation is a journey of personal innovation that involves re-inventing your personal brand to live a more fulfilled life. The book takes readers on a seven-step journey to personal brand innovation. Webster takes a philosophical approach to personal branding as he believes it allows readers to form their own opinions and framework which will help guide readers through the seven-step journey of personal brand innovation.
Webster defines Personal Branding as defining and positioning your story or reputation. On the other hand, Personal Innovation is defined as creating a new story or an improved story of the old one.
A successful personal brand formula requires inserting people who value themselves by striving for excellence – the type of people who aren’t afraid to applaud your success and cheer you on as you strive for victory.
7 Principles that can help build your brand, position it and manage its reputation:
1. Purpose
To truly understand your purpose, you must embrace the significant moments in life that often feel derailing. Purpose in its simplest form is: What outcome would you like to see from your most challenging life experiences? (The most successful people see challenges as an opportunity).
Webster says that the only way to find your Purpose is by making love to your potential and the only way to do this is to literally spend days asking yourself questions about how your innate skills-sets relate with how people see yourself. Unfortunately, the only thing most people can see when they look at you is what you have not become and therefore you need to take ownership of and responsibility of your brand to prevent this perception. The victory of this is only possible for those who refuse to stop fighting.
So make love to your potential to find your purpose and never stop fighting for it and celebrate the battles you have overcome.
2. Price
Nelson Mandela once said: ‘I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ Mandela’s purpose was to find freedom for all and he was willing to pay a price for it – death.
Know the price you are willing to pay for your purpose, for achieving greatness comes in the willingness to pay the bigger price.
3. Power
With strong values, you have unlimited power. Strong values serve as a guidance mechanism that leads you through life.
Webster defines value as a belief, a mission, or a philosophy that is meaningful. Whatever your values, when you take them to heart and implement them in the smallest details of your lives, great accomplishments and successes are sure to follow. Just as individuals subscribe to values, so do organisations and institutions. In fact, some business’s values are key to their success.
Values of a brand influence brand perception, therefore if your personal brand aligns positively with the onlookers highest values, you will receive a positive acknowledgement. If you want to connect with someone, seek out the relationship between their top three values and your top three values. Strong values place all of us on the same level.
4. Perception
It’s a fact; humans are born hardwired to judge. Our brain (mental software) programmes/stores images and assigns value such as the next time it sees the image. We desire labels to ensure more efficient, effective and exciting manoeuvring through the jungle we call life. The ability to label is what defines the modern human. In our changing world we would not cope without label everyone and everything we come into contact with.
In the same way we assign a value to fashion labels, so do we label human beings which then gives us the gift of what could possibly happen next – this is what Webster calls ‘nexting’.
You need to Package your purpose and sell it!
When your brand is packaged properly; nexting invites people to think about your potential, possible collaborations or how you could contribute to the wellbeing of their lives.
Leverage your personal brand by projecting an attitude consistent with your values so that people perceive you for who you are.
It is the people operating the labels who are ultimately responsible for giving the brain something positive to associate the label with. The greatest weapon we have at our disposal is the ability to build our personal brands into machines that deal effectively with this perception dynamic.
Barack Obama changed perceptions. He is the single greatest personal branding transformation anyone has ever undertaken. There are four fundamental principles you can learn from Obama’s transformation from a no name brand to President of the USA.
1. Cultivate an unselfish and inclusive vision
2. Shift hearts and minds to your value
3. Share the proposition (have a strong team that believes in and will promote you)
4. Seize the moment (difficult times produce great leadership opportunities)
Your ability to communicate is the most efficient way to manage how others see your brand. Webster developed the Personal Brand Index which is designed in such a way that you give feedback about how you perceive someone’s performance, behaviour, etiquette and brand reputation without people knowing it came from you. Check it out at www.personalbrandindex.co.za .
Crown yourself! It shows the world that you are ready to honour your value.
5. Position
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to be. Irrespective of where you position yourself, you should be aligning yourself with extensions to ensure you position your value to attract more stakeholders. Each one of us in known for something, but most of us have abandoned the responsibility of managing what that perception is. To manage this perception you need to be the architect of your personal brand and take ownership of it. The secret to building a significant personal brand is to develop the courage to reintroduce yourself to people who don’t fully u understand you. The next step is to then communicate consistent messages and form relationships that drive home your position.
The heart of branding yourself is essentially about packaging and positioning your value in the minds of your stakeholders. These stakeholders include everyone from your friends and colleagues and potential friends and employers. One way of doing this is via social networking as it allows you to project your perceived value; however you have to be very careful as you only want to position yourself how you want your values to be perceived. Here are some considerations to make before you join the online community:
1. To friend or not to friend your colleagues?
2. Virtual footprints – remember footprints are permanent
3. Does your company have an online policy?
You are nothing without relationships as they support your personal brand. One of the best ways to meet people in the 21st century is to develop your own blog .However, you must honour and respect your networks for your personal brand to be successful and sustainable.
To understand and connect with others, you must experience the cultures – to build a strong brand in a continent you need to understand the threads that join various cultures. Understanding others values is of utmost importance for personal branding. Perhaps the most relevant to anyone attempting to build a brand is the fundamental need to understand code-switching (see definition below) when you are positioning yourself. Your image can present barriers for those who haven’t been socialised to appreciate someone from your background and heritage. Shifting your image and demeanour to represent your values appropriately in a given environment can prove extremely valuable when connecting to your market. Just remember that the outward appearance of your brand has the power to set off triggers in the minds of your stakeholders.
But what is code-switching? Shifting positions and projecting a message congruent with the relevant environment or stakeholder. It serves an essential tool for personal and professional survival. How do you become a professional code-switcher? You need to value and take full ownership of an unselfish spirit and an empathetic posture. To switch successfully prioritise your aligning values to those of your stakeholders.
Times are difficult and the question then is how do I effectively position my brand for growth in difficult times?
1. Focus on fewer industries
2. Create new products or services
3. Invest in yourself and your sales team with better training
4. Seek partnerships and co-branding opportunities that yield immediate brand equity.
6. Payment
The easiest way to build personal brand equity is to work harder and study longer than everyone else in your industry. Personal equity is defined as the positive difference between the perceived value of your brand versus the how the market sees the average person in the same position. You need to understand that perception of your brand is under your control.
Paying yourself ultimately involves looking at every area of your life and deciding how you will invest to ensure you live a balanced life. There are 3 key dimensions to this:
1. Invest in your mind
2. Protect your body
3. Manage your spiritual and emotional soul
Gaining control over your personal brand will help you to soar while others fold. The following will techniques will help you become a powerful personal brand especially when the pressure is on and it matters most:
1. Visualise control – paint a picture in your mind of you remaining calm in confusion – it pays off!
2. Reflect on past achievements and failures – celebrate the lessons learned from failures
3. Broaden your leadership style
So how do you pay yourself? Live a balanced life and incorporate leadership techniques. Regardless of what you choose, deciding to invest in your potential is already a pay in and of itself.
7. Personovate
Open yourself up to new stimuli, knowing that you have an unexplored capacity. We don’t always know who we are and what we love until we’re open to a foreign usher walking us a few steps past who we thought we were.
Provoke change by immersing yourself in challenging and complicated work – work that challenges settled paradigms and forces you to grow.
All of us who have acquired a degree of success on this continent must plough our resources back into developmental portals, whether started by ourselves or other social entrepreneurs. We can’t afford not to.
The quest for innovation starts with you – personal innovation. Teach and empower other people. Bring your value to the table and demonstrate how this value will enhance the others life. However, because we do not seek value in both sides of the equation we have a lopsided society where majority of people feel insignificant. You could perhaps question the notion of racism within South Africa here.
The ultimate goal of personal brand innovation is to create newness in your life – new possibilities and opportunities. In a world where many countries are suffering from what we call a RECESSION, businesses need to engage with one another. Businesses need to adopt responsible practices quickly on the basis that consciousness is the new marketing tool. Within this conscious space, the green movement has potentially the greatest legs. Consumers who are going green are loyal and often willing to spend more to stay green.
Companies in certain consumer goods sectors that do not implement sustainable environmental strategies could face a potential reduction of 13% to 31% in earnings by 2013 and 19% to 47% in earnings by 2018. – Rattling Supply Chains: The effect of environmental trends on input costs to the fast moving consumer goods industry – World Resources Institute.
Invest in new social ideas!
The best way to personovate is by getting involved in areas where deep needs exist.
Conclusion
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Live your unlived brand – don’t let resistance get in your way! When you live your unlived brand, you allow yourself to be a better beacon of inspiration, which sets off the butterfly effect. When you flap your wings, rather than keep them dormant at your side, the universe honours you and shifts accordingly.
Your story is yours, their story is theirs, allow yourself the space to believe they can co-exist while you are true to yours.
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