Authenticity is one of the primary keys to building and maintaining an effective personal brand in today’s world. One of the biggest false beliefs about personal branding is that you have to “create” an image of one’s self or one’s business in order to be accepted or to sell things. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A great personal brand is one that is well-connected to who you are as a person and helps to unleash you to a world that can be harshly critical, but at the same time, incredibly forgiving. A true personal brand is one that is unique to you. For all the talk about being comfortable in one’s own shoes and being different in order to stand out, it does take courage to pull off the facade (or not even put one on to begin with) and present a non-doctored version of yourself to the world — your family, your friends, your customers, your clients, your coworkers.
With all the hard work in image management out there, at the end of the day, nobody can be you and nobody can do what you can do, exactly the way you can do it. Consistency and honesty are the wins of the day when it comes to personal branding.
Here to share some of this thought on personal branding and embracing authenticity in work and in life is Leonard Kim.
Leonard Kim is a marketer who wins a lot of awards despite being a self-described expert at failing. But failing can’t be the only thing he is good at since book publishers like McGraw-Hill Business, companies like Cisco, Keck Medicine of USC and Salesforce, universities like USC, UCI, Cal Poly Pomona and ArtCenter College of Design, large media publications like Forbes, CMO, Fast Company, Fortune, Adweek, Entrepreneur, and hundreds of others, and more than 500,000 followers think otherwise.
Leonard Kim is the author of Ditch the Act: Reveal the Surprising Power of the Real You for Greater Success (set to release in October 2019). His TEDx Talk, “Why You Should Let Your Fears Guide You,” has been internationally recognized as one of the best TED Talks by Forbes and Inc. Magazine. Leonard is managing partner of influence tree. At InfluenceTree, Leonard and his team teach you how to build your brand, get featured in publications and growth hack your social media following.
