Your personality, skills and competences make a brand

Fifteen years ago management guru Tom Peters wrote about personal branding. People as brands. He asked: what makes you different from anyone else?

Your education? Hundreds, thousands of people have the same formal education you do. Experience? Of course, but there will always be someone who has more.

It's your value that makes your brand. And what is that? What you are makes an unique and invaluable combination provided you're able to demonstrate how your value can add to the value of others.

So, what is personal branding about? It's about your personality, your skills, your experience. Look at your self as a product with value that you have to sell and try to customize it. You may call it your self, Peters chose to call it your personal brand.

There are several ways to build a brand and sell it. More of it next time.

Surprised with the concept of people as brands? Look around you and you'll find a few notable examples.

Barack Obama, for instance: smart, handsome, lean, energetic, well spoken, appealing to minorities, ex-layer, a shrewd politician that does't look like one of them. On top of it: a wonderful smile. Obama brand is in fact the most powerfull brand in the world.

Learn or live? Both

We're living uncertain times. The more the need to invest in ourselves. Us as people and us as professionals.

In the old times you got a degree for the rest of your life and you'de be living on that. Not now. Now we have to keep up constantly with change. We have to keep fit mentally and physically. We have to learn or improve different skills and capabilities. The boundaries between private life and profession become fuzzier and that's also a cause for rising anxiety. We have to keep improving some aspects of our personalities and behavior and learning new skills. Knowledge is very precious and no one will do it for you. It takes self-motivation and will power.

Flexibility, adaptation, communication, empathy, assertiveness, resilience - these are the keywords. These capabilities are part of knowledge in the broad sense. How to improve or acquire them?

Many people don't know what goes between a psychotherapist and his (her) client. In fact, it's a process of learning for both parts. The important thing is that the client is able to improve communication, empathy, awareness, self-perception. He's supposed to acquire skills that will be useful for the rest of his life.

Private life and work being so entangled nowadays, the more important it is to know yourself, your limits and your strenghs and make use of them.