#9 RE-IMAGINING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND – with CEO & team performance expert Michael Boydell

Are you actively managing your professional and personal brand? Can brand management frameworks help us manage our own careers? CEO & team performance expert Michael Boydell suggests we start with a blank sheet of paper. If it feels uncomfortable, we’re on the right track! Ask yourself: Where & with whom am I most joyful? What makes my heart sing? When do I feel most alive?   References & Links Michael Boydell * website – http://boydellinc.com/ * newsletter – http://eepurl.com/gdQDyv * LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelboydell/ Personal Brand & Psychology Papers * 1997 Tom Peters Fast Company article – https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you * 2005 Fast Company response by Lidsky – https://www.fastcompany.com/55257/me-inc-rethink * Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Personal Branding – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/089331890×4270744 * I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man – https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau6.3.017 * Carl Jung Individuation – https://www.carl-jung.net/individuation_steps.html * Erving Goffman “Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” – https://amzn.to/2T2RVht * Albert Mehrabian “Silent Messages” – https://amzn.to/2EiTqQt Talk About Talk * Newsletter Sign-up: https://talkabouttalk.com/#newsletter-signup * Andrea: [email protected]   Interview Transcript AW:  Thank you, Michael for being here. Alright, let’s get into it. My first question is to ask you to define what do we mean by personal brand? MB: Some people like to think in a holistic sense in terms of how they show up. What they look like, what they sound like. And some people spend a lot of time consciously seeking to emit a certain brand for a certain purpose, which may or may not be conscious to them. I tend to think of our professional brand is something that we maybe start to explore, of course, depending on individual age and stage, but it’s kind of like by your early 20s, you know, that’s a concept that maybe somebody has introduced us to or given us a book to think about. We start to think about who are from a career perspective, who are we as a professional, how do we want to show up in the world. We tend to go into our let’s say, mid 20s with some idea of what we want to pursue and explore. The fascinating part to me is that we are probably unconsciously carrying with us essentially a download of what the world has already taught us our professional brand should or should not be. So we can enter that period of our lives thinking it’s a blank sheet of paper and we can start creating a professional brand, but we are already bring with us a whole lot of source material based on our upbringing. Based on early life experiences, based on our parents. AW: I think there’s so much to unpack their terms of what you just said.