Maximising your Impact: Why Personal Branding Matters with Jess Gosling
We all have a personal brand. Our brand can be how we talk, what we wear, and even what we affiliate ourselves to (like causes). Your personal brand is synonymous with your reputation. As we are engaging more online, it is more important than ever to ensure you get it right. Jess Gosling is Senior Innovation Policy Advisor for the UK Government, co-Chair of the Civil Service Neurodiversity Network (CSNN), and founder of Gosling & Co. Jess will be leading a discussion-based event will provide attendees with professional tips on the topic of personal branding, enabling you to maximise your impact.
Jess is the 27th name on the Top 100 Women Future Leaders 2021 and is passionate about all things interdisciplinary and intersectional. With 10+ years in various sectors and industries, she has bridged the gap between culture, diplomacy, and innovation through deployments with the United Nations, NGOs, civil society, and startups. Jess started her presentation with an open-ended question about the challenges of personal branding. She notes that every individual is a walking advertisement of oneself, including our attire to where we choose to go. According to Jess, personal branding is interchangeable for self-advocacy. The interactive discussion took place through multiple polls where the audience was encouraged to vote about aspects of personal branding.
Shedding light on how brand directly reflects on our careers, Jess progresses to engage the audience with the concept that a career is not a static ladder. However, our careers rely on our immediate actions. Your personal brand is in a constant state of flux, in parallel with your ever-evolving profession, it is a journey, every decision counts so - show up to the world. This process revolved around finding the unique selling points of a personal brand, building a reputation on things you want to be known for and allowing yourself to be known for them. This helps to give you the power to control your narrative and monetize your skills. She continues to talk about branding theory commonly called "Ikigai". Coupled by 2 Japanese words that mean, life and worth, it's a deep-rooted Japanese concept of “reason of being”. The phrase thrives on the idea of the feeling of accomplishment when one follows their passion. Challenging everyone to find their Ikigai, Jess explained through a Venn diagram that our passion, mission, profession and vocation can be entwined.
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The term embodies the idea of happiness and living. This concept applies to everything, why you get up in the morning; it could be a challenge or finding a purpose. Jess continues to elaborate on Ikigai as she takes the audience through her application of the concept to her own life, and the reasons one may find themself motivated towards their passion. She urges the audience to "lean in" towards whatever makes an individual happy and find sections of varied activities that you enjoy, need for sustenance, and one that would be monetized. As priorities change over time, Ikigai can aid in realising the reason for your being. Taking her example, Jess helps the audience understand that the intersection of our reasons for being leads to Ikigai. Ikigai sits at the heart of everything YOU. Your passions, mission, vocation and profession. Then, your proactive actions should be - What are you good at, what do you love, What the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
Moving onto the third section of the discussion, Jess took the audience through the concepts of brand pillars, mission, values and designing a strategy. Just as you would with any brand-building exercise, you must define the message and then move on to the kinds of platforms that can be best utilised to communicate these brand ideas. Then, once your message is defined, make sure you have an elevator pitch, this is extremely important when you want to sum up your entire brand in brief phrases - and create impact. In the end, she takes a deep dive into goal setting and curating actionable goals. The audience was given a walkthrough, starting from brainstorming plausible results that they might need to see as goals, physically writing these goals down to creating an action plan to achieve them while figuring out a timeline for the same. Building a network is significant to the success of your personal brand, Jess stresses that LinkedIn is the best platform for networking. Ensure you keep a consistent message, post regular content and keep on top of relevant conversations (and join the conversation on topics relating to your Ikigai!). Don’t let your LinkedIn profile read for the job you have now, like a CV - instead, write your profile for the job you want! Furthermore, she encourages everyone to use powerful words and highlight the growth in their profile.
Leaving the audience with some final thoughts, Jess mentions that investing in a good personal brand is a good step forward to achieving your career goals while showing up genuinely; leaning into your values projects and authentic self on these profiles.
Written by Liyana Shirin
