How To Grow Your Personal Brand by Telling Your Story Authentically

If you're building a personal brand, you will need this in your personal brand kit to help with communication, marketing and promotions.

In your personal brand kit, you should have:

1. A professional headshot (for speaking gigs, promotion and your LinkedIn profile pic)
2. Your visual colour and logo (for brand association, mine is fried chicken).
3. Your pitch tagline (it anchors your positioning as a brand)
4. Your products (it can be your coaching service or digital courses)
5. Your volks (who are the target market? whom do you want to serve?)
6. And your origin story (read more about this powerful asset below)

Let's talk about your origin story

Often people will reach out and will ask you "How did you get started?"

Telling your story is not a step-by-step timeline. That would bore people to tears.

It's highlighting key milestones that show your character and how you became who you are in your career.

An origin story is a highly curated backstory. It's you and your journey of how you became who you are today.

Your origin story is a brand’s most precious story-asset, the one upon which all future stories and events are based.

An origin story is not the brief bio on your website's About page.

Think of yourself as the protagonist, the main headliner of your origin story. The protagonists are key events that shaped you.

For me, my protagonist key milestone was the death of my older brother. His death hit me hard. He was a hard reminder to set off and create my own path.

Another is the hardship of my mother's working effort to ensure we have an education. I was one of 5 kids. She couldn't afford childcare, but she taught me the valuable lesson of being resourceful. She would leave us at the library before picking us up each afternoon. Personally, I loved being in the library, it was my Google. It fed my love for knowledge and fueled my curiosity for life.

Hardships or hard moments are the pivotal points of how we become who we are today.

Your origin story helps frame:

• who you are (and key points of what shaped you and your values)
• why you do what you do (what key moments inspired you to set up your business?)
• why now
• and what's next

Telling your origin story is an opportunity to:

• establish a connection of trust and rapport
• open your heart, your vulnerability shows your strength and courage
• be a deciding factor of why people want to work or collaborate with you
• inspire others to join in your mission, it's a great recruiting tool

Whether you're looking for a job, starting your speaking presentations or on a first meeting basis... Your origin story will be a powerful brand asset that will help you open doors of opportunities.

In the video above, I share my origin story and how you can frame your origin story too.

The most powerful investment you can do for your career is to tell your story.

The more origin, the more depth, the better.

Comment below and share your story:

"At what pivotal point changed your life and made you who you are today?"

I love to read them.

Share and inspire others. Vulnerability starts from ourselves and taking the courage to share our light.

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