Leverage Your Strengths To Success
One of the key fundamentals of Personal Branding is about uncovering and developing those strengths that would differentiate you from the rest of the competition. By continually focusing on building these strengths and communicating these attributes to the people that matter (your organisation, clients, industry), you hope to become a thought leader in that area.
Think of people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Tony Fernandez, Anthony Robbins or Singapore’s well-known personalities like Peter Lim, Ron Sim, Elim Chew, Olivia Lum, Song Seng Wun.
They all have something which they excel in and are known to be experts in that area of specialisation. That area of specialisation is your personal brand equity which can potentially be the ticket to a successful career of recongnition, rewards and greater opportunities.
Warren Buffet – World’s Greatest Investor.
Expertise – buying cheap, unpopular, strong, familiar, companies with a monopoly, potential multi-baggers.
Personal Strengths - mathematical genius, frugal, money savvy, entreprenurial, patient, methodically driven, process oriented.
While many of us may not achieve that level of expertise to enter the hall of fame like the people I have just listed, the fact is you all have those opportunities to become experts in your domains of team, group, departments, organisation, industry and even at country level. Key point is to continue to build, develop and increase your expertise skills to enjoy career longevity, success and fulfillment.
Next, i want to share with you couple of stories of how these executives transform their careers and embark on a new job search after uncovering their personal strengths.
Emotional Attributes To Career Strengths
The Investment Trader
This is a story shared by a fellow coach from America.
In helping her client who was an ex US Army officer to design his new career, the coach worked to uncover his rational and emotional attributes, passions and values.
Given his outstanding service during his attachment overseas, the coach discovered his strengths of stress management (at high levels, as would expect of soldiers who fought in wars and his level was even higher), strong leadership, calm and steadiness, rational and objective thinking, goal-oriented and methodically driven. With his interest and passion in numbers and finance (MBA), the coach was able to work with him to secure a job as an Investment Trader in a financial instituion.
Collaboration For Success
The Relationship Manager
This is a story of how an Asian finance director decided to redesign her career description from an operational and transactional role to a business and sales oriented job.
While being rated consistently in the top percentile amongst her peers for her individual contributions, her leadership role was not particularly enjoyable and easy but rather challenging when it comes to driving the team towards excellence. She was not in control of her time, performance and quality of work.
Through coaching, her strengths of influencing skills, performance oriented, collaboration and project management were uncovered and she is now pursuing other career options where relationship and clients’ management roles are evident in the job as her skills would be better used to achieve high targets that she is motivated by.
In the leadership role, she lacks the confrontational ability, decisiveness and strong will to manage a team of diverse personalities but her influencing and collaborative skills are critical in working with product partners to meet the clients’ goals.
We all possess some type of strengths and they could even be innate abilities (like Warren Buffet at an early age) that shape the way we work and how we would work. Unfortunately for many of us, circumstances and situations may have taken us off course to doing something that has not leveraged on our strengths to produce extraordinary results.
How often we have heard of law trained graduates becoming actors and actresses or successful but unfilled executives becoming entrepreneurs? In a positive sense, there are also those executives who keep pushing their bars of excellence to attain “expertise” status because of the enjoyment with their work.
Find out how Executives Branding can create the value in your personal brand so that YOU, Inc can generate rewarding benefits resulting from who you are and what you do! (Select your interest here)
or drop me at email at framkie@executivesbranding.com
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