Why Personal Branding?
Create an impact wherever you go
It takes 3 to 30 seconds for anyone to form an impression about you. How you are seen and perceived is critical for how others respond to you. People around you are always picking up non-verbal messages from you, and you may be totally oblivious to this fact. This is the window of opportunity for you to create an impact and launch yourself as a winner in people’s minds!
What do you look for when you choose any product for your home or office? You probably look for authenticity, credibility, features, benefits and trustworthiness! This is exactly what people look for, in the brand called you.
In this world of conformity, where people from the same industry end up looking like they dropped out of a cloning machine, it is important to stand out and look like a leader! You need to look special to be noticed and followed. To become an influencer and a leader, you need to be on top of the pyramid, or lead from the front. Most people want to stand out but do not know how. Personal Branding is your answer.
Whether you have a Corporate career, a Business, or are a Professional, your Personal Branding is your most important asset and your unique selling proposition. Working on your branding can minimize your struggle, by harnessing your strengths, packaging your authentic & unique self and positioning you high in people’s minds. This will help you accelerate your journey to success!
It does not matter where you are in your life now, you can rework on your personal branding and build a strategy for growth from here on! All you need is acceptance, willingness and focus!
Here are a few reasons to master your branding:
- You need to project your Unique qualities, which will help you stand-out and cut competition.
- Working on yourself and aligning who you are to what you do helps people buy you easily!
- You stay on top of people’s minds!
- When the world is full of people who look similar, you being the differentiator will get noticed faster.
- It helps you build trust and credibility with your stakeholders.
- It helps you create opportunities for yourself as people love to associate with successful people!
- Personal Branding enables Leaders to influence their followers faster.
- Leaders who are strong Brands are accepted faster and can accomplish more!
‘Work Hard’ is something that you probably heard from your parents and teachers as a command, while you grew up, and you took them seriously! It is important to put in your best in what you do, at the same time, it is also important to be smart and sell yourself with a strategy! There is no escape from projecting your branding, you are already doing it every single minute. Being conscious about your branding may help you struggle less.
Start working on your branding strategy today!
Personal Branding Meaning?
Leveraging who you are!
‘Everything about you is part of your branding’! – Poornima Kotak
Personal branding is a concept where you align all your personal capabilities (Product), package them in the most appropriate manner (Packaging), create a branding that speaks about you (Marketing) and projects you in the best possible manner (Selling) to the world. Your branding precedes you wherever you go, hence you should have a Personal Branding strategy that speaks about you!
There are 2 aspects to Branding – Outer and Inner. Working on both the aspects together is critical to creating a holistic representation of who you are. Most people kill their branding because of low or exceedingly high self-esteem. The key is to master the art of creating a balanced, realistic, truthful, appealing, promising and a saleable Branding strategy for you!
Your Personal Branding is the biggest asset that you possess! It is the relationship between 2 basic things:
- How you feel about yourself and how others feel about you
- How you sell yourself and why others buy you
These 2 things define your success in whatever you do! So, it is important for you to assess if your branding currently is an asset or a liability for you!
You have probably worked very hard on your technical skills and have grown in your career. While technical expertise is important, nurturing people is what Leadership is all about! People are looking for a leader who is authentic and charismatic. Your Leadership greatness depends on the way you position and project who you are. Your branding is a basic Leadership requirement, it enables you to become an impactful Leader!
You need to constantly market yourself as brand to increase your saleability factor. The gap between who you are and what people want to buy is where Personal Branding steps in. A good brand makes for a potential great leader. How you brand yourself will help people understand why they need to accept your leadership.
Most people live in a dark space of who they are and what their potential is and it may take a lifetime to even understand what they are capable of. You spend all your time trying to sell yourself without knowing what your audience is looking for in you. The concepts of Personal Branding have been tested by time over centuries and all we need to do is apply these appropriately to excel in our respective fields. Personal Branding is a science, and has its own unique concepts, laws and theories.
The 5 Gateways of Personal Branding
Personal Branding is based on the Inside-Out concept where the inner CORE becomes the foundation for external development. But when people meet you, they first see your outermost-self first, i.e, your appearance. Hence it is important to follow the Outside-In concept while working on your Branding, and align all of you into your CORE. All aspects of you from your external appearance to your inner self needs to be aligned and connected, for you to represent your holistic branding.
Your Appearance, Communication, Leadership, Behavior and Thoughts need to work together and support each other for you to be accepted as a strong and powerful Leader.
Appearance
Appearance is the 1st gateway, and is the easiest to change and the first trait in your Personal Branding that is visible. If your appearance seems appropriate and authentic to who you are and what you do, people accept you instantly. And if your appearance is adding value to your Leadership, you get worshipped by your followers. The flipside is, if your appearance is not appropriate, rejection is instant and once rejected, the door for acceptance is closed permanently! The good news is, appearance is no mean task, it can be easily changed with minimum effort! Experience has taught us that this instant change motivates you to patiently learn and implement the rest of the gateways of Personal Branding.
Elements of Powerful Appearance:
Authority vs. Approachability: Power creates distance. Leaders bridge the gap!
Effective leadership is a balance between being approachable and being authoritative. Some call it a balancing between displaying joyful interruption and putting up a Do Not Disturb sign! This concept is teachable and trainable and can be implemented instantly.
Managing lifestyle occasions: First impressions matter most!
Wearing the right clothes for every occasions is important as leaders need to look appropriate and authentic. This is critical for ensuring audience acceptance. By wearing the appropriate clothes and accessories, a leader can create the powerful visual impact that is needed.
Constructing the personal style: No one is you and that is your power!
Every individual is as unique as his or her thumb impression. Hence their personal style should represent their uniqueness. Personal style can be put together using the ancient Chinese concepts of Yin and Yang, and can help balance out the imbalance in physical and psychological characters in the person. Personal style helps people present themselves seamlessly.
Color magic: Colors speak louder than words!
All colors are not meant for everyone’s use. This is because personal colors like color of the eyes, hair and skin differ from one to another and learning and wearing colors that can complement personal colors is a teachable science. Donning the right colors increases a person’s confidence immensely because it has a positive ripple effect on the outside.
Fit fabulous: Dress like you are always going someplace special!
Working with the variations of the body (most call it imperfections) and wearing clothes that enhance the visual height helps leaders create authority. We teach simple formulae that our clients can instantly employ to their advantage and seek acceptance.
Art of accessorizing: Accessories are exclamation points of one’s appearance!
Accessories play a very important role in building visual leadership. In fact, sometimes they play a larger role than clothes themselves. Choosing the right accessories according to the face and body shape and to create the right impact is something we specialize in and train people in.
Magic of make-up & grooming: Do not ignore the finishing touch!
We have mastered these concepts as we have been teaching it for decades and are also passionate to implement some of the ideas, as they immediately help boost confidence of the wearer.
Shopping for 100X returns from your profession: Shopping is no more just pleasurable, but also profitable!
How you shop reflects in what goes into your wardrobe. We teach you the method to this madness of buying. Learn to shop for those things that can help you earn 100x of what you buy! Our aim is to help our Clients get more value for money spent wisely!
Wardrobe Management: Your appearance projects how organized you are in your wardrobe, so get your wardrobe organized!
How you keep your clothes & accessories reflects in what you wear on a daily basis. Managing and maintaining the most important ingredients that go into creating and projecting your visual branding is a simple scientific formulae, and it can be mastered.
Elements of Communication Skills:
Voice Mastery: The human voice is the most perfect instrument of all!
Voice is very critical for vocal communication and can make or break leaders. Every leader should master elements of voice like tone, pitch, volume, pause, word-stress and silence as this helps build leadership, strength and power. Communication skills is not restricted to just having a good command over a particular language. Its a combination of all the above elements
Body Language: The body never lies!
Body language is the most ancient language and the most widely understood or misunderstood. What the clothes, luxuries and success stories manage to hide, the body gives away. Hence it is very important to align your body to your thoughts and actions.
Personal Presentation: The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself!
Creating a concept of the positive self in the mind is critical for success. Self-talk needs to be always positive and progressive to enable good branding.
Communication Attitude: The art of communication is the language of leadership!
When all else goes right, bad communication can be a deterrent. People face hindrances in communication because of language skills, boredom, procrastination, ego, insecurity, fear and hundreds of other factors. Building assertion and purpose in communication is important for progress. We teach the art of communication by working on both the major and minutest aspects of Communication.
Public Speaking: People may forget what you said, but will never forget how you made them feel!
Choosing the right topic and being able to speak is not everything in public speaking. On the other hand, it involves everything from self-management, stage management, topic management, time management, audience management, script management and managing the environment in the room. Implementing these powerful concepts in public speaking is what creates great orators and magical leaders!
Our Methods
We use methods from theatre like music, body movements, opening up the mind, enhancing the imagination, audience management, thinking on the spot and much more in our sessions. Concepts of Communication Skills are best learnt, when there is a plan for implementation and practice. We make this easy for our participants through a system for daily practice. Progress can be easily measured on various metrics, resulting in highly motivated individuals.
Leadership Branding & Relationship Enhancement
Leadership is not only about leading, but also about creating followers who worship you! This can be done by managing the leadership Branding and enhancing your relationship with yourself and others.
Leadership Styles: “To impact people and help them transform, you need to first attract them and they should want to follow you.“
Every leader has a certain inherent style of leadership, which depends on their relationship with their own selves. Before we step into correcting the leadership style, we delve into the individual’s relationship with himself or herself. We help them reconstruct leadership styles to suit their business, personal and professional goals.
Psycho-Spiritual Leadership: “Only a person who is secure in the mind can offer a promise of a secure future to someone else.”
Leadership happens from the psycho spiritual space and not from the physical space. Most leaders operate from the conscious mind and hence are highly logical, analytical and practical in the way they deal with their teams. Leadership is about working with people and helping them grow. Successful leaders are those who are undeterred, ego-less, focused and operate from a very secure mental space. They step out of competition and become kingmakers. We help leaders dig inwards, work on their conditioning, fears, self-concepts, habits, beliefs and help them put together a strong and powerful leadership branding.
Charismatic Leadership:
“Charisma is not just saying hello. It’s dropping what you’re doing to say hello.”
In the age of social media, people are exposed to opinions/views of several leaders across the world and they choose leaders who are most charismatic. What they look for in their leader is a well packaged brand. Charisma is a premium skill and emerges only when the leader feels very secure about the self, operates out of highest energy levels and focuses on the growth of the followers. A charismatic leader operates out of his or her purpose of life and hence is beyond all comparison and competition; feels safe in the mind; practices being in the state of self-love; celebrates every small accomplishment; is excited and enthusiastic; operates on high energies and thrives to support others’ growth! We aim to bring out the best in them and project their charisma by working on their physical, psychological and spiritual selves. We coach leaders individually and in groups on how to use their charisma to attract a large number of followers.
Relationship Enhancement:
”Relationships are like a cog-wheel, one needs to move to move the others.”
Strong relationships are critical for teams that dream to grow big. To work for the cause of the team’s growth, one needs to master the dynamics of managing energies – their own and that of others’.
Relationship enhancement belongs to the intangible space, where everything is subjective. Hence it is important for people to train themselves on how to manage their emotional intelligence. We help people increase their emotional intelligence so that they work from a positive, safe and accommodating mind space. Solving relationship issues, creating a positive mental space and operating from the highest energy helps manage others in any situation. As Master Spirit Life Coaches and Energy Healers, we understand the game of relationships very well. We help our clients enhance their relationships with themselves first and others next. A strong bonding with the self results in successful relationships externally.
CORE:
We are spirits in a human body, experiencing life! Our values, beliefs and intentions dictate our behavior. Who we are in our core leads how we weave our branding. Our thoughts influence our words & actions, and these 3 elements define our branding. Our very existence is not for us, but for contributing to the growth of others! How much we understand this and live our lives by this principle, determines our level of leadership.
Creating a great experience about us, for people around us is what helps us flourish as Brands! As Master Spirit Life Coaches, Healers and Spiritual Researchers, we bring in a very deep understanding of ‘life and beyond’ concepts and use them to work with our clients for building a holistic branding proposition.
Personal Branding Benefits
Increase your salability factor!
‘Create a holistic brand out of a product called YOU, and enhance your salability factor’
– Poornima Kotak
Everyone has a price tag, your market value will depend on how you increase your perceived value. Where you position yourself in your mind is how others see you and that defines your worth. Your positioning depends on your perceived value of yourself, which is driven by your perceived success and failure of yourself in various situations, which in-turn defines your levels of self-esteem and self-confidence. We can safely say that everything about you drives you and others around you, hence it is critical for you to be an impeccable influencer!
Listed below are few benefits of Personal Branding that will help you enhance your salability factor!
- Charismatic persona
- Powerful Personal Presentation
- Impactful Communication
- Influential Public Speaking
- Confident Body Language
- Conscious Leadership
- High Emotional Quotient
- Building Strong Relationships
- Living the purpose!
Personal branding for Corporate Professionals:
Personal Branding is a powerful Leadership enabler! A Corporate Leader is expected to be charismatic, credible and impactful. Leading a successful team calls for you to be a dynamic Leader with a magnetic personality. Chiseling your branding and strategizing your Leadership Image are the key ingredients to your success story!
The program offers a bouquet of modules covering all the 5 Gateways, specifically customized for your leadership journey.
Corporate Leadership is a paradox, you need to play by the rules of your industry or organization, yet be unique in the way you lead! We understand that you have put your sweat, time and youth in this game and hence we bring in the most effective, tested methods to help you become the ICON you dream to be!
Building your Personal Branding keeping in mind your unique gifts, needs and dreams is what can help you become what you want to become with minimum efforts.
As a Corporate Professional, you cannot underestimate the importance of personal branding. You represent several entities viz., yourself, your teams; the organization and the brand that you work for. So what you need is a strong and powerful, yet approachable internal brand, packaged in an equally balanced external brand to grow both yourself and the organization.
Having worked in the Corporate Industry for several decades, we understand the efforts that you put in your work and your aspirations to grow in your career, very well!
We have worked with more than 3000+ Senior Corporate Leaders and helped them build winning Leadership Brands!
Personal branding for Business Owners:
Your products or services are just as good as you! Your Clients buy you before they buy your products or services. Do you look and speak like a credible and trustworthy business owner? For you, Personal Branding is all about creating a sense of authority in you and showcasing you as a successful business owner.
The program helps you become an influential Business Owner, position you as an authority and help you become a Leading Business Magnet!
A large part of the buying process can be attributed to your charm as a seller, rather than the inherent qualities of the product/service! Hence it is extremely important that the selling team needs to be branded and positioned appropriately!
Another aspect for you as a Business Owner is to be assertive as a Brand to be able to manage your team, vendors and other stakeholders with charm and ease. Every Business Owner suffers mediocrity and immature behavior from all and sundry, which affects the business. As a Business Owner, you need to build your muscle through your own Branding, and project a strong and powerful Leadership that compels people to ardently work with you!
We have worked with more than 2500+ Business Owners in helping them become better Personal Brands and take their businesses to greater heights!
Personal branding for Professionals:
You are synonymous to your product or service and hence it is important for you to showcase yourself as an expert! Harnessing your branding will lead to attracting the right clients for your business! How you position yourself and how you project yourself leads to your success!
The program is designed to help you showcase you as a credible professional. You deserve to be paid your worth and on time! We understand just that!
Gone are the days when your experience is what mattered, in today’s time of social media and internet, solutions are available easily and there is a need for you to be presenting yourself in the right light to be seen! Personal Branding concepts help you bring out the best in you for the world to see. The scientific formulae allow you to be your authentic self, while packaging you in the manner people want to buy your service!
Our programs are customized to suit who you are and help you present yourself in the most authentic way, you would like to be presented!
- Introduction to Personal Branding
- Powerful Appearance for a Senior Leader
- Impactful Communication
- Voice Mastery
- Body Language
- Public Speaking
- Personal Presentation
- Communication Attitude
- The Etiquette Series
- Leadership Image Management
- Leadership Attitude
- Mind vs. Heart
- Positioning
- Psycho-Spiritual Leadership
- Relationship Enhancement
- Charismatic Leadership
- Leadership Styles vs. Branding
- Iconic Ways
- Becoming An ICON
- Mind Mastery
- King Maker
- Purposeful Living
“If you don’t build your personal brand, someone else will brand you with the wrong label!” – Richie Norton