Building your personal brand is no easy feat. In fact, building a lasting personal brand takes YEARS of careful crafting. Building your personal brand includes building your reputation, providing a memorable experience and delivering consistent results to your customers/clients. In other words, your personal brand pretty much encompasses everything you do.
I was told as a young attorney that a reputation can take years to build up and only a moment to destroy.
If there’s one piece of advice that I give over and over and over again to my clients it’s this… “Your brand follows you EVERYWHERE”. Your BRAND includes your words and actions.
To give you an example, let’s look at this year’s election.
50/50 Split
It’s a touchy subject, I know…but stick with me! The US was pretty much split 50/50 between the presidential candidates.
Despite knowing this… people have spouted off things like…
“If you support x candidate, unfollow me…because you’re clearly a ****”
That’s just being mild, what she said was way worse. She totally laid into the opposing candidates followers, assuming that every single follower was a <<BLEEP! >>
The sad truth is, this election has brought out the bad in people. And it shows, big time. While I’m 100% okay with others expressing their opinions, it’s completely unnecessary to bring hate and nastiness into it.
Words are powerful. They follow you. They can even destroy what you spent years building up.
Your Actions Have Consequences
In short: I completely changed my view of this colleague that I had done business with in the past. I didn’t care a bit about the candidate she supported…what I cared about was the viciousness that she used to tear down the people who opposed her candidate. Someone with that much hate in their heart was not someone that I could see myself doing business with in the future.
Her brand and personality took a complete 180. All because she decided to bring her nastiness on social media.
Why would I want to work with somebody who openly sends hateful messages? And why would you?
The vote is split 50/50, so there’s a good chance that somebody you know shares a different political opinion. That doesn’t mean that you have to resent them. People hold different opinions. Get over it. Better yet…learn from them.
Moral of this story?
Watch Your Words
If you decide to share an opinion, be sure to leave the nastiness out of it. Why? Because those words will follow you the second you click that ‘send’ button. Those words are a part of your personal brand.
You’ve probably spent YEARS building your personal brand. Don’t let a tweet or post or video destroy it.
Did you find this blog post inspiring? If so I would love to hear your thoughts below and make sure to share this article with a friend who could use it!
Here’s To Your Success!
Loved this video. You are so right. Years of working on your reputation and brand can be damaged in a matter of seconds by using negative, hateful words without thinking first.
I agree that everyone has gone a little over the edge and it is evident in the way we have seen the disrespect of how people have acted over this past election. We have all had disappointments over the years of those who have been in office. Yet to act crazy, unkind, rude, hostile even violence is just nuts.
I also feel that people on social media, doing lives, teaching on videos, where others can see and hear what is being said need to be ear / example worthy of ones branding too. True that actions speak louder than words, yet actions are followed by words and words followed by thoughts. So it does not hurt to do an occasional check up from the neck up. Time we start cleaning up what we allowed to become the norm. ?? No more ? We can do this and make a difference for better.???