The Personal Branding Series! Part 4a: What’s Left to Take Stock of?

9th September, 2009 at 09:00 | Posted in Personal Branding | Comments Off
Tags: Creating a Blog Business, Ebook Benefits, Personal Branding

We’ve analysed me to bits & pieces in the first two sections of Chapter 3: Taking Stock of Your Current Brand of Exile Lifestyle’s Personal Branding eBook, in this part we figure out what could possibly be left?! As it turns out, more than I thought.

What’s Left to Take Stock of?

This part is sub-divided into three posts: Part 4 a,b, and c to make it easy to read and will be published in increments four days apart; be sure to not miss any by subscribing by email or RSS.

Evolution

It’s important that you keep changing, not just because it makes life more interesting, but also because the people who are constantly evolving are the ones that relentlessly continue to move up in the world.

It is the premise of this site that I want to keep evolving. Will this site be in the future what it is today? Will I continue to post the same kind of information? No. I am learning about what to do and how to do it but soon enough I’ll reach a point where I want to give more to the community around me and work harder on establishing the freelance career that will allow location independence, which means maintaining an open-mind with my brand and ensuring that I am flexible and diversified.

The Company that You Keep

Where personal branding is concerned, there are two main types of ‘right crowd’ that you will want to be associated with, and a whole host of other crowds you probably don’t want to be.

Chinese culture has taught me an incredible amount but mostly it has taught me about how to network, how to build relationships and what it means to have guanxi.

There is no direct translation for the Chinese word guanxi, it comes from the two characters for connection and relation and is popularly known as personal relationships; the intricate and very delicate nature of guanxi is something else altogether. It is a combination of the power of position and hierarchy and association according to age and social status; it is the people you know and what they can do for you or what you can do for them; it is business that must always look like friendship; it is money; it is who you know who knows someone you need to know or vice versa; and it is also such a deep rooted element of the Chinese culture that foreigners are often unaware of the significance of their seemingly simple requests.

Mostly, it is about face and maintaining it at all costs.

From the magazine I have also learnt the costs of having a public life and for me it has meant that even if I despise someone I still need to smile and nod my head politely. In fact, I would go so far as to say that guanxi and the magazine have made me a nicer, more accepting person. In the west we don’t have to put up with crap so typically we don’t but here the community is far too small to create waves.

The first crowd you will want to find or build is your core support group. This crowd consists of people who you know you can trust with anything, even if their professional goals do not align with your own.

Having lived independent of my closest friends and family since I was 17 has meant that I have had these key people for a long time. I know exactly how each person in this crowd is going to respond to my endeveours and I have worked hard to maintain their friendships and kept in constant, personal communication with each of them; I do not need these people physically close to me to ensure that I am supported.

In saying that, I do have two amazing friends and a fabulous boyfriend here that love, encourage and believe in me as much as I do them and it makes a huge difference to my productivity and willingness to try new things.

The second crowd you will want to have is your collection of professional friends and colleagues. These people are perhaps not as close on a personal level as your first crowd, but they know your business inside and out, and you know theirs. You all lean against each other, but also maintain certain barriers, keeping the relationship mostly professional in nature.

I would say that everyone else I know here fits into this category, although no one person can I say that they know my business inside out. I think there should be a fourth category here that is simply for people you know that you call a friend but if you were to leave they wouldn’t necessarily be grabbing a Kleenex, not because they don’t care but simply because it’s just one element of the expat lifestyle.

…it can be equally important not to get sucked into a bad crowd. A bad crowd consists of anyone who will bring you down personally or professionally.

Kind of goes without saying really but determining who these people are can be a bit tricky. I’ve found that people will show their true colours pretty quickly so the trick is how to minimise the energy spent on them without rocking the boat. Remember: face.

How do you manage your social and professional circles?

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Coming Next in the Personal Branding Series- Part 4b: What’s Left to Take Stock of?

Missed the Beginning?

• Part 1: What is Personal Branding?
• Part 2: The Labeling Theory
• Part 3: Your Skill Set