“Personal branding is you taking responsibility of who you are. Taking responsibility for your reputation. Your reputation is your share price on the stock exchange of life. It is that little bit of real estate that occupies people’s minds.
The higher your share price the more people are willing to pay for you, because reputation is an intersection between perception and reality.
But you cannot rely on perception allow, because if you do, soon rather than later, that perception will crumble under its own weight. There has to be some reality to it.
You drive that reality. The perception bit is what people think you are, so you have to reinforce that through the reality of who you actually are. And you can control that to a large extent.”
Ms. Judy Rugasira Kyanda, a Ugandan woman of substance, an alumna of University of Reading is the Managing Director of Knight Frank Uganda.
An important message from Ms. Rugasira’s words of wisdom is that you must take control of your personal branding by consistently and continuously directing people’s perception of you with the reality of who you really are. You cannot leave it to chance. You must ensure that you pro-actively and intentionally get people to know who you really are.
If people have the wrong perception of you, you share some responsibility of why so. This is because, if people know who you really are, they are less likely to accept it when ‘haters’ deliberately attempt to tarnish your reputation. At the very least, if people think they know who you really are, they will first want to crosscheck and reconfirm whatever it is that is presented to them that tarnishes your reputation.
No doubt, your reputation is held true by your words and actions. If what you say is not supported by what you do, eventually, what you say may not be taken seriously, for it is inconsistent with your actions. As in, you cannot be a good messenger against corruption when you are known to actually be corrupt, for example.
In the same measure, if you do not talk about your actions, then people are not necessarily always going to know about them and that they are yours. Whereas, actions speak louder than words, you still need to make sure that people know of your good actions, especially.
Whatever you do, simply avoid engaging in bad actions. But we are human and make mistakes. When you do, genuinely apologize; do that which corrects and or rectifies your mistake; and endeavor not to make the same mistake again; otherwise, a mistake made more that once ceases to be a mistake.
This post is shared in the hope that it will contribute to the achievement of our CPAR Uganda mission to mentor young people to possess an attitude of self-reliance. Please help us and share it to your wider networks. Thank you.
CPAR Uganda Ltd 