Last week, we looked at how your values, passions and traits combine to construct the foundation of your personal brand. This week we want to look at how you can build on that foundation and move forward to where you want to be.
Start With an Ending
To do this, let us first think forward to where we feel we would like to end our career. Depending on your industry, this may seem an impossibility. If you work in technology, for example, the chances are that even the most cutting-edge minds cannot accurately predict every development over the coming decades.
However, what we can think about is at what point we could look back on our working life and be happy with the results. Do you want to be a CEO? A Lead Designer? A Head Partner? Maybe you want to build your own business from scratch, make it a success and then pass over the reins to your children?
Whatever you may want, having a destination for your journey helps you plan a route. Moreover, by taking into account what we learned about our values, passions and traits, we can better plan the trip by taking a more desirable path. There could be any number of ways to achieve our goals, but we want to do so in the way that makes us happiest.
Consider the Past and Present
Think about your past jobs and your current one and consider what you like about them and what you dislike. When you do so, reflect on the lists we asked you to make last week. Try and draw correlations between your values, passions and traits and what has made you happy or unhappy at work. If you are an introverted person but have landed a customer service role at some point, it is quite likely that dealing with angry customers made you unhappy. If you are a creative person but have worked in a rather monotonous role that probably did not leave you feeling joyful.
However negative your professional experience, there will most likely be things you found rewarding. What we find rewarding often links back to who we are. When we reflect on these aspects, we can then start to think about what type of professional (and personal) life we want in the future. If your goal is to be a Marketing Director, then it may seem prudent to take sales jobs. However, working in sales is not the only way to becoming a Marketing Director, particularly if previous sales jobs have left you unhappy.
Again, make your list. Assess your professional life to date and draw up the positives and negatives. Compare them to your values, passions, and traits, and you should be able to begin categorising your experiences. At this point, potential paths to both success and happiness should start to reveal themselves.
Plan Your Journey
By ensuring that we stick to our values, we can also consider whether our goal is realistic. Would your destination be too contradictory? For example, would you still want to a Sales Director if it meant prolonged periods away from your family? We should always remember, we can change our goals. Many people get to a point in life and decide to change things. What we are doing now is ensuring we can consider any future changes in an informed way.
At this point, we should have a better understanding of who we are and where we want to be. We should also be able to gauge whether the next stage of our journey is going to fulfil us in the way that we hope it will. Most importantly, we are starting to put our personal brand together in a way that can be beneficial in the long-term. With care and thought, we can be sure that any job application or career move we make is something that we know is the right move for us.
When we are asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” or “Why did you take your last position?” we can have an answer. We can answer all those interview-style questions with confidence and authority because we know who we are and we know what we want. Moreover, we can communicate this to others.
However, we still have more to learn. Now that we know more about our brand we need to ensure others see it too. In our next post, we will look at how to ensure your professional image and your personal brand complement one another well.
