Creating Personal Brand Alignment (part 1)

There are a lot of things that I could talk about when it comes to personal branding. And over the next little while, you’ll see more and more entries in this series. Today, I’m going to talk about the times when we realize our personal brands aren’t aligned with our actions.

Understanding our emotions

I’ve long thought of our emotions as traffic lights. Green means GO. Yellow means CAUTION. Red means STOP.

When you are experiencing happy emotions, you are in personal brand alignment. The activities you are doing feel good and are contributing in a way that is aligned with your values. Whether in our personal life or at work, when we experience green emotions (happiness, joy, weightlessness, confidence, fun) you should actively try to spend more time doing those things :)

Yellow emotions are caution flags. Things like stress and exhaustion CAN be indicators of a brand misalignment, although they are not absolutes. In these scenarios, it’s important to take a look at the driving force behind the emotion and see where it’s coming from. Often, these emotions are driven by small things that we are misaligned with, that we experience over and over. Since they are generally little, there is likely an action you can take to drastically reduce the amount of impact they have on you. But if you don’t take any action, they can become red emotions in a hurry.

Red emotions - things like anger, frustration, overwhelm, fear - are our body’s way of telling us STOP. Something that is happening is WAY out of whack with our personal brand, and these emotions are our indicators telling us that we should STOP it.

Thoughts vs. situations

When experiencing red emotions, there are two ways to address it. One way is to change the situation. There are times when you can simply remove yourself from a situation and that can address the brand misalignment. However, it’s not always possible to remove yourself immediately.

The other way is to change your thoughts. Emotions are 100% driven by our thoughts about a situation or event, so when we actively try to switch our thoughts to things that drive green emotions, it can help immensely.

When you feel like you can’t do either of these things, that is the biggest indicator that you are not aligned with your personal brand and need to start working on a way to fix it.

An example

Here’s an example: when I was in University, I worked for a call center. You know, those ones where you used to call in to find a phone number to reach another person. I trained there for 2 weeks and was the top of my class, which was exciting to me as I was always a great student (good brand alignment). On my first day, I dressed business casual (because I believed you sounded more professional on the phone if you dressed professional) and no one sat with me at lunch. To make sure I got all my hours in, I worked 1 extra minute into my breaks and came back 1 minute early. On my second shift, I received a call from a lovely old gentleman who I spoke with for 7 minutes because he just wanted to chat (and he called me sunshine). At the end of my second shift, my manager scolded me because I was working too much and my average call time was too long.

BOOM. 100% personal brand misalignment.

I quit after my third shift.

It’s not that the job was bad, or that I was bad at it. We were just a poor fit together (I have the same perspective on relationships but I’ll leave that to the relationship coaches).

The moral of the story

When you feel misaligned with your job, it’s because you are. And the more you try to change yourself to meet someone else’s requirements, the more you’re going to feel like you’re selling yourself out. You only have one life…do you want to live it aligned or not?

If you feel like you need a change in your career to support a better personal brand alignment, I’d love to chat about it in a Discovery Call.