Building “Yourself” as a Brand
Branding yourself by discovering your strengths, developing on them, managing your weakness and positioning yourself the way you want others to perceive you is important for success in todays business world.
I was reminded of Satya Sai’s explanation of “You” by Mohan Raman – “The Way you see yourself (Personal), the Actual You (More enlightening and spiritual) and the way others see you (What’s required in today’s business and social world). Personal branding is the third “You” – our ability to get people to associate our name with something we want to be linked or connected with. Perhaps an image, style, words, profession etc. It was rather interesting to note that in many cases (Celebrity world), people have created their brand unconsciously and used that as a strategy in the latter part of their lives to achieve what they wanted.
Ganesh and Kesan introduced “The temparament instrument” which happens to be the brain child of Professor Pradip Khandwala (IIM – A) and that is a great tool to know about yourself. I realized that I had a greater allery to ambiguity that I thought I had from this highly validated and proven instrument. I have worked on a couple of other instruments in the past and have noticed striking similarities – This means that I have good news and bad news.
Well, the good news is that I have been honest and spontaneous about answering these “Strengths questionnaires” which has made me more “Self Aware” and that certainly is a strength. However the fact that scores havent changed much over the last 6 months also reflects that my plan is not working to its best. Time to make changes to the plans and I am making that NOW! Hey, that is also a sign that I am getting my tolerance levels better (Reducing the allergy to ambiguity factor). HURRAY!!
For those of you who are interested to know your strengths, I recommend you to start with Dr. Martin Seligman’s VIA Character Strengths test @ http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
I had some great insights and benefits from this online survery too which ranked 24 of my Character strengths in the order of significance. Dr. Seligman recommends that we pay more attention to the top 5 called “Signature strengths” and find ways to use them more often.
Overall, it doesn’t matter what instrument you use but your top priority is to build yourself as a Brand. These surveys, tests and instruments are the first steps to “Know thyself”, Once you know what you are – make a plan to use the strengths, manage your weakness and promote the brand “You” to move from the ORDINARY to EXTRA-ORDINARY,
