Building Your Personal Brand

By Sonia Beldom

Are you looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace? Do you want to differentiate yourself from the competition and leave a lasting impression on your audience? It’s time to invest in your personal brand.  Personal branding is more than just a buzzword; it’s a powerful tool that can elevate your professional presence and open doors to new opportunities. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, or corporate professional, cultivating a strong personal brand can set you apart and position you as a thought leader in your industry.  By leveraging the power of personal branding, you can attract new clients, establish credibility, and build a loyal following.

Branding started way back around 2000 BC when livestock were branded with a hot iron to prove ownership.  Nowadays, we own our own brand and, if we’re clever, we can control its image and protect its reputation.  Personal branding is about you; who you are and what you stand for. It’s what people say about you when you leave the room or check you out online.  We all have a brand whether we’ve consciously built it or not and yes, nice photos on social media are always great, but they’re one small part of your reputation that the world can see at the click of a mouse or a casual scroll.

As an advanced communications coach, I’m increasingly asked to coach personal branding skills for individuals, teams and people within large companies.  Whether you’re a professional looking to ace that pivotal presentation, an inspiring leader striving to inspire your team, or an individual seeking to master the art of building your personal brand and increasing your confidence, I am here to guide you every step of the way in creating a unique and engaging personal brand.  Through personalised coaching sessions to workshops, these skills are guaranteed to help you shine in your profession and life outside work.

I like to think of it as Bringing Reputation ­And New Directions to the world.

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression.  As in real life, people need to like and trust you and they make their minds up very quickly.  Google your name and see what first comes up.  If you find pictures of you on holiday, swigging champagne from a bottle and falling into a pool, maybe you need to re-think your Insta pictures.  Create your website and keep it up to date.  Include valuable content and be generous about giving information away as it shows confidence, knowledge and generosity.  And if you don’t share your ideas, how will people know they’re any good? We can’t control what other people write about us (or share pictures of us), but we can control our website which should be the first thing people see when people Google you.

CVs on LinkedIn are great for chronicling your past work, but unless the jobs are accompanied by more information on what you excel at, the things you’re best known for or the things that drive you, they’re just job titles.

Your strengths could include:

Skills,

Talents in and out of the workplace,

Relatable achievements,

Engaging statistics,

Genuine qualifications

Trustworthy testimonials to back up your strengths

Helpful tips and tricks that show your expertise, commitment and enthusiasm

Saleable qualities to prove your worth

Always be truthful about who you are, what you can offer and what drives you.  If you try to promote an image of yourself that isn’t authentic, apart from it being hugely stressful to keep up, it’ll become self-evident that it’s an act/image/message that isn’t true.

I encourage everyone to think of every social media post, phone call, casual conversation, board meeting or client presentation as an important opportunity to network with people and share common aims.  By learning the simple, lasting tips and tricks on networking you can take the “work” out and cast your net wide for maximum impact with current and future contacts.  Oh yes, and keep records!  There’s nothing quite like a snippet of remembered information to make somebody feel that you’ve really “got” them.

In a crowded digital and real-world market, we need to stand out to be noticed.  I coach clients on how to maximise a personal strength or unique take on life and work so that it can set them above the competition.  From days of casting network television series, it was incredible how quickly a controller would whizz through a showreel of 20 new faces, picking only 2 or 3 who felt different to the rest (despite how clever, talented and professional the rest were).  What makes you different is a superpower that gets you noticed – and hired.

And in the words of the great Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.”

More about Sonia Beldom

Sonia Beldom is a highly respected TV creative responsible for bringing together Ricky Gervais, Karl Pilkington & Stephen Merchant for “An Idiot Abroad”. Additionally, Sonia is a qualified Executive Coach, NLP and hypnotherapy practitioner, regularly running courses in personal development, public speaking and building confidence skills. She is a leading authority on building your personal brand.

To enquire about booking Sonia, get in touch with The Speakers Agency today on +44(0)1332 810481 or email enquiries@thespeakersagency.com