Developing a Productive Personal Brand

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Many of us seek to improve productivity in our day-to-day lives. How can we do so to enhance our personal brands and enable us to do more of what we want to do in life? This month’s guest blogger, Productivity Maven Jo Dodds of Power to Live More, shares her five tips to help get there.

Photo: Pixabay

Here’s Jo:

Productivity is all about consistency. How do you create consistency in your business especially when life is so busy and there are constant distractions and challenges to contend with?

When I work with my clients we work through my ‘Five Fundamentals to Live More’ to help them to look at and improve their business and life. And when I say ‘to Live More’, that’s about getting to do more of the stuff that they want to do rather than that they should or need to do.

The five fundamentals, with some thoughts of how they can be applied when thinking about building your brand, are as follows:

1. Simplify

This is about working out who you are and what you do and want to do, so that you can drop the unnecessary stuff in your life. This involves being clear about your vision for your life, what roles you have, and want to have, and how they shape what you do. It’s also about identifying what goals you have and therefore what actions you need to take to move you towards those goals. I’m a big fan of taking small daily actions to move you consistently towards your goals.

Being clear about all of the above then enables you to drop the stuff that you are doing that doesn’t fit with your vision, roles and goals. Simplifying your life is all about knowing who you want to be and what you want to do and ensuring that your activity is aligned with that.

When thinking about your branding:

  • Personal branding doesn’t work if you aren’t first clear about who you are, what you do and for whom. Don’t try to be ‘everything to everyone’. To consistently build your brand you need to make sure that everything you are doing points back to your proposition. And you can only do that if you first identify what that is.
  • Decide on what you are willing to do and what’s not for you. For example I choose not to use video even though I probably should because I just don’t like using it!
  • Have a plan, though make sure it’s flexible as things change.

2. Systemise

Once you have simplified your life and business, the next step is about systemising what you do so that your activity is streamlined, efficient and effective and, where possible, automated. This ensures that what you do gets done in a flow that creates least resistance in your life.

I’m a big fan of creating written processes and checklists within your business to help to create flow and I suggest that you use an Operations Manual of some description to document these processes.

There are at least a couple of reasons for doing this. The first is that, when you’re ready to outsource or delegate and get someone else to do these tasks, you will have all the instructions already created. And secondly, if you are doing something yourself that is fairly complex, or that you don’t do often, having a checklist or instructions to follow makes it much easier for you to get the task done consistently (there’s that word again) with least thinking and as quickly as possible.

When thinking about your branding:

  • Work out how to deliver a consistent brand automatically and with least effort.
  • Use a tool like Canva.com and have a brand library of images set up for all your needs.
  • Use tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and Meet Edgar to consistently manage your marketing, website and social media.

3. Share

Once you’ve followed the stages of simplifying and systemising what you do, the next step is to work out which tasks you need to do and which you can outsource and delegate. As an entrepreneur / small business owner it’s easy to get stuck trying to do everything yourself and to take on all the pressure of that responsibility.

Often what stops people outsourcing is getting stuck thinking that it’s quicker and easier to just do the work yourself. But, of course, if you have followed step two and recorded your systems, you are now in a position to more easily outsource them.

The other aspect to sharing involves connecting and sharing with other people, whether that be other business people and/or family or friends for support and accountability. Finding mentors or mastermind partners can be really helpful in helping you to work through business issues and develop and grow you and your business. And, if you work from home, sharing may also include sharing home tasks within your family to reduce your personal workload and allow you to get your business work done.

When thinking about your branding:

  • Use masterminding / accountability to review what you’re doing, get feedback and keep you consistent.
  • Work out what you can outsource to specialists, like graphic designers and social media managers.
  • Actually outsource it!

4. Self Care

Self care is all about looking after your health and wellbeing and ensuring your energy levels and resilience are high to keep you happy and well. This isn’t really the fourth step in the process, it’s something that you should be continuously working on to enable you to implement the other steps. If you aren’t fit and well then everything in your life becomes just so much harder to do, doesn’t it?

How can you self care? The four areas that I try to focus on are mindfulness, exercise, nutrition and sleep.

When thinking about your branding:

  • Make space in your business and life so that you can be creative around your personal brand.
  • Keep healthy to enable you to work consistently on building your brand.
  • Build healthy habits into your daily routine; use an accountability app like Momentum on your Smartphone and record your daily activity that forms part of your routine, like walks, for example.

And that leads us on to the fifth ‘S’, which is:

5. Sustain

This is about how you set yourself up to keep doing these things by creating routines, rituals and habits to build activities into your life and business in a regular, consistent way. It can be really helpful to consider setting up and using systems to track your habits too whether that be using apps or personal measurement devices like a Fitbit or just plain old pen and paper or a calendar on the wall.

When thinking about your branding:

  • Set up plans, schedules and routines around areas like your social media presence and website development to keep these things going consistently.
  • Use tools like Feedly and Pocket to allow you to consistently learn and find useful content to share with your audience.
  • Regularly review the five fundamentals and how you are applying them in your business to keep consistently moving forwards.

How can YOU use these five fundamentals to help you efficiently build your personal brand?

To learn more about Jo Dodds, visit powertolivemore.com

jododds

2 Comments

2 thoughts on “Developing a Productive Personal Brand”

  1. Addie Ugbenne says:

    Thanks for this Jo and Golden Notebook! As someone straddling two completely unrelated roles and struggling to make enough time for either these are tools I really need to be implementing now!

    1. Jo says:

      Thanks for commenting Addie. I know the feeling! I reconciled everything this summer so my two unrelated roles not fit together. It’s made it a lot easier. Thought I realise not something that’s possible in all cases!

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