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Discover Your Personal Narrative

Lesson 4 from: FAST CLASS: Personal Branding for Creative Professionals

Dorie Clark

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Lesson Info

4. Discover Your Personal Narrative

Lesson Info

Discover Your Personal Narrative

another technique that I'll suggest as a way of kind of sparking ideas about about your brand and how to tell the story of your brand is this this is the sort of past into present exercise here, which really basic, but where you started how your past relates to your future and then where you're going, you know, sort of a linear narrative because that seems really basic. But for a lot of people, it can be hard for them to kind of grasp how, how your past actually connects to where you're going. They may say, wait a minute. This seems like totally unconnected. And so for instance, just I'll give you an example for me. Um you know, I do I do marketing strategy now, I do teaching, I do consulting and all this kind of stuff. And it could seem really disjointed to some people if they weren't sort of thinking hard about it. But so to take one thing from my past, I could grab. All right. You know, I did communications on a presidential campaign, so I could say so as a former presidential campa...

ign spokesperson, one of the things that I learned was the importance of being able to communicate your message in a really noisy environment where there's a lot going on and you have to find a way to break through and get noticed. And so today as a speaker and a consultant and a professor, I helped my students and the companies, they work for break through the noise and find ways to to really distinguish themselves in the marketplace. And so, you know, you can kind of take that strand and explain it and that way people say, they may look at this thing, you know, this resume with like 75 different jobs, but they can say, oh, okay, that kind of makes sense. Yeah, there is continuity because the human mind looks for continuity, if you can provide a sense of that, that's that's really powerful for people as a form of evidence for your skills and you know, because, you know, they're looking for that kind of resolution. So a couple of ideas to kind of get your mind working there. So I'd actually like to shift into an exercise and this is the building your narrative exercise. And so what I'd love it, if you guys could, could tackle for me, we have a few questions that you can fill out number one, what's your greatest weakness? Number two, How is that also a strength? Nothing is an unalloyed weakness. Right? We talked about how your weaknesses and your strengths are usually fairly tightly bundled together. Number three, along alongside what we were just doing our kind of paragraph here, how does what you've done in the past relate to your future and as a result of that, you know, can you tell, you know, this is something ideally we want it to be short, you know, but right out a draft narrative statement, So, kind of, you know, kind of like what I was what I was talking about earlier, you know, start thinking about that. So let you guys do that at home, you can start working on this as well, but as you're doing that, I mean, I'll just kind of mention another one. So if I was if I was picking up a different strand from my past and you know, maybe depending on, you know, the audience, you shifted a little bit, you know, I want to be clear, you're not telling like, wildly different stories about yourself to different people and, you know, you're you're not kind of presenting a totally different person, it's all about facets and it's about emphasis. So, for instance, if I was speaking at a convention of Journalists, which I actually do, sometimes I would want to kind of create an initial bond with them by telling them the story of being a journalist and how that impacted my life. But if somebody said, you know, wait a minute, how how did you get from here to there? How does that relate? And, you know, how does it help you? I would probably tell this story, you know, and I'd say something like, okay, if we're doing past into future, I'd say, well, you know, my training as a journalist was really invaluable because it taught me to be able to ask really good questions and to engage deeply with people and that has been amazing for me as a consultant, because one of the things you need to be able to do is really establish trust quickly with your clients so that they well feel open and telling you what the real issue is, and so that you have a kind of trusting relationship so that you can have the necessary back and forth and they'll take your recommendations seriously so that the process will work. And so therefore being a journalist is really great training for later career as a consultant.

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Ratings and Reviews

Sandi K. Terry
 

I never thought I would watch a class on personal branding and end up wishing that I had watched the longer one instead. Wow! I watched this instead of a different one I looked at on another platform that struck me as the antithesis of this class. It gave me that yucky, using-people feeling that Dorie teaches you NOT to do. If you're like me and confused about how to create a personal brand (part of my new career as a UX designer) and you're put off by what you've seen elsewhere, take this class instead. I am so glad to have taken this class and only wish I had watched the longer one instead. Five stars; highly recommended!

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