What Builds Your Brand Experience More? Personal Development or Professional Development?

Your brand experience is how someone else feels about you when you leave the room. And whether that room is a boardroom in your place of business, a zoom room from your home office, or your kitchen after family dinner, these experiences are happening ALL the time.

So, if you want to create an intentional brand experience, what is the best first step?

Well, if you’ve read or listened to me before, you’ll know I don’t believe in a SINGLE best first step for every person.

So what is this blog post about, you might ask?

It’s a CONVERSATION around what type of support might work best for you in the development of your intentional brand experience. So let’s base this conversation on the two most obvious options for this type of development. Let’s go!

The Definitions

Pulling from the website Definitions.Net, “Personal development includes activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations.”

On the other hand, and from the same source, “Professional development is learning to earn or maintain professional credentials such as academic degrees to formal coursework, attending conferences, and informal learning opportunities situated in practice.”

One of the most important things you may notice here is the LACK OF OVERLAP in the two definitions. This, of course, does not exist in the real world, and many learning opportunities may be both personal and professional. In fact, in my experience, all of my personal development training has led to improvements at work, and vice versa.

There is no definite black or white.

But what these definitions DO allow us to do is identify which learning opportunities we have historically desired, and which we may not have accomplished yet, which may have historically led to us to being somewhat disappointed in the outcomes.

Building a Brand Experience

Building a brand experience is all about being able to look at how you’re showing up in a specific capacity, and identifying the underlying reasons why this may be. So, let’s look at how each of these types of learning opportunities can contribute to YOUR brand experience. I’m going to bring some points into play, because everyone likes a competition, right?

Personal development is up first.

• Improve Awareness & Identity: as already mentioned above, the ability to improve your awareness of your current experience and assess whether or not it is aligned with your identity is a crucial piece of personal branding. Within this learning experience, score 1 each time you notice that you are aware of the experience YOU are providing for other people within the space, and a BONUS 2 if that experience you are creating is aligned with your personal brand.

• Develop Talents & Potential: one of the things I love to speak about in personal branding is the Golden Thread, a concept I use to described the ONE THING that ties all of YOU together. Again, not the one thing that ties everyone together, as it’s different for each person, but for you in particular. You have specific talents. You have specific potential. And being able to see those and use that knowledge intentionally to create an experience that is aligned, is what makes “showing up” that way MUCH, much easier. Let’s add up to 10 points here…5 if the learning experience is targeted at your talent(s) - not weaknesses - and a BONUS 5 if afterwards, you believe you have increased your potential :)

• Build Human Capital & Facilitate Employability: when we look at employability specifically, conceptually it’s easy for a company to define a box (with a job description let’s say), and then for people to try and FIT into that box at all costs. Historically, that is what “getting a job” has looked like. But in the new age of the Great Resignation, humans expect more. When you look at the things that make YOU employable, are you looking solely at professional credentials? What more can you bring to the table with Human Capital that another applicant can’t…even if your professional credentials are the same? If you feel like the learning experience uniquely contributes to YOUR employability (and not just “people in general”), add another 5 points.

• Enhance Quality of Life & Contribute to the Realization of Dreams and Aspirations: well, this one is pretty all-encompassing, and again, professional development can TOTALLY do this as well. After all, you’re never going to be a doctor if you don’t go to Med School. And at the same time, I feel like this ends up being related MORE to personal development when we look at INTENTIONALITY. Are you taking this learning experience to enhance YOUR quality of life? Yes…you specifically. And if so, do you know enough about what YOU want to make that decision? This is based on YOUR dreams and aspirations. Not your parents. Not society’s. Yours. And if you DO have that focus, I would say this one is like, at least 100 points ;)

And now let’s bring in the professional development pieces:

• Learning to Earn/Maintain Professional Credentials: as mentioned above, if you intend to move towards a certain profession, professional credentials are KEY. Medical School. Flight Hours. Astronaut Training. Culinary School. All of these learning opportunities teach you critical skills to be successful in these arenas. The drawback being, if you are following those paths because you “think you should” or “someone else thinks you’d be good at it”, the ability to maximize your intake of the information remains low. So let’s give each of these just a single point; one for each credential you have. BONUS 2 points if it’s a credential in an area in which you LOVE to contribute.

• Informal Learning Opportunities situated in PRACTICE: last but not least, one of the greatest contributions of professional development opportunities is that they are situated in practice. And this is an area that is so greatly under-represented in personal development. All skills that we learn take practice to master. So it’s important to find opportunities and spaces that allow you to do this practice. And more importantly, support you in FAILING in executing the skills, as that’s one of the places we learn the most. If the learning opportunity provides you with ample space for failure, feedback and practice, then you’ve got a winner. On the points scale, let’s add 5 points for every 1 hour of practice.

The Competition for Resources

When it comes to the resources we have for these two different types of development, often they come from two different places. Workplaces are much more likely to invest in you from a professional development angle, whereas most people need to invest in THEMSELVES for personal development.

I have experienced this myself. My workplaces paid for my Dale Carnegie professional development, and I paid for my Landmark personal development.

But here’s the thing…

When you look at the definitions and outlines above, BOTH personal and professional development are required to really grow, specifically when it comes to historically defined “soft skills”.

And how WE feel about the learning opportunity also has a lot to do with whether or not we will experience the desired outcomes.

For example, if we don’t think that a course will improve our employability, the likelihood that we will go all-in is low. On the flip side, if we do a bunch of personal development but then never have any time to practice, it’s like reading the instructions on how to play a game, but never having a chance to actually play. That’s not how you get GOOD at something.

You get good at something when YOU get clarity, when you see the benefit for YOU, and when you have time to PRACTICE.

And if the definitions above are any indication, we need BOTH personal and professional development concepts to make that happen.

It’s important for companies to remember this when making investments into their employees. And if you’re choosing your own training opportunities, it’s your responsibility as well ;)

In Summary

I don’t know how many points you gave yourself for a specific learning opportunity, but I do know this. If you are able to evaluate on this scale that includes BOTH personal and professional development principles, and they rank high, the more likely you are to feel like you got what you needed out of the training.

So next time, instead of looking at personal VS. professional opportunities, look at how likely they are to be BOTH.

Because we all need ALL of these skills, in work and life. And if we’re going to spend our time doing the work, we want it to count.

If you’re specifically looking for an informal learning opportunity to PRACTICE skills that you have recently gained, whether in the personal or professional development arena, check out the Your Business Peeps Community!