At our most recent Quarterly Event, we learned the foundation of a personal brand. I want to thank Mark DiGiacoma for giving us the tools we need and hitting on the strengths we all have, to building your own personal brand. I would also like to thank Centro for hosting our meeting. Now let’s get into the objectives in building that brand!
Mark started off the meeting by asking everyone in the room what objectives they believed were important in building your own personal brand. Being ready for a change, using simple life tools, always looking to new ideas, having a conscious awareness, identifying your weaknesses, and using your personal strengths to the best of your ability is what the group came up with. Mark made it a point to make sure everyone knew that their personal brand is and always will be a consistent statement. Whether you are on the golf course, with your family, at school or work, it represents YOU! What people see is not just a perception but a reality! Shareholders want to make sure that there is value in your brand, customers want to see stability, employees want to make sure that they will have a job, your family will want to make sure that your job is secure and the media is incumbent upon you to address their needs. In the end, everyone is looking to make sure you have “EMPATHY.” This was Mark’s number one point when describing the key factor in building a brand.
Mark went on to discuss empathy, and it’s a dynamic force in building your own brand. Without empathy and self-awareness, your brand will not grow. You also must have a skill set that is always being perfected and improved upon. Make sure to ask sincere questions and listen, then repeat that process over and over again. Mark brought up some great points when it came to listening. He asked the group, “When’s the last time someone listened and invested in you without expecting a return.” He made sure to point out that one should always listen with the intent to understand and not to respond. After just 7 seconds, people want to interrupt and stop listening, so without empathy, without truly listening and understanding your audience, your personal brand will not grow, be trusted, or taken seriously. One must make sure that the ideas they talk about are ideas that their audience wants to hear. The only way to know this is to have empathy, is to listen, is to understand your audience; this is how you will succeed and build a reliable brand.
A few fun facts Mark brought to our attention were:
1. People form a 1st impression in 25 milliseconds.
2. It takes seven times to overcome a bad 1st impression.
3. The average attention span is 8 seconds.
4. People have 50,000 unique thoughts in a given day.
Thank you for attending our Quarterly Event. You can find the slides from the meeting, here. Please have a wonderful summer, and we look forward to seeing everyone on September 6th for our Leadership Meeting.