Promote Your Brand

Getting recognition at work is all about helping others to see what your unique contribution is. You may feel that selling yourself and your skills is egotistical, especially if you tend to be naturally modest about your achievements. Perhaps you tend to hide your ‘light’ and find that over time you begin to feel a little resentful that people don’t always notice or appreciate your good work. Or you may take the opposite view and grab the limelight as often as you can, only to find that those around you push you back down into place. Getting the balance right is tricky. You may feel that you have to adopt a different work persona and play office politics to be successful, but the truth is that most people hate spin, and the last place they want to have to deal with it is at work.

• In what ways do you put up a façade at work?
• Do you sometimes present a show of blustery confidence when you’re really quaking in your boots? At times this is helpful, but at other times it may prevent you from getting the support you need. If you manage staff, do you think you always need to know the answer to every problem?
• What impact does this have for you and the team, on those occasions when you don’t know the best solution?
• How can you present an authentic you at work and maintain the respect of others?

Think of yourself as a business. What are your unique selling points?Yes, you have skills, but how do you package and present these skills to the world in a way that is unique to you? Getting used to thinking about how you project your personal brand can help you to develop versatility. After all, you are uniquely your brand and you can also change that brand as you wish, according to the ‘market’ you’re in. So you may choose to display your more extrovert image in a meeting or you may let people see your reflective, thoughtful side, depending upon your audience and what’s required.

Related articles

• How to Treat your Blog like a Business (problogger.net)
• Personal Branding Becomes a Necessity in Digital Age (pbs.org)
• Personal Branding for Generalists: An Interview with Dan Schawbel (businesspundit.com)
• Build Your Personal Brand by Working for Free (lifehack.org)
• Three Steps to a hugely successful Personal Branding campaign (jeremymeyers.com)
• Why Personal and Business Branding Work Best Together (freelanceswitch.com)
• Worlds Highest Paid Sporting Personal Brands… (buzzle.com.au)
• Platform Thinking in Personal Branding (kathydragon.wordpress.com)
• HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter (mashable.com)
• 5 Things to Do Before You Build Your Personal Brand (lifehack.org)

Free 4 Hour Work Week Guide

CEO Bernard Sandoval of Sandia has developed a check-list for his employers based on some of the principles in Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Work Week.

Download it here

In the book Ferriss uses the acronym DEAL for the four main chapters. It stands for: Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation.

1. Definition means to figure out what a person wants, get over fears, see past society’s “expectations”, and figure out what it will really cost to get where a person wants to go.
2. Elimination is about time management, or rather about not managing time. This is achieved applying the 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. There’s a difference, Ferriss says, between efficiency and effectiveness. The book’s emphasis is on effectiveness.
3. Automation is about building a sustainable, automatic source of income. This includes techniques such as drop-shipping, automation, Google Adwords and Adsense, and outsourcing.
4. Liberation is dedicated to the successful automation of one’s lifestyle and the liberation from a geographical location and job. Incidentally, Ferriss notes that if somebody has a regular job, the order of steps will be DELA, not DEAL.

The book asserts that technology such as email, instant messaging, and Internet-enabled PDAs complicate life rather than simplify it.^[4][5] It advocates hiring virtual assistants from developing countries such as India to free up personal time.