Marcos Salazar - Co-founder and Innovation Catalyst at Be Social Change, Social Entrepreneur, Leadership Researcher, & Expert on Psychology of Gen Y & Millennials

My Personal Branding Journey Part 8: Communicate Your Brand with Good Blogger Relations & Twitter

In writing this series of posts, I’ve been trying to strike a balance between discussing why I began this personal branding journey while at the same time providing readers with useful information they can integrate into their own personal branding efforts. If I had simply been talking about myself the entire series and just trying to promote my books, websites, or clothing store, it wouldn’t have been very interesting or useful for readers.

So, in the third step of developing your personal brand found in Me. 2.0 – Communicate Your Brand – I will go over what I think are two of the most important strategies you can use today to communicate your brand effectively without being seen as a shameless self-promoter. They are developing meaningful blogger relationships and using Twitter as a connector and being a resource.

Why do you want to contact bloggers?

When I launched BoroThreads, the focus of connecting with bloggers was to get the word out about our hyperlocal clothing designs and hopefully sell some shirts. However, instead of making the mistake of simply pitching to bloggers and asking them to write about us, I decided to create a mutual beneficial situation that focused on the blogger directly. This usually involved emailing local bloggers about the possibility of a contest for their blog where BoroThreads would give away a free shirt to new subscribers or Twitter followers.

However, in promoting my personal brand of being a Renaissance Worker, my focus was not on selling some type of tangible product. Yes, in some ways it was about the selling of my ideas and what my personal brand has become. However, as I thought more about it I realized that I wanted something more then just some type of mutual promotion. What I really wanted was to reach out and develop meaningful relationships with people I found interesting, respected, and admired and use this as a vehicle for communicating my brand.

First who, then the what

While I do have books and clothing to sell, the reality is that these were never major reasons for wanting to go on this personal branding journey. As I mentioned in my first post, I had been out of the blogging and Gen Y/Millennials space for quite a long time and I really missed it. I missed all the connections I had made with people in the field and wanted to reconnect as well as get to know new people. It is this desire for connection and focus on quality vs. quantity that can  be one of the best ways to communicate your brand as well as be the most psychologically rewarding.

In writing this post, I started thinking about Jim Collin’s book Good to Great and his principle, “first who, then what.” Often we are so focused on the “what” in our lives – what we want to do, who we want to be, where we want to go – that we forget about or push aside the “who.” But the truth is even if you picked the perfect what but also picked the wrong who, life is going to pretty much be crappy.

In a world that is constantly changing, it is the who that stay consistent in our lives. The what can change (and most likely will quite often in our lifetimes), so one of the main questions we need to ask ourselves in deciding on what approach to take when communicating our personal brand is who are the people we want to be communicating our brand to and do we want to focus on quantity or quality?

What I will be focusing on personally in communicating my brand is connecting with those bloggers that I want to develop strong relationships with. And as I said before, this is also a great personal branding strategy because if a blogger gets to know you well and respects you and your ideas or work, they are more likely to recommend you, and even become an evangelist.

Using Twitter as a connector and resource

So then the next question is where do you find these bloggers that you would want to develop strong relationships with? In the past you could find them on blog rolls, but since I started my personal branding journey I have come to see Twitter as the ultimate community builder where I am able to find and connect with new and interesting bloggers quickly and easily. In the tweets of the people I follow, I can quickly see who they think are important and instantly learn more about people in their network. It sure beats scrolling through blog rolls, doing an online people search, or searching Google to find people I want to reach out and connect with.

But great relationships are two-way streets so it is important to also use Twitter as a platform to become a resource for others in order to nurture those relationships. By sharing useful information, interesting links, and fun advice you can promote your brand by becoming a resource that engages your Twitter audience while also giving something back to the people you are trying to build good relationships with.

 

My Personal Branding Journey Part 7: Strategies for Creating an Online Presence

In my last post, I discussed how to use the techniques of narrative, being a purple cow, and understanding context to create a strong offline presence. These same principles can be used to create a powerful online presence as well and prevent incidents such as the one above from happening to you. Below is how I’ve learned to use these strategies to help differentiate my personal brand online and how you can use them to create a brand that grabs your audience’s attention and keeps it.

Using a “blogsite” to create a narrative

Whether we realize it or not, we are all creating a narrative about ourselves online. Everything we post, comment on, or upload is contributing to the story of who we are online – potentially to millions. And even if you don’t make a conscious effort to create an online presence, that too is a narrative because you are leaving your personal brand to chance.

This is why a blogsite – a hybrid of a blog and a website – is so essential to creating a strong online presence and is one of the main principles found in Me 2.0. By having a website that allows you to both blog and provide addition biographical information, you can take control of your online narrative and begin telling people the unique story of who you are and what you think within the field that interests you.

Before venturing on this personal branding journey, my blogsite focused on personal development for young professionals. However, if you visit my main website you’ll see that the focus of it has shifted due to what I’ve learned on my personal branding journey. Now my site is centered around being a Renaissance Worker, Career Adventurism, and Psychology Development for Young Professionals. And as time goes on I will be providing more and more content that not only benefits people within these topics, but also adds to my narrative and makes my brand stronger.

Being a purple cow online

One thing you always want to do is try to differentiate your blogsite in some way. Common strategies are covering unique topics or through unique site design. For example, a great title to your blog such as Matt Cheuvront’s site Life Without Pants can turn you into a purple cow and draw people in to ask why you named your site a certain way. Or you can create a memorable logo and display well known news outlets associated with your site such as the ones found on the Personal Branding Blog home page.

Another great technique is to have a unique picture on your website. Seth Godin’s image is a great example of this. He is well known for his bald head and if you go to his site, he has a picture displaying the top of his head front and center. It is not a loud or crazy image. It simple, shows his personality, and draws you in.

In redoing my blogsite, I decided to use a simple and easy to navigate design as well as have a fun and interesting image on the sidebar. Such images can add to your narrative by providing readers with a sense of your personality, creativity, and display a more human side of you that can increase interest and make visitors want to find out more about your personal brand.

Online social networks and context

In many ways, social networks are extensions of your main website and can fill in important details to the narrative you are trying to create for your personal brand. For example, your LinkedIn profile provides people with a detailed look at your professional life and allows other to give recommendations that can add rich information to the story of who you are. Flickr can provide a concrete view of things you are involved in such as events, trips, or project. And YouTube allows you to create content that gives your narrative human elements and lets people see more of your personality.

But in thinking about each social network, it’s important to keep context in mind. For example, you won’t want to post information that is too personal on LinkedIn because this is where your professional network resides and you don’t want to potentially damage your reputation. You may use Facebook more for keeping up with friends, so will not want to inundate them with lots of posts or updates about things happening within your field. Or on Twitter, where everything posted is on public display, you may not want to post highly personal information that can make you look unprofessional or damage your brand.

How does this impact my narrative?

When using these (or just about any strategy) in developing your personal brand, one thing to always keep in mind is that anything you post could have an impact on the narrative you are trying to create.  So when forming a strategy, ask yourself, “How is this going to contribute to the story I want to tell?” Finding answers to this question will provide you with a good guide in developing a strong personal brand both on and offline.

My Personal Branding Story Part 6: Narrative, Context, and Being a Purple Cow

 In my last two posts, I described why I decided to use the concept of being a Renaissance Worker as my personal brand.  In many ways, adopting this brand was a risky because Renaissance Worker is not a term people are familiar with. In addition, if someone asks me what I do, am I going to say, “I am a Renaissance Worker.” Nope – that’s not going to fly and it probably never will. I was aware of both of these issues and while they may seem like obstacles to creating my personal brand, I actually see them as opportunities because they will require me to take a creative approach to communicating my brand.

In this post, I will be discussing three psychological strategies – creating  a narrative, understanding context, and being a purple cow – in conjunction with the second step in Me 2.0 – Create Your Brand – to help you grab your audience’s attention and keep it. While I will be using these strategies in the context of being a Renaissance Worker, they can be applied to any personal brand. I will begin with offline strategies first and in my next post will transfer them to creating a strong online presence that will attract people to your personal brand.

Create a narrative

I was at a party this past weekend and like usual, I got the typical, “What do you do?” Now, if I had said, “I am a Renaissance Worker,” we all know I would have gotten a confused look. But even saying the typical, “I am a consultant at xyz company” would not have been any better.

I rarely answer this question by just stating my day job because simply put, it’s a pretty boring response. If I’m talking to someone, whether it’s a friend, a date, or someone at a networking event, I want to be engaged. So what I usually end up doing is telling some kind of story.

When I got asked what I did in New York, the person also said, “Nice shirt!” That night I was wearing one of my Brooklyn BoroThreads tees, so instead of simply mentioning my day job of, “I’m a psychology researcher for the Girl Scouts,” I took a cue from that person and started talking about how I had designed the shirt myself and it was from a clothing company I just launched in New York. I could have ended there, but that still would have not been too exciting.

So I began telling a story of how I had met my business partner Gabriel via Craigslist when I subletted an apartment after breaking up with the girlfriend I was living with. Gabriel was my roommate for that month and we hit it off right away as we hung out in the apartment talking about how much we loved Brooklyn, funny things about New York, Amherst (where he was from and I went to college), and general tech stuff. This led me to talk about how  Gabriel and I were chatting at a café one day and noticed how New York was packed with clothing stores, but no one had ever really created hyperlocal clothing focused on interesting and quirky things about living in the 5 Boros.

So before you know it, I was creating a narrative on the origin of BoroThreads and discussing funny stories, the way we come up with the designs, and how we end up seeing people on the streets wearing our gear and make it a point to go introduce ourselves (and sometimes buy them a beer). The person was really enjoying the story and I can guarantee that they remembered who I was much better than if I had just said, “I am a clothing designer.”

This illustrates an extremely important idea to keep in mind when communicating your personal brand: our brains are wired to think in terms of narratives. Storytelling is one of the few universal human traits that spans across cultures and all of known history. They captivate the mind and elicit emotions that become tied to themes, events, or characters. When this happens, our story gets implanted into memory easier and much more permanently. This is why creating a narrative about your personal brand is infinitely better than simply stating your job title.

Context is key

When talking about your personal brand, especially if you are a Renaissance Worker with many slashes like me, you always have to take into account the context you are in. For example, at the party I picked up on the cue of the person making a comment about my shirt, so that was a perfect lead in to talk about BoroThreads and clothing design. If I had started talking about Girl Scouts or my books, it would have been out of context and may have been harder to create a story or get them interested in one of my slashes.

It’s the same when I am at a psychology conference. If someone asks me what I do, it wouldn’t really be appropriate to start talking about BoroThreads because that is not what people are there to discuss. So whenever you are in a situation where you may be talking about your personal brand, learn to take cues from your environment and the person you are speaking to, and then adapt your narrative appropriately.

Becoming the purple cow in the room

While telling a story will make you more memorable, one way to make your personal brand stand out is by having people see you as being unique or remarkable in some way. As a Renaissance Worker with many slashes, a good way to do this is by throwing out one of your other professional identities at the right time to create surprise and uniqueness.

So at the party, when I was telling the story about BoroThreads I could tell they were under the impression that it was my full time gig.  So after I was done, I casually mentioned, “Oh, but for my day job I am a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts.”  This seemed to have come out of left field and I did this on purpose because we are psychologically programmed to notice novelty and pay attention to things that seem strange or different. When they heard this, the person was surprised because they were not expecting to hear something like that and became curious of not only the fact that the Girl Scouts have a Research Institute, but that there was a guy working for them.

So mentioning that I worked for the Girl Scouts as a psychology and leadership researcher right after talking about clothing design created a psychological disruption that forced the listener to spend more cognitive energy to understand what I had just said. The end result was creating a conversation that was a bit unusual and this led the person to pay attention at a much higher level.

This strategy is what Seth Godin calls being a purple cow. Godin says, “Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.”

Discussing being a renaissance worker

While I didn’t discuss the concept of a Renaissance Worker right off the bat, I did set the stage for talking about it using these strategies. And when I did bring it up, they loved the idea and felt they could really relate. So in creating a strategy for communicating your brand, always try to create a narrative, take your context into consideration, and find a way to present your uniqueness so you become the purple cow in the room.

My Personal Branding Story Part 5: Becoming a Renaissance Worker

 In my last post, I introduced the concept of a Renaissance Worker and how I came to see this term as a way to unify all of my skills, passions, and work experiences into a personal brand. It was an idea I had been thinking about for months, but during the discover phase of my personal branding journey I realized that it really encapsulated the career adventurist in me. In addition, the brand just felt right.

I have always been the type of person who loves learning from a wide array of fields, and I have made the conscious effort since college to develop skills from a diverse set of disciplines. This mindset has been at the heart of almost all my career decisions and I have seen many, many benefits of approaching my professional life in this way.

However, I am by far not the only person who has adopted the Renaissance Worker mindset. More importantly, I believe that developing a Renaissance Worker mindset will need to become an essential part of any personal brand if you want to succeed in the working world of the 21st century.

Twenty-First Century Renaissance Workers

What do Bono, Diddy, and Tim Ferriss have in common? They are all modern day Renaissance Workers.

Diddy, for example, owns Bad Boy Records, has his own clothing line Sean John, has a movie production company, and owns two restaurants. He has also taken the roles of recording executive, performer, producer of MTV’s Making the Band, writer, arranger, clothing designer, and Broadway actor.

Bono is a rock superstar, but he is also a dedicated humanitarian as well as owner of Dublin’s five star Clarence Hotel, on the board of the Elevation Partners private-equity firm, has invested in the Forbes Media group in the US through Elevation Partners, and been in multiple movies.

Tim Ferriss is a bestselling author and much sought after speaker, but he has also amassed a diverse (and often odd) roster of credentials. He has been a Princeton University guest lecturer, the first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango, a National Chinese kickboxing champion, and was named Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008.”

While these are examples of individuals at the far end of the Renaissance Worker success spectrum, Diddy, Bono, and Ferriss demonstrate how you don’t have to stay in a single niche anymore. Today, you are able to diversify your professional life and succeed in many areas that don’t always seem to relate to each other.

Gen Y and Millennials – Renaissance Workers in the making

What I have discovered on my personal branding journey is that my generation (Gen Y) and Millennials are all adopting the Renaissance Worker concept – both out of choice as well as necessity.

In many ways, the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker was laid out for us by our educational system. Most students are required to take liberal arts classes where they learn about topics unrelated to their major (sadly, colleges still don’t do a good job of helping students see how the knowledge and skills they learn in one field could be beneficial other fields as well as in the potential career paths they may take after graduation).

In addition, there has never been a time where we have access to so much knowledge, are able to use so many tools to express our creative potentialities, and are not penalized when we jump from job to job. Today’s working world is perfectly set up to become a Renaissance Worker.

Our generation has also come to see that work is no longer designed for someone who is going to stay in one job, or even profession, for 30 years. These jobs are vanishing each day therefore, we are all forced to constantly seek out new knowledge and develop new skills just to survive.

The benefits of diversifying your professional life

On March 12, 2009, Bernard Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies and admitted to operating what has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by an individual. Prosecutors estimate that his 4,800 clients lost over $64.8 billion.

Now, what does Bernard Madoff have to do with being a Renaissance Worker and personal branding? Three words: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify! Many of the people Madoff defrauded lost virtually everything because they decided to put all their money into one single investment. Then when things went bad, poof – all their money was gone!

Today, we are told to diversify our investments and this is why people buy mutual funds instead of putting all their money into one stock. Sure, sometimes a single stock can pay off short-term, but in the long run this strategy could be extremely risky and potentially catastrophic. So when it comes to the career investment game, doesn’t it make sense for you to start diversifying your knowledge and skills as well?

In her book One Person/Multiple Careers, Marci Alboher says that adding “slashes” i.e., having multiple jobs or professional identities, is just like diversifying your investment portfolio. This way, if the market goes south or one employer runs into trouble, a diversified career portfolio can buffer you against hard times, especially if you have other potential income streams.

Becoming a highly valuable worker

Adopting the Renaissance Worker life can also benefit you by making you a much more desirable job candidate. If you have many more slashes on your resume then the other candidate, you have a much better shot at landing the job because your additional skill set sets you apart and will bring added value to the organization. And if you are already within an organization, your slashes will create new opportunities and potential promotions.

In my own professional life, my day job is a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts Research Institute. However, on a daily basis I am constantly using the creative and entrepreneurial skills I developed when opening up my clothing business, am being sought for my technology skills, and am helping IT, Marketing, and Communications create a social media strategy that will increase awareness of our new Girl Scout Leadership Experience that will help usher in a new generation of girl leaders for the 21st century. So because of my diverse set of knowledge and diversified skill set as a Renaissance Worker, I add value to my organization in a way that is far outside my job description.

How do you become a Renaissance Worker?

To answer this question, I am going to take you back to my previous posts. They are all related to the discover phase of personal branding outlined in Me 2.0 and will help set the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker.

First, you have to get a better sense of who you are and see if this professional lifestyle fits with you (however, like I said earlier, I think sooner or later everyone is going to have to become a Renaissance Worker). Next, you have to figure out what are you passionate about. I have never done a job in my career that I didn’t enjoy or feel I was growing from. If the learning curved leveled off or I lost interest, I realized that job was not for me and I went exploring for something else I was passionate about. Never settle for a mediocre job experience.

Next you have to figure out what you were born to do and see if this aligns with your passions. As I said in my third post, there is a huge difference between doing what you are good at versus what you were made to do. Next, you have to figure out how to connect all your interest, skills, and work experiences so there is a level of synergy that all your professional identities benefit from each other. Once this is done, you can then see how to put them all under a unified personal brand.

Do you think you will adopt a Renaissance Worker mindset soon? What value do you see it bringing to your professional life?

 

My Personal Branding Story Part 4: I am a Renaissance Worker

Over 500 years ago, a new vision of human beings began to emerge during the Renaissance period that “considered man empowered, limitless in his capacities for development.” This idea was fully embraced by a group of individuals known as Renaissance Men whose lives were dedicated to developing their skills in all areas of knowledge, physical development, social accomplishments, and the arts.

It is this same vision that I have pursed my career since graduating college. I have always been the type of person who loves seeking out knowledge from a wide array of fields and has tried to develop a  skill set that draws from a diverse set of disciplines. This has been at the heart of almost all the career decisions I’ve made and it has led me to discover a brand that fits not only my personality, but also how I approach my professional life. On this personal branding journey, I have come to realize  that I am a 21st century Renaissance Worker – and you may just be as well!

Marcos Salazar – Renaissance Worker

This past weekend, I was rereading one of my favorite books, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick-sent-me-high-ee”) and there was a quote that really struck me: “To live means to experience—through doing, feeling, thinking…Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life.”

As I have been reflecting back on my last post and the overall discover phase of my personal branding journey, I began to see that my world since college has been consistently driven by the desire to fill my life with experiences that allow me to fully explore all the aspects of who I am and the many professional pathways I would like to potentially travel down. After graduating from Amherst College with a psychology degree,  I moved to Boston to get away from academia and was interested in exercise and nutrition, so I became a personal trainer, spinning instructor, and wrote a book about the antidepressant effects of exercise. The plan was to apply for a PhD in clinical psychology but nine months later I became interested in politics, so I moved to DC and did an internship at the AFL-CIO and took classes at American University.

I then moved back to my hometown of Taos, New Mexico where I was a substitute teacher and then became a case manager for a community mental health clinic. There I helped clients find meaningful jobs, secure safe housing, assisted psychiatrists with psychological intakes, and eventually developed a patient assistant program that allowed low-income patients to receive badly needed medication for free from pharmaceutical companies. I eventually got the bug to live abroad, so I picked up and moved to Barcelona to experience international life while starting my second book on the psychology of life after college.

I eventually I moved back to DC where I had a brief stint as a sales consultant before I landed a job as a researcher for the American Psychological Association where I conducted education and workforce trends within psychology. While in DC, I published my second book and also got my Masters in organizational management as well as a certificate in leadership coaching from The George Washington University. I soon became interested in business and technology and opened up a DC focused online clothing company as well as taught myself to code as I tried (unsuccessfully) to launch a few social networks sites.

I eventually moved to New York, fell in love with Brooklyn, and am now working as a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts Research Institute where we are studying how to develop a new generation of girl leaders that will take us into the 21st century. I also run a positive psychology website, FiveDailyGratitudes.com, and am now creating an iPhone app based on the site. And most recently, I opened up a New York based clothing business as well as started working with a community organization in my neighborhood to help teach low-income residents technology, entrepreneurial, and business skills. Lastly, I am working on new book focusing on psychological development for young professionals.

Whew!!!! Since graduation I have had 12 official jobs and probably just as many informal ones! And what I have learned over the years is that I am someone who thrives off of having new and different experiences, especially when it comes to my professional life. More importantly, I love diving in into new projects or fields, learning everything I can, and then integrating the knowledge and skills I gain into other areas of my work life. I have learned that I was born to be an explorer. I was born to be a career adventurist. I was born to be a Renaissance Worker.

What about a niche?

In the first post on my personal branding journey, I received an interesting comment regarding my desire to integrate all my talents, passions, and work experiences into a unified personal brand. Jose Paula told me, “…you have too many things happening at the same time and simply cannot focus and pay undivided attention to your niche…If you cannot define yourself in one sentence and state your one, single niche in it, you’ll continue to be confused.”

While it is important to find a niche that you can become an expert in, a niche and a personal brand are not the same thing. You will always able to have multiple niches; you just have to try to connect under a single personal brand. More importantly, I believe it is becoming increasingly important that all of us have more than one niche simply because the working world is no longer designed for someone who is going to focus on one single path for 30 years. Those types of careers don’t exist anymore and adopting adopting a mindset of a Renaissance Worker where you are constantly acquiring knowledge from a variety of fields and developing a skill set from a multitude of disciplines will provide you with a career advantage over those who have decided to put their head down and focus on a single career or niche.

Add a slash to your career

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post on introducing the concept of a Renaissance Worker I checked my Twitter account and saw an interesting tweet from my friend, Lindsay Pollak, entitled: “Defending Generation Y: The rise of the ’slash-career’” http://bit.ly/RLZ9c — follow @heymarci, the authority on slash careers.” Taking Lindsay’s advice, I went on to visit @heymarci (Marci Alboher) and eventually checked out her main web page and found that her writings discuss a very similar work life concept that I am exploring as a Renaissance Worker.

In her book One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success, Marci tracked people whose careers were comprised of many professional identities with Marci herself being a lawyer/author/speaker/journalist. What she found was that adding “slashes” to your career not only makes life more interesting, but also provides many new career opportunities. For example, if I was up against another candidate for a research job, the fact that I have many more “slashes” on my resume would be to my advantage. Since I am also as writer/speaker/entrepreneur/community developer as well as being very adept at using social media, if the other candidate just has lots of research experience who do you think they are going to choose? Who adds more value to the organization?

In addition, having many slashes can bring you into contact with many different types of communities and allows you to build a diverse network that can significantly help you in your professional life (learn more in this great Authors@Google video with Marci Alboher as well as Tim Ferriss, one of the ultimate Renaissance Worker.)  As for me, you can see what my slashes would be on my new logo for my blog.

What’s next?

In the next post I will be diving deeper into the concept of being a Renaissance Worker, how I use my knowledge and skills from many different fields to add value to every job or project I am involved in, and discuss the benefits of adopting this type of mindset when it comes to your career and personal brand in the 21st century. But for now, I would like to know what you think about the concept of Renaissance Worker? Do you feel you are a Renaissance Worker in your own career? Would you ever integrate this into your personal brand?

My Personal Branding Story Part 3: Passion is Never Enough

“What are you passionate about?” I am sure there’s a post on every single career website that focuses on this topic. And for good reason – you won’t have a meaningful career nor will you be able to develop a strong personal brand if you don’t know the answer to this question. However, the harsh reality is that passion will never be enough!

In my last post, I started the process of clarifying the things I am passionate about in order to help me further develop my personal brand. However, as I thought more about the post, something just didn’t set right with me. There was something missing that I needed to do. I felt like the last post was really thin and didn’t dig deep enough in developing an understanding that would provide a foundation for creating a unique personal brand. I soon realized that before I am able to integrate all my interests, passions, and work experiences into a unified personal brand, there’s another form of self-knowledge that needs to be tapped into, and that is discovering what you are born to do.

The curse of competence

When I started college I thought I wanted to major in biology. I was really good at it in high school and loved the subject. I also knew chemistry was a big part of the major and didn’t worry too much about that because I knew I was pretty good at this also.

Then I took my first chemistry class. This was the first time I encountered people who were programmed for chemistry. While it would take me 2 hours to finish an exam, these people were out the door in 30 minutes and would easily set the curve for the class. What I quickly realized is that even though I enjoyed chemistry and biology – and was really good at them, I would never truly be great at either of the subjects no matter how much I studied.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, refers to this concept as, “the curse of competence.” That is, we are all pretty good at a lot of things because we have an abundance of talent, but there are only a few things that we are genetically programmed to do and become truly excellent at.  So in addition to discovering work we are passionate about, you also need to keep in mind there is a huge difference between doing what you are good at versus what you were born to do.

This idea that there are things we will not be great at is something that goes against the grain of what many people have told us since we were kids. This is especially true for all us Gen Yers whose parents have told us that we can be anything we want to when we grew up. However, the brutal fact is that there are some things that we will only be good at, and part of your personal branding journey is to find out what you were made to do in life.

Psychology came calling

It was after this realization that I was not going to major in biology (and a few not so great grades in Chemistry) that I took my first psychology class. I had always been fascinated with human behavior and why people acted they way they did. From a very young age I recognized that I had a unique ability to provide people with a level psychological visibility that made them feel understood – often in a way that they had never experienced before. When I would meet someone for the first time, they would open up and tell me things that they usually kept deep inside and had never even told their best friends or family.

It’s as if people had a certain frequency that they operated on and I was able to naturally tune into their unique frequency and connect with them on a level that they had not previously experienced. This was also facilitated by me being able to naturally pick up on emotional cues and ask insightful questions based on that information (what would later be called having high emotional intelligence). Through this way of relating, I was able to provide people with an environment where they could let down their guard and simply be who they truly were.

So when I finally took my first psychology class, I felt like a fish in water. I had found something that provided structure to all that I had been thinking and a systematic way to describe all the things I had been experiencing since I was a little boy. I realized this was what I was meant to do – in what capacity, I was not sure yet, but I did know that I had found what I was wired for.

Then came writing, organizing, and creating businesses

However, just because you find something you were born to do doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to that one thing. After graduation I thought psychology was going to be my life. The plan was to take a year or two off, get some work experience, obtain my PhD in clinical psychology, then teach at a university and have a practice on the side. Sounds like a great path, right?

Well, once I started to explore more of the world after college. I started to develop a better sense of who I was and where I wanted to go in life and came to see that there were many other things I was passionate about and potentially born to do. This became increasingly apparent as I moved from job to job and project to project – a common theme among Gen Y and which I describe personally in my first post in this series.

What all these experiences have made me come to see is that the discovery process is never-ending and we have to think of our personal branding journey not as linear, but as circular. After we develop our personal brand, from time to time  we will need to come back to the discovery phase and integrate new experiences, passions, and information about things we are potentially born to do. The key, however, is to continue to be open to new experiences and knowledge while also trying to maintain a consistent personal brand.

What are you wired to do?

Each of use has a genetic predisposition to be great at certain things. When you ask yourself this question, be brutally honest with yourself. While I loved biology (and still do – I read read about evolution and how it relates to psychology constantly), I had to accept the fact that I would never be great at it. But in accepting this fact I was forced to go exploring and that led me to psychology. Today, I can’t imagine my life without having this self-knowledge of one of the things I was born to do.

So set some time aside and ask yourself, “What are those things that I can truly be great at? What am I wired to do?” Then use this knowledge you gain during the brand discovery process and integrate it with your passions to create a strong personal brand you can feel confident about!