It’s a Sunday morning, you wake up and slide your feet into your Crocs slippers, walk up to the washroom to squeeze out a sparkling whitening Colgate toothpaste. You grab your Starbucks coffee mug and wear your Nike shoes…. you are all set to hit the gym in your Honda car!!! Wow….. So many brands in just a few minutes….. Brands, brands and more brands, our life revolves around them. But, if we rewind the scene and go back to the first scene, you see the most powerful brand in the washroom mirror…. “YOU”!!! Yes, you read this right…. YOU are a brand…. clothes, cars, accessories, watches alone do not make you powerful, what makes you powerful is YOU.

You need to ask yourself few questions – Why should someone hire me? Why should someone have lunch with me? Why should someone walk up to me to talk to me? How am I different from others? What are my strengths? Once you have the answers, you have created your own personal brand. Some people are purely lucky; they are at the right place at the right time. For majority of the people, they have to build themselves from the scratch. Technology plays an extremely important role in personal branding. College students need to necessarily build their personal brands if they are looking for job opportunities. Recruiters nowadays depend upon Google searches, specially looking up the Facebook profile of the prospective candidates, LinkedIn profiles and other social media platforms to shortlist and evaluate their prospective candidates. Therefore, one needs to be very careful and particular about the kind of content that is posted on their personal accounts and the kind of comments they write.

Creating your own personal brand cannot happen in a day, just like Rome was not build in a day! It is a process which needs to be nurtured everyday, every moment very carefully. The first step in this process is “self discovery”. You need to find out what your expertise is, what are you good at, what makes you different from others, what makes you stand out in a crowd. Just like brands have their own identity in  the form of logos, you need to find out your identity in this big crowd. The most important and critical aspect of creating your personal brand is to step out of your comfort or I would call it, your “safe zone”.

Are you ready to take this bold step and take a leap of faith to create the most powerful brand, the brand christened “YOU”!!