Your Reputation Is an Asset

Before you build your personal brand, build the person behind it.

Long before LinkedIn profiles, personal branding strategies, professional photos and carefully crafted content, people built their reputation in much simpler ways.

• By how they showed up.

• How they dressed.

• How they treated people.

• How they respected their colleagues.

• Whether they kept their word.

They carried themselves with dignity.

I think about my father while writing this article.

He was always impeccably dressed. He cared about how he presented himself and never gave anyone a reason to question his professionalism.

But it was never really about the clothes.

It was about dignity.

He had a certain standard for himself, and that standard showed in everything around him.

That, to me, was personal branding. We just didn't call it that.

Today, my work is building people's #personalbrand. But there is something more fundamental underneath all of it:

Your character.

When I work with clients on their personal brand, we don't start with perception; we start with character: what they want to be known for, and whether the two align.

Your character shapes your reputation.

And your reputation is what people always remember when you're not in the room.

We can build a very polished personal brand. You can have the right positioning, the right profile, the right content and the right photographs.

But if the experience people have with you doesn't match the image you're creating, the brand won't hold for long.

Your reputation is built slowly. In the small things.

• How you behave under pressure.

• How you speak to people who cannot do anything for you. (especially the juniors with no power)

• How you handle mistakes.

• Whether your actions match your values.

• Whether people can trust your word.

This is why I don't see personal branding as creating just an online image.

I see it as making the outside reflect what already exists on the inside.

Your character is the foundation. Your reputation is the result. Your personal brand is the expression.

The strongest personal brands aren't built by trying to look like someone worth trusting.

They're built by becoming someone worth trusting.

Before you build your personal brand, build the person behind it.