My Personal Brand Values

As I begin my fourth month of full-time freelancing, I am giving myself some grace in that I have not yet figured out my personal brand. I know how difficult it is to develop an organization’s brand and how long it can take (hello LSS, 4 years of my life!), but I still thought this would be easier. If anything, it’s harder. I expected there to be some iteration of my brand as I built my business and developed a niche but I also thought I’d be closer to a finished product by now.

I am not. And I think it’s ok, for now. Anyway, I was reminded last week by the awesome Melissa Ripp, owner of Peapod Marketing, that part of building a personal brand is understanding your personal brand values. These are your North Star, the elements that are reflected in everything you do, create, or say. Personal values guide your actions, both personal and professional. They inform your decision-making, your goals, your aspirations, and your relationships.

A brand’s values tend to be very business-like. My previous employer, Lutheran Social Services values are:

My personal values can be more personality-driven since they are reflecting me as a human and a business owner. You would think that it would be easy to name my personal values. But when I’ve tried to do this in the past, everything I thought about sounded trite and not authentic. So, I just gave up and moved on. I created a starter value proposition without doing this important step first. You might remember I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago. I knew I would have to go back to it once I spent more time on my personal values.

In a really helpful presentation on personal branding, Mel offered us a two page list of options to get us thinking about our personal brand values. It was a little overwhelming, but it was also good to see some of the words I had dismissed as inauthentic. Maybe I was on the right track!
So, I spent some time this week combing the list and choose the five values I thought spoke to me the most. They are:

Excellence

Creativity

Accountability

Authenticity

Curiosity

Integrity

It was really hard to narrow down the list to only five. There were so many great options. Some reflected my personal life more than my business life so I stuck to the ones that were closer to how I behave as a business owner.

It’s funny that two of these words are the same as LSS’. I could say that accountability is very similar to stewardship as well. No wonder I loved working there when the culture matched their values and left when it changed. I also think it’s amusing that these words aren’t necessarily personality-driven. I could have chosen words like:

Energy

Giving

Endurance

Courage

Vitality

I could probably make a case that I am all of those things but I don’t think they are the driving force behind my behavior at work. Anyway, I think my list is good. I’m going to sit with it a while to make sure I am comfortable with it.

Then, I will go back to the value proposition I wrote and make sure these values are reflected there. It’s important to me that the promises I make to my clients reflect my values. I don’t want to ever misrepresent myself or my personal brand.

The discovery continues!