How Personal Brand Impacts Your Career: Guest Post Maegan Watson
In my continued quest to empower women with great resources, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Maegan Watson, a personal branding expert who has helped me greatly.
Maegan is a wife, sister, yogi, personal branding guru and the founder of My Dear Watson. She has nearly a decade of experience supporting professionals by building their career-transforming visibility. She solves the unending question of “what will I wear today?” so your energy is reserved for family, fulfilling work, and fun!
Enjoy this guest blog post from Maegan to learn why branding is powerful and why you need to focus on yours today.
Think about the last movie you watched with teenage characters in it. I bet the high school scene in the movie was full of stereotypical groups. Jocks wore jerseys, math team members wore glasses, cheerleaders wore skirts, punks had green hair and the Goths wore black eyeliner. Do you have this visual? How easy it is to decipher this scene you may have even lived, but seen so many times onscreen? You can understand something about these different groups just by looking at them before a single word is spoken. Movies use strong stereotypical brands to convey a message. The understanding of a scene is almost always dependent upon you learning something about the character just by looking at them. This is called branding and in the real world branding can either work for you, or against you.
So how can you make the power of branding work for you? You are not dressing for a character or a certain role. This image must be created for your life; it should show your strengths, your passions, and emulate what drives you to get out bed every morning. It should visually represent your values; things like peace, health, authenticity, strength, leadership or whatever your core qualities encompass.
Perhaps you know your values but you still struggle to find value-aligned opportunities. Job offers, promotions, dates, donations, or whatever else you are seeking. Well that’s because no one else knows your values, no one else can see (yes, literally see) what you are all about. This is where you can make a big impact with personal branding. Humans are visual beings. My job is to show you what your values LOOK LIKE so your image can speak for you.
You must look like your values. Whatever message you are trying to send whether it is to save the turtles, or hire me for a new position – it will be misread, lack power, and be unheard if your image doesn’t support the message.
Do you feel like you have to move mountains to get people to understand you?
Well friends, that’s personal branding. Your message will be received loud and clearly when the package (that’s you) sending the message is aligned with your values. Want to get your message heard? This work has to be done from the inside and the best time to start is now.
I am working with Maegan to define my brand so it aligns with my personal and professional values and reflects the message I want to lead with. It has been a fun and refreshing process to discover the brand I want to show the world. Thanks, Maegan for being a trusted part of my Personal Board of Directors!
