August is for personal branding
Preparing for the start of the year in academia is a new thing for me and I am excited to be working on a lot of new courses, all mainly in the area of digital marketing. One topic in particular is getting me super motivated at the moment: digital personal branding.
To learn more in this area, I have bought the Udemy course “Building a personal brand by Gary Vaynerchuck”. Gary V is a very polarizing character, and some aspects of his full-on, “in-your-face” type of personality do slightly irritate me, but I find him really inspiring here.
The ONE learning from this course is to be self-aware, to reflect on who you are. Too few of us really activelly practice self-awareness. I’m doing the exercise: it is worth it, and boils down to the following:
- Ask yourself what you love (your passion);
- what you are good at (your strengths);
- and what you suck at (your weaknesses).
In the process, be true to yourself.
What you love is what you’ll be able to do every day for the rest of your life. Then come your strengths and weaknesses. The advice is to go all in on the former, and try and delegate the latter. Easier said than done, I agree. Or maybe it seems easy and you already have the answers. In any case, I recommend taking a moment to do it. You may even ask your friends what they think.
What better time than August to reflect on yourself, you career, your goals and aspirations for the year to come? Holidays are ending and it’s back to work, or back to school: be a little more self-aware!
Laurence
Photo credits: Tom Hussey.
